ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N T. c 1900
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tenants and tenants asked the names of the owners from whom they rented, primarily, it would seem, as a double-check on the identity of the owner, although there was, no doubt, some concern about future landlord-tenant disputes. Unfortunately, these records are unavailable to us, and we therefore have no direct written means of determining even the rate of tenancy in the New Territories in 1900.
I have attempted to arrive at an estimate of the rate of tenancy by examining the Block Crown Lease Schedules of 1905 for three Demarcation Districts in the Yuen Long region, adding to this interviewing in the villages within those districts and other materials, wherever I can find them. My findings so far are, of course, quite tentative and local, but I think they may be generally suggestive of the situation in some other parts of the New Territories. The area I have covered so far extends from near the Tang clan stronghold of Kam Tin eastward to the very end of the Kam Tin Basin. In other words, it includes a major portion, although by no means all, of the Pat Heung region. My estimate is that total cultivated land in this area in 1900 was close to 1,500 acres. The population, according to the 1911 Census, was about 2,650, which I take to be about 530 households. Thus, if the land had been equally apportioned, each household would have had about 2.75 acres to farm, enough for subsistence and close to the maximum an average-sized family could farm with its own labour. In fact, however, the land was not so apportioned, at least not in ownership terms.
My estimate is that slightly over 50 percent of the land in these three Demarcation Districts was tenant-cultivated in 1900. I arrived at this estimate as follows: all cultivated land over three acres in the name of a single owner I took to be land that he and his family probably could not cultivate themselves and so would either lease out or work with hired labour; all clan-owned land would, of course, have to be counted as tenant-cultivated, whether the tenants were or were not members of the owning clan. Third, any land located over a mile from the address of the owner I took to be too distant for him to work regularly and hence likely to be let out to tenants. The sum of these figures represented my total of tenant-cultivated land. Not surprisingly, the major portion of tenant-cultivated land was clan-owned land. In this region, about 35 percent of the land under cultivation was clan land. Most of the difference between that and my figure of slightly over 50 percent was accounted for by holdings
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