34
EDGAR WICKBERG
One might infer that in such cases the large owner was using mortgage loans as well as direct purchases to expand his holdings over a large span of territory. Not all large "absentee" owners appear as mortgage holders, however.
Our interpretation of the mortgage data is severely limited by the fact that we are looking at a single slice in time, 1905, which may not give us a full picture of the lending and borrowing operations of individuals as they might appear over several years of activity. It also is well known that at the time of British takeover of the New Territories many long-standing customary mortgages were paid off under an apprehension that they might not be recognized by British policy. Therefore, the situation of 1905 as reflected in the Block Crown Lease Schedules, does not necessarily typify that of any given year in the nineteenth century.
It would be of interest to compare land tenure in Hakka areas and in Punti areas. Of the four major villages that make up my area of study, only one is completely Hakka, although Hakkas are found in one other. In addition, much land in this region was owned by the Hakka clans of the large village of Wang Toi Shan, which is in the eastern part of the Pat Heung but outside the scope of my research so far. The limited amount of information I have allows little generalization. The small Hakka village of Shui Lau Tin contains a few major owners whose holdings are well beyond the lands of the village itself; but many "outsiders" owned lands right up to the gates, so to speak, of Shui Lau Tin. The Wang Toi Shan Hakkas, on the other hand, owned land all over the region of my study. More about them below.
Hakkas were important as landlords. We do not normally think of Hakkas as landlords. But in this region Hakka-owned tenant-cultivated land amounted to about 175 acres out of 1,472, or about 12 percent. Locally speaking, about 20 percent of tenant-cultivated land in the western end of this area was Hakka-owned; and in the western extremity Hakka-owned land was almost 50 percent of all tenant-cultivated land.
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Thus, of four reasons commonly given for relatively high rates of tenancy - population pressure on land; existence of sizeable land-owning clans; frontier or land reclamation; and commercialization it would appear that the presence of the clan was clearly the most important reason for the level of tenancy in this part of the New Territories, and probably in the entire New Territories as well.