36
EDGAR WICK BERG
British administrators, believing that the landlords wished to retain grain rent (an impression nourished by the receipt of landlord petitions to that effect) and that tenants did not, attempted to outlaw any but monetary payments of future contracts, but the practice of grain rent continued.
Typically, the level of rent was an amount of grain that approximated one-half of the year's yield of rice, paid in two installments at the time of each harvest. Thus, if one tou-chung of land (Cantonese tau-chung, a common measure in the New Territories, approximating one Chinese mou) produced, say, 200 catties of grain, the rent would probably be about 100 catties. As in other parts of China, there was an understanding between most landlords and tenants that in the case of a poor harvest due to bad weather or other circumstances beyond the tenant's control, the landlord might grant a reduction. I have no information about how regularly this ideal was actually observed in the New Territories.
It would be interesting to compare tenant rent to grain price and land price, and if we can get together enough material on these subjects, it should be possible. If so, we can then make some observation on landlordism as an enterprise, on some aspects of tenant economy compared to that of an owner-farmer, and on the possibility of a tenant's buying any part of the land he rented.
In several regions of south China in late imperial time the practice of requiring a tenant to pay a cash deposit, most often called ya-tsu, was prevalent. Such a deposit, often quite large, guaranteed tenant performance of the contract; it also provided the owner with a lump sum in cash which he could invest as he wished without having to pay interest. So far as I have been able to determine, this practice did not exist in the New Territories ca. 1900. Its absence may indicate many things: harmonious landlord-tenant relations; absence of competition for land; or lack of landlord interest in, or need for (from this source, at least) interest-free cash. It may be that the prevalence of clan ownership of tenanted lands in the New Territories is the explanation, if we argue that clan leasing practices did not, or probably would not, include practices of that kind.
IV. Lineage
We come now to the "lineage" part of this paper, in accordance with the title of my talk. I will continue to refer to the lineage as the clan, however, despite the problems in using either name—or both