ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N T. c. 1900
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names!
My point of departure is Hugh Baker's essay on the "Five Great Clans of the New Territories". I can hardly hold Baker responsible for what my imagination has done with the material and the views he presented. I can only give him credit for stimulating me to think about the history of the New Territories as, looked at in one way, a history of a few major clans competing for influence over territory. Territorial influence, as I understand it, might have been exercised through overlordship, of the kind the Tangs of Kam Tin held in the Pat Heung region; or control of markets (there were some well-known instances of this); or actual land ownership (in the sense of ownership of the right of cultivation or occupancy, whether by clan trusts or by individual members of the clan); or by possession of mortgages over a significant proportion of the land. It is the last two of these – land ownership and mortgage holdings that I shall examine.
Baker did not argue that all of the land in the New Territories was occupied by the great clans. Indeed, it has been generally observed for many years now that there were two types of area, with reference to lineage in the New Territories: one, the lineage stronghold, was dominated by a single lineage; the other was an area where there was no dominant lineage. Whenever the relationship between the two kinds of areas had been discussed it has been either in terms of the kind of overlordship of Tang over Pat Heung that I have mentioned above or else with reference to the existence of subordinate villages within the sphere of the dominant lineage. This last phenomenon, that of the so-called ha-tsai (more commonly referred to as "ha-fu" or subordinate villages), has been discussed by Potter for the Ping Shan area and by Watson for the San Tin area. So far I have found no evidence of its existence in the part of the Pat Heung I am studying.
My objective in choosing for study the area from Kam Tin eastward to the end of the Kam Tin Basin was to see what I could learn about the extent of Kam Tin power as expressed in land and mortgage ownership as one moves away from the stronghold of Kam Tin itself. Since none of the other “Five Great Clans" owned land or otherwise exercised influence in this region it seemed to me that any limits on Tang land-owning power or expansion would not, therefore, be the result of countervailing power expressed by another major clan. Such limitations, if any, might be the result of local resistance of some sort, or merely the result of distance from Kam Tin. With this in mind, I have examined land and mortgage ownership, house ownership and evidences of the existence and strength of local clans, temples, schools and community