ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N. T. © 1900
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village or nearby? What relevance to Kam Tin is there, if any, to the modest expansion of the Hakka Tangs of Wang Toi Shan, such that they owned 150–200 acres spread over a wide part of the Pat Heung?
This last point raises the question of how surname influence of non-"great" clans was extended; or, to put it another way, the nature of the territorial history of non-dominant lineages. Granting the limitations of the material we are using, a few preliminary observations may be made. It appears that the Tangs of Wang Toi Shan may have acquired lands through mortgage or purchase by their clan trusts, as well as by individual acquisition. It is striking that although their lands nearest to their home base are either individually owned or corporately owned, those most distant are almost invariably owned by lineage trusts. It is of further interest that of the 44 major landholding individuals in the area I have studied, only one of them was Wang Toi Shan Tang. Wang Toi Shan Tang land, wherever it was found, was likely to be clan land. The 'Kam Tin Tangs' lands in the Pat Heung, by contrast, do not include any distant holdings at least not in this part of the Pat Heung. And, unlike the Wang Toi Shan Tangs, whose corporate organizations made mortgage loans to other surnames, the Kam Tin Tangs, according to the record of 1905, were mortgaging property only among themselves.
VI. Conclusion
To briefly summarize the paper: I think that the tenure system in the New Territories ca. 1900 was broadly similar to that found in other parts of South China at the same time. The rate of tenancy, measured in tenant-cultivated land, may have been about 50 percent or slightly higher. A typical farm might range in size from one to three acres, perhaps half of it owned by the farmer and the other half rented. An ordinary farm family might derive its income from several sources and occupations, and we can apply no easy and exclusive analytical categories, such as "tenants", "labourers", etc. Clan influence over territory might be exercised through a clan's ability to collect rents as an overlord or super-claimant on the land; or through its control of a market; or through its land ownership. A federation of less powerful clans might reduce its power as a revenue claimant or a market controller. Whether there were any such federations that checked its expansion of land ownership remains to be seen.
Two types of locality in the New Territories are presented in most analyses. The "lineage stronghold” type is dominated by a single