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Heung ("White Metal Village").
The last is by the old silver-lead mine, which was opened about 1891 by a company which also worked a mine in Hainan. The ore was treated on the shore and shipped away; but the mine closed down later. The ore now found about the mine is not concentrated enough to be paying; and silver-lead is not of very high value.
Another enterprise, which was carried on for a short time in 1926, was the making of cement bricks on the sand bank; but this soon failed; another of the many derelict enterprises which litter the New Territory. This beach was also worked a long time by sand junks, in fact until some fields were wrecked by salt water; but this has ceased now.
Northward, navigation is impeded by rocks, and villages are mostly small and unimportant, except Tai Pak and Yi Pak ("Great and Lesser White").1 These are Hakka villages. The villagers here protected their fine beaches by piling stones in the water 100 yards off shore, so that sand junks could not get near: if they did, the villagers repelled them with guns. Now, Tai Pak is a great centre for the distilling of "moonshine". Besides Tai Pak and Yi Pak there is Sam Pak (“Third White"), a deserted valley with an old kiln; each of these places has a sandy beach, but whether the "pak" refers to that, or to the deserted fields (pak tin) the Hakka settlers may have found when they first came, it is impossible to say.
There is another Tai Pak: it is the islet just opposite the village1 close to Pingchau, with a large limekiln on it,
The hamlets at the north end of Lantau furnished in 1934 an emphatic warning of what may happen to strangers who rashly lease New Territories land against the will of their neighbours. A Chinese doctor and his wife from up country leased some fields for cultivation from District Office, South. This inconvenienced some villagers of the hamlets nearby, who conceived they had a better right to them. One night they came in a body, hacked the doctor to death, chased his son into the sea; he escaped by swimming and tied up his wife and daughter to a tree. They were released next day. It was a year before any of the culprits were caught, and out of five only one was hanged.