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produce from the sea near the present Aberdeen Country Club. Some villagers operated stake nets lowered by windlass into the sea from a rocky headland, and others used lines catching fish like nai mang (鯺鏝) to make a sweet congee. The old lady's mother, born about 1860, planted hemp and made it into string used for tying and mending clothes until she was sixty years of age. The village people also grew a kind of rush (cheung po) (菖蒲) when she was young, using it as a charm to hang over their doorways, especially in the fifth moon, in the manner reported in old works on China.2
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The stake nets were an especially favoured form of fishing in local waters. One can see a few surviving sites round the southern coast of Hong Kong island to this day. In the Tangs' time as sub-soil owners
see below they may have leased sites to local persons, as they were doing in the New Territories in 1899. It is also of interest that no less than 13 sites on the south side of Hong Kong island were leased out by another absentee landlord family of scholar gentry, the Wongs (王) of Nam Tau (南頭) and Cheung Chau, as shown in maps in their printed genealogy issued in the 1860s. People walked far to secure a livelihood in those days. One of the persons interviewed in the investigations into the murder of two British officers near Stanley in 1849, was a villager of Little Hong Kong who had a hut and operated a stakenet on the point where Stanley Fort now stands.
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However, farming was the principal occupation. The Little Hong Kong fields can be seen on the Hong Kong Government's first survey sheet for the area, whilst the extent of the Wong Nai Chung fields can be gauged by the race course at Happy Valley which was built over them.28 Rice was favoured because there was a plentiful supply of stream water available that only required damming, leading and terracing, albeit by dint of hard labour, to provide fertile land that would support two crops of rice yearly. An account of harvest time in one of the Hong Kong villages appeared in one of the numbers of the Illustrated London News for 1858.
"On the 1st of November (1857) I took a walk with a friend into the interior of Hong Kong and saw the process of rice-harvesting, beneath a bright, hot sun, the entire village popu-