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In the nearby Pat Heung region, according to a genealogy dated about 1933, the rent the Dangs used to collect from the portion of their farm land holding lost in the land re-registration in the 1900s amounted to more than 2,000 taels. The Dang elders explained to me that the lost land included both individual and corporate holdings. They were lost to Pat Heung people, i.e. the villagers of Yuen Kong, Sheung Tsuen, Wang Toi Shan and Lin Fa Tei. The Dangs lost the land because the government's policy was to ask those who claimed a piece of land to say where the land was rather than to say who the tenants were. In many cases the Dangs knew the tenants but not the land, and were unable to sustain their claim. Dang Wing-Sau was told by his mother that a certain Lam Ngau-Jai of Yuen Kong had claimed the land he rented from Wing-Sau's father. Wing-Sau's father took the case to court and won the lawsuit. Subsequently Lam Ngau-Jai changed his name to Lam Jyu-Jai so as to avoid possible prosecution.

I learned of a similar case from an anecdote about Ng Sing-Chi. A son of the Ng of Nam Pin Wai in the 1873 dispute, he was a prominent figure of the period around 1898 who was instrumental in opening a new market in Yuen Long in opposition to the Dangs.* A Mr. Dang of the Gwong-Yu Tong told me of Ng Sing-Chi's role in putting an end to the rent payments to the tong. On each Chinese New Year Eve each household in Nam Pin Wai had to pay the Gwong-Yu Tong Dangs a small sum of money, which, he said, was rent for their house land. The Dangs used to do the collecting themselves. But soon after Ng's release by the British officials from imprisonment for his involvement in the fighting against the British in 1898 he played a trick against the Dangs. He offered to them that to save their trouble he would do the collecting for them, if they would give him a receipt. This the Dangs did, and with the receipt Ng reported the case to the government. It was illegal. Since then the Gwong-Yu Tong Dangs dared not collect the rent from Nam Pin Wai any more.

## COMMUNITY AND WORSHIP

### III. THE COMMUNITY

#### A. Overview

Many informants mentioned the expression "five wai and six tsuen” with regard to the Kam Tin Dangs, but none of them was able to list these walled and unwalled villages definitively. The villages of Kam Tin

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