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had been manned once. It is possible that the District had seen a steady decline in the effectiveness of its official government since the early nineteenth century, so that inter-village disputes came more and more to be settled by fighting rather than by an airing in the Yamen. The onset of the Tai Ping rebels must have reduced the effectiveness of the Magistrate to a very low level (groups claiming to be Tai Ping rebels, threatened Sha Tau Kok and captured Kowloon in 1854, although the Hong Kong Government doubted to what degree these groups were really Tai Ping, and not just opportunistic bandits using the name to frighten possible opponents). By the end of the nineteenth century there seems to have been a definite improvement in effectiveness, as the action at Sham Chun in 1903-1905 shows. The period of ineffectiveness seems to have lasted from the 1830s to the 1880s, with the low-point in the 1850s and 1860s. Most of the known inter-village warfare in the area occurred within these years.
The importance of control of the nodal points of the traffic system is quite clear, as can be seen from the table below. There can be no doubt that the Sham Chun dispute, as a dispute over control of markets and traffic nodal points, fell into a clear local pattern.
These inter-village disputes were often blood-thirsty and implacable, and the nineteenth century has evidence of enough inter-village wars to make it clear that Krone was in no way exaggerating the lawlessness of the period. The list below is not exhaustive, but merely lists those inter-village wars in the immediate Hong Kong region known to me.
It is interesting to note, as a measure of the ease with which local politics could degenerate into warfare, that the single village of Wong Pui Ling was involved in local wars at least four times between 1850 and 1875.
Between 1911 and 1925, the District Officer, in his Annual Reports, every year mentioned as a serious problem cross-border armed raids by "bandits". Some of these bandits were, certainly no more than that "enemies of the people". Some, however, were probably recrudescences of old inter-village rivalries. Not all "bandits" in the area were necessarily seen as bandits by themselves. In the warfare at Po Kat in 1853, the Basel Mission station which was outside the town, in the countryside between the two sides was at first