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villagers jointly owning property, but where one of the group also individually owned a house in Nga Tsin Wai. Eight of these seventeen house-owners owning premises only outside the village comprised groups of joint-owners. Sixteen of the 72 owners owning houses within the village consisted of joint-ownership groups of two or more villagers. Villagers of Nga Tsin Wai (including the village trusts) owned rather more than 83 acres of arable land. Villagers of Nga Tsin Wai as defined here also owned 47 house-lots in Sha Po, and 30 house-lots in Kowloon Market. In Sha Po and Kowloon City, many of these house-lots covered several adjacent shops, or else comprised large walled compounds with many workshops (one consisted of no less than fifteen small buildings set in a large courtyard). The standard shop or house occupied about one-hundredth of an acre: some of these compound lots in Kowloon City and Sha Po were as large as nine, or even eleven standard buildings. The villagers thus owned the equivalent of 95 standard buildings in Kowloon City, and 99 in Sha Po. Nga Tsin Wai village must have had a total population of about 400 people, although, even in 1902, a percentage were living away from the village, working as seamen or in the City.
According to the Sha Tin villagers, the bare subsistence requirement for an adult in this area is about one-sixth of an acre of medium-good arable land. Between half an acre and three-quarters of an acre is the bare minimum for the subsistence of an ordinary family, although the villagers traditionally talk of an acre as desirable. The arable land near Nga Tsin Wai was all of average or good quality, with little poor quality land. Any village with above three-quarters of an acre of average or good arable land per household should definitely be seen as prosperous above the average. Villagers also say that three houses per household are desirable (allowing one for a barn, and one for a married son); villages in the New Territories range from barely one house per household to a little over two per household (“house” in this context means the small single-storey brick traditional structures, often of about 436 square feet). On both counts, Nga Tsin Wai was prosperous in 1902; it had well over two houses per house-owning household, and over an acre of reasonably good arable land per household. If the village had a total population of 400, that would imply a population equivalent to about 300 adults: that would have given every adult villager access to over a quarter of an acre of agricultural land, again, a sign of prosperity.