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part of it was being used for market gardening. The villagers in the Ng and Li clans had enough trust land to provide a fallback for poorer clan-brothers, although the Lease shows us the Chan clan already almost gone from the village. The Ng clan are shown as taking an aggressive part in the lending of money on mortgage, and thus increasing the clan land-holdings by foreclosure: the Lis, however, may not have had enough spare cash to do this. The village elders, Ng Kam-tong and Li Lai-ting in particular, stand out. Nga Tsin Wai does not show anything very different from other New Territories villages of this period, albeit it was more prosperous than most, but the Lease does bring the then village community to life.
Traditional Lifestyles
It is likely that the Nga Tsin Wai area was never a standard rice subsistence area. The proximity of the Market at Kowloon must have encouraged a measure of market gardening here from an early date. If the Lams settled at Po Kong because it was convenient for their trading business, it would seem likely that growing vegetables and cutting fuel for ships was always part of the Po Kong lifestyle. Nga Tsin Wai was doubtless also involved in this sort of business from the beginning.
Nonetheless, at the end of the nineteenth century, a good deal of the land of Nga Tsin Wai was still used for growing rice. The land here was extremely fertile: rich, deep soil with few stones, and well watered: eminently suitable for rice growing. The present village elders remember hearing about rice-cultivation in the village from their grandparents, although pig-rearing and vegetable growing for the market was already very important in the late nineteenth century when those grandparents were active.
According to the memories of the village elders of today, it is likely that the percentage of the land devoted to vegetables and livestock for the market grew steadily from 1841 onwards, until rice was, by the late nineteenth century, being grown only to meet the subsistence needs of a minority of villagers, who were otherwise living on the cash income from market gardening. Buyers from the new city of Hong Kong came to Kowloon City and Shamshuipo and Tsuen Wan from 1841 on looking for vegetables and meat animals to meet this new, and insatiable, demand. Market gardeners in the Kowloon City