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sites in the "Model Village".
The Nga Tsin Wai villagers fully expected to be driven from their homes as the Po Kong villagers had been. A Japanese officer (a "General" according to the villagers) in fact came to the village to issue the Eviction Order, but, for some reason decided against it, and left again. The Nga Tsin Wai villagers believe this to have been another miraculous intervention on their behalf by their Goddess, equivalent as an exercise of divine power to the intervention of the Goddess against the Taiping bandits. But the new nullah came very close to the village (see Map 3), and all the houses outside the village, between the village and the old river course, were destroyed. The new nullah came so close to the village that the moat, too, had to go - it was filled in with the debris from the construction of the new nullah.
The Nga Tsin Wai villagers whose houses outside the walls were destroyed were able to take part in the ballot for house sites at the “Model Village”, and several succeeded in getting sites there. The villagers with premises within the walls agreed that they could not allow their village brothers to perish of hunger: old pig-sties and cattle sheds within the walls were hurriedly cleared for the displaced village brethren who were unsuccessful in the ballot for the “Model Village”, and they moved in to live there. Some other villagers from the Nga Tsin Wai clans displaced from premises in Sha Po were also allowed into the empty premises inside the walls at this time. The Lams at Po Kong had no-one to take them in, which is why so many of them died of starvation over the next three years: the Sha Tei Yuen villagers mostly moved into squatter huts in the Choi Hung area.
When the villagers who lost their houses outside the walls and from Sha Po moved into the old pigsties and cattle sheds they had to undertake hurried improvements to the premises, many of which were very run down. Upper floors were quickly cobbled together from waste stone and brick in a number of houses, for instance, and others had to patch or replace walls, and re-lay floors, before the premises could be used as human residences. All these improvements were very crude, thrown up in a terrible hurry from what waste material could be found, and all was done very much on an amateur and unskilled basis. The pre-British houses at Nga Tsin Wai almost all survive, but they are not always easy to see under these crude and ill-built Wartime extensions