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altogether for owing to high rentals a single family among
the poorer classes of Chinese cannot afford to occupy a
whole floor, and where more than one family live on the same
floor decency demands that some means of securing privacy are
available. Cubicles fill this want, and owing to the structural
form of existing Chinese houses it is necessary that a limited
number of windowless cubicles should be permitted on floors
that are properly lit and ventilated. For, if it is sought to
obtain the necessary window area for a cubicle by building
the cubicle round one of the two windows (or round two out of
three windows where there are 3) of the floor of a Chinese
house, it is found that the remaining window will seldom, if
ever, be sufficient to provide the minimum window area re-
quired by law for the remaining portion of the room.
The enclosed copy of a Petition on the
subject with the accompanying plan of an ordinary Chinese
floor with three windows in the usual positions will render
the matter quite clear.
11.
It became evident, therefore, that an
alteration of the law was imperative. The provisions of
Section 19 of the amending Ordinance submitted herewith
coupled with the repeal of the proviso to Section 46 of the
principal Ordinance practically put this question of cubicles
back into the position in which it found itself in Messrs.*
Chadwick and Simpson's draft Bill,with this difference, that
cubicle and room are now separately defined (see Section 2)
and that the window areas required for a room in existing
buildings is reduced from a glazed area of not less than one-
tenth of the floor area of such room, to an area equal to at
least
osure i