how they first came to pay rent to the Tangs.
3.
The Taxlord also originates :-
748
on a transfer of land.
(a) The transfer may take the form of a sale.
Then either to avoid the expense of registering the transfer, or because the purchaser not coming of land-holding stock has no heading of his own in the District Registers to which his land can be transferred - the land remains in the vendor's name, the purchaser agreeing to make him an annual payment to cover the taxes for which he continues liable.
(b) The transfer may take the form of a perpetual lease. These transactions are often virtually sales but the conveyance is drawn up as a lease in order that there may be no risk of the purchaser omitting to keep up his annual payments to cover taxes.
(c) There may be an ancestral prohibition against the alienation of any particular land or generally of any land belonging to the clan. The family is in straits for ready money and a scheme is devised which has all the pecuniary advantages of a sale while yet the injunctions of former generations cannot be infringed.
I can give an example of an ingenious device which has come under my own observation in the case of the Island of Ping Chau. A deed of lease is drawn up under which a small rent is reserved while a premium amounting to the full selling value of the land is handed over to the lessor. The instrument contains a stipulation that