B...
}
closure 3
33
13.
The Memorialists object to the Crown Lease; but they forget that in the Po On (San On) district, of which the New Territories formed part, there was no land survey whatsoever and no effective land registration system. The archives in the office of the District Magistrate at Nam T'au contained only the record of large vaguely described grants to powerful clans, who undertook the payment of the land tax. Individual owners held by unregistered deeds from the heads of these clans and often paid them the full amount of the land tax. A personal title provable at law to a holding of 0.01 acre was seldom, if ever, registered by the Chinese authorities. Consequently negotiations for any scheme of development would under the Chinese régime have inevitably been with the heads of the village clans, who would certainly not have been liberal in the distribution of the spoils. The Hong Kong Government, however, brought order out of chaos by completing a survey of every plot of land and investigat- ing and settling individual ownership down to the minutest sub-divisions. It is thanks to the Crown leases granted by the Hong Kong Government that the Memorialists can now prove any individual titles to land in New Kowloon. They complain that their rights have been infringed; but, as I have pointed out in paragraph 3, by comparison with the present day practice in Kuangtung the Hong Kong Goverment has acted liberally, while, according to the practice of 1898, the individual owner would have had no voice at all in a matter of this nature except through the heads of his clan.
14.
Although the plaintiffs in Original Jurisdict- ion Action No.276 of 1923 have not signed the Memorial, it undoubtedly took its origin in the failure of their case and it is pertinent to examine the history of the land involved
in that action. A plan of the area is enclosed. The bulk
of it is shown by documents filed with the Land Court to
have