losure 1.
27
comparison with which the policy of the Hong Kong Government is generous.
4.
As regards "the rights which holders of land possessed under Chinese law" I know of no provision in the code of the late Manchu dynasty dealing with the type of case which has confronted the Goverment of this Colony, but I can confidently say that in the time of that dynasty's power, if systematic town-development or any similar public work had been envisaged by any of its officers as a duty of his office, the amount of compensation paid to expropriated private owners would have varied inversely as the confidence | of the officer in his ability to suppress forcibly any expressions of dissatisfaction. A definite pronouncement
on this point is, however, to be found in the enclosed
excerpt from a publication entitled "The New Code of Law of Kwong Sui of the Tsing Dynasty". This section, dealing with railway construction, appears to have been promulgated about
1903, when the dynasty was already tottering before the
onslaught of republican ideas, and its provisions regarding
inflated values foreshadow the very drastic action taken by
the Republican authorities in Canton to which I have
referred above.
5.
In the absence of any clear law on the
subject, it seems necessary to examine the land custome prevailing in the New Territories at the time of the Convention, and here it is important to bear in mind that
the New Territories as a whole were then a rural area, and
the rights of land owners limited by rural custom which differed and still differs widely from town and city custom.
While it is true that a rural land-owner could erect buildings on agricultural or waste land without official permission, he was always, at any rate in the district of
which the New Territories formed part, tightly fettered by
rural
I
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