CO129-494 - Governor Sir Clementi - 1926 [9-10] — Page 31

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rural beliefs in geomancy (fêng shui). He could not, for

instance, build out of alignment with, or higher than, the

rest of the village. Or, if a completely new site were to

be chosen, he could not have it facing the ancestral hall,

or across an earth- or dragon- pulse. Even if general

consent had been obtained to the site and design of the

building, should sickness ensue in the village very heavy penalties might be exacted from the builder. Here, there is, I submit, at least an embryonic form of the town-planning

idea and of the limitations which it must impose upon private rights and wishes; and, if the enterprise of the Hong Kong Government has brought the town to the rural holdings of the Memorialists, that is no reason why they should claim the townsman's immunity from rural superstitions. They invoke the Convention and must stand by their rights as they were at the time of the Convention, and it is entirely untrue that at that time a landowner could build upon his land when, where, and how he personally chose.

6.

The policy of the Government in the matter of land resumption has been dictated by sheer necessity. The configuration of the island of Hong Kong is such that new building areas can only be provided by costly terracing of steep hillsides or equally costly reclamation into more or less deep water. These methods have been and are still being extensively used, but they could never keep pace with the growth of the Colony, and in any case cannot, by reason of their cost, provide any real solution of the housing problem. The Government had, therefore, to look to the Kowloon peninsula. Here again the nature of the terrain dictated the lines of expansion. The peninsula consists or consisted of a core of barren and rocky foothills intersected · by swampy gullies of cultivated land, and flanked by tidal flats running out into shallow bays. As the peninsula

broadens