RAS-1981 — Page 47

ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N T. e 1900

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migrating for a time. What makes this picture plausible is that it accords well with the findings of C. K. Yang for a village located near to the city of Canton. The Pat Heung region did not have the population pressure upon arable land that helped shape the tenure system of Yang's village; but there was a common factor of clan ownership which immediately removed a large proportion of the land from the possibility of private ownership and also made tenancy, at a substantial rate, inevitable. My findings so far are also generally consistent with John Brim's reconstruction of the tenure system in the Yuen Long region as a whole.

I have identified 44 persons or households as non-corporate owners of lands amounting to over 3 acres each. The largest of these large owners owned over 50 acres, quite sizeable by New Territories standards. Another held 25 acres. All others owned less than 20 acres, the usual amounts being between 3 and 10 acres each. Parenthetically, let me say that I am well aware of the limitations of the Block Crown Lease Schedules as a research tool, including their possible inaccuracies in owner registration, and I have, I hope, maintained an open mind to the possibility that the picture may have been somewhat different from what I now see. Although some of these large owners might be classed as absentee owners for some of their lands were quite distant from their homes, there was very little absentee-owned land of this kind. And there was no urban Hong Kong or even market town (that is, Yuen Long) ownership registered for lands in this region.

A small proportion of the lands of the region were subject to mortgages. Most often these were of the customary type referred to above, in which the lender takes over the land and its income through- out the life of the loan, acquiring his compensation for the loan from the land proceeds rather than from interest, which is not paid. There were, however, some interest loans, although I could not discern any patterns in the use of one type of mortgage or the other. Those lending and those borrowing were in all kinds of relationship to each other. That is, they might or might not be of the same village and sur- name; they might often be major owners lending to individuals or else to their own clans (in which case the major owner in question might also be a trustee of that clan); they might be clans lending to persons of the same surname or a different surname; or one clan might mortgage its property to another clan. In some cases, major landowners, some of whose lands were distant from their homes, were registered as mortgage holders on other lands away from their home territories.