RAS-1981 — Page 49

ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE NT, 1900

III. Conditions of tenure

-

35

The existing literature on the New Territories and the small amount of interviewing I have been able to do so far suggest that there was considerable variation in both the form of contract and the term of tenure on the land. On individually-owned (that is, non-clan) lands there might be written leases, but the unwritten, or oral lease, was quite common (as it was in Taiwan). There was an open-endedness about the arrangements. A term of lease might not be specified, there being the understanding that the lease ran from year to year and, assuming each side kept to its terms, was understood to be renewed. How did such a lease without term and subject only to performance – become (if it did) a lease that guaranteed the right of the tenant to stay on the land? Or were such guarantees of perpetual lease, as opposed to this open-ended lease, never the outcome of years of open-ended lease but instead a product of documented arrangements from the very beginning? As far as I know, this point has never been researched. On lands owned by clan trusts it appears that in some parts of the New Territories the land was leased in turn to branches of the clan, with the understanding that the leasing branch for that year had to be responsible for managing all expenditures to which clan land-derived funds were to be applied. For the Ping Shan area, Potter reports a practice of leasing clan lands only to the poorer branches of the lineage, the richer branches simply enjoying the benefits. There was also, it seems, the practice in some times and places of letting out clan lands to the highest bidder, whether or not a clan member. This last practice apparently was common in the Pat Heung region. No doubt there were other variations besides those just mentioned. What is needed is research that will explain why a certain system was used at a given time and in a certain situation.

So far as I know, rent on rice land was always paid in grain, in a fixed amount that reflected an established ordinary yield per unit of land. A fixed rent favoured the tenant in the sense that anything he produced over the normal yield was his, unless and until he did so with such regularity that the landlord was alerted to the possibility of renegotiating the rental figure. Many tenants, however, disliked grain rent, as opposed to money rent, because they felt that they were cheated by the measuring devices used by landlords. Landlords also complained of tenant slyness in measurement, and it is clear that payment in grain was, in the New Territories as elsewhere in China, a fertile source of landlord-tenant disputes and suspicions. The early