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better wooded - seven hundred years of cutting fuel by Nga Tsin Wai villagers on Lion Rock had left that mountain rather bare of wood). Their mountain could not supply all the fuel the village needed, given its bareness, and the villagers had to buy fuel in Kowloon Market from the hillside villages in Sha Tin which brought it there for sale. When the British closed the hills to wood and grass-cutting after the Lease, in order to undertake a major programme of re-afforestation (several hundreds of thousands of new trees were planted in the Kowloon Hills), this caused major problems to the villagers, since they now had to buy all their fuel (each village was given a fuel reserve to cut fuel from, but these had to be left until the trees there had grown). Illegal fuel gathering was endemic, and led to brawls between villagers and Forest Warders. One villager, at Ngau Chi Wan, according to the Ngau Chi Wan elders, shot and killed a Forest Warder who interrupted him while he was illegally cutting wood - the village, with considerable trepidation, decided to fee an expensive European barrister, who, to the village's vast delight managed to get him off (the village is still speaking of this 80 years later).
Villagers often went down sick (the average age of death in the New Territories in 1911 was about 20 years of age, and those who survived to 16 could expect to die by about 45-50). There were several dozen doctors in Kowloon City, but they were very expensive, and the villagers rarely used them. The Lok Sin Tong would give free medicine as a charitable act in certain circumstances, and the villagers would sometimes go there, but usually the villagers used their own village remedies, using herbs from the hills, which were boiled up to make medicinal teas or used to make medicinal washes or baths. Not all the village families knew which herbs to pick - village families with this knowledge kept it secret as it represented good income. Some village remedies were fearsome - a tea made from boiling up bat-dung scraped from the floor of the Ancestral Hall was used to cure certain childhood fevers, for instance, and a split pod of wild black pepper was bound round the wrist of children seriously ill with malaria, and left there until it had eaten its way deeply into the flesh. Witchcraft, involving secret prayers and incantations, and strange ritual acts, was often used as well - there were several village women who knew how to "call the spirits" in this way.
50
better wooded - seven hundred years of cutting fuel by Nga Tsin Wai villagers on Lion Rock had left that mountain rather bare of wood). Their mountain could not supply all the fuel the village needed, given its bareness, and the villagers had to buy fuel in Kowloon Market from the hillside villages in Sha Tin which brought it there for sale. When the British closed the hills to wood and grass-cutting after the Lease, in order to undertake a major programme of re-afforestation (several hun- dreds of thousands of new trees were planted in the Kowloon Hills), this caused major problems to the villagers, since they now had to buy all their fuel (each village was given a fuel reserve to cut fuel from, but these had to be left until the trees there had grown). Illegal fuel gather- ing was endemic, and led to brawls between villagers and Forest Warders. One villager, at Ngau Chi Wan, according to the Ngau Chi Wan elders, shot and killed a Forest Warder who interrupted him while he was illegally cutting wood - the village, with considerable trepidation, decided to fee an expensive European barrister, who, to the village's vast delight managed to get him off (the village is still speaking of this 80 years later).
Villagers often went down sick (the average age of death in the New Territories in 1911 was about 20 years of age, and those who survived to 16 could expect to die by about 45-50)". There were sev- eral dozen doctors in Kowloon City, but they were very expensive, and the villagers rarely used them. The Lok Sin Tong would give free medi- cine as a charitable act in certain circumstances, and the villagers would sometimes go there, but usually the villagers used their own village remedies, using herbs from the hills, which were boiled up to make medicinal teas or used to make medicinal washes or baths. Not all the village families knew which herbs to pick - village families with this knowledge kept it secret as it represented good income. Some village remedies were fearsome - a tea made from boiling up bat-dung scraped from the floor of the Ancestral Hall was used to cure certain childhood fevers, for instance, and a split pod of wild black pepper was bound round the wrist of children seriously ill with malaria, and left there until it had eaten its way deeply into the flesh. Witchcraft, involving secret prayers and incantations, and strange ritual acts, was often used as well - there were several village women who knew how to "call the spirits" in this way.
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