[ { "id": 204799, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 102, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "90\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nIt is hoped that this account of Peng Chau will demonstrate the diversity of settlers and enterprises which appears to characterise even the smaller settlements of this part of the Kwangtung coastline. Peng Chau is a Cheung Chau in miniature, and because of its smaller size a wider treatment than was possible for Cheung Chau can be given, in an article of this length. Again, my intention is to provide no more than an outline, and an indication that, despite their size, such communities could be complex settlements in which traditional lines of division were blurred by proximity and a common environment.\n\nNOTES\n\nAny statements in respect of Peng Chau and its people which appear to be unsubstantiated are based on information supplied by various elders. I am most grateful for the assistance given by the Chairman of the Peng Chau Rural Committee, Mr. LAM Shue-chun#, and Mr. LO Chi-chung# of the District Office, South,\n\n1 See \"The pattern of life in the New Territories in 1898\" pp. 75-102 of this Journal, vol. 2 (1962) and \"Cheung Chau 1850-1898\" in vol. 3 (1963) pp. 88-106.\n\n2 See Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong—hereafter styled Sessional Papers (Hong Kong Noronha & Company, at yearly intervals, in this case 1905) p. 144 in the Report on the work of the Land Court for the New Territories for 1900-1905.\n\n3 See G. N. Orme, “Report on the New Territories 1899-1912” in Sessional Papers 1912, pp. 56-57, for significant changes in wages and the cost of living.\n\n4 A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong, Government Printer 1960) p. 83. In this article characters have not been given for any place names which appear in the Gazetteer,\n\n5 Schedules to the Block Crown Lease for Peng Chau, District Office, South, New Territories Administration. Hereafter styled BCL.\n\n6 Under the Convention of Peking signed on 9th June 1898,\n\n7 Sessional Papers 1911, p. 103(22) and (26). This figure is broken down into 434 males and 208 females, children included. The preponderance of males is noteworthy and may be due, in part, to the number of single men employed in the limekilns. The boat population are not specified separately in the Census returns and cannot be separated from the 4,442 contained in the Cheung Chau district figure. Cheung Chau with Peng Chau and Nei Kwu Chau formed a census district in 1911, but whilst the land population for each place is given separately, the boat populations are not so specified.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205393, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1967", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "148\n\nLIN SHU-YEN\n\n1939 “A slight (unspecified) fall in the output compared with 1938\" A very successful year as a result of a large increase in price.\n\nSome general figures for the New Territories salt-industry before 1912, not specifically related to Tai O, are given in G. N. Orme's \"Report on the New Territories 1899-1912\" (para. 71) to be found in the H.K. Government's printed Sessional Papers for 1912. They are as follows:\n\n1900 30 cents a picul.\n\n1908 $1.20 a picul: \"salt makers came in for large profits\".\n\n1912 70 cents a picul: decrease \"chiefly owing to imports from the Northern Coasts\".\n\nOrme lists 37 acres of salt pans at Tai O, 32 at Castle Peak, 12 at Shun Wan near Tai Po and less than one acre at Sha Tau Kok. However, at Tai O at least, the area under production at that time was not the total acreage laid out for the purpose. At the survey and land settlement conducted a few years after 1899 a total of 107.07 acres was recorded as salt-pans. These were then (1903-04) five pans, the largest 37.39 acres and the smallest 5.66 acres. The area under production was, it appears, usually less than the total and would vary according to the demand for salt, and the market price. These details are taken from the Block Crown Lease and Survey Sheets in the District Office South.\n\nThere is an interesting passage on the manufacture of salt in the New Territories and the uses to which both it and imported salt was put at that time in Colonial Reports Annual, No. 314 Hong Kong, Report for 1899 (London, HMSO, 1901);\n\n\"Salt is manufactured at four places in the New Territory, the yearly output being about 4,466 tons, worth some $16,000, which in part supplies the local demands of the population, the fishing junks which keep the fish they catch while at sea in brine, and the various fishing stations where fish is salted and dried. A much larger quantity is, however, imported at certain places for the use of the fleets of fishing junks. The imported salt is also largely used for the salting and drying of fish, for which purpose it seems to be preferred to the locally manufactured salt. The manufacture of salt is an industry which is likely to increase and develop in the New Territory, and which is worthy of being", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205552, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1968", "page_number": 94, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "FAN LAU AND ITS FORT\n\n$9\n\ni.e. great island, by the Chinese; the town Toongchung on the north shore opposite Chulocock I. is the largest on the island\"\n\nOn the other hand, it seems by this date that the fort was already abandoned since one of the British officers who came out to China for the hostilities of 1841-42, has this to say of it in an account of his experiences:\n\n14\n\nAt the S.W. part of Lantou (sic) we saw, on a height, the remains of an old walled fort, supposed to have been one of the haunts of the famous Coxinga, the pirate However, the fort could not have been abandoned for very long since a repair tablet inside the Tin Hau temple at Fan Lau dated the 2nd summer month of the 25th year of Chia Ch'ing (11th June -9th July, 1820) records contributions by officers of the\n\n21\n\nas it is described thereon. Both these records can only apply to the Fan Lau fort.'5\n\nWhen the Hong Kong Government surveyors arrived at Fan Lau in 1904 after the New Territories were ceded to Britain, they found the fort still abandoned. In the Block Crown Lease Survey, it is described as \"old fort, ruins, waste\".16 It had probably not been re-occupied since the early part of the 19th century.\n\nIt can now be argued that the Kai Yik Kok fort is a Ming dynasty fort built sometime before 1573, possibly abandoned, but rebuilt again in 1730, captured by pirates and re-taken by govern-ment forces sometime between 1810 and 1815, and then refurbished, refortified, and garrisoned until some time before 1841-42, by which time it was already again abandoned.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Also known to the villagers as Yuen To Shan (#ll) or \"the hill from which to watch the arrival of distant boats\". There is a level spot high above the village, which, according to tradition, was used by observers to watch for incoming vessels proceeding up the Chu Kong or Pearl River estuary.\n\n2 The locations of these various strongpoints can be plotted from the text and maps in the Coastal Defence sections of the 1864 edition (map circa A.D. 1822) of the Kwong Tung Tung Chi\n\nthe 1819 edition of the San On Yuen Chi M £ M ; the 1827 edition of the Heung Shan Yuen Chi ₺ 4B #; and the 1800 edition of the O Mun Kei Leuk * 1938 #. The last three works contain maps of varying dates from earlier editions.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205554, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1968", "page_number": 96, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "FAN LAU AND ITS FORT\n\n91\n\n11 A lorcha is a specialized fighting craft from Macau that combined a Western-style hull (for speed and maneuverability) with Chinese batten sails and rigging (for easier sail-handling and disguise).\n\n12 Charles F. Neumann, History of the Pirates (š), who infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810, (London, John Murray, 1831) P. 58.\n\n13 J. R. Morrison, A Chinese Commercial Guide (Canton, Office of the Chinese Repository, 1848) pp. 70-71.\n\n14 The Last Year in China to the Peace of Nanking as sketched in Letters to his Friends by a Field Officer actively employed in that Country (2nd edition, revised, London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans 1843) pp. 51-52.\n\n15 There is, in addition, the possibility that the fort had a temporary garrison in 1834 see the imperial directive given respecting defence and patrolling at Lantau and Macao quoted by J. L. Cranmer-Byng in his brief note \"An old fort at Tung Chung on Lantao Island” in J.H.K.B.R.A.S. Vol 3 (1963) pp. 144-145.\n\n16 Hong Kong Government. New Territories Administration. Block Crown Lease Demarcation Districts 322 and 327, Shek Sun village, Lantau Island.\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY CITED\n\nJ. J. L. Duyvendak, \"Sailing directions of Chinese voyages\", T'oung Pao vol. 34 (1938), pp. 230-237,\n\n\"The true dates of the Chinese maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century\", T'oung Pao vol. 34 (1938), pp. 341-412.\n\nLuis B. Gomes, Monografia de Macau, Macau, 1951.\n\nHongkong Government. A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hongkong, Kowloon, and the New Territories, Hongkong, 1960.\n\nLo Hsing-lin, Hongkong and its External Communications before 1842. Hongkong, 1963.\n\nJ. R. Morrison, A Chinese Commercial Guide, Canton, 1848.\n\nCharles F. Neumann, The History of the Pirates who infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810, translated from the Chinese original, London, 1831.\n\nCh'ing dynasty work:\n\nChinese Sources\n\nMo Pei Chi (AA) A.D. 1621\n\nThe provincial Gazetteer of Kwangtung:\n\nKwong Tung Tung Chi (♬✯ ih sk) 1864 edition\n\nThe District Gazetteers for the following:\n\nSan On Yuen Chi (%) 1819 edition\n\nTung Kwun Yuen Chi ✯✯✯) 1797 edition\n\nHeung Shan Yuen Chi (3) 1827 edition\n\nO Mun Kei Leuk (39 1932) 1800 edition", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205814, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "114\n\nH. G. H. NELSON\n\n(in an attempt to use the physical structures as a basis for a random sampling frame), and reached the conclusion that in the conditions of New Territories villages, it is strictly undefinable. The local \"village houses\" are built in terraced rows: each \"house\" consists of a single \"room\", which, although generally divided by a partition into living and sleeping quarters, is regarded as the living accommodation proper to one married couple and their unmarried children. It is very rare for an old and widowed mother to share the same \"house\" as her son and daughter-in-law: I have not come across a single instance of more than one married couple, however closely related, sharing the same \"house\". The correspondence between room, house, and household is by no means exact: not only may one household (defined as a group of kin sharing a common budget and a single stove) be spread over a number of \"houses\", but where one household is occupying two adjacent \"houses\", an interconnecting door may be opened between them, turning them, to all intents and purposes, into a single \"house\" of two \"rooms\". It might almost indeed be more logical to regard each unit in a terrace as a \"room\", and define \"house\" as that combination of \"rooms\" which is occupied by a single household, even when the \"rooms\" are located in more than one terrace; but Chinese usage does not support this — each unit is called uk, never fong.\n\nThe Hong Kong Government surveyors who numbered all agricultural and building lots in the early years of this century evidently came up against a similar problem of definition; and there are inconsistencies in the system of numbering they adopted. Where two adjacent units were owned (and occupied?) by one man, they are numbered together as one (double-sized) house-lot. There is one row in Sheung Tsuen, however, where the living quarters of each house are separated from their kitchens by the narrow lane that gives access to them: it is clear from the pattern of ownership in 1905 (when the Block Crown Lease was drawn up), and from the way these structures have been passed down the generations since then, that each kitchen is linked with a single\n\n* I use the Meyer-Wempe Romanisation of Cantonese terms throughout.\n\n† Sheung Tsuen (1) in the Pak Heung (^#) where Mr. Nelson carried out his research. See p. 171 of A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong Government Printer, n.d, but 1960), Ed.\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205815, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 121, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM\n\n115\n\nliving unit; and yet the surveyors gave each structure a separate number.\n\nChinese village houses are not strongly built: once left unoccupied and untended, they rapidly succumb to the ravages of typhoons without, white ants and weeds within. They may be used for a while for storage, but without care they soon lose even this function. How is one to decide at what stage of decrepitude a structure ceases to qualify as a house and becomes an insignificant ruin? More importantly, what criterion did the 1905 surveyors use? There seems little doubt that they failed to number structures that were ruined then (gaps in the sequence of numbers in a row have since been filled with \"New Grant Lots\"), and gave numbers to structures that were destined to crumble away altogether by 1968 (many lot numbers correspond to nothing discernible on the ground at present). Therefore, just as it would be wrong to suppose that the habitable structures now visible represent the sum of houses listed in Government Land Records, so it would be a mistake to regard the entries in the Block Crown Lease as an exact reflection of the number of habitable structures on the ground in 1905.6\n\nA further problem is raised by the fact that the use to which village structures are put changes over time: relatively few are built as cowsheds, but a great many do service as such (or as pigsties) at some stage, and are restored for human habitation when necessary. They may even serve a dual purpose. My own attempt at defining \"house\" ran aground when I discovered two households which had insufficient space to accommodate each husband's aged mother: one mother slept in one of the separate kitchens mentioned above, while the other shared a house with the family's pigs.\n\nFor the purposes of this article, it is not necessary to make a hard and fast definition of “village house”, but simply to point out that the present-day observer cannot be certain that his understanding of the term coincides with that of the 1905 surveyors: so that the apparent total of \"houses\" recorded in the Block Crown Lease may include a good many structures that were unfit for human habitation, or used for other purposes, at that time. What follows is an attempt to explain why at any one time many of the houses that are fit for human habitation are likely not to be in use.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205821, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM\n\n121\n\nof the two should in fact have proportionately more empty houses than its poorer neighbour22; it is not impossible that the sort of inefficiencies in the descent system that I have described whereby the swelling of a descent line in one generation may leave the next with more house-property than it needs or can redistribute — may account for this anomaly.*\n\nH. G. H. NELSON.\n\nNOTES\n\n1. Göran Aijmer, \"Being Caught by a Fishnet: On Fengshui in South-eastern China\", J.H.K.B.R.A.S., Vol. 8, 1968, pp. 74-81.\n\n2. Field data drawn on in this paper are derived from a period of work in Sheung Tsuen, Pat Heung, from June 1967 to October 1968. I was employed as a Research Officer of the London School of Economics, on a project financed by a grant made to Professor Maurice Freedman by the Social Science Research Council. Much of the information from the Hong Kong Government's land records was collected by my wife, whose fare to Hong Kong was provided by the London-Cornell Project for East and South-East Asian Studies, financed jointly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Nuffield Foundation. I am very glad to acknowledge their generosity.\n\n3. See for example J. E. Spenser, \"The Houses of the Chinese\", Geographical Review, Vol. XXXVII, 1947, pp. 254-273.\n\n4. Cf. J. W. Hayes, ‘A Chinese Village on Hong Kong Island Fifty Years Ago Tai Tam Tuk, Village Under the Water', in I.C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, eds., Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, London, 1969, p. 33.\n\n5. Block Crown Lease, Demarcation Districts Nos. 112 and 114, 1905; various Memorials in Yuen Long District Office; and ‘A-Roll' volume X.14. I am most grateful to the New Territories Administration for their courtesy in allowing me access to the invaluable information contained in their Land Records.\n\n6. The current records conceal the difference between inhabited structures and \"house-lots' (Crown Rent being assessed on the site rather than the structure) - a difference of which the villagers are aware. Many of them, when asked how many houses they own, will say, \"so many houses and so many lots \"(uk-tel_£)\". It seems to me possible that some villagers may, in 1905, have been far-sighted ---or fortunate enough to register both their houses and their ruined lots, thereby avoiding the expense and complication of obtaining a New Grant Lot when they wanted to rebuild on an old site.\n\n* Groups of houses, bigger and more durable than usual, have also been built as a form of long-term investment (and prestige expenditure) by particularly wealthy men; but their hopes of producing enough sons and grandsons to justify this deliberate over-production of houses are often sadly unfulfilled.\n\n* On the subject of this article see also Mr. Hayes' note at pp. 158-160.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207169, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 240, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "234\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nhouses were built later at the back when they had more descendants. That is the entire village even to this day.\n\nThere are 42 dwelling houses within the village, divided by 5 lanes and ten gates; measuring 162'-3\" in width and 125'9” in depth. The idea of this layout would seem to have been to protect themselves from pirates, when the whole family stayed inside. The Chi Tong is located in the centre with three roofs and two light wells (#). There is a village school 150 feet from the southern corner for primary education of their children, and a Tin Hau Temple within 500 feet to the northeast for worship.\n\nLand Registration took place in 1906 in Tsuen Wan after the Lease of the New Territories. The village was recorded from Lot No. 1528 to 1559 (Lot No. 1546 excluded) in Demarcation District No. 449 in the Block Crown Lease, totalling 0.43 acre of house land and 0.03 acre of waste land, all belonging to the Chan family. It is a pity that 0.135 acre of house land were sold to outsiders since 1937 otherwise the village would still remain solely in the hands of the descendants of the founder.\n\nChan Kin Sheung, the founder of Sam Tung Uk, was awarded a portrait by Chien Lung of Ch'ing Dynasty, worded \"Heung Yam Tai Bun” (means Honourable Guest in Village Parties). To everyone's sorrow and great loss it disappeared during the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong.\n\nThere have been very many big changes in the area surround-ing the village since re-development of Tsuen Wan. Fung shui trees at the back were felled, village type houses were built around, roads were constructed in front, multi-storeyed buildings were erected with obstruction of the front view. Ngau Kwu Tun, the small hill by the left, was removed to make way for a school building, and the hill at the back was partly cut off for construction of the Rapid Gravity Filter. Even the grave of the village founder was affected as it was in the same line and over-looking the village. The name in fung shui was called \"Lion over-looking the village platform\" (獅子瑩樓台)\n\nIt is to be hoped that the Walled Village can be retained as a historical relic in Tsuen Wan, even if the whole area is to be re-developed. God has blessed it for over two centuries and it is hoped will continue to do so.\n\nText and visits are organized and prepared by Mak Kai Yim, A. H. Mackreth, Brian Liu and Helga Werle.\n\nPage 240\n\nPage 241", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208844, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1980", "page_number": 6, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "205\n\n12 On this particular type of tenancy, see John Kamm, \"Two essays on the Ch'ing economy of Hsin-an, Kwangtung Province”, JHKBRÁS 1977, pp. 55-84, and James Hayes, The Hong Kong Region, 1850-1911, Folkestone, Kent, England, 1977, pp. 50-53.\n\n13 Ints. Mr. Wong 22.6.81, Mr. Lam Kaap Shau 8.6.81, Mr. Cheung Kau 26.6.81, Mr. Cheung 26.6.81, Mr. Cheng Yung 10.7.81, and Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 8.5.81; Hugh D.R. Baker, Sheung Shui, A Chinese Lineage Village, Guildford and London, 1968, p. 172.\n\n14 Father Sergio Ticozzi, 12.5.81, quoting from Giovanni B. Tragella, Le Mission Estere di Milano, Nel Quadro Degli Avvenimenti Contemporanli, Milan 1950-1963, vol. 1, pp. 274-275, vol. 2, pp. 85, 89, and 314. Int. Father George Carusso, 20.5.81.\n\n15 Ints. Mr. Lok Tak K'ei 17.7.81, Mr. Leung Yung Hei 16.6.81, Mrs. Lau 14.6.81, and Mr. Tse Kw'an 16.11.80.\n\n10 Int. Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 8.5.81. Mr. Yau's term for \"moorage inlet\" was \"siu wan t'au\". Cf. also the type of market James Hayes refers to as \"coastal market centres\" in his Hong Kong Region, p. 37.\n\n17\n\nDocuments on this case are included in Kuan T'ien-p'ei, Ch'ou-hai ch'u-chi (1836, n.p., Taipei reprint, 1968) 2/26a-33a, 56a-74a, 80a-99b. Kuan was Naval Commander-in-Chief for Kwangtung from 1834 to 1841. C. Fred Blake, in Ethnic Groups and Social Change in a Chinese Market Town, Hawaii, 1981, p. 46 note 8, states \"Lung Shuen Wan was a traditional outpost for the Chinese imperial navy's regulation of eastern approaches to the Pearl River. I wonder if perhaps Lung Shuen Wan was the original 'coastal market centre' in this area?\" Elsewhere (loc. cit. and p. 95) he points out that the Lung Shuen Wan Tin Hau Temple retained the patronage of the Pak Kong and Sha Kok Mei villagers, despite the greater convenience of the Tin Hau Temple within Sai Kung Market.\n\n18 These are figures of shops as registered in the Block Crown Lease (DD215, DD224). It is more than likely that these were shop spaces rather than shops, and in the event that a shop might take up more than a shop space, there were fewer shops in Sai Kung and Hang Hau in the early 1900's than noted here. For comparison, in 1905, Yuen Long had only seventy-four shops and Tai Po Market twenty-three large and fifteen small ones. See James Hayes, Hong Kong Region, p. 36.\n\n19 Ints. Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 15.5.81, Father George Carusso 20.5.81, Mr. Lei Kan 19.6.81, Mr. Ue Shun Hing 10.7.81.\n\n20 Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 15.5.81.\n\n21 Mr. Cheung Ts'oi 20.6.81, Madam Chiu I Mooi 7.5.81, Mrs. Foo, née Lei, 28.6.81.\n\n22\n\nMrs. Kong Lei San Kiu 21.6.81. Mr. Cheung Kin Wa 10.6.81 of Taai Fung Nin (opened c. 1933) in Sai Kung Market remembered that the shop used to slaughter a pig each day to sell to the boat people.\n\n23 Mr. Chan Kei Shang 28.5.81, Mr. Chan Shou 19.6.81.\n\n24 Mr. Hoh King 6.5.81, Mrs. Lei née So 20.6.81, Mr. Lei Yau 13.11.80, Mr. Cheung Ming Shing 8.6.81, Mr. Lai Foh 8.5.81. Mrs. Lei used to obtain piglets from Kam Lei Loi in Sai Kung Market. It took six to seven months to fatten them, and two dollars to have each pig carried back to Sai Kung Market. She also had rice and pig feed (chiefly rice husk) from Kam Lei Loi on credit. Kam Lei Loi was a butcher's cum general store, where her husband worked.\n\n25 According to Mr. Yau T'aam Shang, 15.5.81, the interest rate in Sai Kung Market was 5 cents per dollar per month, i.e. 60 percent per annum.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209142, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 45, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N T. c 1900\n\n31\n\ntenants and tenants asked the names of the owners from whom they rented, primarily, it would seem, as a double-check on the identity of the owner, although there was, no doubt, some concern about future landlord-tenant disputes. Unfortunately, these records are unavailable to us, and we therefore have no direct written means of determining even the rate of tenancy in the New Territories in 1900.\n\nI have attempted to arrive at an estimate of the rate of tenancy by examining the Block Crown Lease Schedules of 1905 for three Demarcation Districts in the Yuen Long region, adding to this interviewing in the villages within those districts and other materials, wherever I can find them. My findings so far are, of course, quite tentative and local, but I think they may be generally suggestive of the situation in some other parts of the New Territories. The area I have covered so far extends from near the Tang clan stronghold of Kam Tin eastward to the very end of the Kam Tin Basin. In other words, it includes a major portion, although by no means all, of the Pat Heung region. My estimate is that total cultivated land in this area in 1900 was close to 1,500 acres. The population, according to the 1911 Census, was about 2,650, which I take to be about 530 households. Thus, if the land had been equally apportioned, each household would have had about 2.75 acres to farm, enough for subsistence and close to the maximum an average-sized family could farm with its own labour. In fact, however, the land was not so apportioned, at least not in ownership terms.\n\nMy estimate is that slightly over 50 percent of the land in these three Demarcation Districts was tenant-cultivated in 1900. I arrived at this estimate as follows: all cultivated land over three acres in the name of a single owner I took to be land that he and his family probably could not cultivate themselves and so would either lease out or work with hired labour; all clan-owned land would, of course, have to be counted as tenant-cultivated, whether the tenants were or were not members of the owning clan. Third, any land located over a mile from the address of the owner I took to be too distant for him to work regularly and hence likely to be let out to tenants. The sum of these figures represented my total of tenant-cultivated land. Not surprisingly, the major portion of tenant-cultivated land was clan-owned land. In this region, about 35 percent of the land under cultivation was clan land. Most of the difference between that and my figure of slightly over 50 percent was accounted for by holdings\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209144, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 47, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE N.T. c. 1900\n\n33\n\nmigrating 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nA 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 throughout 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 surname; 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.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209145, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "34\n\nEDGAR WICKBERG\n\nOne might infer that in such cases the large owner was using mortgage loans as well as direct purchases to expand his holdings over a large span of territory. Not all large \"absentee\" owners appear as mortgage holders, however.\n\nOur interpretation of the mortgage data is severely limited by the fact that we are looking at a single slice in time, 1905, which may not give us a full picture of the lending and borrowing operations of individuals as they might appear over several years of activity. It also is well known that at the time of British takeover of the New Territories many long-standing customary mortgages were paid off under an apprehension that they might not be recognized by British policy. Therefore, the situation of 1905 as reflected in the Block Crown Lease Schedules, does not necessarily typify that of any given year in the nineteenth century.\n\nIt would be of interest to compare land tenure in Hakka areas and in Punti areas. Of the four major villages that make up my area of study, only one is completely Hakka, although Hakkas are found in one other. In addition, much land in this region was owned by the Hakka clans of the large village of Wang Toi Shan, which is in the eastern part of the Pat Heung but outside the scope of my research so far. The limited amount of information I have allows little generalization. The small Hakka village of Shui Lau Tin contains a few major owners whose holdings are well beyond the lands of the village itself; but many \"outsiders\" owned lands right up to the gates, so to speak, of Shui Lau Tin. The Wang Toi Shan Hakkas, on the other hand, owned land all over the region of my study. More about them below.\n\nHakkas were important as landlords. We do not normally think of Hakkas as landlords. But in this region Hakka-owned tenant-cultivated land amounted to about 175 acres out of 1,472, or about 12 percent. Locally speaking, about 20 percent of tenant-cultivated land in the western end of this area was Hakka-owned; and in the western extremity Hakka-owned land was almost 50 percent of all tenant-cultivated land.\n\n―\n\nThus, of four reasons commonly given for relatively high rates of tenancy - population pressure on land; existence of sizeable land-owning clans; frontier or land reclamation; and commercialization it would appear that the presence of the clan was clearly the most important reason for the level of tenancy in this part of the New Territories, and probably in the entire New Territories as well.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209310, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 213, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n199\n\na small family, 1 shing (about 760 sq. ft.) for a large one.\n\nBasic family requirements\n\nAssume a family of 2 adults and 3 children and assume each child eats 0.75 as much as an adult. Such a family would require 4.25 adult requirements. Assuming all food and Crown Rent met from harvest with no cash sales or casual labour income.\n\nIn land, this implies:\n\nTai Wai good average land, 1 tau can feed 1.94 adults (as above) without outside assistance, 4.25 adults, therefore require 2.19 tau, which requires 4 shing of seedbed and 0.5 shing vegetable gardens or 2.19 + 0.4 + 0.05 = 2.65 tau,\n\nTai Wai best land\n\n1 tau can feed 3.03 adults (as above). 4.25 adults therefore require 1.4 tau which require 2.75 shing seedbed and 1/2 shing vegetable gardens or 1.4 + 0.275 + 0.05 = 1.73 tau.\n\nWong Chuk Yeung good average land\n\n1 tau can feed 1.38 adults (as above). 4.25 adults therefore require 3.08 tau which require 6 shing seedbed and 0.5 shing vegetable gardens or 3.08 + 0.6 + 0.05 = 3.72 tau.\n\nLarger families (4 adults, 6 children)\n\nIt may be assumed that economies of scale appear, and that the family would require about 1.75 of the land of the small family, e.g. (Note: not checked)\n\nTai Wai average land 2.64 x 1.75 = 4.62 tau\n\nbest land 1.73 x 1.75 = 3.02 tau.\n\nWong Chuk Yeung average land 3.72 x 1.75 = 6.51 tau.\n\nTo translate to Block Crown Lease acreages\n\nAssume approximate equivalence 1 tau and 0.175 acres (=7630 sq.ft.)\n\nTherefore,\n\n \n Basic family requirements\n \n \n \n \n Tai Wai average land\n 2.64 x 0.175 = 0.462 ac.\n \n \n \n best land\n 1.73 x 0.175 = 0.302 ac.\n \n \n \n Wong Chuk Yeung average land\n 3.72 x 0.175 = 0.651 ac.\n \n \n \n Small family\n \n \n \n \n Large family\n \n \n \n \n \n 4.62 x 0.175 = 0.809 ac.\n \n \n \n \n 3.02 x 0.175 = 0.529 ac.\n \n \n \n \n 6.51 x 0.175 = 1.139 ac.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209980, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 239, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "217\n\nwas great and must have left them with little time or money to spare for their ruined temple. Finally, and almost certainly the most seriously, the influx of a new population, and immense schemes of redevelopment completely altered the generally rural background of village and market town life that still characterised pre-war East Kowloon.\n\nThus, in the Tung Shan Temple we can see a temple, founded for purely rural reasons slowly growing until it became the predominant community temple of the whole of rural East Kowloon. During this period its management changed from a purely private, clan-based system to a typical community temple structure of committee members and chairman of a type typical not only of the rural community temples in the rest of the New Territories but also of those in urban Hong Kong at this date.\n\nFounded in a rural community this temple could, and did, develop both physically and in its management structure to reflect the needs of that community. It could not, however, survive the complete destruction of that community, and its ruination directly reflects the collapse of its founding community in the face of massive urbanisation, and the establishment of the new urban communities created by that urbanisation. The new urban communities have formed their own shrines, and their flourishing condition, alongside the continued ruin of the main temple of the defunct rural community, show more clearly than anything else can the essentially community basis of the temples of this area and their management groups.\n\nNOTES\n\nIn the 1904 Block Crown Lease for Survey District No. 3, New Kowloon, the ownership is recorded in the monk's name Shing Kin (Hsing Star Bridge) and the property is listed under Lot 1101 as temple 0.7 acres, house 0.2 acres, and potato ground 0.33 acres. An entry \"Kwun Yam Temple, Ngau Chi Wan\" had been crossed out by the Assistant Land Officer who recommended that a lease for the temple buildings and site be given to the Registrar General, 28 April 1904.\n\nFrom south-east Kowloon, Ngau Tau Kok and Cha Kwo Ling; from east Kowloon, Ngau Chi Wan, Ping Shek, Sha Tei Yuen, Upper and Lower Yuen Ling and Chu Shi Liu; from central Kowloon, Tai Hom, Po Kong, Nga Tsin Wai, Upper and Lower Sha Po, Nga Tsin Long and Kak Hang; from Kowloon City, the commercial areas, Sai Tau, Tung Tau and Hoklo Village.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209996, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 255, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "233 \n\nOLD HAU WONG TEMPLE, TAI WAI, SHA TIN \n\nP. H. HASE \n\nOn 14th June 1982, as part of the development of Sha Tin, an area to the north of Tai Wai Village was cleared. At the time of the Block Crown Lease (1905) this area had been separated from the walled part of the village by the village moat. The area was at that date crossed by the main footpath leading from Tai Wai Village to the footbridge over the Shing Mun River from where the footpath continued through to Tai Po. \n\nOn this area, very close to the edge of the moat, a temple to Hau Wong had been built. This temple had been abandoned at some date between the Block Crown Lease and 1914. The abandoned temple had been used as a playground for village children in the period up to the last War. During the last War the roof was removed and used for fuel. After the War the temple was occupied by squatters who demolished part of the walls and divided the building into three units, two of which were used as residential units (in one case part of the unit being used as a sitting area for a cooked food stall), with the area near the original altar being used as an engineering workshop. Later the old moat was filled in and the whole area became covered with squatter structures many of which backed onto the outer wall of the temple: by 1955 only a small part of the doorjambs of the temple remained visible. \n\nSince the whole area was due for clearance the opportunity was taken of discovering what could still be uncovered of the structure of the old temple, measuring it and if possible discovering more on the history of the temple. The attached plan and description is the result. Since the measurements could only be made in the 24 hours between the demolition of the squatter huts and that of the temple, all was done in great haste. \n\nEntrance \n\nThe entrance front of the temple was constructed of rudely coursed blue brick faced in the area around the entrance with finely laid granite ashlar slabs, and faced with well laid blue brick \n\nPage 255\n\nPage 256", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210003, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 262, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "240\n\ntrading contacts with Tai Wai. At the same time the temple is currently used by the villagers of Tai Wai for purely village rituals such as the hanging of the lanterns for new-born sons, and the only communal worship is conducted by the village elders, and not by the elders of the Heung.\n\nIt was probably this conflict between the communal and the purely village interest in Hau Wong and his temple which led to the decision to build an entirely new, and much larger temple, just outside the village. Such a site would certainly make it easier for non-villagers to worship, and that this was aimed at is shown by the specific mention of Lek Yuen (1), the old name for Sha Tin District, in the doorjamb inscriptions. At the same time all the donors named in the door inscriptions were Tai Wai villagers, the most prominent, Wong Yin-Tsun (2), being a villager who had succeeded in securing an official post in Shantung province.\n\nThe villagers believe that this new temple was only built a few decades before the Block Crown Lease - probably, therefore, the date 1888 on the door is the original foundation date. The foundation was not successful: most villagers wanted the god back in the old temple inside the village, and difficulties which arose were blamed on damage to the Fung Shui of the village as set out by Lai Po-i. After about 30 years, the temple was closed and the god taken back to his old home opposite the village gate: since then his temple, in the village, has been considered basically for Tai Wai villagers only.\n\nNOTE\n\n1 Chinese Monasteries, temples, shrines and altars in Hong Kong and Macau, Keith G. Stevens, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 20, 1980, pp. 1–33.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210213, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1984", "page_number": 184, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "163\n\narea of about 115 km2 and contains 330 Mm3 of water at mean sea level (about 1.3 m above Hong Kong principal datum (PD)). Sand is brought into Deep Bay close to Black Point on the flood current and moved along the Hong Kong coast by wave action during storms. Silts and clays appear to be largely derived from the catchment draining to the inner part of Deep Bay.\n\nThe tides are complex, with a strong diurnal component superimposed on a semi-diurnal pattern. The usual sequence is thus two high waters and two low waters in just over 24 hours, with one high and one low significantly higher or lower respectively than the other. On certain occasions (14 in 1984) the diurnal component completely dominates and only one high and one low occur in a day. The maximum tidal range is about 2.8 m.\n\nHistorical background\n\nOyster cultivation is traditional and has been practised in the Pearl River estuary for several hundred years. The coastal town of Shajing (JP) has long been associated with oyster fattening. Oyster cultivation has been practised in Deep Bay since at least 1800 (Bromhall, 1958; Mok, 1973).\n\nDisputes over the ownership of Deep Bay oyster beds led to short term leases being granted in 1909 to those organisations, both those based in Hong Kong and those based in China, who could prove good claim to ownership prior to 1898 when the Crown Lease of the New Territories commenced. One oyster bed was reclaimed from the sea around 1915/16 and now forms part of the Tin Shui Wai area. Additional oyster beds were leased, mainly in the mouth of the Shenzhen River, during the period 1909 to 1933. The original 1909 leases were extended from 1931 to 1952.\n\nDuring the early part of World War II many oyster farmers with much traditional expertise moved from Shajing to settle in the Lau Fau Shan area, but the majority of the beds were either ruined or fell into disuse by 1945. Reorganisation of the industry in the immediately post-war era was influenced by events within China culminating with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Further leases were granted to some oyster farmers", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211533, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 250, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "226\n\nto this one, although the bamboo arm-rest was a bit of a luxury not always found! This latrine was probably built early this century. Sheung Wo Hang had 30 latrines to service its approximately 100 families at the time of the Block Crown Lease in 1905; the great majority of them were very close in style and construction to this one.\n\nNOTES\n\nP. H. Hase\n\n2 Journal Vol. 23, 1983, p. 241-246.\n\nMy thanks are due to Mr. M.Y. Lee, of Sheung Wo Hang village, for drawing the latrine to my attention, and for helping me to measure it.\n\nSee plan attached, and plate 11.\n\n4 See plate 12.\n\nA NOTE ON RICE HULLERS (RE)\n\nIn March 1972, I visited the New Territories' village of Ma Yau Tong, situated off the Po Lam road leading to Rennie's Mill in Junk Bay. I knew the village representative, Mr. Li Tak (...) from my days as\n\nDistrict Officer South, 1957-60. He was aged 79 in 1972.\n\nWith friends from Ngau Tau Kok old village in East Kowloon, who knew the Ma Yau Tong people, I looked carefully round the houses, paying special attention to old ones and their contents.\n\nLike most N.T. villages, Ma Yau Tong had been a rice-growing settlement, but in their case they had stopped planting some 10 to 15 years before my visit. I was interested in the farming tools and equipment, and made notes on a pair of rice hullers that we saw. However, we were only able to learn the details about one of them. The other was much older, and had been in the house longer than the old lady who lived there. As she had already lived in the village for 48 years, after marrying into one of the village families when she was 20 years old, it had obviously been made before about 1920. “About 100 years\", they guessed, but", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211535, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 252, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "228\n\nIt reads in translation:\n\n+\n\n+\n\n\"There are two sorts of rice huller. One is made of wood. The other sort is made of mud. This sort is made with a round bamboo frame, filled with clean yellow mud. Bamboo teeth are pressed into both the upper and lower hulling faces. The upper frame of the huller has a hollow to receive the grain, the capacity of which is double that of a wooden huller. If the grain is at all damp when it goes into the huller, it will be crushed. After hulling 200 shek (E) of rice, a mud huller will start to fall to pieces. Wooden hullers require strong men to operate them, but mud hullers are suitable for operation by women or young people. The ordinary peasants use mud hullers of this type.\"\n\nI am grateful to Mr. Yau for drawing my attention to this description.\n\nJames Hayes\n\nA GLIMPSE OF THE LAND SETTLEMENT AT SHEK PIK VILLAGE,\n\nLANTAU ISLAND, HONG KONG\n\nIn the opening years of this century, following the lease of what is now the New Territories of Hong Kong, all land that was being utilised or had been occupied was surveyed by the new government. A Land Court was set up to settle all claims to ownership of land, and any disputes were adjudicated. Finally, a register of ownership for each of the 355 Demarcation Districts was prepared and bound into a folio together with a survey sheet and a Block Crown Lease.\n\nWhilst the work of the survey and land court are well-documented in the official reports of the time,1 few materials showing the process in the villages have survived.\n\nTo my mind, the most interesting of these are the small printed \"chits”, known to villagers and government staff alike as Chi Tsai", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211537, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 254, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "230\n\nThe main additions to our knowledge of the land situation at Shek Pik afforded by the chi tsai come from the notations giving the local place name (4) of each property, and whether a field was being cultivated by an owner or another party, and whether the claimant held a mortgage on someone else's property, as did Chi Yau-kei in a number of cases. Other information, on the use of huts, the occupancy of houses, with the numbers by which they were known in the village (?), and on abandoned (uncultivated) land, was also provided. Mortgages held by Yau-kei were also noted.\n\nIn Chi Yau-kei's case, the chi tsai appear to show him in possession of a considerable amount of land, some abandoned or fallow but mostly under his own (and his family members') cultivation and use. His fields extend over demarcation districts 312, 315, and 318, but are mostly located in the last.\n\nIs such information reliable? It could only have been given by the claimant. Unless he was slack in his answers, deliberately to avoid giving more information than he had to, or because he could not be bothered — it would have been easier to say that he occupied and farmed everything himself — the chances of accuracy are fairly good. If so, it is a pity that more chi tsai from the village have not survived, as they would have told us more about land use than it is possible to gain from the ownership schedules in the Block Crown Lease.\n\nFinally, a word about the forms themselves. They are of additional interest because each carries a red oval-shaped \"chop\" bearing the title of the New Territories Land Court in English and Chinese. In every case, there is another \"chop\", also in red, from the District Officer, added after the claim of ownership had been substantiated, stating that the paper is only for identification and record purposes and has no value by itself, since only the Tsap Chiu would be taken as an accurate record — presumably in case unscrupulous persons tried to pass the Chi Tsai off as title deeds in a fraudulent sale.\n\nThe forms have another value, in that the District Officer's notice is the earliest example I have seen of the use of the Chinese title “Lei Man Fu (li min fu)”, the time-honored description of the officer and the implied duties of the post. The full inscription reads:\n\n!\n\n \nI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211540, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 257, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "DEZAKETTRE DWUKISME)\n\nJames Hayes\n\n233\n\nNOTES\n\nSee the list of printed papers given at pp. 271-272 of my book, The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911: Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside (Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1977). Perhaps I should add that whilst the progress of the survey and land settlement are described, the records of hearings in cases where disputes could not otherwise be settled are not now available, save for some reports in the local English-language newspapers.1 See Chapter 4, \"Shek Pik, A Multilineage Settlement of Cantonese Farmers\" in Hayes 1977, op cit, pp. 104-128. I have also used some of the documentary material in my paper Education and Management in Rural South China in the Late Ch'ing at pp. 575-592 of Vol. 1 of Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Asian Studies 1984, (Hong Kong, Asian Research Service, 1985).\n\n1 Although surviving “Chi Tsai” from the New Territories are few in number, they are not rare either. I have come across them here and there in my research, but unfortunately dismissed them as being of no particular interest or value, compared with the Block Crown Leases and actual customary deeds of sale and mortgage.\n\nOne entry from my Notes, for instance, taken at Chuk Yuen Village, New Kowloon, in July 1963, states, \"Her husband's father was Lam Hei (), and she showed me a few chits for lot numbers claimed at the Land Court in 1901. They included one interesting receipt for 13 tax receipts, presumably Ch'ing land tax receipts, which must have been submitted as proofs of ownership at the land settlement following the lease of the New Territories to Great Britain in 1898“. A collection of some dozens of chi tsai from New Kowloon villages is in the Public Records Office, Hong Kong (HKMS104): these will be the subject of a separate note in due course.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211566, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 283, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "259\n\nNOTES\n\nThere are several instances where Faure distorts the anthropological literature completely. The “frontier” which Pasternak (1969) refers to, for example, has to do with the socio-political consequences of a certain economic relationship between man and his use of specific strategic resources, namely water and land. Land reclamation is not an accurate translation of this frontier situation. Faure also reads Freedman's (1958:2) interpretation of a passage by Fei (1946: 1) superficially and without much understanding of its context or rhetorical intent. Freedman's purpose in quoting Fei was to argue that the function of the lineage as a political and local organization transcends its identity \"in name” as a descent group. But it should be noted also that Freedman deliberately distorted Fei as well. Had Faure actually read Fei, he would have also discovered that the phenomenon which Fei (1946:5) was describing was not even a descent group at all, which should make it quite enigmatic indeed. Sometimes among the peasants, the clan is found, but it is of another kind. In Yunnan, for instance, I have seen that in villages local organization is formed in terms of clan which includes even members of different surnames. Functionally these are not strictly kinship groups. I shall leave open as to the nature of the so-called clan-village. I rather suspect that such an organization among the peasants is a local organization, not a kinship organization.\n\nWhen reading Fried as he does Freedman, Faure confuses the model for empirical reality. Underlying the petty disputes over the definition of lineages and clans as analytical constructs, Fried (1970) was trying to make a more important point about the political functions of a genealogy in allocating differential access to scarce strategic resources (i.e., lineage property), this according to Fried being more important than the existence of property per se. The relative distinction between stipulated and demonstrated descent must be understood in this light.\n\nSheer numbers never mean anything. Even in Faure's (p. 96) analysis of a Chinese funeral, there is no a priori reason to believe that the lineage or village should have any role or obligation to play in ritual preparations. The scale of any such operation is always determined by the family of the deceased. “Work” is delegated among volunteers within the community (not necessarily a territorial one), whether it be neighbours, colleagues, or friends. Correspondingly, compensation for services rendered is made either as payment or as fa see.\n\nI suspect that variations in village organization and relationships within village clusters were shaped during the formative period prior to the time when the village had any formal identity. The diversity of local experience can only be attributed to the diversity of interaction within different villages. Rules prohibiting intermarriage in Man Uk Pin and the lack of an ancestral hall in Wong Keng Tei are other examples of local phenomena which must be understood in reference to the way the villagers themselves define or interpret the nature of their own community.\n\nSee Strathern's (1984) study of the \"community\" in an English village.\n\nThe whole problem with Faure's description of “lineage-building” is that it is too easy to project a genealogical structure onto residence patterns, especially with help from Block Crown Lease Demarcation District Maps and the like. As for the Sha Tin Wai example, I doubt whether Faure bothered to match up the registered ownership of houses with its actual inhabitants or even to seek informant testimony with regard to this period of household mobility. In practice, villages rarely update actual ownership records unless there is a conveyance of sale or other transaction that requires re-registration. That registered ownership is usually a couple of generations behind is thus the norm rather than the exception.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211710, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 125, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "100\n\nTsun Wan has several local industries; . . . In the valley running up into the hills to the south-west of Tai Mo Shan there is a village consisting entirely of watermills, where wood is ground up for the manufacture of joss sticks. This picturesque place is about half a mile beyond Tsun Wan, near the 9th milestone, and follows the stream upwards, first on the one bank and then on the other. The first watermill is reached in 5 minutes' walk from the road, and beyond are a dozen more little houses perched on the sides of the valley, each with its waterwheels busily turning. For a small tip the owner of one of these mills will show you inside; the atmosphere is thick with fragrant dust, and through it you can dimly see great stone-headed hammers pounding away the aromatic wood.23\n\nFrom the description cited, the area seems to be Tso Kung Tam (2H), which is situated to the north-west of Tsuen Wan. According to elder villagers, there were six water-wheels in operation after 1930, and one of these was still in operation until 1952-1953. Later, they were replaced by electrically driven grinders, and manufacturing activities expanded to include the production of incense coils. Heywood's description was written during the last few years in which the incense wood was pounded by water power. The whole area was resumed by the Government around 1978 for the construction of the Tsuen Wan Mass Transit Railway Terminus.\n\nAlthough Tsuen Wan is the best known of the incense milling centres of the New Territories, and was the only one to survive after the 1920s, in the early years of the century there were at least two others. Sandalwood mills were noted at Pak Kiu Tsai between Pun Chung and Wun Yiu immediately outside Tai Po New Market during the Block Crown Lease surveys of about 1905. Similarly, early twentieth-century maps show sandalwood mills at Heung Fan Liu (56%, “Incense Powder Sheds\") just outside Tai Wai in Sha Tin. Heung Fan Liu and Pak Kiu Tsai are sites very similar to Tso Kung Tam in Tsuen Wan immediately alongside a fast-flowing stream with a substantial year-round flow of water to power the water-wheels. Heung Yuen Wai (I, \"Incense Tree Grove\") in Ta Kwu Ling may also be a placename referring to the incense trade → adjacent villages are called Tsung Yuen (AB, \"Pine Grove\") and Chuk Yuen (†, \"Bamboo Grove''), suggesting three local specializations. No sandalwood mills at Heung", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211745, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "135\n\nbeen only too pleased to have the buildings back in operation, and the daily prayers re-started. Kuk Shan Kit, however, died after being at the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz for only a few years. His disciples dispersed to other monasteries. Only one disciple, a lady of over 40 when she arrived from Lo Fau Shan, stayed at the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz, where she lived until she died early in 1991. It is because of Kuk Shan Kit's early death, and the dispersal of his disciples, that the nunnery escaped being rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s.\n\nBefore the War, the nunnery seems to have been dependent on donations from villagers and on offerings made by wayfarers, despite the fact that, at least on paper, it owned a considerable amount of land. At the Block Crown Lease Survey (1905) it was registered as the owner of 2.49 acres of First Quality, 1.8 acres of Second Quality, and 0.23 acres of Third Quality riceland in the Ping Shan area (DD79), 3.79 acres, 0.42 acres and 0.26 acres in the Ping Che area (DD77), 0.87 acres of First Quality riceland in the Wo Hang Au area (DD38), and 1.22 acres of First Quality riceland in the Man Uk Pin area (DD37), totalling 8.37 acres of First Quality, 2.22 acres of Second Quality, and 0.49 of Third Quality riceland; 11.08 acres overall. The only houseland owned was the nunnery itself. Unfortunately, the title deeds for this land have been lost, and it is impossible to be sure when they were donated to the nunnery. The tiny plots near the nunnery were also owned by the nuns, but the value of these plots was so low that they were left unregistered.\n\nIt should be noted that the average holding of an average New Territories family actually farming their own land in the early part of this century was about one acre. Land rented out was usually rented at 50% of its crop, so that the 11.08 acres of the nunnery's holdings should have produced enough, if all rented out, to provide for the subsistence needs of five families, and hence should have been more than sufficient for the needs of a couple of elderly nuns, even if they did have to provide free tea to all wayfarers. However, it seems likely that only a small percentage of the income from this land actually reached the nunnery. This point is considered more fully below.\n\nThe Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz and the Ping Yuen Hap Heung\n\nPolitically, the nunnery stood at a nodal point in the tangled web of local politics. The area near the nunnery was certainly settled in the Ming period. The Punti Ho (I), Tang ( ), Man (A), To (#), and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211754, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 169, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "144\n\nThe Shing Ping She was thus required to maintain the Kim Ho Temple, and at least the Heroes Shrine part of the Ping Yuen Temple, and had to meet the costs of the rituals it conducted there. It also had to maintain the bridges and roads, and to meet the costs of the patrols it sponsored. However, it had no land at the time of the Block Crown Lease (1905). Apart from the temple itself, the Ping Yuen Hap Heung owned no land at that date either. Similarly, none of the individual villages of the area owned any significant amounts of communal land. The Shing Ping She did, however, have enough income to buy a good deal of land within the New Territories later — five and a half acres was bought, together with a house, between 1911 and 1920, at a cost of $1,272.50 for just over three of the five and a half acres. Villagers believe the She also bought land at Wang Kong Ha during this period.\n\n18\n\nThe She seems to have imposed a grain tax on all householders and cow owners within the patrol district. At least in the 1930s, as the elders recall, some of this grain was passed to the nuns at the Kim Ho temple and the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz for their sustenance, but most was sold.\n\nThe villagers claim that the Shing Ping She also bought from the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz all the nunnery's lands within Ping Che and Ping Yeung, at a date somewhen in the 1920s, but without changing the registration of the land in the Land Registry. This is possibly why the She's programme of land purchase in its own name comes to an abrupt end in 1920.\n\nThis claim may well hide a more complex situation. As mentioned above, neither the Shing Ping She nor the Ping Yuen Hap Heung held any communal land in 1905, although they had significant communal commitments: Loi Tung, equally, seems to have had no communal land to provide income for the needs of the Loi Tung Yeuk. At the same time, the nunnery land does not seem to have been used to meet nunnery needs. After the fire, the abbess repaired the roof by seeking donations, not by selling or mortgaging part of the land, and this was clearly the position also at the time of the 1868 rebuilding, since the inscription in the temple records the donors. In the 1930s, the nuns' rice came from donations from the Shing Ping She, not from rent. It seems very likely that the Ping Yuen Hap Heung and Loi Tung people had placed their communal lands under the name and protection of the Buddha. This is not uncommon in the area; such an arrangement made it more difficult for managers to embezzle the land entrusted to them, and protected it from external...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211764, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 179, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "154\n\n19\n\n, at Law Fong) are believed to have entered the area after 1700. See Map of Ta Kwu Ling.\n\nIt is interesting to note that, of the 21 villages in the Ta Kwu Ling area, seven are purely Punti, nine are purely Hakka (including two of originally Punti but now Hakka speaking Mans), but five are of mixed Punti and Hakka residents, including the large village of Chau Tin (which has only a tiny handful of Hakka residents), Fung Wong Wu, Kan Tau Wai, and Law Fong, and Tong Fong which consists partly of Punti speaking Mans, and partly of Hakka speaking Mans.\n\n+\n\n1\n\nYeung, and Ng, at Fong Wong Wu; Siu, and Ho, at Chau Tin; Wong, at Kan Tau Wai; Pang, and Au, at Tai Po Tin; Fu Lau, (and others) at Wo Keng Shan; Yiut, at Chuk Yuen; Chan, and Yiu, at Law Fong (Luofang); Chau at Wang Kong Ha; Yeung, and Kwu, at Sai Ling Ha (Xilingxia), and others.\n\n21 The temple bell, of Chien Lung 21 (1756) was donated by \"all the faithful people of the Ping Yuen Hap Heung...\n\n...to stand for ever before the altar of the Lady Tin Hau*. Faure, Luk, Ng, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 670. The only earlier dated item in the temple, a Cloud Gong of 1727, was donated by a single family from Ping Che, Faure, Luk, Ng, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 661. The temple continued to be owned and controlled by this group of villages. Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, Oxford Univ. Press, Hong Kong, 1986, p. 104 is incorrect in saying that the temple was owned by Ping Yeung. In the Block Crown Lease, the Manager of the temple was Man Shan-fung, of Ping Che. The Tong Fong people, although closely related genealogically to the Ping Che people, were not part of the Ping Yuen Hap Heung, and did not take part in the Ta Tsiu.22 Faure, op. cit., p. 103.\n\n+\n\n+\n\n23 The four managers at the time of the Block Crown Lease were Tang Hung-wai (a houseowner of Loi Tung), Chan Shing-pong, called a houseowner of Ping Yeung in a District Office report of 1979), Man Ying-shau (probably a villager of Ping Che, a relative of the houseowners Man Ying-kei, Man Ying-wai, and Man Ying-fat), and Chung Choi-wah (a houseowner of Man Uk Pin). These died in 1938, 1926, 1925, and 1942 respectively, according to a report made to the District Office in 1979. The abbess, Wong Tik-yuen, was appointed a manager in 1926, but she died in 1931. After the War, the lack of managers caused trouble on a number of occasions. A temporary manager was appointed in 1968. In 1979 the Chairman of the Sha Tau Kok Rural Committee and others were appointed as managers, although he, as a Lin Ma Hang villager, had no connection with the nunnery. This seems to have been with a view to rebuilding the nunnery. This proposal has led to a string of vigorous complaints from the elders of the six villages with shares during the last three years, but the situation remains, at present (1991), unresolved.\n\n24 See Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society, op. cit., pp. 100-127, for a discussion of the Yeuk.\n\n25 The only alternative was a dangerous, difficult, and often impassable waist-deep ford, as the 1896 Kwong Fuk bridge tablet makes clear. See Faure, Luk and Ng, Historical Inscriptions of Hong Kong, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 298.\n\n26 See Robert G. Groves, \"The Origins of Two Market Towns in the New Territories\", Aspects of Social Organisation in the New Territories, Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, Symposium Report, 1964, pp. 16-20, and Alice Ng Lun Ngai-ha, \"Xianggang Xinjie xushi zhi xingqi yu shuailao: Dabuxu yanjiu\" [The Foundation and Decay of Market Towns in the New Territories of Hong Kong: A Study of Tai Po], in Chinese Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1985, pp. 633-655. The very widespread support for the Tsat Yeuk can be gathered from the list of donors shown on the Kwong Fuk bridge tablet, Faure, Luk and Ng, loc. cit.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213141, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1993", "page_number": 209, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "No. Name of Shop\n\n191\n\nAddress\n\nof Shop\n\nName of Owner\n\nVillage of Owner\n\nSource\n\nComments\n\nTobacco\n\n67\n\nGuesthouses\n\n68-71.\n\nWIS\n\nC\n\nC\n\n'3 or 4\" guesthouses See below under \"Others\" Basel missionaries. 1859\n\nOpium Divan\n\n72\n\nWIS\n\nLunie-burners\n\n73-74\n\nYin Lou\n\nC\n\nC\n\nFt.L\n\nOilers\n\n75\n\n=\n\n}\n\nWH\n\nC\n\ngroceries\n\n76\n\n77\n\n仙\n\n78\n\n利\n\n79\n\nSE\n\nB\n\n1 or 2 limekilns\n\nLockhart's Report, 1899\n\nsweets and small\n\n) these may be two of\n\nB\n\n) the guesthouses\n\nB\n\nJ\n\nB\n\n)\n\nHO\n\n...\n\nB\n\n) nothing is now\n\n18\n\nW\n\nB\n\n} remembered about\n\n82\n\n87\n\nK\n\n4\n\nB\n\n> these shops\n\nB\n\n}\n\n#4\n\n¥\n\n}\n\nProstitutes\n\n85-96\n\nRow neat\n\nCity\n\nC\n\nLS\n\nSaltworks\n\n97-115\n\n-\n\nYon In EL\n\nC\n\nHawken\n\nC\n\nWIS\n\nPunti girls from City\n\nOffered opium to clients\n\nHL workers from\n\nSwabue, sold salt retail\n\nDetail of works in Block Crown Lease\n\nFish, meat, vegetables, cooked food (including noodles), handicrafts\n\nfuel. Also at Yim Liu Ha\n\nE\n\nNOTES\n\nSee G A C Herklots, The Hong Kong Countryside, Hong Kong, 1951, pp 86-89 for tigers and leopard on Ng Tung Shan, and the Hsin An County Gazetteer (1819 Gazetteer, ch 3. Chung Lap Pao Edition, 1979, p. 45) for tiger, wild boar, and deer in the area\n\n2 1688 Hsin An County Gazetteer, ch 3, 127\n\nA salt commission was established at Nam Tau (Nantou) just outside the present borders of Hong Kong, probably in the Nan Yueh period, in the second century BC This was later divided into 4 commissions, probably during the Nan Han period (tenth century A.D) Of the 4 Nan Han commissions, the Kwun Fu commission certainly covered the Mirs Bay area in the Sung; the headquarters of the commission were moved temporarily from Kowloon City to Tip Fuk (Deep Fuk) on the east coast of the Bay in 1163; and probably did so from the establishment of the commission The borders of Tung Kuan County and its predecessors bent round to include just the coastal strip of Mirs Bay.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213143, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1993", "page_number": 211, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "193\n\nH\n\nDetails of the early Hakka examination successes are known from a recently recovered genealogy, of the Chan (陳) lineage of Nam Chung. It is understood that a copy of this genealogy will be deposited with the Hong Kong Museum of History. I am indebted to Mr Chan Wing-hot for drawing my attention to the information in this genealogy.\n\nQ Seen 8\n\nAt the time of the Block Crown Lease (1905), 12.68 acres of saltpans were recorded. However, the serious inadequacies of the first survey here led to another being conducted in 1912, when 17.11 acres were recorded. However, in 1912 two areas were left unclaimed, probably because storms had breached their bunds and ruined them. These two areas totalled about 3.3 acres. In addition, there were about 0.6 acres of houses, huts, and waste within the saltpan reclamation, which, therefore, totalled about 21.2 acres. The saltpans were very valuable property in the nineteenth century - the Basel missionaries (see below, n. 17) record the sale of a share by a Tam Shui Hang villager in 1882 for \"several hundreds of dollars\" (Basel Mission archive, doc. AT-16, Nr. 45). In the 1920s, however, and still more in the 1930s, cheap imported salt caused ever-growing problems, which led to the closure of the saltworks before the War. A bridge was built to the saltpans in 1934 (Administrative Reports for the Year 1934, App. J, \"Report on the New Territories for 1934\", p. J17). After the War, the abandoned saltworks became the site of a major squatter settlement, recently cleared. Today, the saltpan area has disappeared under new reclamation, and all that remains is a new Tin Hau Temple, replacing the old one previously on the saltpans, built on a new site on the new waterfront.\n\nFor details of the history of the temples in the area, on the settlement of the Hakka in the area, the reclamation projects they undertook, the founding and management of the market at Sha Tau Kok, and the functioning of the Shap Yeuk as the district management body, see P.H. Hase, \"The Alliance of Ten Settlements and Polities in the Sha Tau Kok Area\", in D. Faure and H.S. Siu, eds., Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China, Stanford University Press, 1995.\n\n12. No details on the earlier history of the temple survived the very full restoration of 1894, but Shan Tsun elders believe it to be very old.\n\n13. In the 1688 Gazetteer (Ch. 3) a ferry “along the coast” is mentioned called the \"Ma Tseuk Ling Ferry\". There can be no doubt that this is the ferry to Sha Yue Chung (Shayuchong, etc.), 12 miles down the coast. Ma Tseuk Ling, at the head of Starling Inlet, is the nearest old village to the Wu Shek Kok Temple (Wu Shek Kok village - probably a foundation of the early nineteenth century). The coasts of Starling Inlet within two or three miles of Ma Tseuk Ling were blocked with mudflats and mangrove everywhere except at Wu Shek Kok, where alone a hill falls steeply into the sea. Wu Shek Kok is, therefore, the only possible site for a \"Ma Tseuk Ling Ferry\" landing place. The Ma Tseuk Ling villagers owned the Wu Shek Kok Temple, and the Ma Tseuk Ling military post (1688 Gazetteer, ch. 7), was at Shek Chung Au, just a few hundred yards from Wu Shek Kok. These Ma Tseuk Ling connections with the Wu Shek Kok area strongly suggest that the Wu Shek Kok hill was regarded as forming part of the Ma Tseuk Ling area. Later, Wu Shek Kok formed part of the Ma Tseuk Ling Yeuk of the Shap Yeuk.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213144, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1993", "page_number": 212, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "194\n\n14 The oldest surviving dated object is the bell, of 1922 (D Faure, A Ng B Luk, F. M. Xianggang Beiming Huabian, Historical Inscriptions of Hong Kong, Urban Council, Hong Kong, Vol 3, p 733) The temple, however, appears in the Block Crown Lease (1905), and the local villagers believe it is old\n\n15 The Sam Heung villagers have recently elected a tablet at the resited replacement temple, stating that the temple was first built in the Chia Ch'ing reign (1796-1820), and that the Ta Tsiu was instituted as soon as the temple was built While the grounds for these statements are not given, they are reasonable, and probably correct, although a date late in the reign is likely\n\n16 D Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society, op cit. p 107\n\n17\n\nA copy of this genealogy is in the collection of New Territories historical documents at United College, Chinese University of Hong Kong I am indebted to Dr D Faure for drawing my attention to this reference\n\nOur information on mid-nineteenth century Sha Tau Kok comes primarily from documents of the Basel Mission, which had a Mission Station in the town 1849-1854, and whose missionaries regularly visited it in the late nineteenth century The missionaries rented four houses from a local village elder, near the western end of Upper Street, backing onto the wall The missionaries drew a map of the town in 1853, plans of typical shop units in 1849 and 1853, and wrote a long description of the town and district in 1853 – Map 2 is a re-drawing of the missionaries' map of 1853, corrected by measurements taken from the 1924 aerial photograph of the town (13 November 1924 original in the Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong) The written description of 1853 is Basel Mission archive, doc Al-2, Nr 44, “Half-Yearly Report of the missionary Rev P Winnes, from 1st January to 1st July 1853\", printed in translation in P H. Hase. \"Sha Tau Kok in 1853”, in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol 30, 1990, pp 281-297 See PH Hase, \"The Alliance of Ten\", op cit, for redrawings of the plans of mid-nineteenth century shop units, and also for a drawing of a cross-section of such a shop unit I am indebted to Rev Carl Smith for drawing my attention to the importance of the Basel Mission documents to the history of Sha Tau Kok, and for allowing me to use his transcripts and notes I would also like to thank Mrs W Haas, and the staff of the Basel Mission archive in the preparation of this article\n\n19 The Tung Wo Kuk was so named in direct emulation of the older Punti Council in Sham Chun, which was also known as \"The Council for Peace in the East\", PA, Tung Ping Kuk - the choice of the name Tung Wo Kuk must be seen, in these circumstances, as a marked sign of local pride and self-confidence\n\n20 See n 11\n\n21\n\nThe villagers believe that the name Sha Tau Kok is taken from a poem by a Ch'ing official who passed by and was so impressed by the beauty of the sun rising above the sand-dunes that he wrote a poem on it ADV AEAA. \"The sun rises from the sand-dunes the moon hangs where land and ocean meet\" I have heard this story from a Sheung Wo Hang elder, and see also Shatoulaode quwer xuanguanbu (Sha...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213451, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 47, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "14\n\nEven portions of the sea and the bed of the sea, foreshore, sand beaches, and any land whatever which may be turned into use and profit, are claimed and in some cases registered\n\nAll land in the New Territories with effect from 23rd July 1900 was declared to be Crown Land.\" Any Crown Land not included in a Block Crown lease was, therefore, unleased Crown Land. But the District Commissioner records:-\n\n\"Certain prescriptive rights over \"Crown Land\" have, however, always been recognised either tacitly or by official acknowledgment; most villages have rights of this kind over a greater or smaller area adjoining them, where they graze their cattle, cut grass and bury the dead...\"\n\nThe question of clan lands has right from the outset been a thorny problem. The Memorandum states:-\n\n\"Small villages and hamlets often place themselves under the protection of large and influential clans to which they refer all their complaints and from which they expect assistance in case of attack, robbery, and lawsuits. In some instances the smaller villages pay their land tax to the Government through the influential clans... These clans have, as before stated, claimed large tracts of land, which they have never occupied, but which they have leased in perpetuity to others, who undertake to bring the land under cultivation. The greater part of the land claimed by clans was never registered and, as a rule, it appears that no land tax was ever paid on this land to the Government.\" The cultivators, who have paid rent for years to the clans, in view of the fact that the land had not been registered, were afraid to dispute the rights of ownership, as they anticipated it would result in the land being resumed by Government and they would thus be deprived of their right of cultivation.\n\n+\n\nThe sequel is to be found in the \"Memorandum of the work done in the Land Office, Hong Kong, in respect of the New Territories for the year 1899***.\n\n\"The most serious matter of all, however, has been the stand taken by the farmers against the clans, their former landlords. The clans and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213473, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 69, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "36\n\nHong Kong Sessional Papers, 1900, pp 26-269 This Report was forwarded to London under cover of Sir Henry A. Blake's despatch to Mr Chamberlain of 19th February 1900 and this Memorandum of Land was subsequently published as Command Paper 403 in November 1900 (vide Committee Report, 1953, Chap III para 39 and Appendix 10 at p 207, where only two extracts appear) Mr Lockhart stated that the Memorandum was prepared with the assistance of Mr. Messer and Mr Ts'oi, Cader and First Clerk respectively\n\nA later, verbose but less informative source is \"Some Notes on Land Tenure in the New Territories\" attached to the Report, dated 4th March 1901, on the Land Court for 1900 by Mr HHJ Gompertz (who in 1909 was elevated to a puisne judgeship), a Member of that Court - Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1901 p 371 at p. 374\n\n17\n\nThe Emperor of China\n\nre the Chinese Government and Imperial Rent\n\nReport, DCNT, 1959-60, para. 171. The District Commissioner's Report for 1947-48 records (at para 29) that it was discovered in that year that one hamlet had never paid Crown rent since the British occupation of the New Territories This was remedied by the grant of a Block Crown Lease\n\n90 8. New Territories Ordinance (Cap 97)\n\n\"Report, DCNT, 1959-60, para 171\n\nTA\n\ne The Chinese Government\n\nby Bruce Shepherd, Deputy Land Officer, dated 17th January 1900, being Appendix VIII to Lockhart's Report, para. 12 (Hong Kong Sessional Papers, 1900, p 277 at p 279)\n\n44\n\nReport dated 18th February 1905 of Mr C. Mcl Messer, member of the Land Court (Hong Kong Sessional Papers, 1905, p. 149)\n\nReport dated 7th March 1905 of Mr JR Wood, Member of the Land Court (Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1905 p. 147)\n\nIbid, and see also Report on the New Territories 1899-1912, para 21(1), (Hong Kong Sessional Papers, 1912, p 46)\n\n7\n\nTregear, op cit, p 62\n\nDA\n\nReport, DCNT, 1959-60, para 177 and Tregear, loc cit\n\n44 Wilson's Notes\n\nalso sometimes termed \"Ching Sheung\" according to Wilson's Notes", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214650, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "29\n\nNga Tsin Wai in 1902\n\nA great deal of information on Nga Tsin Wai can be gathered from the Block Crown Lease, which in Nga Tsin Wai dates from 1902. Nga Tsin Wai forms part of Survey District 1, the very first area to be surveyed, and, as a result of experience gained, the later surveys were improved, particularly by the inclusion of the Chinese characters for the names recorded, and the recording of the village the landowner claimed to belong to. Although this useful information is omitted from the Nga Tsin Wai Lease, a good deal of information can still be had.\n\nAt the Appendix is a summary of the land-holdings of Nga Tsin Wai as recorded in the Block Crown Lease. For the purposes of this summary, any villager owning a house in Nga Tsin Wai in 1902 is considered a villager of Nga Tsin Wai, even if he owned other houses elsewhere. Any villager not recorded as owning any house is considered an Nga Tsin Wai villager if the bulk of his farmland was near the village. Any trust is considered a Nga Tsin Wai trust if the Manager (or any one of the Managers) was a Nga Tsin Wai villager, or if it owned a house within the village: any manager of a Nga Tsin Wai trust is also considered a Nga Tsin Wai villager, even if he would otherwise not be. There were other landholders in the Kowloon City area - especially men of the Ng clan resident in Sha Po - who are here considered as Sha Po villagers rather than Nga Tsin Wai villagers, and so are not included in the summary. This is not entirely satisfactory since, in 1902, there was probably no clear distinction drawn between Nga Tsin Wai and Sha Po, and the distinction drawn here between Nga Tsin Wai and Sha Po villagers is one unlikely to have been accepted by the villagers in 1902. However, it is the best that can be done.\n\nThe village consisted in 1902 of about 140 houses within the walls (not including the Tin Hau Temple and the Village Office), and some 48 outside the walls, plus the Ng clan Ancestral Hall and school. Six of these 188 houses were owned by village trusts: 73 individual villagers or groups of villagers owned the others. A further twelve house-owners classed here as Nga Tsin Wai villagers owned houses only in Sha Po, and five more owned houses only in Kowloon City. These villagers are here classed as Nga Tsin Wai villagers because of acting as trustees of Nga Tsin Wai village trusts or because the bulk of their agricultural land lay near the village, or because they formed part of groups of villagers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214652, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 67, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "31\n\nOne of the things which stands out most clearly from the Block Crown Lease at Nga Tsin Wai is that the Chans were already only a remnant in the village in 1902. Eight Chan clan households are recorded owning houses in the village, but five of these are recorded as owning only houses (four of the five only owning a single house, within the walls). Yet another Chan is recorded as owning nothing except one one-hundredth of an acre of arable land. A seventh household consisted of no less than five adult men as joint heads of household, owning jointly a single house within the walls, and a small amount of arable land (one-fifth of an acre). These seven households are clearly relics of an earlier period when their ancestors were villagers in reality. Most of these families had sold out, and kept back just the one house, possibly for ritual reasons, disposing of their arable land, and, probably going into business in the City.\n\nand the one-fifth of an acre of arable land, however, was almost certainly a Tso Uk (祖屋, \"Ancestral House\"), owned by all the Chans from all the various scattered places where they then (and now) live. This house was doubtless put into joint ownership when the Chans started to desert Nga Tsin Wai, so that the clan would retain their links with their place of origin. The house still functions in this way today, with the Village Headmen of all the various Chan villages being the joint owners. The house is used for various rituals at the Ta Tsiu and elsewhen. Only two Chan households remained in 1902 as genuine villager households - Chan Ying-kam, who owned five houses in the village and one in the Market, and 0.43 acres of arable land; and Chan Fu, who owned three houses within the walls, one outside, and one in the Market, and 0.86 acres of arable land. Chan Ying-kam was also the Trustee of the only Nga Tsin Wai Chan clan trust to survive as a functioning Nga Tsin Wai body to 1902: the Chan Shuk Ching Tso, which owned 0.16 acres of arable land (the Chan Chiu In Tso functioned insofar as it was one of the three joint owners of the Tin Hau Temple and the Village Office, but this trust, in 1902, retained no other property in the Nga Tsin Wai area).\n\nThe Yung clan, which had bought into the village, probably only a few years before the 1902 Survey, consisted of just two brothers, Yung Wing-kwong and Yung Wing-fai. They owned only the two houses they lived in, and no arable land - the houses were owned jointly. These brothers had doubtless bought the houses as a place to live in: they were very probably merchants working in the Market.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214656, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 71, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "35\n\nby renting arable from the ancestral trusts of which they were members. 28.91% of the total arable land owned by the Ngs of Nga Tsin Wai was held by ancestral trusts. As usual in the New Territories, these trusts ranged from the very tiny to the very large. Thus, the Ching Yam Tso (in the name of the pivotal ancestor of the twelfth and most junior of the descent lines of the Ngs) owned only a single house within the walls, and 0.13 acres of arable land. There were only three descendants alive at the time of the Block Crown Lease. There can be little doubt that this house was a Tso Uk, used by the descendants to hold their ancestral tablets and to perform family funeral and other rituals (this was a common practice at Tai Wai in Sha Tin, where, as at Nga Tsin Wai, the houses within the walls were just too small to cope with rituals). The arable land was doubtless rented out to provide income for maintenance of the family graves. Similarly, the 0.14 acres of the Man Hing Tso, the 0.12 acres of the Shing Pak Tso, the 0.07 acres of the Tsak Tai Tso, and also the 0.1 acres owned by the Li Yung Fat Tso - all of these probably reflect small areas rented out for the maintenance of graves.\n\nAnother reason for these tiny trust estates which is quite likely in some circumstances (and which would reflect similar practices in Sha Tin) would be trusts set up by brothers on the division of their father's estate on his death, when some part of the estate was found to be difficult to divide, and so was put into a trust, so as to be held by the brothers jointly - examples in Sha Tin include small orchards, rice-drying grounds, buffalo wallows, and so forth. This is almost certainly the case with the King Tai Tso, where the trustees and sole beneficiaries in 1902 were the King Tai Ancestor's younger son and the son of his already deceased elder son - this trust owned only 0.04 acres of land.\n\nOther trusts, however, were devices for holding family property. The Chiu Pak Tso owned a large house in Kowloon Market, and 0.99 acres of arable land. The two trustees, Ng Shing-po and Ng Loi, were the only members of this trust: individually, the two owned only houses (Shing-po owned two houses within the walls and one without, and Loi owned one within and two without), and one small plot of arable each (probably the family vegetable garden - 0.04 acre in the case of Shing-po, and 0.03 in the case of Loi). This trust was probably set up in the name of the ancestor who was the grandfather of Loi and the great-grandfather of Shing-po: this was effectively another uncle-and-nephew land-holding, but where the family preferred to hold the joint estate more formally, as a trust. Other similar situations are likely to lie", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214661, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "40\n\nThe 1902 Lease also shows us a glimpse of how women were treated in the village then. It was a frequent occurrence that men died, leaving widows. Traditionally, there were three ways of dealing with this. In poorer households, the widow would live in a corner of the house, which would be taken over by her sons. Where this happened, the Block Crown Lease, of course, does not show it. However, in other cases, especially where the widow was elderly, with adult sons, she would be given the house she had lived in for life, while the sons took the other houses and the farm, guaranteeing the mother a certain fixed amount of food per month for her upkeep (in some villages, the sons would execute a legally binding deed to this effect). At least three examples of this practice can be detected in the Nga Tsin Wai Block Crown Lease. The widow Ng Chan Shi (“Madame Ng, of the Chan surname”) is recorded as owning merely 1 house within the walls, and 1 house in Kowloon Market. Li Chan Shi (“Madame Li, of the Chan surname”) owned a house outside the walls, and 0.37 acres of land - probably to provide her with vegetables, and possibly for a small market garden plot. Li Ip Shi (“Madame Li, of the Ip surname”) had a house outside the walls, two houses in Kowloon Market, and a vegetable plot of 0.06 acres, with a further 0.05 acres held jointly with Li Ping-sang.\n\nThe alternative method of dealing with widows, especially where there were infant children, was to allow the widow to occupy the land in trust for her sons' coming-of-age. Sometimes this was formalised, with the widow shown in the Block Crown Lease as Trustee, but very often the widow is shown as full owner, everyone understanding the arrangement. There is one clear case of this in Nga Tsin Wai. Li Ng Shi (\"Madame Li, of the Ng surname\") is recorded as the owner of three houses within the walls, and a very large house at Sha Po, together with 1.24 acres of arable land. While it was theoretically possible for a woman to own land (e.g. land she bought with her own money), it was very rare, and it can be confidently assumed that this land was land held by her as widow, in trust for her infant sons.\n\nThe 1902 Block Crown Lease, therefore, shows us a prosperous village, filled with people, surrounded by what, for the New Territories, were broad areas of arable land, with the essential components of a self-confident village of a fine Ancestral Hall and School, and with access to a literary club. The Lease shows us that the village families were mostly holding enough land for their subsistence, especially if", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214663, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 78, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "42\n\narea faced in consequence a sellers' market, and doubtless the result was a steady increase in the number of fields under vegetables, and in the number of village households rearing pigs and other livestock for the market. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, buyers from Hong Kong could only buy from villages on the mainland sea-coast opposite the City, since there then were no roads to bring in produce from further afield, and no vehicles to carry anything either. However, even though market gardening must have increased in importance throughout the later nineteenth century, it is likely that demand from Kowloon City and the ships calling there was enough to make market gardening a significant feature of local life even before 1841.\n\nThe Nga Tsin Wai villagers say that rice cultivation stopped in the village well before the last War. Most of the elders cannot remember seeing any rice cultivation there in their youth in the 1930s. By then, the area was entirely devoted to producing food for the market. One contact said his mother and grandmother ran a pig-farm in the 1930s with 40 head of pigs - a very large farm for the New Territories at that date. That farm operated out of sheds built on the family fields, but a lot of villagers kept pigs and cattle actually within the walls of the village. The elders say that a lot of houses within the walls were empty in the 1930s. Many of the villagers had moved to the larger and airier homes outside the walls leaving empty premises behind (twelve villagers in 1902 owned houses both within the walls and outside, and a further nine had houses only outside the walls then). These empty houses within the walls were mostly used as pigsties and cattle sheds in this period: indeed, it is doubtful if there had ever been enough resident population at Nga Tsin Wai to fill all the village houses within the walls.\n\nA Sha Tin villager, Hui Wing-hing, F, of Shek Kwu Lung Village, wrote a series of poems about villages in Sha Tin and adjacent areas, mostly in the period 1890-1905, i.e. at approximately the same time as the Block Crown Lease Survey. For each village, he wrote about what caught his eye as important and special in that village. Market gardening was what he found most significant about the Kowloon City villages, and, in particular, the growing of fruit for the market. He has this to say of the League of Seven and Six Villages areas in his poem on the villages of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and Tsuen Wan:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214665, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 80, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "44\n\nThe lychees at Po Kong are really abundant.\n\nOf these verses, the reference in line 169 is to a temple near Ma Thu Wai. The reference in lines 170-172 is probably to the ejection of the Ch'ing officials from the Kowloon Walled City. In line 174 the reference may be to the prostitutes' quarter in the Market. The \"hospital\" in line 175 is the Lok Sin Tong.\n\nFor three villages - Po Kong, Sha Tei Yuen, and Yuen Ling - the poet singles out the orchards and vegetable fields he saw there as particularly significant and worth comment, and at Ngau Chi Wan it was \"herding\" - presumably of meat animals for the market - which he noted as interesting and special. The vast majority of villages visited by Hui Wing-hing were rice-subsistence villages, with almost every inch of arable land used for rice, and the Kowloon villages clearly looked very different. While Hui Wing-hing's attention at Nga Tsin Wai was taken up by the British takeover of the New Territories, there can be no doubt that Nga Tsin Wai, too, was to a large degree a market-gardening area in his time.\n\nAlmost all the coastal villages in the New Territories area had sampans, and added inshore fishing to their subsistence. It is a measure of Nga Tsin Wai's general prosperity that the Nga Tsin Wai village elders believe that their ancestors did not do this: the village had no sampans, and bought its fish - probably mostly from the coolies carrying fish from Tolo Harbour past the village to Kowloon Market. The Nga Tsin Wai villagers did, however, dig clams from the mud flats offshore, together with the villagers of all the other villages in the Kowloon Bay area. They also reared carp in the village moat, and possibly in other fishponds, for sale in the Market.\n\nNga Tsin Wai was never a poor village, but it prospered noticeably during the later nineteenth century. 1902, the date of the Block Crown lease must have been about the most prosperous period of this village community. The village fields were fast being converted to market gardens as the village faced their sellers' market in the growing City. The village had developed good contacts with shipping companies, so that many of the men were able to get good jobs as seamen. Many villagers were also getting good jobs in the Whampoa Docks, where, again, the village developed good contacts in this period. As the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214667, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 82, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "46\n\ntrust in his father's name (the Chan Hok Yin Tso) which owned 2.7 acres (Chan Tak-hing and his brother Chan Tsan-hing,\n\n(\n\n, were the only beneficiaries - it is likely that much of the property of this trust was amassed by Chan Tak-hing). His son, Chan Kwok-yan, 1872-1937) succeeded him on the Lok Sin Tong Board, the Kowloon City Kaifong, and as trustee for the Chan Hok Yin Tso, but he took to smoking opium, and the family business was closed down in 1930, when the family shop in Kowloon City was cleared for re-development.\n\nAs for the Lis, Li Ping-ngam, an \"honest farmer, who, on coming back from a meeting in Kowloon City, would take off his shoes and go back to work in the fields\", and resident in Sha Po, was an early Director as well312. He was probably dead by 1902. Li Ping-shang, who does appear in the 1902 Block Crown Lease, may have been his brother; if so, the lady Li Ip Shi mentioned above was very possibly Li Ping-ngam's widow, since Li Ping-shang owned a small piece of land jointly with the widow Ip. It is entirely likely that Li Ping-ngam was not quite the simple farmer he was remembered as. He may have been the dominant leader of the Li clan before Li Lai-ting (who could also have been called \"an honest farmer\").\n\nNg Shue-fan was also one of the Directors of the Lung Chun School within the Walled City () at the end of the nineteenth century33. This had been founded in the 1840s when the Sub-Magistracy was moved to Kowloon City, as a mark of the importance the Ch'ing Government placed on education and scholarship. Five trustees, who probably represented the local groups who had paid for the erection of the school in the 1840s, managed it: it is likely, therefore, that Nga Tsin Wai had been significantly involved in the foundation. By the end of the nineteenth century this school was being used as a Meeting Hall when meetings of the district elders and gentry were called. That Nga Tsin Wai provided one of the trustees is eloquent evidence of its local prestige and importance.\n\nNg Shue-tong was similarly important in local charitable affairs outside the Lok Sin Tong. Thus, when the Hau Wong temple was restored in 1879, he was the Chief Manager for the project (at least seven other Nga Tsin Wai villagers can be identified from the Donation Tablet)34. When the Hau Wong Temple had been restored in 1822,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214684, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 99, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "63\n\n16 The date is engraved on the earth god shrine in the village\n\nFor the Ta Tsiu at Nga Tsin Wai, see J W Hayes, The Rural Communities of Hong Kong Studies and Themes, Hong Kong Oxford University Press, 1983, pp 157-159 See also p 162\n\n18 These guns were all sunk in the moat immediately to the south of the village gate when the Japanese came\n\n19 In the 1902 Block Crown Lease, the Ancestral Hall is shown as the Ng Kit-san house, and the Ng Kit-san house as the Ancestral Hall by some strange error\n\n0\n\n1\n\n༣།\n\nDespatch from Sir M Nathan to Colonial Office, January 11th, 1905, in file CO882/6, printed in Eastern No 88, Confidential Hong Kong Correspondence [December 15 1903 to February 27 1907] Relating to the Proposed Canton Kowloon Railway', printed for the use of the Colonial Office, April 1907, No 59, pp 81-88\n\nThe slopes to the east of Lion Rock were under the protection of Kwun Yam These slopes were called Tsz Wan Shan (Fill, “Mountain of the Cloud of Compassion one of the titles of Kwun Yam) There has been a temple to Kwun Yam half way up to the pass since at least 1853, probably much earlier The early ownership of this temple is unclear\n\nInformation on the Chus is taken from their Tsuk Po, a copy of which I was kindly given by Dr James Hayes, and from notes of interviews Dr Hayes had with Chu clan elders in the 1960s See also, Southern District Board, 1996, p 138\n\nOn the Tung Shan Temple, see J W Hayes, \"The Kwun Yam - Tung Shan Temple of East Kowloon, 1840-1940”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, Vol 23, 1983 pp 212-218\n\n*For instance, in Aed (), Joint Publishing (Hong Kong), 1994, p 44, and RPF Lam, ed The Hong Kong Album, Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1982, p 66\n\n25 I am indebted to Dr James Hayes for much of the detail of this section\n\n26 See A Lui, Forts and Pirates, op cit p 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 } ]