[ { "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": 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": 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 } ]