Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1954-1955 — Page 56

of accommodation in the tenement areas of the city, and its high price, had compelled them to squat in a village with inadequate water supply and virtually no sanitation. Many of them had previously been living in tenement areas.

67. The range of incomes was so considerable as to make average figures meaningless. Some families had two or three grown up children with steady jobs in local factories or in business: the father might run a small squatter shop in Li Cheng Uk while the mother earned pin money by embroidery; such a family might be earning $1,000 a month, whilst the family next door might be desperately poor. Li Cheng Uk was far from being just a jumble of domestic huts. In among the buildings were about four acres given over to intensive cultivation of fifty different kinds of vegetable and fruit for the city markets. Pigs were bred everywhere and some families cultivated bean sprouts in cellars or dark rooms. Business thrived, and there were over two hundred shops and workshops in the area cleared by the department. The workshops included a large number of sub- stantial rattan godowns and workshops, some of them engaged in the export trade. There were also tinsmiths, blacksmiths, shoe-makers, rubber goods factories, and forges, mostly operating on a small scale. On the fringe of the area were a number of squatter factories using power-driven machinery for the manufacture, among other things, of torch cases and metal castings. Besides eating houses and a market there were three squatter schools, an unregistered Chiu Chow temple and a village fire brigade station. Every structure was illegal.

68. The clearance of nearly ten thousand of these people in ten weeks required careful organization. The department had the benefit of the experience gained by the inter-depart- mental organization which had handled the Shek Kip Mei fire victims, and the procedure adopted was somewhat similar. The area was first divided into seven zones of about 1,350 persons, each zone going through the several stages of documentation about six days after those in the preceeding zone. This meant

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