ENG-1948 — Page 66

plus of salt/dried fish. Normally the best buyer of Hong Kong fish is China but unstable conditions in that country and the rapid devaluation of the Chinese currency had an unfavourable effect on this trade. At times, instead of the greater part of the exports going to China, most of the fish exported from the Colony went to Chinese populations in America, Australia, Canada, the Philippines and Malaya. Some 40% of the total quantity of salt/dried fish marketed in 1948 was exported and the average value of monthly exports was a little under $400,000.

AGRICULTURE

Most of the 391 square miles within the boundaries of the Colony consists of mountains and hills, the more gradual slopes being clothed with grass, ferns and sparse pine-wood, the rocky ravines with evergreen trees and dense thorny shrubs. Practically none of this land is suitable for cultivation. The level land includes the alluvial plain north of the mountain of Tai Mo Shan but much of this, bordering Deep Bay, is mangrove swamp and salt marsh. The more gentle slopes of the valleys are intensively cultivated and the lower shoulders of the hills have also been terraced where practicable and where water is available for irrigation. The terraces and irrigation channels may date back many years; some fell into disuse during the Japanese occupation but have since been taken back into cultivation.

Before the war about one-tenth of the Colony's population lived on the land. The Chinese farmer of the New Territories is primarily a rice producer; any other crop that may be grown is subsidiary to rice. Rice from the Sha Tin area is of a very high quality, and is much too valuable for the farmers and villagers to eat; they are content with cheaper rices of poorer quality imported from Indo-China, Burma and Siam. In the time of the Manchus, Sha Tin rice was sent to the Emperor, so fine was the quality; in the years before the war it used to find its way to New York. Now that the export of rice is prohibited the local produce is consumed in the Colony; most finds its way to the city where it is bought at a high price in the open market by the more wealthy Chinese. Many farmers do not benefit greatly by this enhanced value of their produce because, as in so many places in the East, a large proportion of the wealth of the land goes to landlords, who may or may not live in the vicinity, and the amount of paddy handed over as interest on debts, perhaps of many years' standing, is not inconsiderable.

Except for the salt lands, which yield but one crop, most of the paddy fields of the Territories produce two crops a year,

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