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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
the refugees. Some refugees entered into occupation and some Hong Kong residents went out into the streets. The effect of this on the refugee problem as such will be referred to later.
If accommodation was desperately short, so was land. Even ten years ago there were few vacant levelled sites. Building land in Hong Kong is not found, it is made; either hacked out of the hills or created by reclamation. And there are clear limits to either process. Most of the refugees were farmers, a true cross-section of the population of China which is overwhelmingly agricultural. But where was the farming land? 50 square miles was under cultivation, and that 50 square miles was already supporting a population of nearly 300,000, three times as many as when the rural areas adjoin- ing the city first came under British rule in 1898. Almost all of the remaining country, which, apart from the cities of Hong Kong and Kowloon, measures another 328 square miles, is made up of steep and rocky hillside on which no farmer has ever found a living. The rural land already had more farmers than it could support.
The immigrants were homeless and the only livelihood they knew was debarred to them. They therefore depended on the two cities. Depended-the word has a melancholy aptness. For, when virtually all the vacant urban sites, Crown land and leased land alike, had been over-filled with their flimsy insanitary shelters, they moved into the hills with which the cities are surrounded and hung their shacks in deep festoons over rocks bared by the war-time search for fuel. But always they crowded in on the town, for there alone lay the hope of rice for tomorrow. They turned their hands to new trades with the resilience and resourcefulness of their race, and they caused little trouble so long as they were left undisturbed in their pathetic settlements, densely packed by both necessity and choice.
Before turning to the Government's attitude to this pre- dicament and it became a predicament with astonishing
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