Introduction
When urban authorities across the British Empire attempted to ‘improve’ ‘insanitary’ settlements in the late nineteenth century, especially after the plague epidemic in the mid-1890s, acquiring landed property from indigenous communities became a pressing issue. But who could claim to be indigenous residents that were entitled to compensation? Numerous studies have focused on the improvement trust and other authorities in Bombay to illustrate how the acquisition of ‘insanitary’ property created disputes with Indian property owners over property values and compensation. However, this body of literature, with exceptions such as Nikhil Rao’s study of suburban development in the interwar years, focused on the acquisition of property in the city centre.Footnote 1 A recent study even assumed that Hong Kong was anomalous from the Bombay model as its government did not persist in redeveloping the urban core at this time.Footnote 2 Such an assumption neglected the improvement schemes in Hong Kong that targeted rural settlements outside the city. Studies of urban development in colonial Hong Kong, such as those by Carl Smith, Ho Pui-yin and Cecilia Chu, have suggested that ‘indigenous residents’ or ‘Chinese property owners’ participated in the improvement schemes by exchanging land with the government.Footnote 3 By generalizing the landowners as ‘indigenous residents’, their works left room for exploring the ways in which colonial land settlement reinterpreted customary land practices and redefined who were ‘indigenous’ and entitled to land ownership. In this article, I will discuss the relationship between improvement schemes for Chinese rural communities and colonial adaptation of customary land practices in Hong Kong from the 1890s onwards.
This article thus also foregrounds the largely neglected impact of urbanization on Chinese rural communities before the 1950s and presents more complicated changes in rural landownership than the literature of colonial Hong Kong has portrayed. Many studies have refuted earlier assumptions that British indirect rule maintained rural social stability in the colony and have highlighted the ways in which colonial law and the administration altered the customary land practices that prevailed in Qing-era southern China and weakened landlord lineages’ control over their tenant villagers. Despite different understandings of the extent to which this change eroded Chinese customs, they mostly agreed that the colonial government was not interested in developing the New Territories – a leased territory obtained in 1898 – before the 1950s.Footnote 4 They thus neglected the colonial intrusion and uprooting of Chinese rural communities on the Kowloon Peninsula, including part of the leased territory known as New Kowloon, from the 1890s onwards. Alan Smart and Tang Wing-shing highlighted the administrative particularities of New Kowloon and argued that the British land policy deprived pre-1898 residents of the right to build on their own land.Footnote 5 However, as this article sets out below, examples from the colonial archive illustrate a more complicated picture, in which the land settlement in New Kowloon was not invariably in favour of the tenants. The settlement determined whether a pre-existing resident would gain from or be dispossessed by the improvement schemes.
Whereas several of the abovementioned studies have utilized part of the colonial land records concerning the improvement schemes in New Kowloon, I base my discussion on exploring other understudied files with the aid of the invaluable research notes compiled by Carl Smith.Footnote 6 These files document the land settlement and improvement works in New Kowloon and demonstrate that colonial law and administration remodelled customary practices that resulted in a settlement of land ownership that was messier than the abovementioned studies assumed. I argue that the results of colonial land settlement created ambiguous notions of indigeneity and led to certain precolonial residents gaining from the improvement schemes while others were dispossessed. The first section discusses how the settlement of the Squatters Board and the Land Court identified a mix of land-hoarding outsiders and old residents as ‘original owners’ of land, who were entitled to obtain land and invest in the improvement schemes. The second section then traces how the landowners referred to their precolonial residency and settlement history to avoid the government’s discriminatory treatment of ‘speculators’ during the acquisition of land. Eventually, the third section highlights the ways in which the Land Court’s procedures and ruling denied land ownership to some long-term residents, who were then dispossessed by the improvement schemes and moved into illegal ‘squatter’ settlements.
Becoming ‘original owners’
The implementation of sanitary improvements in outlying villages in the 1890s necessitated that the colonial government settle ownership of village land, which it had previously neglected, and adapt Chinese customary practices to the British legal system. In the Qing era, Chinese inhabitants adhered to a set of customary practices of land ownership in southern China, which was generalized by colonial officials and scholars as ‘one plot, two owners’ or ‘perpetual lease’. When latecomers settled in the region in the eighteenth century, they obtained perpetual leases for land from absentee landlords who had registered ownership of the land at the county magistrate with ‘red deeds’ (that is, deeds with the official red seal). The perpetual leases granted them varying rights, such as cultivating land, building houses, subletting, differing case by case, which were permanent and inheritable, but the deeds were not registered at the government office and were known as ‘white deeds’. As David Faure put it, the landlords’ claim on the land ‘rested on their having registered the land for tax’ and the tenants’ claim on having obtained deeds of perpetual lease from the landlords.Footnote 7 However, such arrangements were overhauled by the British. When Hong Kong island became a colony in 1841, the colonial government demarcated urban plots as property of the British Crown and sold leasehold by auction to both Chinese and non-Chinese purchasers. While the landlords, the Tang lineage of Kam Tin, lost control over their tenants in the villages on the island, the government compulsorily acquired land from the tenant villagers and infringed various of the villagers’ rights. When the government took over what later became known as British Kowloon in 1861, it compensated the Tangs and other landlords but simply declared the tenant villagers in the colony to be ‘squatters’ as they could not prove ownership. Nevertheless, except for demolishing several villages to make way for the city, others were left largely undisturbed and only required to pay annually for Squatters’ Licences from 1865.Footnote 8
It was the impetus to improve the city by expanding onto land inhabited by the ‘squatters’ that drove the colonial government to ascertain who among them had settled on and owned land before colonization. In the mid-1880s, the government endeavoured to expand the city to alleviate overcrowding.Footnote 9 Governor William Des Voeux found the government in ‘a great deal of embarrassment’ when attempting to remove Chinese ‘squatters’ for ‘building and sanitary purposes’.Footnote 10 A government-appointed commission to report on the land question recommended granting Crown leases to ‘original holders of land’ who had owned the land when the British arrived.Footnote 11 At the urging of Samuel Brown, the surveyor general, the government conducted a complete survey of village land in the colony for the purpose, with the part for British Kowloon completed in 1894.Footnote 12 At the same time, the government established the Squatters Board in 1890 to grant Crown leases to qualified holders of Squatters’ Licences. Villagers who were confirmed to have settled only after colonization were granted 25-year or shorter leases. In contrast, those who were ascertained to have settled before colonization, or their descendants, were identified as ‘ancient holders’, ‘descendants of original owners’ and owners of ‘ancestral property’.Footnote 13 They were granted 999-year or 75-year Crown leases for village plots. As Cheung Sui-wai describes, the holders of Squatters’ Licences ‘became respectable lease-holders of the colony’.Footnote 14
The government seized this opportunity to improve the villages. In various coastal villages, such as Fuk Tsun Heung and Tai Kok Tsui, the government granted realigned plots to the new Crown leaseholders in exchange for their old building land.Footnote 15 It also provided these villages with sanitary infrastructure. In 1897, it was reported that Tai Kok Tsui and Fuk Tsun Heung were redeveloped from ‘insanitary rookeries’ into ‘model villages’ with drainage and ‘properly kerbed and channelled streets’.Footnote 16 Existing studies have suggested that the plague pandemic in 1894 gave new impetus to colonial authorities to redevelop ‘insanitary property’ in the city, but the case of the Kowloon villages shows that the Hong Kong government had already been expanding the city by redeveloping peripheral ‘insanitary’ settlements by the time of the plague.Footnote 17
When the Hong Kong government took over the Chinese portion of the Kowloon Peninsula – as part of the leased New Territories – after the signing of the Peking Convention in 1898, it prepared for settling land ownership and drawing up street layout plans for the district. A few years earlier, Governor William Robinson had already written to the Colonial Office to report on land hoarding in the district by the colony’s Chinese businessmen and argued for expanding the colony to regulate their activities.Footnote 18 Some of the businessmen even introduced newspaper reporters to their plans for suburban development in the district.Footnote 19 Soon after the takeover, the government passed a law to demarcate the newly acquired portion of the peninsula as ‘New Kowloon’ and to apply there the laws concerning public health and property valuation in the city.Footnote 20 But still, the Convention restricted the colonial government from acquiring land from the New Territories’ inhabitants by stipulating that there would be ‘no expropriation or expulsion of the inhabitants of the district’ and that ‘land required for public offices, fortifications, or the like official purposes’ had to be ‘bought at a fair price’. The government tried to settle the issue of precolonial land ownership,Footnote 21 and in 1900, it notified local inhabitants to submit their claims to the Land Court for examination. With reference to the Land Court’s ruling, in 1905 the Hong Kong government’s Land Office then registered the names of landowners, or ‘leaseholders’, on a 75-year Block Crown Lease.Footnote 22 Existing studies suggest that the Land Court tended to recognize tenants as landowners at the expense of their landlords, thus weakening the lineages’ influence over the tenants.Footnote 23 Allen Chun even claimed that apart from ‘trifling exceptions’, ‘tenant cultivators and shopkeepers were registered everywhere as owners’.Footnote 24
Given New Kowloon’s proximity to the city, settlement of land ownership there was more complicated than existing studies have suggested. Land hoarders from the city acquired land from the landlords and succeeded in claiming ownership at the expense of the tenants, far more than ‘trifling exceptions’ would suggest. For example, Li Ping, a Chinese building contractor in the city, bought some fields north of Sham Shui Po, a market town bordering the old Anglo-Chinese Boundary, from a local family with the surname Tsang in October 1899. The latter had purchased the fields from the landlords, a few members of the Tangs of Kam Tin, in 1871 and 1882 and registered their red deeds at Hong Kong’s Land Office one month before the sale to Li. Li was then registered on the Block Crown Lease as the owner of a plot of agricultural land.Footnote 25 Although he had only purchased the land after the British takeover, he was still recognized as a landowner as he had a well-documented title.
It was newcomers like Li who ‘spearheaded’ the development of the district, as Cecilia Chu suggests, but some older residents also emerged as prominent property owners by participating in the improvement schemes.Footnote 26 In 1906, Li applied to the government to convert his agricultural plots to the north of Sham Shui Po and south of a village named Ap Liu into building plots.Footnote 27 As the low-lying farmland was reclaimed for building sites, the two localities became blocked and needed to be ‘improved’.Footnote 28 The government announced the improvement schemes for Ap Liu and Sham Shui Po in 1910 and 1914 respectively and contracted the improvement works for Ap Liu to Li.Footnote 29 It also financed reclamation, road construction and drainage to form new building plots for the purpose of exchanging with the landowners.Footnote 30 Some old landowning residents also gained from land exchange. James Hayes suggests that the business opportunities around provisioning the colony enabled some villagers in Kowloon to achieve social advancement.Footnote 31 For example, a man named Yau Sui Chi accumulated the capital necessary to undertake construction and buy more properties. His forefather was a lime burner who had relocated from Tsim Sha Tsui in British Kowloon to Sham Shui Po in 1861.Footnote 32 He was recognized as the owner of four building plots in Sham Shui Po in 1905 and exchanged them for three realigned building plots in 1916.Footnote 33 Li and Yau then emerged as leaders of the neighbourhood in 1913 as they promoted the establishment of a public dispensary, a neighbourhood-wide public health institution that the Hong Kong government collaborated with Chinese elites to establish.Footnote 34 By 1919, Sham Shui Po had been developing into a suburb built with ‘modern tenements’ which colonial officials believed would be suitable for the working-class Chinese to inhabit.Footnote 35
The village improvement schemes in Kowloon thus differed from improvement works in other British colonial cities as the colonial government played a more active role in settling land ownership issues and drawing up plans for redeveloping rural settlements into suburbs. In Bombay, Nikhil Rao suggests that municipalization in the 1910s gave rise to a new practice whereby landowners at the urban periphery worked with the Municipal Corporation to formulate town planning schemes on their own and retained their original plots, instead of surrendering land to the improvement trust or colonial authorities.Footnote 36 In Hong Kong, while Cecilia Chu similarly emphasizes the agency of Chinese property owners in promoting urban expansion, the examples above illustrate that their enterprise had to conform to the government’s layout plan which determined where buildings were allowed to be built. The government’s efforts to identify ‘original owners’, which in fact included post-1898 newcomers, also determined who was eligible to obtain land by exchange agreements in improvement schemes. Furthermore, as the next section shows, the landowners were only entitled to land or cash compensation in proportion to property valuation that was determined by the government.
Denying being ‘speculators’
As the colonial government sought to restrict ‘speculators’ when acquiring land for improvement works after 1905, it introduced administrative measures that were later contested by landowners in New Kowloon who highlighted their residency on the land before British rule. The government’s attempts to make buildings conform to an urban layout prepared by the Public Works Department led to the outlawing of unauthorized construction on one’s own land. This was done by classifying built plots in the New Territories as ‘building land’ and unbuilt plots as ‘agricultural land’. Owners of ‘agricultural’ plots were required to apply to the government to ‘convert’ them into ‘building’ plots.Footnote 37 Accordingly, the government determined ‘agricultural land’ to be less valuable and levied lower Crown rent as it could only be used for agricultural purposes.Footnote 38 It thus offered less compensation for unbuilt ‘agricultural’ plots; this decision led to disputes with landowners, or ‘speculators’ in the officials’ words, when improvement works proceeded.
The government offered to exchange ‘building land’ to solicit investment in improvement by ‘original owners’ while resettling them. The government first announced the ‘resumption’ of land (which meant taking back the leasehold property granted to landowners) under the Crown Lands Resumption Ordinance for improvement schemes; owners of agricultural plots would receive cash compensation at $0.05 per square foot, which was lower than the compensation rate of $0.35 per square foot for building plots.Footnote 39 Otherwise, they could apply to the Public Works Department for land exchange instead of receiving cash compensation. They would be granted building land conforming to the urban layout and were expected to fulfil a building covenant by spending a required amount to develop the land within a certain period. For example, Tsang Kam Lam, a pre-1898 resident of Sham Shui Po, exchanged his building plots at 1 square foot for 1 square foot. His buildings were valuated and exchanged for an extra area at $1 for 3.33 square feet. But for his agricultural plot, he could only exchange it for an extra area at 1 square foot for 0.55 square foot. He then had to spend $7,000 on his 10,352 square feet of land within two years.Footnote 40 In this way, villagers with building plots had the opportunity to own property in the improved settlement. However, they could not obtain new agricultural plots.
On the other hand, the government sought to restrict ‘speculative’ building activities on agricultural land or transactions that would increase the cost of future land resumption for urban development. In 1907, the government decided to levy a premium for converting agricultural land. When a landowner named Albert Ahwee applied to convert his agricultural plots, he admitted to the officials that he had advised his friends to purchase neighbouring agricultural plots at $0.17 or $0.18 per square foot, which was higher than the official compensation rate. Director of Public Works William Chatham found Ahwee’s activities to be speculative and proposed a levy on the grounds that it would be ‘absurd’ for the government to sanction conversion without doing so while compensating for the value of building land in the case of resuming the plots later.Footnote 41 Despite this restriction, investors from the colonial city continued to purchase agricultural land with a view to obtaining building land in the future, and the villagers found it more profitable to sell agricultural land to these outsiders. For example, a Macanese resident of Hong Kong, Joseph Maria de Castro Basto, purchased agricultural land in New Kowloon from villagers on various occasions between 1906 and 1917.Footnote 42 In December 1919, Cadet Officer Roland North reported that some of the owners of agricultural land north of Sham Shui Po and Ap Liu were ‘speculators’ who had bought land at $0.08 to $0.09 per square foot, and that most of them rejected cash compensation and asked for land exchange instead.Footnote 43
For the government, ‘speculators’ were to be offered harsher terms than ‘original owners’. When the Executive Council of the government approved a scheme to build a Garden City at Kowloon Tong in December 1921, it decided to revise the Crown Lands Resumption Ordinance to facilitate the resumption of agricultural land around the village. Director of Public Works Thomas Perkins proposed that compensation for agricultural land would be based ‘purely’ on the ‘agricultural value of the land’. Joseph Kemp, the attorney general, suggested that the government should distinguish between land plots ‘still held by the original owners’, who would receive ‘more favourable terms’, and those ‘which had changed hands since the acquisition of the New Territories’.Footnote 44 The amended ordinance, which was passed four months later, specified that ‘expectancy or probability of the grant or renewal or continuance’, including the potential of conversion into building land, would not be considered in determining compensation.Footnote 45 At the same time, a newly appointed Town Planning Committee, chaired by Perkins, also worked on devising a development plan covering the entire Kowloon Peninsula to facilitate improvement works on a greater scale.Footnote 46 Although the clause identifying land owned by ‘original owners’ was not inserted into the law, it shows that the officials thought of ‘original owners’ – those settled in the New Territories before 1898 – as a distinct group that deserved more favourable terms.
However, it was impractical to distinguish a group of ‘speculators’ from the ‘original owners’, and the old residents and newcomers combined to oppose the resumption policy by referring to the Peking Convention’s guarantee for the New Territories’ inhabitants. In April 1925, 671 New Kowloon landowners petitioned the British government’s Colonial Office.Footnote 47 They alleged that the resumption policy for agricultural land was unfair and breached the clause of ‘expropriation and expulsion of inhabitants’ in the Peking Convention. They thus requested that if resumption were to take place they should be offered ‘other lands equivalent in acreage and fertility to the land taken’ or money ‘equivalent to the real value of the land’.Footnote 48 While the petition referred to the Convention’s clause that protected the New Territories’ inhabitants, it was co-signed by some of the major investors in the Sham Shui Po scheme, such as Li Ping, and some pre-1898 residents who had exchanged land with the government, like Tsang Kam Lam, among other villagers.Footnote 49 Governor Cecil Clementi, who had served as a member of the Land Court, thus argued that a large portion of land had ‘passed from New Territory hands to Hong Kong hands prior to the [Peking] Convention’ and cited the district officer’s report that the district was ‘full of land speculators and money lenders’. He even hinted that the petitioners were not ‘genuine natives of the New [Territories]’.Footnote 50 The Hong Kong government eventually did not review the resumption policy despite being urged to do so by the Colonial Office, but it later offered land exchange to owners of agricultural plots, which included some of the petitioners.Footnote 51
In cases where landowning villagers had worked with moneylenders from the city in land exchange agreements, the landowners referred to their settlement history to prove themselves as ‘original owners’ instead of ‘speculators’. When the Guangzhou-Hong Kong General Strike in 1925 and 1926 halted construction work in the colony, many of the landowners changed their minds and requested the cancellation of land exchange agreements and grants of cash compensation in lieu. The government tried to distinguish speculators from the original inhabitants and decided to offer an ex gratia payment to the latter only. For example, Tse Tsun Fuk of Tin Liu village had applied for land exchange in August 1925, but he could not subsequently fulfil the building covenant.Footnote 52 He wrote to the director of Public Works to request returning the new plot to the government, being refunded the premium levied for it and receiving cash compensation for the old plot. He emphasized his status as an ‘original owner’ and wrote,
I am living in a matshed at Kap Shek Mei, Shamshuipo, and have lived many, many years (i.e. for several generations) in the New Territory. This shows that I am really an original inhabitant of the New Territory and original owner of the Old Lot in question, and not a speculator.Footnote 53
Thomas Ainsworth, the chief assistant to the secretary for Chinese Affairs, then interviewed Tse. He reported that Tse was a member of the Tse clan of the village. A building contractor had promised to lend him money and asked for a portion of the land in return, but then the contractor went missing. Tse had surrendered the old plot and moved to a matshed at Kap Shek Mi (today’s Shek Kip Mei), a valley at the northern hillside, where he worked as a farmer and lived with his family. As Ainsworth confirmed that Tse was an original inhabitant, though he seemed to ‘have been in the hands of speculators’, Tse was allowed to receive $2,627.25 which included both the refund and compensation.Footnote 54 There were also other petitioners who told similar stories to that of Tse.Footnote 55 In these cases, the local landowners were collaborating with individuals like the contractor whose profiteering activities the government would define as speculation. However, landowners like Tse had learnt to refer to the settlement history of their families to avoid the government’s punitive treatment of ‘speculators’.
Despite their claimed distinction from ‘speculators’, some of the old residents requested to be resettled but then resold their property after developing it. In 1930, a villager named Tsang Tso Sang and his six family members applied to surrender several agricultural plots, owned in the name of their ancestor Tsang Hung Ut, in exchange for a building plot. When they wrote to the government to request a discount in the premium to be levied, they also denied being ‘speculators’ and made claims similar to those of Tse,
[We] are not speculators and only through fear of being soon dispossessed of our buildings and cultivating land, which are the only means of the majority of us for a living, that we applied for this exchange … We are well aware of and greatly indebted to Government generosity towards us natives …Footnote 56
Despite the request being rejected, the Tsang family fulfilled the building covenant by constructing four tenements. However, they sold the property the following year.Footnote 57 Although there is no stated reason for the sale in the file, this example illustrates the difficulty in clearly distinguishing a group of ‘speculators’ aiming to make profit from the improvement schemes of a group of ‘original owners’ with genuine needs for resettlement.
The disputes between the colonial government and the landowners over speculation in the potential value of land were, to some extent, similar to those experienced in the improvement schemes in Bombay, but the case of Hong Kong was complicated by the issue of ‘agricultural land’ owned by precolonial residents.Footnote 58 In Bombay, the government accepted considering potential value in determining compensation for urban properties. However, the Hong Kong government was determined to rule out any potential value of unbuilt ‘agricultural land’. Moreover, it attempted to distinguish the old residents – landowners settled before British rule – from the ‘speculators’, while the old residents combined with urban businessmen to petition against the resumption policy but denied being ‘speculators’ on other occasions. The petitioners referred to the Peking Convention’s non-appropriation clause for inhabitants of the leased territory and their settlement history to claim their indigeneity. Nevertheless, they were not the only inhabitants on the land before British rule. As next section shows, many other old residents, who were not recognized as landowners or preferred an agricultural lifestyle, were dispossessed and moved further away to become ‘squatters’ on agricultural land.
Becoming ‘squatters’
While the first section discussed cases where landlords succeeded in claiming ownership, the following cases illustrate messier results of the Land Court’s settlement which did not recognize some of the residents as landowners. These residents were then evicted for the improvement works to take place and were obliged to find shelter in ‘squatter’ settlements on outlying agricultural land. As suggested earlier, the settlement was not invariably in favour of precolonial tenants. Success in claiming ownership depended more on whether one’s claim was undisputed by others than on whether one could prove titles recognized by the Qing government. Cecil Clementi, then a member of the court, reported on the principles behind his decisions. He only allowed claims that were ‘valid not only against other owners but also against the Chinese Government’ – holders of red deeds – and recommended to the governor that he grant 75-year Crown leases to the claimants. For those without valid claims against the government but in ‘prolonged occupation’, which might include tenants of the landlords, and with claims not disputed by other claimants, he disallowed the claims but still recommended granting Crown leases.Footnote 59 In four cases concerning certain agricultural plots, he disallowed the claims but recommended granting Crown leases to the four claimants, one on the grounds that his father and grandfather had ‘squatted there for over 40 years’ and the other three that their ‘ancestors [had] occupied’ since 1737, 1870 and 1880 respectively.Footnote 60 Land Officer Bruce Shepherd initially decided to grant Crown leases on a shorter term of 25 years to these ‘[squatters] who [had] no title except that of occupation’ before the British takeover.Footnote 61 Nonetheless, Clementi insisted that 75-year leases should still be granted for the sake of ‘uniformity [and] simplicity’, and his recommendation was adopted.Footnote 62 In this case, those who were initially described as ‘squatters’ in ‘prolonged occupation’ would receive equal terms and appeared on the Block Crown Lease in the same way as those who could prove their Qing-era titles.
However, in the case of disputed claims, the ‘squatters’ were only recognized as owners of ‘superstructure’ with a one-year lease.Footnote 63 This happened where Qing-era tenants had sublet their land. Whereas examples of subletting could be found elsewhere in precolonial New Territories, it was more common in Sham Shui Po in New Kowloon, where newcomers continued to arrive in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 64 The ruling of the Land Court further complicated the pattern of ownership. For example, 11 households in the town of Sham Shui Po were sublessees of a man named Wong Chu Chau with ‘tenancies terminable on one year’s notice’ in 1903, while ten others had obtained a perpetual lease from Wong. Wong himself obtained a deed of perpetual lease (a white deed) from the landlord in 1875, with the right to build houses and sublet.Footnote 65 Eventually, Wong’s claim was allowed, and Wong’s perpetual sublessees were recognized as the owners of both their plot and buildings, and those with terminable tenancies were only recognized as owners of the superstructure of Wong’s plots.Footnote 66 The superstructure lease was much less secure than that of a plot as the government could simply terminate it and compensate according to the valuation of the buildings.Footnote 67 In a resumption case in 1923, the government compensated the superstructure owners for their buildings at $0.0045–$0.007 per cubic foot of their volume. Director of Public Works Edgar Carpenter admitted that the amount for each building, ranging from $69 to $738, was insufficient for them to build new houses.Footnote 68
Some villagers might even have neglected to claim ownership in the Land Court and were hitherto regarded by officials as ‘tenants’ without legal entitlement to compensation or resettlement. Misunderstandings and negligence during the procedure of making claims in the Land Court were common across the New Territories.Footnote 69 Some were only identified by the officials as old residents when they were evicted decades later. For example, when nine people applied to Southern District Officer Eric Hamilton in 1920 to purchase building plots after the landowner surrendered the plots on which their houses were to the government, Hamilton presumed that the applicants were the landowner’s tenants who ‘had no legal status’ and would not be compensated by the government.Footnote 70 He also rejected offering preferential treatment to sell land without auction. However, Cadet Officer Roland North then discovered in Clementi’s notes for the Land Court that these shanty dwellers had been living in the houses as early as 1903. As they claimed the houses ‘as their own property’, North suggested that they might have neglected to claim ownership. Eventually, they were treated as superstructure owners and allowed to purchase building plots from the government without auction.Footnote 71
The case of a village named Tong Mi was more extreme in that all villagers were not recognized as legally entitled to any compensation. The building plots of the village were registered on the Block Crown Lease as the property of Ng Wing Ki Tong, meaning ‘Wing Ki Hall of the Ngs’, but this leaseholder was not associated with the villagers. Ng Wing Ki Tong was a corporate name used by Ng Shui Shang, who was an agent of Wei Yuk, one of the colony’s leading Chinese elites, and a local informant of Colonial Secretary Stewart Lockhart, the official in charge of taking over the New Territories.Footnote 72 In 1896, Ng had sold an expansive tract of land to Wei U Yam Tong (‘U Yam Hall of the Weis’) for $6,750. On 13 June 1899, Wei Yuk’s wife, Wong Yuk Hing, registered the deed at Hong Kong’s Land Court and was the first one to do so for a deed in the New Territories.Footnote 73 Neither Wei nor Ng could provide a deed showing from whom Ng purchased the land, and Ng was later accused by the inhabitants of the neighbouring Kowloon Tong village as having ‘obtained [the title] by fraud’.Footnote 74 Despite this, Ng Wing Ki Tong claimed ownership of the building plots of Tong Mi at the expense of the villagers, while Wei U Yam Tong owned the agricultural plots between the two villages.Footnote 75 Ng’s property then changed hands several times and eventually passed to various Chinese businessmen, who surrendered it to the government in August 1926 for $31,100.Footnote 76 The villagers were to be evicted without compensation. In January 1927, about 50 villagers met an official of the Public Works Department, who gave them a 14-day grace period. This time District Officer Hamilton insisted that they had ‘no claim’ legally and decided to ‘evict them with police aid’ after the grace period.Footnote 77 There was inadequate evidence to confirm that these matshed dwellers had settled there before 1898. Nonetheless, as the Block Crown Lease only recognized Ng Wing Ki Tong as the landowner, the villagers would in any case be denied ownership of their land and opportunities to apply for land exchange.
As the villagers were evicted, many of them came to settle on farmland in Kap Shek Mi valley as ‘squatters’. Theoretically, they might have accommodated themselves as tenants in the newly built tenements. However, those who preferred an agricultural lifestyle sheltered on farmland at the urban fringe. Becoming ‘squatters’ might mean they occupied and built on Crown land without authorization, but it could also mean they rented from owners of agricultural plots who had built houses on their own plots without the government’s knowledge.Footnote 78 ‘Squatter’ buildings on agricultural land were discovered from time to time. In one of the cases of resumption, Land Officer Philip Jacks complained that such irregularities were ‘bound to occur’ as just two land bailiffs were insufficient for inspection.Footnote 79 In July 1927, the government discovered 300–400 huts and proceeded to demolish them. A Chinese newspaper reported that about 1,000 inhabitants were relocated from the demolished villages, including Kowloon Tong, Tai Kok Tsui and some others. They built matsheds or houses to live in and continued their agricultural activities like growing bean sprouts, making bean curd or rearing pigs and poultry. An official told the reporter that they must relocate ‘because their cultivating activities are insanitary’ and their mobility made it difficult for the Sanitary Department’s staff to inspect.Footnote 80 Despite this attempt to remove the illegal structures, the squatter area continued to grow. On a plan dated 1934 indicating agricultural plots with temporary permits for buildings, there were two clusters of small pigsties in the neighbourhood. The centre of the valley was also enclosed by a few larger pigsties.Footnote 81 In this emerging ‘squatter’ area, evicted villagers sheltered themselves in unauthorized buildings on farmland and continued to make a living from agricultural activities which were described as ‘insanitary’ by the officials.
In this sense, some of the villagers were deprived of land ownership and evicted not because they could not prove their precolonial title, but because their claims were disputed by other claimants, or simply out of ignorance of the official procedure for submitting claims. Many others who were ‘disallowed’ – ruled as having no proof of ownership recognized by the Qing government – were granted Crown lease on the same terms as those able to prove their Qing-era title. While Ho Pui-yin has suggested that ‘indigenous residents’ were offered land exchange and resettled in the improved area, Alan Smart and Tang Wing-shing argue that ‘pre-1898 residents mostly failed to take advantage’ as their land appreciated.Footnote 82 Both tell only part of the story. On the one hand, living in New Kowloon before 1898 did not necessarily guarantee residents indigenous status. They had to be recognized by the colonial government as ‘original owners’. On the other hand, being unable to prove land ownership recognized by the Qing government did not necessarily deny them ownership under British rule. It mattered whether their claims were disputed. These nuances illustrate the messy results created by the Land Court’s settlement, which determined what pre-1898 residents could get from the improvement schemes. Cecilia Chu argues that the development of New Kowloon provided ‘new opportunities for capital accumulation for property investors and other agents’.Footnote 83 But for those who sought shelter as ‘squatters’, the improvement schemes hardly provided opportunities.
Conclusion
In the case of Hong Kong, ‘improvement’ of indigenous settlements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only took place within the colonial city, but also beyond it and had a great impact on the Chinese rural communities settled before British rule. With the advent of improvement works on the Kowloon Peninsula, many rural communities were dissolved and absorbed into the expanding city. Cheung Sui-wai suggested that the rural lineages in eastern New Kowloon survived until after the Second World War, but on the other side of the region, the villages and market towns had disappeared, or, in the words of the colonial government, been ‘improved’.Footnote 84 The local communities in this part of the leased territory were intruded on by the colonial state and urbanized long before the 1950s. In this process, while recently arrived land hoarders and some of the villagers became ‘original owners’ who were compensated and resettled, many dispossessed villagers had to move further to the fringe of New Kowloon as ‘squatters’. The valley of Kap Shek Mi, or Shek Kip Mei, grew into a major squatter area of the city after the Second World War when these villagers were joined by large number of refugees from China looked for shelter.Footnote 85
The contrast between ‘original owners’ and dispossessed residents brings into question the notion of ‘indigeneity’. The literature of colonial cities tends to focus on the spatial relationship between the colonizers and the ‘indigenous population’ – the Chinese in Hong Kong and the Indians in Bombay – in the city. However, the setting in this article – urbanizing rural settlements at the periphery of the colonial city – highlights the diverse experiences of colonial urban development among the Chinese population. Although the colonial government of Hong Kong disregarded Chinese land customs and simply treated pre-existing inhabitants outside the city as ‘squatters’, it left their communities largely undisturbed. Only when the government started expanding the city into these communities in the 1880s, did it become imperative to settle the precolonial land ownership that was hitherto undetermined. Along with the arrival of Chinese land hoarders from the city, the colonial government redefined who owned the land before colonial rule when adapting precolonial customary land practices into the colonial land administrative system. This in turn determined who among the precolonial residents was entitled to compensation and resettlement in the improvement schemes. When implementing the schemes, the government’s attempts to distinguish ‘speculators’ from ‘original owners’ made the notion of indigeneity further contested. While many urban businessmen combined with old villagers to petition for breach of their rights, other landowning old villagers who also took part in ‘speculation’ claimed to be ‘original owners’. The notion of being ‘indigenous’ in New Kowloon was mobilized to bargain for better terms in improvement schemes, but it did not guarantee all precolonial residents would be resettled. In short, the improvement schemes in colonial Hong Kong provided opportunities for capital accumulation for some of the ‘indigenous population’ but also dispossessed others.
Acknowledgments
This article is derived from my MPhil project on colonial Hong Kong, for which I am most grateful to Ho Pui-yin, who has shaped my interest in the history of urbanization, and Ma Muk-chi, who has generously shared with me his knowledge and insights on Chinese society under colonial rule. I am also deeply grateful to Robert Bickers and Vivian Kong for their guidance and support in preparing the article. Special thanks to Brian Lui, Lau Tin Long, Ben Tsang, Alex Wong, Quinton Huang and Atlantis Leung for their suggestions and encouragement. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal and editor Shane Ewen for their comments which helped improve the article.
Funding statement
Research work for this article was funded by the Postgraduate Student Grants of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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