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The roots of modern Hong Kong are firmly planted in the soil of its rural hinterland where the first inhabitants of the region arrived as long ago as the twelfth century.

Before the development of today’s great metropolis, life moved to a slower beat in the broad valleys and coastal shores of the New Territories. The genesis of Hong Kong’s essential character lies hidden amongst the sleepy rural villages to the north of the Nine Dragon range, in the hardy self-sufficiency of the indigenous residents, in the once green vistas across serried terraces of rice paddies and market gardens, and in the long-abandoned harbours and the bountiful sea lapping ceaselessly against our shores. Scant evidence now survives of that earlier phase of human occupation, but hints of its simple grandeur still endure amidst the invasive reach of new towns and the deafening roar of modern life. Like the Chinese banyan tree, the roots of modern Hong Kong are deep and strong, its branches resilient and ever-growing, bending to the elemental forces around it, but never breaking.

Even before clan-based inland farming communities began to lay down their roots in the region, the prehistoric Stone Age inhabitants of the South China archipelago were able to eke out a precarious yet viable existence along the thousands of kilometres of shorelines that marked the convergence of bountiful seas and protective dry land. The sandy berms of wide beaches along the shores of Cheung Chau, Lantau and Sai Kung provided a scattering of locations for a rudimentary fishing economy and the elaboration of human culture, evidenced by large middens of discarded shells, pottery goods and simple tools, while the jagged stone ramparts guarding the interior’s valleys and summits were imprinted with rock carvings of unpretentious but haunting simplicity. In later times, the sea would become a cornucopia of diverse marine products sustaining a flourishing network of fishing villages, while in more recent centuries the ancient trading routes established across the Pearl River delta would be the harbinger and the focus of international trade with the rest of the world.

Rugged mountain ranges jut boldly into the shimmering stillness of the South China Sea, creating a littoral zone of natural beauty across hundreds of miles of coastline.

The textured verdure of the highland terrain in the New Territories and its scattered archipelago of more than 250 islands, many of them still uninhabited, offer a tranquility that is in stark contrast to the frenetic pace of the modern city. Here the caller will find hidden coves with sandy beaches below adamantine cliffs of towering granite accessible only from the sea, precipitous hill paths linking once-prosperous farming villages that are now dilapidated and overgrown, and small harbours that once gave shelter to fishing fleets which roamed far and wide in search of their catch. These sparsely populated rural enclaves, almost forgotten by today’s city-dweller, were the humble beginnings of the present day metropolis of Hong Kong, one of the world’s greatest financial centres and commercial ports, and it is here that we still find a green lung that helps to sustain the life of the city and reminds us of a time when nature was in command and puny humans bowed down to its mighty power.

閑如社

094

東流不溢

連山到海隅

004

005

006

Self-sufficient rustics along the remote southern fringes of China rejoiced in the knowledge that “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away” but, as has proved to be the case elsewhere in modern-day China, the main threat to their lifestyle has been rapid urbanization. Villages like Lin Au in the New Territories lie partly abandoned, monuments to a vanished way of life, as forests of residential blocks encroach on the agrarian landscape. In the more prosperous districts of the western New Territories, wealthier clans built fortified walled villages to protect themselves from enemy lineages or pirate raiders from the Pearl River delta, but elsewhere villages consisted of little more than one of two rows of stone houses and livestock shelters surrounded by paddy fields and feng shui forests. These clan villages created an interconnected pattern of rural settlement that supported a modicum of commerce and cultural development, eventually enabling Hong Kong to become a place of trade as well as agricultural production. Most of the land remained untamed across the ages, but a start had been made in a centuries-long process that would make Hong Kong one of the greatest commercial entrepôts in the modern world.

The flourishing agricultural prosperity of the Boa’an hinterland, especially after the Qing rulers allowed farmers to return to the coastal regions after the evacuations of 1661-69, brought both trade and pirates to this distant corner of the Chinese empire. By the nineteenth century, the imperial authorities found it necessary to erect a ring of fortified customs outposts to ensure that taxes were collected and pirates repelled.

At Tseung Kwan O, near to the eastern entrance of Hong Kong harbour, the Imperial Maritime Customs established one such post to monitor large flotillas of junks that congregated in the area before entering the harbour. Unlike other customs posts, which were square or rectangular in plan, Mau Wu Shan was blessed with a pleasing circular appearance. Like most public buildings from the imperial period, it was fashioned of stone blocks hewn from the living bedrock nearby, a construction method that would continue to dominate most urban buildings in Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth until the early twentieth century, when concrete became the preferred building material.

Engulfed by wild grasses on its elevated knoll, this reminder of Hong Kong’s mercantile past seems to grow organically from the site on which it has been placed.

The Shatin Valley, in the days before rapid urbanisation, was a green patchwork of paddy fields, traditional villages and meandering streams. Like their neighbours to the north in Guangdong, farmers of the area had been toiling in the fields since time immemorial, using methods and tools that were as ancient as the irrigation systems that brought water to their rice fields. Near the wide expanse of Tolo Harbour the land was level and easy to cultivate, but higher up the slopes of the valley it was necessary to cut terraces into the hillsides and to devise methods of delivering water to where it was needed. Off-shore, the waters teemed with fish. The Shatin cornucopia of fisheries, terraced rice fields and market gardens produced an abundance of marine and agricultural produce that was traded far and wide during the Ming and Qing periods. Nowadays, the irrigation channels lie dry and the farmlands of this once-verdant stretch of the New Territories are overgrown, while shipping containers and abandoned cars are left to rust where once there was energetic planting and harvesting.

安其居樂其俗

廢沼荒丘

千陌連綿

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008

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Rice, the heavenly grain, has been harvested in southern China and throughout Southeast Asia for millennia.

Here in the moist southern provinces, it has become the staple grain crop, while in the drier north it is wheat. The rice paddies of the Shatin valley were some of the most productive in all of China. The quality of the crop was second to none, with humble offerings of the local grain made each year to the emperor far away in Beijing.

During the cultivating seasons the inundated rice fields of the New Territories mirrored the sun overhead within an intricate lattice of paddy fields whose hydraulic ingenuity allowed the land to produce up to three harvests each year. Rising steeply from the valley floors to the heights of the uncultivated peaks above, the unforgiving terrain was stepped into ascending ranks of small terraced fields. In these picturesque surroundings, men and women worked harmoniously, distinguishable only by their headware providing protection from the scorching sun. Rice cultivation along these traditional lines embraced all the members of a village, establishing strong bonds of mutual trust and dependence, and creating a distinctive identity that has now been lost forever.

Villagers of the Shatin valley tended their rice fields with a reverence for the sovereign grain that shaped lifestyle and customs, for without rice there could have been little human habitation in these marginal places. Among the Cantonese of southern China the words used for rice and nourishment are identical, with “How are you?” substituted for “Have you eaten?” as the common salutation among farming folk. Elsewhere it is said that “a meal without rice is no meal at all”, while early missionaries translated a key passage from the Lord’s Prayer as “Give us this day our daily rice”. In the halcyon days of widespread rice production, small market towns dotted the agricultural landscape, with a number of fortified villages in the western areas providing a more diversified lifestyle, but agriculture dominated the scene for centuries. Over time, however, rice was replaced by market gardening as greater profits were sought from the land until the soil itself became the most lucrative crop. In the 1960s agrarian clans began to dispose of their land to developers who expeditiously transformed the lush green rice fields of the New Territories into a cement-clad blanket of new towns and factories.

In addition to human perspiration and manual labour, water buffalo and oxen provided the extra locomotive power required for farming activities in the New Territories. Their prime use was in tilling the fields and drawing water into irrigation channels. Paddy fields had to be flooded before ploughing could begin, but the climate could not be relied upon to deliver rain at the correct time, so complex irrigation systems were fed from streams and tanks using various methods of diverting the water to where it was needed. A popular method was to yoke buffalo together whose constant plodding along well-worn circular furrows rotated water wheels to scoop water from stream to irrigation channel. Flooded paddies were easier to plough than scorched plots, but it still required domesticated draft animals to break and turn over the rich topsoil months before the rice seedlings could be planted. Crops remained covered in water throughout the growing season to produce higher yields, but the water was drained away before the rice fully ripened for harvesting. Abandoned paddy fields and irrigation channels may still be encountered throughout the New Territories, but rice-growing is a long-forgotten skill among today’s villagers.

農月無閒人

知足不辱

一犁春雨趁農耕

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What would Hong Kong have looked like before the modern city obliterated all trace of its earlier manifestations?

Many answers may be found in this volume of historical photographs from the University of Hong Kong Libraries.

Beginning with the natural landscape and the enduring life of villagers in the New Territories, these images span the development of nineteenth and twentieth-century Hong Kong and the survival to the present day of an intangible heritage that is internationally renowned for its richness and diversity.

As Hong Kong reaches out to the future, forging its distinctive role in the flourishing Greater Bay Area, these invaluable images remind us of where we have come from and to cherish a city that was so different and yet so similar to the one in which we live today.