Land was always at the centre of life in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories: it sustained livelihoods and lineages and, for some, was a route to power. Villagers managed their land according to customs that were often at odds with formal Chinese law. British rule, 1898—1997, added complications by assimilating traditional practices into a Western legal system. Custom, Land and Livelihood in Rural South China explores land ownership in the New Territories, analysing over a hundred surviving land deeds from the late Ch’ing Dynasty to recent times, which are transcribed in full and translated into English. Together with other sources collected by the author during 30 years of research, these deeds yield information on all aspects of traditional village life—from raising families and making a living to coping with intruders—and evoke a view of the world which, despite decades of urbanisation, still has resonance today.

Land was always at the centre of life in Hong Kong's rural New Territories: it sustained livlihoods and lineages and, for some was a route to power. Villagers managed their land according to customs that were often at odds with formal Chinese law. This book explores land ownership in the New Territories, analysing over 100 surviving land deeds from the late Qing Dynasty to recent times, which are transcribed in full and translated into English.

This book argues that as colonialism brought the concept of individual, as opposed to collective, land ownership to indigenous society, along with Western surveying techniques, the changes that resulted altered the relationship of the state to its citizens, and, thereby, the structure of local societies. The book considers these issues in all of East Asia, including China, Japan and Korea, focusing in particular on Hong Kong, which was subject to British rule from 1842 to 1997, and on Taiwan, which was subject to Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945. The book discusses how, although the main impact of land ownership by individuals and modern surveying were felt after colonialism had ended, it is by studying the introduction of these factors that their impact can be most clearly understood.

In War and Revolution in South China, Edward Rhoads recounts his childhood and early teenage years during the Sino-Japanese War and the early postwar years. Rhoads came from a biracial family. His father was an American professor while his Chinese mother was a typist and stenographer. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the Rhoads family lived through the turbulent years in southern China and Hong Kong. The book follows Rhoads’ childhood in Guangzhou, his family’s evacuation to Hong Kong, his father’s internment and repatriation to the United States, and his and his mother’s flight to Free China. He recalls his reunion with family members in northern Guangdong Province in 1943, their retreat to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing, where his father worked for the American government, and how they returned to Guangzhou after the war. The Rhoads family then witnessed the socioeconomic recovery in the city and the regime change in 1949. The book ends with their departure from China to the United States in 1951, a year and a half after the Communist revolution. The book fills an important gap in the scholarship by examining the impact of the Sino-Japanese War in southern China from the perspective of one family. Rhoads reveals that the war in this region, while often neglected by scholars, was in fact no less turbulent than it was in northern and central China. He combines autobiography with serious historical research to reconstruct the lives of his family, consulting a large number of archival documents, private correspondence, and scholarly literature to produce a rare study that is both scholarly and accessible. “This book is a very timely reminder that one should look at the experience of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War from a regional perspective in order to understand the diverse historical experience of the people from different geographical, ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds.” —Chi-man Kwong, Hong Kong Baptist University “A pleasure to read and of compelling interest, Edward Rhoads’ book explores the more benign side of the foreign influence in modern China: the introduction of modern educational institutions. The intriguing lens through which we look is his biracial family, their multiple flights across southern China as refugees escaping war, and their eventual expulsion from China.” —Stephen Davies, The University of Hong Kong

“Without a clear idea of the history of the New Territories, the history of Hong Kong as a whole would be impossible to bring to any sort of satisfactory completion. ... Elucidating the development of a village, a clan, a temple, or a market-town is also, in and of itself, real and valuable history, and abundantly justifies the time and effort spent on it.” This book is a history of village communities in the New Territories of Hong Kong, including those in the areas of Ha Tsuen, Hung Shui Kiu, and Sha Tin as well as those on the islands of Lamma, Ma Wan, and Tung Ping Chau. Elaborating on primary interviews with village elders, government documents, and public information, this book places the individual histories of each area into the context of Hong Kong’s rich past. The introduction sets up the rest of the book, outlining common themes and highlighting the dangers of using the communal memories of village communities while, at the same time, showing the valuable information doing so can bring. Each chapter provides a more detailed account of one specific area, concentrating on the settlement history, the lifestyle, and the politics of that area.

This book is the first Western-language monograph on the study of the Qingshui River manuscripts. By examining over 3,000 contracts and other manuscripts, this book offers constructive insights into the long-standing question of how and why a society in late imperial China could maintain a well-functioning social system with few laws but many contracts, i.e., Hobbesian “words without sword.” Three interrelated questions, what contracts were, how and why they worked, are explained successively. Thus, this book presents a non-stereotypical “contract society” in southwest China, arguing that the social order which provides predictability and regularity for economic prosperity could be formed and maintained through contracts even under the condition of relatively weak influence of governmental and legal authorities. This book benefits readers who are interested in law, society, and history. While presenting the socio-legal landscape of a frontier area in late imperial China for historians, this book provides a novel and empirical interpretation of the supposedly well-known contract device for legal researchers, thereby proposing materials for an integrated theoretical explanatory framework of contracts in general. By employing the innovative theory of blockchain in its key argumentation, the book offers a creative interpretation of historical and social phenomena.

Hong Kong boasts a number of rich archaeological sites behind sandy bays. Among these backbeaches is Sha Po on Lamma Island, a site which has long captured the attention of archaeologists. However, until now no comprehensive study of the area has ever been published. Piecing Together Sha Po presents the first sustained analysis, framed in terms of a multi-period social landscape, of the varieties of human activity in Sha Po spanning more than 6,000 years. Synthesising decades of earlier fieldwork together with Atha and Yip’s own extensive excavations conducted in 2008–2010, the discoveries collectively enabled the authors to reconstruct the society in Sha Po in different historical periods. The artefacts unearthed from the site—some of them unique to the region—reveal a vibrant past which saw the inhabitants of Sha Po interacting with the environment in diverse ways. Evidence showing the mastery of quartz ornament manufacture and metallurgy in the Bronze Age suggests increasing craft specialisation and the rise of a more complex, competitive society. Later on, during the Six Dynasties–Tang period, Sha Po turned into a centre in the region’s imperially controlled kiln-based salt industry. Closer to our time, in the nineteenth century the farming and fishing communities in Sha Po became important suppliers of food and fuel to urban Hong Kong. Ultimately, this ground-breaking work tells a compelling story about human beings’ ceaseless reinvention of their lives through the lens of one special archaeological site. ‘A singular effort in the field of Hong Kong archaeology, Piecing Together Sha Po adopts a social landscape approach to chart the development of a single site over millennia of occupation, revealing as it does the untapped potential which careful field investigations hold for generating a better understanding of the region’s rich past.’ —Francis Allard, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania ‘This volume is the best overview of the early history of Hong Kong that I know. The authors have articulated patterns of human settlement at Sha Po in a masterly way that informs us not only of Lamma Island, or greater Hong Kong, but of Lingnan as a whole. I welcome it as the key source for specialists and the interested public alike.’ —Charles Higham, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, New Zealand ‘It is rare indeed for a multi-period study of a region to not only synthesise a vast range of archaeological material but also include incisive points of theory alongside that narrative, such as the need to understand evidence at a landscape level and questioning the utility of “Neolithic” and “Bronze Age” categories. This is such a book.’ —Steve Roskams, Department of Archaeology, University of York

In Urban Land Rent, Anne Haila uses Singapore as a case study to develop an original theory of urban land rent with important implications for urban studies and urban theory. Provides a comprehensive analysis of land, rent theory, and the modern city Examines the question of land from a variety of perspectives: as a resource, ideologies, interventions in the land market, actors in the land market, the global scope of land markets, and investments in land Details the Asian development state model, historical and contemporary land regimes, public housing models, and the development industry for Singapore and several other cities Incorporates discussion of the modern real estate market, with reference to real estate investment trusts, sovereign wealth funds investing in real estate, and the fusion between sophisticated financial instruments and real estate

When Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution in 1970, he sketched a research itinerary on the emerging tendency towards planetary urbanization. Today, when this tendency has become reality, Lefebvre’s ideas on everyday life, production of space, rhythmanalysis and the right to the city are indispensable for the understanding of urbanization processes at every scale of social practice. This volume is the first to develop Lefebvre’s concepts in social research and architecture by focusing on urban conjunctures in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dhaka, Hong Kong, London, New Orleans, Nowa Huta, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, Sarajevo, as well as in Mexico and Switzerland. With contributions by historians and theorists of architecture and urbanism, geographers, sociologists, political and cultural scientists, Urban Revolution Now reveals the multiplicity of processes of urbanization and the variety of their patterns and actors around the globe.

At the end of the nineteenth century a slice of imperial China was abruptly incorporated into the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It became known as the New Territories. The people of this remote and traditional corner of the Ching empire were not consulted about the annexation, initially resisted and long resented it. To placate them, the incoming authorities promised that little would alter and that their customs would be respected. The promise would not be fully kept but it became the source of the preservation of Chinese customary law in respect of rural land and the justification for privileges afforded to indigenous inhabitants. Their tenacious assertion of those rights and aversion to authority is detectible throughout the twentieth century and into the era of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; it permeates almost every aspect of policy and law relating to rural land. The Unruly New Territories is an account of the annexed area and of its special place in Hong Kong history and law. It recounts the customs and privileges, how they preserved a China that was elsewhere disappearing and how they gave—and, despite enormous changes, continue to give—leverage to indigenous representatives in dealings with government as well as handsome profits to rural landowners. ‘This fascinating and impressive book is a must-read for all who want to know more about the New Territories. Malcolm Merry traces, with his usual clarity and insight, its unique land history that blends, not always harmoniously, Chinese custom with the advance of common law and this area’s dramatic development.’ —Sarah Nield, University of Southampton ‘The Unruly New Territories covers various aspects of land law and custom in the New Territories and the history of this region in a thoughtful and provocative combined thesis. A must-read for anyone studying the laws and customs affecting land in rural Hong Kong and interested in the history of the New Territories.’ —Steven Gallagher, The Chinese University of Hong Kong