Opinion | Freeing up Hong Kong’s ancestral lands for development requires tying up many legal loose ends
- The struggle to trace descendants of landholding clans and iron out discrepancies between Imperial Chinese and British colonial law makes selling ancestral land near-impossible
- What is needed is a system overhaul, with tso and tong organisations replaced by modern corporations – a long process, but no quick fix has worked so far
First, some background on land ownership in the New Territories before the arrival of the British is necessary. During the Qing dynasty, land was either owned by the government or held privately – by individuals or on a communal basis. It was this communal ownership which bewildered the outside world.
Communal lands took various forms. For example, family members might purchase a piece of land to build a shrine to worship their ancestors. Some parts of the land were then rented out to people in the same village and the proceeds equally distributed among the family and their descendants forever. This land was called “ancestral land”.
Or, if a man died without leaving a will, one piece of land in his estate was retained to support his widow and any unmarried daughters. This land was known as “maintenance land”. If different clans living in the same village bought a piece of land for the purposes of education, that land became “education land”.
These are just a few examples of the types of communal lands formed in Imperial China. Who, then, was responsible for managing this land?
In many cases, no manager was appointed. Instead, land was managed according to informal or spoken agreements among family members. In some cases, family or clan landholding organisations, known as tso or tong, were formed to manage the lands.