Then & Now | When burnt rice, sent or carried to China, was a lifesaver for families during Mao’s ‘Great Famine’

From its mid-19th century urban beginnings, Hong Kong was regarded – with some truth – as a place of opportunity for those who had scrabbled hard to make a bare living elsewhere in the Pearl River estuary.

Those who migrated to the British colony generally did so with long-term transience in mind; first and foremost, newcomers came to make a living – not a permanent home – and repatriated whatever money was left over to their home villages, where it went much further anyway.

This remained the case until relatively recently; stories abound of Hong Kong people who visited relatives in mainland China in the 1980s, and returned with only the clothes they wore – everything else had been left behind.

After the Communist assumption of power, in 1949, care parcels were still regularly sent back to ancestral villages from Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Hard-to-obtain goods – many of which could be bought only through ration coupons, or a lengthy wait for a quota-limited item – were popular inclusions.

China’s best-quality manufactures in those years were almost entirely exported; with unintended irony, these were purchased outside the country (with hard currency) in Hong Kong, Singapore or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and then sent straight back.