For more than a thousand years men have wrested a precarious living from the farms and fishing grounds of the New Territories, yet they remained outside the economic and social orbit of Hong Kong until a few months after World War II.

Politically, the New Territories had been part of the British crown colony since 1898. Nevertheless, the people of this scrambled-egg land mass and the 235 islands around it had held their interest in its British rulers to the legal minimum. The British themselves, passing through the New Territories on their way to the Fanling golf course or the Chinese border, viewed the region and its people with the fixed indifference of a New York commuter rolling over the swampy monotony of the Jersey meadows.

This reciprocal insularity broke down at last under the pressure of two events which have touched and twisted the lives of almost everyone in contemporary Hong Kong: the Japanese Occupation of World War II and the rise of Communist China. To the people of the New Territories, the Japanese interlude was an economic disaster; denuding their forests, depleting their livestock and impoverishing their fishing fleet. Both the Japanese and the Communists drove thousands of refugees into the New Territories to compete with resident farmers for scarce marginal land. The Communists further disrupted things by closing the China market to New Territories produce and by forcing colony fishermen to keep twelve miles away from its coast and its islands.

The four main Chinese groups in the New Territories, the Cantonese and Hakka farmers, and the Hoklo and Tanka fishermen, were no more severely shaken by all this than were the British. When the Japanese and the Communists had done their work, the British and the urban Chinese of Hong Kong found themselves dependent as never before on the fish and produce of the New Territories. The picturesque, faraway people of the countryside had come into sudden, sharp focus as instruments of the colony’s survival.

No one seriously expects the farmers and fishermen of Hong Kong to produce enough food to sustain more than 3,000,000 inhabitants, but the more they can bring to market, the greater the colony’s chances for survival.

The total area of farmland under cultivation has averaged about 33,000 acres for many years, except for a sharp drop during the Japanese occupation, but the size and nature of its yield have changed radically in the last fifteen years. The maximum farmland area cannot exceed much more than 40,000 acres, and even then much of it would look more like a rock garden than a farm. American and European farmers would consider most of the colony land already under cultivation as unworthy of their time and effort.

In 1940, rice was the chief crop, occupying seven-tenths of all cultivated land in the colony. Since the war, rice has steadily lost acreage to vegetable-growing, and in spite of its greater productivity per acre through improved irrigation and a more judicious use of fertilizers, it has fallen far behind vegetables in cash value. Vegetable crops today yield almost three times as much money as rice; $7,614,000 for the 1960-61 vegetable crop, compared with $2,870,000 for rice. Vegetable production has more than quadrupled since 1947.

When the Japanese were driven from the colony in 1945, they had reduced the livestock population to 4,611 cattle, 659 water buffalo, 8,740 pigs and 31,000 poultry. A count at the end of 1960 showed 18,000 cattle, 2,000 water buffalo, 184,000 pigs and 3,405,000 poultry. This tremendous increase stemmed directly from the expansion of the domestic market, but it was made possible by the colony government’s postwar plunge into marketing cooperatives for farm and sea products, the introduction of private and public loans for farmers and fishermen at reasonable interest rates, and the application of scientific methods to every phase of the farming and fishing industries.

Agricultural production of every kind totaled $40,506,000 in 1960-61. In descending order of value, this included poultry (chiefly chickens), vegetables, pigs, rice, various animal products such as hides, hair and feathers, fresh milk, sweet potatoes and other field crops. Among other products of special interest are fruit (litchi, limes, tangerines, olives, etc.), pond fish (mullet and carp), export crops (water chestnuts, ginger, vegetable seeds, etc.) and such flowers as gladiolus, chrysanthemum, dahlia and carnation.

That $40,506,000 farm-income figure has a momentarily impressive ring until one sees how it is divided. The average vegetable farm is about two-thirds of an acre, and the average “paddy,” or shallowly flooded unit of rice-growing land, usually runs to two acres, with an upward limit of five acres. There are several larger farms of 100 acres or more, but these are share-cropped by tenant farmers for exporters of special crops such as water chestnuts or ginger. The size of almost all other farms is dictated by the amount of hand labor one farm-owning family can perform; the only extra-human labor comes from the plow-pulling power of the dwarfish Brown Cattle and water buffalo. On these postage-stamp farms, tractors would be prohibitively expensive and as destructive as an army tank. Even a hand-operated power cultivator would be far too costly for a typical family farm.

By Western standards, any farm of less than two acres would barely qualify as a truck garden, but the Chinese of the New Territories cultivate the land with unique intensiveness. A fresh-water paddy produces at least two rice crops and often an additional “catch crop” of vegetables each year; six to eight crops are harvested annually on all-vegetable farms.

Farm income is as subdivided as the land. There are an estimated 30,000 farm families and a total of 250,000 persons who rely on farming for their living. The per capita income of the farming population therefore runs around $162 a year, or $13.50 a month, less the forty to sixty percent of crop value they must share with the landowner, leaving a meager net income of as little as $81 a year, or $6.75 a month. Things have been worse; in 1955 the annual per capita net income of farm people was about $30.

What the farm worker has, in one of the lowest-paid and most arduous jobs in the colony’s industries, is a place to live, enough to eat and an almost irreducible minimum of money for clothing and other expenses. In thousands of cases, his lean resources are supplemented by remittances from his relatives overseas, but he could not have survived in the postwar economy without the basic reforms in marketing, credit and research that began in 1946. One expensive event such as a wedding ($200) or a funeral ($100) could keep a tenant farmer in debt for years to loan sharks who charged him interest of eight to thirty percent a month. In numerous instances, it still happens.

For generations Hong Kong farmers had lived in permanent bondage to the “laans,” or middlemen, who controlled the marketing of farm and fishery products, paying the producers as little as possible and cutting themselves a thick slice of profit for the relatively simple process of taking the goods to market. They advanced money to farmers and fishermen at extraordinary usury rates, further tightening their strangle-hold. The Japanese Occupation, by grinding the farm and fishing population into desperate poverty, unintentionally broke the grip of the laans.

When the British Military Administration took control in the fall of 1945, it acted decisively to save the primary industries. Two men, Father Thomas F. Ryan, Jesuit missionary and the colony’s first Acting Superintendent of Agriculture, and Dr. G. A. C. Herklots, naturalist and author, were designated for the task.

Many years later, Father Ryan, who had long since returned to teaching at the Jesuit Wah Yan College on Hong Kong Island, said when asked about his 1945 assignment:

“I really knew very little about agriculture, but Dr. Herklots and I were asked to help with the vegetable and fish marketing. It was obvious that the laans were beginning again to take all the profits.”

The Jesuit priest and the naturalist learned a lot about marketing in a hurry. The vegetable and fish marketing organizations they set up under government control ended the dominance of the laans, but not without some anguished howls from the displaced profiteers. For a standard ten percent commission, the vegetable marketing organization transported and sold all vegetables grown or imported into the colony at the government wholesale market in Kowloon. A Federation of Vegetable Marketing Cooperative Societies grew out of the original organizations. It extended credit to farmers and has progressed steadily toward ultimate control of the market by the co-op societies. As the co-ops take charge of organization work, three percent of the ten percent commission is refunded to them. The Vegetable Marketing Organization also distributes fertilizer in the form of matured nightsoil, i.e., human excrement treated to reduce its germ content.

The Fish Marketing Organization, established along the same general lines as the Vegetable Marketing Organization, controls the transport and wholesale marketing of marine fish, charging a six percent commission on sales. It created loan funds to help fishermen rehabilitate and mechanize their boats. Evolution of the Fish Marketing Organization toward a wholly cooperative set-up has been impeded by the fact that only fifteen percent of the fishermen can read or write, compared with a colony-wide literacy rate of seventy-five percent. Living and working aboard their boats, fisher folk could not attend school. This ancient pattern has been altered in the last few years because more wives and children of fishermen are living ashore. About 4,000 children of fishermen attend schools on land, and there are special classes for adult fishermen.

Father Ryan and Dr. Herklots laid the foundation for the first Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, which came into existence in 1950 after a series of preparatory steps had been taken. Father Ryan initiated a survey of the colony’s primary industries and personally directed the renovation and replanting of the Botanic Garden and other public park areas, as well as the first postwar reforestation of the scalped hillsides in the reservoir catchment areas. In 1947, he relinquished his colony post to become the Jesuit Superior in Hong Kong. In recent years he has conducted a local radio program of classical music as a sideline.

Long-term assistance to farmers came from another private source in 1951: Horace and Lawrence Kadoorie, two Jewish brothers who shared positions of prime importance in the Hong Kong business community. Sir Elly Kadoorie was a former official of the colony government and one of its early business leaders. His two sons were members of a family which came to Hong Kong from the Middle East in 1880 and built a large fortune. The brothers were partners in the business house named for their father and directors of more than thirty other companies. Both had earned reputations as shrewd, tough businessmen; but Horace, the bachelor brother, had acquired a special fame among ivory collectors as the author of the seven-volume book, The Art of Ivory Sculpture in Cathay.

The Kadoories, observing the general poverty of colony farmers and the even worse situation of the refugees who crowded into Hong Kong in the late 1940s, decided to do something to help these displaced persons get on their feet. Knowing the Chinese to be a predominantly agricultural people, they chose a form of help that would make impoverished farmers self-supporting; that of raising pigs donated by the Kadoories. Pig-raising is a fairly simple venture that makes good use of marginal land, and pork is always in demand at local markets.

Reaction to the idea was chilly; other businessmen considered it unworkable and farmers regarded it skeptically, looking for a catch in it. The Kadoorie brothers agreed to put it to a test, choosing 14 families with no farming experience for the experiment. The group included a handyman, a carpenter, a beggar, a semi-invalid and a stonebreaker. The Kadoories gave them cement, bamboo straws and a few hand tools and invited them to build their own pigsties.

“Every one of those families made good,” Horace Kadoorie recalled in a 1961 interview. “Today they all have excellent farms. Their success in proving that you can really help people who are willing to help themselves was what convinced us we were on the right track.”

The brothers, working independently at first, and then in close collaboration with the officials of the Department of Agriculture, have given various forms of assistance to over 300,000 people in 1,092 villages.

They functioned through two allied agencies, the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association, which makes outright gifts, and the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Loan Fund, which makes interest-free loans. The two Kadoories and colony agricultural officials are jointly members of the boards of directors of the two institutions. The Association has donated the equivalent of $3 million-plus in agricultural gifts. The Fund, established by the Kadoories with an initial gift of $44,000, has been increased to $306,000 by the government. The J. E. Joseph Fund, another farm-loan fund, established in 1954, is also administered by the government; its initial capital of $79,000 is loaned at three percent interest.

In an economy like that of the United States, $3 million in gifts would disappear like a pebble in a lake, but with that amount the Kadoorie philanthropies have changed the face of the New Territories. The list of improvements is awe-inspiring, and it is no exaggeration to say one can hardly walk a mile anywhere in the rural district without seeing evidence of their eminently useful contributions.

They contributed junks and sampans to isolated villages, and then built 27 piers to accommodate them. Dirt paths were the only routes between many villages and farmers either walked or sloshed through the mud, sometimes using bicycles and carrying five or six members of the family or possibly a live pig lined up on the fenders and handlebars. The Kadoorie Association has provided 150 miles of concrete paths, six motor roads and 142 bridges to make the going easier.

Often villages depended on mountain springs for their drinking water, but these had an unfortunate habit of sinking back into the ground before they had served the thirsty villagers. The Association disciplined the vagrant waters with thirty miles of concrete channels, 293 dams, 400 wells, 51 sumps and 8 reservoirs. Rogue rivers and the invading sea had eaten away valuable farmland, and the Kadoorie Association produced restoratives with 29 seawalls, 30 retaining walls and a variety of culverts and floodgates. Odds and ends, helpful in diverse ways, ranged from rain shelters to compost pits, poultry sheds to outhouses.

Pigs were popular because, as Horace explained, “It’s the only animal you can see expanding daily.” Thousands were given away, and advice on caring for them was supplied by the agricultural stations.

One group that was the especial beneficiary of pig gifts were farm widows ranging from seventeen to ninety-six years of age. Horace, as the roving scout of the Kadoorie Association, had noticed that hundreds of women whose husbands had been killed by the Japanese or had died natural deaths had not only lost the family rice-winner, they lost the “face” or community status they enjoyed with their husbands. Custom frowned on their remarriage, so they could do little but linger disconsolately on the fringes of village life. The Kadoories talked it over and decided that a gift of pigs, cows, ducks or chickens would give these widows something to occupy themselves with and enable them to earn some money. In a period of two years 10,000 widows received these animals and enclosures for them. Feed they obtained through the Kadoorie Agriculture Aid Loan Fund. Blind and elderly women were able to care for flocks of chickens; younger ones received pigs and cows. The usual pig gift was six purebred Chinese sows from the Kadoorie Experimental and Extension Farm at Pak Ngau Shek; all pigs were inoculated against disease and the Agricultural Department specialists showed the widows how to care for the animals. Many women tripled their small incomes by breeding pigs and selling their offspring. As the owners of livestock, they became persons of consequence in their villages.

With the aid of government experts, the brothers bought hundreds of foreign pedigreed pigs, and bred Berkshires, Yorkshires and middle whites with the local animals to produce a larger and hardier strain. Cows and water buffaloes, indispensable as draught animals, were distributed by drawing lots in the villages, and the drawings became lively public gatherings with soft drinks and cakes served all around. Gifts or loans financed the construction of numerous fish-breeding ponds, with the seed fish supplied gratis.

The 25,000 loans made through the Fund covered livestock, seeds and fertilizer, building materials, insecticides and spraying equipment, land development and other purposes. Over 95 percent of the loan applications are approved, and the repayment rate has remained very high.

Creating new land for farming has been an important part of Kadoorie efforts. Horace came upon a group of squatters who had been moved from the city to make room for a new road; he found them moping about forlornly on a rocky field which was the site of a cemetery from which the bodies had been removed. Horace suggested that they use the rocks to build pigsties, promising them the needed cement and two pigs for each sty. On his next visit he found many pigsties completed, but was temporarily baffled when the settlers asked him to buy for them a nearby hillside rock, fully 100 yards wide and stretching from the bottom of the hill to the top. He acquired the rock, and the settlers, working from the bottom upwards, covered it with terraced growing lands.

At Nim Shue Wan village, a hillside settlement along a steep shore, the Kadoorie Association built a seawall, mixed the sticky red earth of the hillside with beach sand, and produced a good soil for vegetable-growing which now supports 100 families in the area. At Pak Ngau Shek, the Kadoorie farm on the high slopes of Tai Mo Shan, highest (3,140 feet) mountain in the colony, the brothers began to experiment with plants and animals, chiefly because the land had been judged worthless for farmers. If they could make anything thrive there, they believed, it might teach them some way to utilize the colony’s heavy proportion of wasteland. They had many failures, such as typhoons uprooting all their shallow-rooted peach trees, but they discovered that even trees and vegetables considered unsuitable for high lands did very well. Some vegetables, growing more slowly on the mountainsides, reached the market when lowland crops were less plentiful, and therefore brought better prices. The farm operated at a financial loss, but gave full value as an agricultural testing site.

The Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association meets once every two weeks, considers 50 to 100 applications for help, and tries to assist about 15 new families every day. It has given away 7,000 pigs in less than three months. Many situations won’t wait for committee meetings; some farmers in dire straits have walked up to Boulder Lodge, Horace’s home at Castle Peak, to ask for help in the middle of the night. Horace, who often works a 13-hour day and spends Sundays roaming around the farm districts, is more flattered than annoyed by these occasional late-hour callers.

“Speed is of the essence in this work,” he said. “When a typhoon heads this way, we assemble building materials for repair work and all the quick-growing seeds we can buy; then we’re ready to help the farm people get back into operation and plant vegetables as soon as the flooding subsides.”

Fire is often a total disaster to the rural poor, wrecking their homes and frequently killing their livestock. When an entire village was wiped out by fire in 1960, the Kadoories threw a round-the-clock emergency staff into a four-day rescue operation, providing new furniture, clothes, two months’ food supply, extra cash, livestock, bicycles and rebuilding all the houses.

Hundreds of artificial limbs donated by Kadoorie Association have enabled crippled people to earn their living as farmers and fishermen. The Association doesn’t scatter its benefits recklessly; all applicants are thoroughly investigated to discover whether they will work to improve themselves when they receive aid. When a man or woman receives a gift of livestock, he may not sell it for one year without Kadoorie Association consent; if disease or unavoidable accidents kill the stock, the Association replaces them free.

“Our idea has been to find out the wants of those in need,” Horace said. “It is worth more than anything else.”

The contributions of the Kadoorie brothers and the many other religious and philanthropic bodies working in the colony serve as a valuable supplement to the main task of directing and improving the primary industries. The principal responsibility lies with the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and with the Department of Cooperative Development and Fisheries, which was separated from Agriculture and Forestry in 1961.

The Chinese farmers of the New Territories can grow a garden on the side of a rock—as Horace Kadoorie found out for himself—but they know little about scientific farming, and until the 1950s, there was no one to teach them. Now the Agriculture & Forestry Department conducts three-week general agricultural courses, followed by one-week specialized courses in paddy cultivation, pond-fish culture and other phases of farming. There are vocational courses, lectures to cooperatives, radio farming broadcasts, film shows, guided visits to experimental stations and an annual Agricultural Show at Yuen Long with prizes for the best farm products.

At the Sheung Shui Market Garden Experimental Station, only two miles from the Red China border, S. Y. Chan, an assistant agricultural officer, directs a five-acre center for testing every species of foreign and domestic vegetables and flowers he can lay his hands on. Chinese white cabbage, Taiwan radishes, sugar peas, chrysanthemums, 30 varieties of English and American tomatoes, chives, and corn each have their small test patch to show whether they can survive in Hong Kong’s climate. Roses, for example, wilt and die in a few seasons, but the station is seeking new strains with greater durability. Unlike plants and flowers in most sections of the United States, the majority of Hong Kong vegetables and flowers grow best in winter, the local summers being too wet.

At Ta Kwu Ling Dryland Experimental Station, the problem is how to get some use out of the thousands of acres of former farmland abandoned because of poor soil or insufficient water. The station, started in 1956, made little progress at first. Then it added compost of manures and chemical fertilizers to the soil, and tried deep plowing to retain moisture in the earth. Large white local radishes as big as yams did well in this ground, and so did sweet potatoes. The department experts found that windbreaks of sugar cane helped to offset the drying effects of strong winds. Several types of fodder, including six varieties of grasses, were tried out in sample patches. Five of the station’s eleven acres are devoted to improvement of local pig breeds by crossing them with exotic strains.

The Castle Peak Livestock Experimental Station, located in an area of badly eroded hills, is the chief center for artificial insemination of pigs. Semen from selected strains of Berkshire, middle white, and large white and improved local boars is injected into local sows, producing larger and hardier litters. Various breeds of chickens are crossed to develop poultry which thrive under local conditions and are acceptable to Chinese tastes. A complete laboratory treats and experiments with every known disease of poultry, pigs and cattle. Pig semen is carried by bicycle, truck and helicopter to outlying sections of the New Territories to service local sows.

Artificial insemination of pigs, based on its highly successful use in Japan, has become increasingly important in Hong Kong, with more than 1,000 instances of its use in 1961.

In the northwestern lowlands near Yuen Long, the department has developed a fast-growing source of food in the fish-raising ponds. From the top of a small hill, Yu Yat-sum, fisheries officer, is able to point to a speckled, silvery expanse of such ponds, covering 700 acres in individual ponds from one to 10 acres each. Each acre produces about a ton of fish every year.

Mr. Yu explains that a five-acre pond, equipped with sluice gates and surrounded by dirt embankments, could be built for $2,700. Usually they are owned by a village or a co-op society. They are only five feet deep, but packed with 3,000 to 3,600 fry an acre, each about the length of a paper clip. The fish would all be crushed and battered if it were not for their superior adaptation—big head and silver carp cruise near the surface, grass carp favor the mid-levels, and grey mullet and mud carp gravitate to the bottom. Fed on rice bran, dry peanut cakes and soya bean meal, they fatten at a prodigious rate and are ready for the market within a year, selling at 21 to 30 cents a pound. For the pond owners, it’s a net return of twenty percent per year. There are more than 1,000 acres of these ponds in the New Territories, and they are increasing at the rate of 60 acres a month.

The Chinese have their own strict ideas of what fresh fish means; to them, the only fresh fish from a pond is a live one, so the carp and mullet travel to market in tubs, still alive. The job of Mr. Yu and other departmental experts is to see that the fish do not perish before their time because of diseases or excessive salinity in the pond water.

The Tai Lung Forestry and Crop Experimental Station concentrates on the expansion of the colony’s forests, which almost disappeared during World War II. Here the six-inch seedlings of Chinese pine, eucalyptus, China fir and other species are placed in polythene tubes and covered with soil by patient Hakka women who do the work by hand. After a few months in the shade and a brief maturing period in full sunlight, the polythene tube is removed and the tree is planted on a hillside in one of the reservoir catchment areas. Spaced about six feet apart on all sides, they go in at the rate of 2,500 an acre. Tai Lung produces 1,500,000 of these plantings each year. A month after they are placed on the hillsides, their progress is checked by an inspector; if more than twenty percent have died, the area is replanted. A second check is made a year later.

Four main forest areas stretching across the New Territories from Tolo Harbor to Lantau Island now total more than 11,500 acres. In ten years some of the lean China pines have shot up to 30 feet high. The overworked forestry staff has been so busy planting trees and keeping a close watch on forest fires that it has had little time for the next stage of the reforestation, which is thinning overcrowded areas. Other complications confront them when a firebreak is cut through the hillside forests; the cutover strip erodes quickly in the summer rainstorms, damaging the tree plantations and sending silt into the reservoirs.

If forestry is the youngest of Hong Kong’s primary industries, fishing is indisputably the oldest, and for many centuries, the largest primary income producer. Until fairly recent times, fishermen were inclined to demonstrate their versatility and supplement their income by piracy. Fast, steel-hulled naval ships with long-range guns have taken much of the lure out of part-time piracy, especially for the crews of slow-moving junks, and the fisher folk have become a law-abiding group. Today they number around 86,000 and catch approximately $10 million worth of fish every year. Not included in their ranks are the keepers of fish ponds, who are regarded as farmers, or those who live on boats but earn their living by hauling cargo, running water-taxis or selling merchandise from their boats.

The fishing people, chiefly Tanka but including other Chinese like the Hoklo and Hakka, are concentrated at Aberdeen and Shau Kei Wan on Hong Kong Island and seven settlements in the New Territories. By environment and preference, they are deeply conservative, disinclined to mix in the affairs of landlubbers. Nevertheless, the irresistible winds of change which have swept through the colony since World War II have shaken them loose from their traditional moorings.

Like the farmers, they were able to free themselves from the iron grip of the laans when the Fish Marketing Organization put the middlemen out of business. The Fish Marketing Organization gave them a fair return on their catch, established cheap credit to improve their boats and equipment, provided boats and trucks to get their fish to the five wholesale markets and founded schools for their children. CARE and other relief organizations came to their aid. The Fisheries Division offered classes in navigation, modern seamanship and boat design, marine engineering and the use of up-to-date fishing equipment, with classes being adapted to the fishermen’s working schedules. A fisheries research unit from Hong Kong University became a regular part of the departmental organization. The 240-ton otter trawler Cape St. Mary cruised the fishing grounds from the Gulf of Tong King, west of Hainan Island, to Taiwan in the east, gathering data on ocean currents, water temperatures and depths and the feeding habits of fish. A fishing master was appointed and careful studies were made of pearl- and edible-oyster culture.

All these are routine procedures in present-day fishing centers, but they were virtually unknown in Hong Kong until 1946. Since then, despite harassment and inshore fishing restrictions enforced by Red China, the tonnage and market value of the annual catch have almost tripled.

Red China has maintained a certain disinterestedness in its mistreatment of fishermen. During the last five years the Communists demanded so great a share of the fish caught by their own people that thousands of their fishing boats never returned. Some sailed far out in the China Sea, then turned back toward Hong Kong and became refugees; others slipped through Chinese shore patrols at night and defected to the British colony. Between 1957 and 1962, the new arrivals swelled the colony fishing fleet from 6,000 to the present 10,550 units.

The most radical change in the colony’s fleet, however, has come from within. The Chinese junk, famous throughout the world as the symbol of Hong Kong, has dropped its picturesque sails; more than 4,000 of them now churn along under Diesel power. The Chinese junk is as diverse in its size, shape and function as the infinitely varied Chinese people. There are sixteen different classes of junks in Hong Kong alone, and none of them closely resembles a junk from any other part of China. They are single-, double- and triple-masted; they are little craft 25 feet long or lumbering giants of 100 foot length. To a colony fisheries expert, “junk” is only a loose generic term; he immediately classifies it according to the job it is designed for, as a long-liner (four classes by size), seiner (two main types, depending on the net it uses), trawler (four main types, depending on the kind of trawling it does), gill-netters, fish-collecting junks and several miscellaneous varieties.

Since the British came to Hong Kong, the junks operating in local waters have borrowed design features from European ships. The big fishing junks of Hong Kong, with their high stern, horizontal rails and the large, perforated rudder pivoting in a deep, vertical groove on the stern, resemble no other junks in the world. Like junks from all parts of China, and even the boats of ancient Egypt, they have an oculus, or painted image of the human eye, on their bow. In fishing junks, the center of the eye is directed downward so that it can keep a close watch on the fish; trading junks have the eye aimed higher so that it can scan the distant horizon. The bow eyes of the old-fashioned sailing junks no longer have much to look forward to. The deep-sea trawlers, operating as far as 250 miles out, are all mechanized. The sailing junks operate closer to shore, but the cargo-carrying junks in Victoria harbor are predominantly mechanized. To anyone who has crossed the harbor recently it is obvious that the sails are disappearing at an alarming rate.

The fishermen who live and work on junks instead of viewing them abstractly from a distance have not yet formed a Committee for the Preservation of the Romantic Junk. After approaching mechanization with reluctance and suspicion in 1948, they became convinced that the big sailing junk is through. Motorized junks can reach the distant fishing grounds much faster, they catch a lion’s share of the fish, and they return to market far ahead of sail competition. Because of their greater speed and stability, they can venture out in the typhoon season when sail craft are obliged to stick closer to shore. Within ten years, fishing authorities say, the sailing junk will have become virtually extinct.

It has been proposed that the Hong Kong Tourist Association hire a couple of junks to sail up and down the harbor for the sole delectation of tourists, but no official action has been taken. Tourists can travel 40 miles west to Macao where the harbor is still crowded with sailing junks. Here the sails persist only because the Macao fishing industry lacks the low-interest loans available to Hong Kong fishermen through the Fish Marketing Organization and the fishing co-ops. Without such credit, very few fishermen could afford Diesel engines or other motor-driven equipment. In Hong Kong, even the little 4-horsepower engines of sampans are bought on credit.

Now that progress has reached the fishing fleet, it will not be satisfied until it changes everything. Under the direction of such knowledgeable men as Jack Cater, co-op and fisheries commissioner, Lieutenant Commander K. Stather, fishing master, and Wing-Hong Cheung, craft technician on modern junk design, the whole junk-building industry is being turned upside down.

For centuries, the junk has been built without plans or templates, with the designers proceeding entirely by habit and skill. This is relatively easy in building a 15-foot sampan, but when it is extended to 100-ton vessels of 90-foot length it becomes both art and architecture. The size of the investment, by local standards, is staggering: $40,000 for a large trawler and its mechanized equipment, and around $7,000 for a mechanized 40-footer.

There are nearly 100 junk-building yards in the colony, but no more than ten of these are capable of building a junk from blueprints. The fisheries department is conducting boat-design classes in three major fishing centers, Aberdeen, Shau Kei Wan and Cheung Chau, and training builders to read plans. The classes are held at night to avoid conflict with working hours, and the courses are for three months.

The junk-building yards present a vivid picture of a civilization in transition. At one yard, a workman is laboriously breaming the hull of a sampan—killing marine borers by passing bundles of burning hay beside and beneath it—and a workman or two in an adjoining yard are covering the hull of another boat with anti-fouling paint. The object of the two operations is identical, but the anti-fouling paint protects the wood about four times as long as breaming and takes no longer to apply. On the port side of an 86-foot trawler, a Chinese carpenter is using a half-inch electric power drill; on the starboard, another man is drilling holes with a steel bit spun by a leather thong with its ends fixed to a wooden bow.

Lu Pan, the Celestial master builder who transmitted the secrets of carpentry and shipbuilding to mankind, is honored with a tiny shrine in an obscure corner of every yard. Joss sticks are lighted before a statuette of this practical divinity, and his birthday observance on the 13th day of the Sixth Moon is a holiday in the shipyards. Lu Pan has not yet betrayed any overt sign of annoyance at the invasion of his domain by power tools and Diesel engines.

The timber that is cut for these all-wooden ships is tough and durable—China fir, teak, and various hardwoods chiefly from Borneo, like billian, kapor and yacal. The planks are hewn at mills near the yards, and bent to fit the curvature of the hull. The curving is accomplished by heating the center of the plank with a small fire and weighting its ends with heavy stones to set the curve. The 3-inch-thick planks are secured to the upright framing members with 14-inch steel spikes, and the main stringer, just below deck level, is fastened with threaded bolts. Despite the general disarray of the open yards and the lack of precise plans, the junk almost invariably turns out to be a nicely dovetailed, exactly balanced boat, good for twenty or thirty years of service in the rough weather of the China Sea.

The long-liner ranks as the giant of the junk fleet, having an overall length between 80 and 100 feet. Junks of this class fish from 20 to 60 miles south of the colony, cruising above a vast expanse of underwater flats where depths seldom exceed 90 feet and the muddy bottom makes other kinds of fishing unfeasible.

A typical long-liner under construction at the Yee Hop Shipyard in Shau Kei Wan has a 90-foot length and the elephantine stern characteristic of its class. Its high poop carries bunks for 16 men, with additional bunks located forward and a total crew capacity of 57 men, sandwiched in with no more than a yard of clearance between upper and lower bunks. Eight sampans can be stowed along its deck and lowered over the side when the fishing grounds are reached. Despite its traditional outline, it has Diesel engines, twin-screw propellors and a 20-ton fishhold lined with modern insulation material.

Costing about $36,000 with full equipment, one long-liner, for example, was ordered by Hai Lee Chan, a Shau Kei Wan fisherman who already owned another like it, plus two smaller junks. During the two and one-half months that 35 carpenters required to complete it, Mrs. Chan and her twelve-year-old daughter remained on or around the junk to keep a watchful eye on its construction. A long-liner of this kind may put out as many as 100,000 hooks on lines attached to its bow and stern or strung out by its covey of sampans. A single trip to the fishing grounds may keep it at sea for a week or more and bring a ten-ton catch of golden thread, shark and lizard fish.

Comparable in size but differing completely in design are two deep-sea trawlers built at the Kwong Lee Cheung Shipyard in Kowloon. These are sister ships, 86 feet long, and the first ones of their size that faithfully followed the modern specifications laid down by Mr. Cheung and the Fisheries Department. They were the first big trawlers constructed according to written plans and framed around modern templates or patterns in Hong Kong.

As they neared completion late in 1961, the twin wooden trawlers of 100 tons each looked more like dismasted clipper ships than junks. The old type of high poop had been cut down and crew quarters moved forward. The fat, bulging stern had been slimmed down to improve the streamline, and the traditional rudder-slot was gone. The deck was level and uncluttered, with far more working space than older junks provided. The outline of the hull was slim and graceful, giving more longitudinal stability than the tub-bottomed junk. The free-swinging tiller and massive wooden rudder had been replaced by a ship’s wheel and a much smaller rudder of steel that turned on a metal shaft. Powered winches would be welded to their decks. Mechanized and streamlined, the new trawlers could deliver more speed than a motorized trawler of conventional shape, and require less fuel to do it.

When the two partners who had ordered the trawlers, fishermen Lee Loy Shing and Cheng Chung Kay, smilingly greeted visitors to the yard, pointing out the features of their new ships with considerable pride, it was evident that they regarded the old-style junk as an expensive antique. Mechanization has already proved itself; although mechanized boats number less than half the fishing fleet, they take 80 percent of the catch. Many fishermen are beginning to believe that modern ship design is as important to the future of Hong Kong’s fishing fleet as mechanization.

Steel-hulled trawlers of the Japanese “bull” type are already being used by the fishing companies in the colony. One dozen of them operate in the Gulf of Tong King, near Hainan Island. However, they are much too costly for most fishing families.

Colony fishing methods are as varied as the boats used. The deep-sea trawlers, generally working in pairs, drag a huge bag-shaped net along the sea bottom, gathering in horsehead and red snapper, or red goatfish and golden thread. Purse-seiners, working in pairs and fairly close to shore, stretch a big net between them at night and use a bright light to lure such smaller fish as anchovies and carangoid into the net. The Pa T’eng seiners set gill nets along the bottom for yellow croaker, and drift nets for white pomfret and mackerel. Other types include gill-netters, shrimp beam-trawlers, and three smaller classes of long-liners. About twenty kinds of fish form most of the catch, and among these are conger pike, big eyes, grouper, young barracuda and red sea bream.

The ship carpenters of Hong Kong are far above average ability, so much so that the Chinese Communists have attempted, without notable success, to induce them to build junks in China. Demand for their skills has, however, raised their wages about one-third in the last two years.

The fishermen have had their rigid conservatism shattered by the changes around them. In spite of their usual illiteracy, they have learned the rules of navigation at fisheries department schools. More advanced classes have qualified for licenses as engineers, pilots, navigators and boat-builders. For the first time they have lodged their families on shore, with the wives becoming used to housekeeping and the children attending schools.

Many Westerners, seeing this upheaval in the fine, free life of the fisherman, deplore the passing of the old ways. The fishermen, always quicker at grabbing for prosperity than in clinging to romantic illusions, are moving forward at top speed without a thought to their suddenly disappearing past.