water resources; even before it was established, sailing ships stopped
regularly at Hong Kong Island to draw clear, sparkling water from its
hillside springs. After the island was settled the springs soon fell
short of needs, and five wells were sunk to tap new sources of supply.
Their levels, too, sank as rapidly as the population rose. Governor
Hercules Robinson expressed his concern over the dwindling supplies by
offering $5,000 in 1859 to anyone who could design a reservoir system
adequate for 85,000 residents. S. B. Rawling, civilian clerk-of-works
for the Army Royal Engineers, took the prize with a plan to build a
2-million-gallon reservoir at Pok Fu Lam, on the slopes of Victoria Peak,
and carry the water through a ten-inch pipe to tanks above Victoria City.
Completed in four years, Pok Fu Lam proved to be short of the need even
then, for the population had risen to 125,000. Striving to catch up, the
colony installed a much larger reservoir above Pok Fu Lam, linked it
to a pair of supplementary reservoirs, and discovered that the demand
was still in advance of supply. Before the end of the century, new
reservoirs had been added at Tai Tam and Wong Nai Chung, and the water
finally reached the eastern sections of the city. Filtration through sand
beds was also incorporated into the system.
None of these efforts satisfied the popular needs for long. Completion
of Tai Tam Tuk Reservoir in 1917 near the southeastern end of the island
raised the storage capacity to 1 billion, 419 gallons and everyone
thought the problem was solved at last. A series of punishing droughts
killed that bright hope, and the building of the Aberdeen Reservoirs
rounded out all the parts of the island that could be drained for
storage. Two reservoirs on the Kowloon Peninsula were tied to the island
with underwater pipelines, but this was done only after a spring drought
in 1929 had dried up five of the island’s six reservoirs, making it
necessary to bring in water by ship from as far away as Shanghai.
The rain-gathering potential of the New Territories had been exploited
by the 1930s with the construction of the Shek Li Pui and the Jubilee
Reservoirs. When the Japanese arrived, they found 13 reservoirs with a
storage capacity of 6 billion gallons. They let the mains deteriorate
during their occupation of the colony, applying their own brand of
water-rationing by cutting off all supply to entire sections of the
colony whenever they chose to.
Following World War II, the government tried deep boring to reach
underground water resources, but this turned out to be scarcely worth
the effort. After years of surveying and study, engineers laid out the
Tai Lam Chung Reservoir System, at the central western end of the New
Territories. This called for construction of a two-section dam 2,300
feet long and 200 feet high. This gigantic main dam, built entirely
of concrete, created a reservoir of 4 billion, 500 million gallons.
Twenty-three miles of “catchwaters,” or concrete channels to trap run-off
from the rains, funneled the surface water from 11,000 acres into the
reservoir. It took eight years to construct, being completed in 1960 at a
cost of almost $25 million.
None of these large dams served the needs of the hundreds of small
villages in the New Territories, which still relied on wells and streams
or threw up earth dams in hilly areas to form their own miniature
reservoirs. After World War II the colony government and the Kadoorie
Agricultural Aid Association, a private philanthropic body, furnished
grants of cement to replace these crude and leaky installations with
concrete dams and concrete-lined wells, plus pipes to carry the water
into the villages.
Rice crops in the New Territories were dependent on their own irrigation
systems, traditionally constructed of earth channels and dams. They were
laid out with evident shrewdness to cover the greatest possible area,
but the dams and channels had to be nursed along constantly to prevent
leaking and to keep them from becoming choked with weeds. The government
and the Kadoorie Association also furnished materials to replace these
systems with concrete dams and channels. Nearly 600 dams and more than
220,000 feet of channels have been improved in this way since World War
II.
When the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir was under construction, a very delicate
balance of catchwaters and irrigation channels had to be worked out so
that the reservoir collected all the excess summer rain not required for
irrigation, but did not draw off the sparse winter rains which farmers
had to have. The farmers’ initial assumption when they saw the huge
catchwater channels passing the farms on their way to the reservoir was
that they were being robbed of water; it took considerable diplomacy and
convincing proof to allay their suspicions.
Farmers who learned that their villages were about to be inundated by
the big reservoir were even less happy. They rejected the government’s
proposal to move them to another rural area and insisted on moving, if
move they must, to the developing industrial town of Tsuen Wan. They
received the full market price for their farm property and were resettled
in new houses at Tsuen Wan, with shop space they could rent to replace
their farming income. A few holdouts threatened to stay in their old
homes until the reservoir floated them to glory, but belatedly reversed
themselves and walked out on dry land.
The Tai Lam Chung relocation was hardly concluded when the government
found itself involved in an even knottier problem. Continuing demands
for more water forced the construction of still another dam—Shek Pik,
on Lantau Island. This was a remote part of the colony, much larger
than Hong Kong Island, but completely without roads until 1957. A
few government people visited the island regularly, but its isolated
villages, with their square stone towers or “cannon houses,” were more
likely to regard all visitors as pirates until proved otherwise. Armed
and alert, they holed up in the towers to defend themselves against
marauders who still stage occasional raids in sparsely settled areas.
Two villages in southwestern Lantau, Shek Pik and Fan Pui, would have
to be removed to make way for the new dam. Their people, having no
knowledge of modern technology and no need for a dam, viewed the project
with fear and hostility. The dam was not, in fact, being built for them;
its collected water was to be carried by pipeline to Hong Kong Island,
Kowloon and Peng Chau. Fan Pui, the smaller village, had to be treated
with diplomacy and compensated before its 62 people consented to move to
another rural area on the island. Inhabitants of Shek Pik elected to move
to Tsuen Wan, settling in new five-story blocks. The oldest inhabitant,
an eighty-six-year-old woman, made the transfer with full official
ceremony, her sedan chair borne by four policemen. The ancestral tablets
and household gods also made the trip on the shoulder-poles of respectful
bearers. Anything less than this diplomatic ritual would have made the
entire relocation impossible.
Preliminary work on the Shek Pik Dam became a trail-blazing venture
into unexplored territory. A ten-mile paved road had to be built along
the edge of the sea from the sheltered harbor at Silver Mine Bay to
the future dam site. Test borings at the foot of Shek Pik Valley where
the dam was to cross disclosed that the ground was a porous mixture of
gravel, boulders, and rotten granite down to 137 feet below the surface.
Since the ground stood only 15 feet above sea level, seawater would be
able to seep into the reservoir and the fresh water in the reservoir
would escape beneath the dam, undermining it.
If a regular concrete dam were to be built on such ground, its
foundations would have to go down at least 137 feet, a frightfully
expensive procedure. Engineers produced a reasonable alternative by using
the recently developed technique called grouting. In this process, a
mixture of water, cement, and clay is pumped into porous ground under
high pressure, sealing off the foundation without requiring excavation to
bed rock. A series of tests established that this process was feasible
for Shek Pik, and preparations to build an earth dam were made in 1958.
The dam was to be 2,300 feet long, with a maximum height of 180 feet. It
would back up 5 billion, 400 million gallons; a third of the colony’s
total water storage. A ten-mile tunnel was to carry the water from the
treatment works near the dam to Silver Mine Bay. From there it would be
pumped under the sea in twin 30-inch-diameter pipelines to reach Hong
Kong Island, eight miles east of Lantau. Fifteen miles of catchwaters
were to drain about twelve square miles of land, aided by the fact that
rainfall on Lantau Island is generally ten percent heavier than on Hong
Kong Island and is more evenly distributed throughout the year.
One of the tunnels was delayed for a time by a peculiarly Chinese
problem; its “fung shui” was regarded as injurious to a resident dragon.
The fung shui, a very important consideration among local people, meant
that any proposed change in the local landscape had to be undertaken
with great care. It would never do to nip off the top of a hill that was
shaped like a dragon, for that might blind the mythical beast and put a
hex on the countryside. The thing to do was to hire a fung shui expert
from a nearby village; for a suitable fee, he would propitiate the dragon
and the work of dam-building could proceed.
In a more practical way, the engineers had to install concrete channels
and pipelines to make certain that sufficient quantities of water were
diverted to irrigate farms near the catchment area. Hillsides above the
big catchwaters had to be faced with chunam, a mixture of straw, lime,
clay and cement which keeps the hillside soil from washing into the
catchwaters and clogging them.
By early 1962, the southwestern portion of Lantau was criss-crossed by
deep catchwaters and the earth dam was rising at the foot of the valley,
with its core of impermeable clay being made ready for a covering of
ordinary clay and dirt. Up in the mountains at the head of the valley,
Buddhist monks and nuns continued their quiet, contemplative existence
in the Po Lin Monastery, almost untouched by the dam project. Even when
a few more guests stayed overnight at the Po Lin hostel, the pattern of
prayer and work did not change.
Construction of the dam, pipelines, tunnels, and catchwaters became an
international venture, with French, English, American, and Hong Kong
contractors sharing the work under supervision of government engineers.
The entire $40 million job is to be completed late in 1963.
There were no claims that the completion of Shek Pik would give the
colony all the water it required. The new dam on Lantau and the water
pumped in from China would be helpful, but far short of indicated needs.
Two factors balanced each other in planning further exploitation of the
colony’s water resources. More reservoirs of the type already in use
would displace more farmland than Hong Kong could afford to lose. But the
introduction of grouting, the foundation technique successfully employed
at Shek Pik, made it possible to consider reservoir sites which would
have seemed ridiculously unsuitable a few years earlier. And these sites,
it appeared, could be developed without invading farm areas.
In the late 1950s, engineers of the Public Works Department and two
consulting firms directed their search for more water toward the thinly
settled scrub country of the eastern New Territories. This part of
the colony consists of two peninsulas with the irregular outline of
an ink-blot, separated by the broad, ten-mile-long Tolo Channel. Both
peninsulas are chopped into by dozens of deep bays, coves and inlets
bordered by high, rocky hills. Hundreds of inshore fishermen ply the
surrounding waters, but most of the region is too barren and mountainous
for farming.
Survey engineers made two recommendations which startled laymen: (1)
Build a 6,600-foot-long dam across the entrance of Plover Cove, a
four-square-mile inlet from Tolo Channel, and cut it off from the sea.
(2) Build a similar but much shorter dam to seal off Hebe Haven, an inlet
about one-fourth as large as Plover Cove. When the dams were finished all
that would be necessary would be to pump the seawater out of the inlets
and let the rains fill them with fresh water. The two reservoirs would be
enough to double the storage capacity of the colony’s water-supply system.
These basic recommendations in further discussions evolved into an
integrated scheme of tremendous size and complexity, covering the entire
eastern half of the New Territories. It included a series of service
reservoirs and pumping stations along a main pipeline extending from
the Red China border to Kowloon. These would be linked to Plover Cove
and Hebe Haven by another system of tunnels. Virtually all the surface
rains in the eastern end of the New Territories would be fed through
catchwaters into the two main reservoirs. Since Hebe Haven might collect
more summer rain than it could hold, the excess water could be conveyed
by tunnel to Plover Cove, with its much larger capacity. Even the water
brought by pipeline from Red China would be fed into the integrated
system. Three balancing reservoirs, to maintain a controlled and even
flow of water, and two large new filtration plants, to purify the water
before it made the last stage of its journey to urban consumers, were to
become part of the system.
Many of the connecting pipelines were to be designed to convey water
in either direction, making the utmost use of storage capacity. By
these refinements of the original recommendations, the capacity of the
integrated scheme would be raised to 100 million gallons a day when it
came into full use.
The first stage of the gigantic new system had made remarkable progress
by the early part of 1962. The Lion Rock Tunnel had already been begun by
cutting through the side of a mountain to connect the filtration plant at
Sha Tin with a pair of service reservoirs in Kowloon. The tunnel, 32 feet
in diameter, will carry three pipelines, each four feet in diameter, and
a two-lane, 24-foot-wide auto road three-fourths of a mile through Lion
Rock Mountain. Excavation work on the Lion Rock Reservoirs, with a total
capacity of 41 million gallons, had almost been completed. At the other
end of the tunnel, at the Sha Tin filtration plant and pumping station,
a hillside site as extensive as four football fields had been excavated
and the spoil was being used to fill a shallow inlet. Construction of
ten miles of tunnels and the 10-foot-high Lower Shing Mun Dam were well
advanced.
Meanwhile, engineers were probing the soil structure at the entrance
of Plover Cove. Working from barges in 35 feet of water, they bored
down through 35 feet of soft clay, reaching to almost twice that depth
before they found impermeable clay and rock to form the foundation for
their earth-fill dam. When complete, the dam will extend 35 feet above
the water and 70 feet below it, with grouting to provide a watertight
foundation. The main section of the dam will cross the cove’s wide
entrance. Two shorter sections will close off side entrances to the cove.
The first stage of this integrated scheme will be rounded out in 1964.
Both Hebe Haven and Plover Cove should be ready by 1970, though any
completion dates beyond 1964 are likely to be elastic. At each stage,
improvements are introduced and existing goals altered.
In addition to these broad-scale developments, the colony has taken
immediate measures to conserve the present supply of fresh water by
making it possible to use salt water for such purposes as flushing and
fire-fighting. Since 1958, salt-water mains have been installed in four
densely populated sections of Kowloon and two on Hong Kong Island.
Fluoridation of the entire water supply began in March, 1961.
The possibility of distillation of seawater for producing a fresh-water
supply has been examined by engineers, but thus far the outlook is
discouraging; the cost remains far too high. There is even a faint,
faraway hope that some day atomic energy may be employed to distill an
unlimited supply of fresh water from the ocean at low cost.
If every phase of Hong Kong’s integrated scheme is in operation by
1970, its water shortage may be over. Similarly, if all the reclamation
projects now under consideration are brought to fulfillment in the next
decade, there may be enough land to meet all ordinary requirements.
The determination of these requirements, however, will derive from the
Department of Public Works only secondarily. The primary determinant will
come from the Registry of Marriages.
Any recent visitor to the Central Marriage Registry would appreciate the
difficulties in predicting the population of Hong Kong even five years
hence; there the walls of two long corridors are so thickly papered with
overlapping notices of marriage that not much more than the names and
occupations of the prospective couples remain visible.
Neither land nor water is likely to become a surplus commodity in
tomorrow’s Hong Kong.
CHAPTER SIX
A New Day for Farms and Fisheries
“On our small and peculiar land area, it would be impossible to
reach a high order of self-sufficiency in food production.”—W.
J. BLACKIE, former Hong Kong Director of Agriculture, Fisheries
& Forestry
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.