Chinese villagers at the colonial urban periphery: improvement schemes, landed property and indigeneity in Hong Kong, c. 1890s–1930s

Abstract

From the 1890s onwards, the Hong Kong government implemented improvement schemes to redevelop Chinese rural settlements. Existing scholarship has discussed how British colonial urban authorities negotiated with indigenous owners of urban property, but in rural Hong Kong the government determined who the ‘original owners’ were that were entitled to compensation. At the city’s periphery, the government altered Chinese customary land practices and settled ownership in messier ways than existing scholarship has suggested. Analysing land records, I argue that the messiness of colonial land settlement created ambiguous notions of indigeneity which meant that certain precolonial residents gained from improvement schemes while others were dispossessed.