The Wong Lineage Land: Property and Belonging in the New Territories of Hong Kong in 1904

This essay explores the distribution of the ownership of land in a coastal village in the New Territories of Hong Kong at the beginning of the last century. The study examines land and houses as indices of relative wealth in a poor community. Above all, it points to the discursive social use of land as a genealogical tract in an area where written genealogies would have been scarce or nonexisting. Belonging in terms of agnatic continuity and its ramifications over time were mapped out in the agricultural landscape to form a complete depicting graph.