Hedda Morrison

For centuries the seasonal rhythms and hard realities of farming had patterned Hong Kong's rural hinterland. In pocket depressions below the Kowloon hills, and still more in the valleys and uplands that reached through the New Territories, farming life had hardly changed in decades – and little enough over generations. The villagers who tilled the land remained close to their peasant roots, their daily life entirely removed from that of the urban areas.

In 1946 – 47 most of the New Territories could
only be reached on foot, along paths that
branched out from the trunk roads that went over the mountain passes or through the lowlands. Except for a few images of market gardening and dairying on Hong Kong Island, Hedda Morrison's photographs of rural life were mostly taken around the more easily reached Punti lowlands in the
New Territories, dominated by paddy-field rice cultivation. Farther west, on the alluvial plain, she recorded duck ponds and fish farming. She did

not photograph any of the truly remote hamlets, the Hakka places sequestered in upland valleys. There, tougher crops grew and hardships marked each day. Today mostly abandoned, these villages amidst the ranges remain difficult of access. In 1946, with security in the outlying regions uncertain, reaching them would have entailed real challenge.

Hedda Morrison first saw the Hong Kong lowlands in early winter, when drying paddy-fields lay bare beneath browning hillsides. Steep subtropical Hong Kong was far different from the inland plains of north China, which she knew. Yet there were underlying similarities. Throughout China, the lives of country folk had aspects in common with the life of their cousins elsewhere, including those in Hong Kong. And there were stronger similarities to the farming life that Morrison had photographed near Nanking (Nanjing) in 1944, with its lowland rice cultivation: irrigation systems, water buffaloes straining at ploughs, women transplanting rice, enormous effort to ensure the harvests.