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.”