This paper is a study of certain aspects of land tenure in late imperial China. An extensive literature has evolved in recent years on the relationship between traditional forms of landholding and rural social structure in the irrigated rice-growing areas of southeastern and central China. In particular, the pronounced separation of‘rights to the surface’ (tianmianquan) and ‘rights to the subsoil’ (tiandiquan), which was common in many regions until its elimination as a result of the land reform campaigns of the People's Republic during the early 1950s, has attracted the interest of a growing number of sinological historians and anthropologists. I analyze here some of the principal characteristics of this traditional Chinese method of dividing property rights in land as they were found in the pre-British New Territories of Hong Kong. I also give consideration to those areas of the existing literature which seem especially relevant to my interpretation of the local manifestations of this extremely important feature of Chinese social life.

The Foochow Navy Yard was founded in 1866 by Tso Tsung-t'ang with the assistance of two French naval officers. In their opinion, they had provided ample funding for the enterprise, which was to construct a modern naval dockyard and academy, to build sixteen gunboats, and to train the Chinese in all aspects of naval construction, marine engineering, navigation and command of the small squadron, all within a five-year period. By a liberal interpretation of the contract, Tso managed to commit the government to funding the project for a total of seven years, up to early 1874. Since the objectives were by and large attained by that date, one could say that the Navy Yard was a success.

The interplay of religion and political protest is a familiar theme in Western studies of Japanese Christians who contributed significantly to the socialist movement in their country from the late Meiji period to World War II. Less well known is the fact that a minority of Japanese Buddhists likewise applied the ideals of their faith to political dissent in the movement. Their defiance of the State and the predominantly conservative Buddhist sects which generally supported Emperor, nation, and Empire in Asia constitutes in effect a modern Japanese Buddhist tradition of protest comparable in kind if not in scale to that found in Japanese Christianity. The purpose of the article in hand is to explore this tradition through a study of the Nichiren priest and Buddhist socialist, Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) whose career provides a striking illustration of the Buddhist dimensions of socialism in prewar Japan.

The paper is divided into three parts. In the first part I discuss ethnographic accounts from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries which concern the tribal Kurumbas of the Nilgiri Hills in South India. In the second part I present a brief profile of the Naiken, one of the Kurumba sub-groups with whom I conducted anthropological fieldwork between September 1978 and October 1979. The name Naiken is used by the people themselves and their immediate neighbours. In the literature they are often referred to as Jenu Kurumbas. In the final part of the paper, I critically re-examine the literature in the light of my field material and experience. Prior to my work none of the Nilgiri Kurumba groups have been subjected to intensive anthropological studies, although there are references to them, and in particular to their role visà-vis the other Nilgiri tribes in numerous accounts, including such seminal works as The Toda by W. H. R. Rivers (1906) and ‘Culture Change among the Nilgiri Tribes’ by Mandelbaum (1941). I suggest that the much-criticized early accounts by ‘amateur’ travellers, administrators, and planters may be more accurate than has been thought and perhaps even more revealing than the subsequent references up to the present offered by ‘professional’ anthropologists.