This reciprocal insularity broke down at last under the pressure of two events which have touched and twisted the lives of almost everyone in contemporary Hong Kong: the Japanese Occupation of World War II and the rise of Communist China. To the people of the New Territories, the Japanese interlude was an economic disaster; denuding their forests, depleting their livestock and impoverishing their fishing fleet. Both the Japanese and the Communists drove thousands of refugees into the New Territories to compete with resident farmers for scarce marginal land. The Communists further disrupted things by closing the China market to New Territories produce and by forcing colony fishermen to keep twelve miles away from its coast and its islands. The four main Chinese groups in the New Territories, the Cantonese and Hakka farmers, and the Hoklo and Tanka fishermen, were no more severely shaken by all this than were the British. When the Japanese and the Communists had done their work, the British and the urban Chinese of Hong Kong found themselves dependent as never before on the fish and produce of the New Territories. The picturesque, faraway people of the countryside had come into sudden, sharp focus as instruments of the colony’s survival. No one seriously expects the farmers and fishermen of Hong Kong to produce enough food to sustain more than 3,000,000 inhabitants, but the more they can bring to market, the greater the colony’s chances for survival. The total area of farmland under cultivation has averaged about 33,000 acres for many years, except for a sharp drop during the Japanese occupation, but the size and nature of its yield have changed radically in the last fifteen years. The maximum farmland area cannot exceed much more than 40,000 acres, and even then much of it would look more like a rock garden than a farm. American and European farmers would consider most of the colony land already under cultivation as unworthy of their time and effort. In 1940, rice was the chief crop, occupying seven-tenths of all cultivated land in the colony. Since the war, rice has steadily lost acreage to vegetable-growing, and in spite of its greater productivity per acre through improved irrigation and a more judicious use of fertilizers, it has fallen far behind vegetables in cash value. Vegetable crops today yield almost three times as much money as rice; $7,614,000 for the 1960-61 vegetable crop, compared with $2,870,000 for rice. Vegetable production has more than quadrupled since 1947.