Bringing the Vegetables Back In: The Unruly Dynamics of Postwar Market Gardening in British Colonial Hong Kong

Abstract

The Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO) historically has long been a focal point of the study of the postwar boom of local agriculture in Hong Kong for two reasons. First, it centralized/monopolized the city’s vegetable wholesaling by eradicating all traditional marketing channels; second, its semiofficial status allowed it to accumulate a set of useful statistics on the production and circulation of local fresh produces. This article draws on fieldwork on local market gardeners and studies of colonial marketing institutions to argue that official statistics are rather inadequate to grasp the dynamics of local agriculture. A study of the so-called “dawn markets” and the vegetative dimension of the plants that lie outside the official system is necessary. It also suggests that dawn markets were not any residue from the pre-VMO era, but an “unruly twin” of the post-World War II colonial Hong Kong’s governmentality.