20-year tax abatement programs which require owners to pay land tax help keep homes affordable.

From the unchallenged admiration in the eighteenth century to the threats of urbanization, agricultural depression, democratization, shifting land markets and changes in land tax laws, the economic value of the country always weighed into the equation of preservation, government intervention and the cultivation of a national attachment to country houses.

With the introduction, in 1872, of the 3 percent land tax payable in cash rather than the harvested rice, her family fortunes rapidly declined and went the way of many other peasant families as they gradually lost their five-acre farm.