1
Review
THE BIG COUNT-CENSUS 1961
FOR the past five years the Hong Kong Annual Report has begun with a chapter in which some particular facet of the Colony's life has been brought into focus. The first chapter written to this scheme was sub-entitled 'A Problem of People' and since then inevitably each subject selected for review, 'Building and Develop- ment', 'Industry', 'Refugees' and 'Water', has reflected to a large degree the problems which arise from the rapid increase of popula- tion in an already over-populated territory. In the spring of 1961 Government carried out the first census in thirty years of the population of Hong Kong and so, with this year's review, the first chapter of the Annual Report comes back to the subject with which the series began-people.
At first sight Hong Kong is an easy place in which to take a census. The territory is small and well mapped. The people are civilized and co-operative-but a closer look shows that Hong Kong presents certain not inconsiderable difficulties for the census taker. For example the boat people. Over twenty five thousand small craft frequent the waters of the Colony. The men and women who operate them have generally no homes on dry land, and often no regular 'home port'. A junk that carries cargo or passengers carries them to whatever bay or anchorage the passengers, or the consignors, choose. A trawler brings its catch in to the nearest fish market or to the one where the best price will be offered. Wherever the boat is moored, there for a night is home. How, then, could they be counted accurately? And yet they too are part, and a valued part, of Hong Kong's people, and could not be left out.
Then there are those that live in unnumbered and apparently innumerable squatter huts on hillsides and on rooftops, or in tiny cubicles and bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Sai Ying