REVIEW
9
census in general terms from first to last gives an intimate glimpse of local life in the Colony.
Although this army of census enumerators contained many bright young men and women it could achieve little unless trained. To allow for wastage and failure in the final test nearly forty thousand applicants had to be put through a training course of nine lectures and a film. That this took some organizing may be seen from the fact that at one period over four hundred classes were being held together in different parts of the Colony. The programme of train- ing claimed a very high working priority, and the time-table for it had to be fixed at the same time as that for the census itself. It had to be finalized before even the list of topics to be covered or the tables required to illustrate the topics or the questions required to prime the tables could be settled. Also, at this stage another obstacle had to be surmounted-the Problem of Language.
The official language of Hong Kong is English. The laws are in English. The courts conduct their hearings in English, with inter- preters. Public correspondence is almost all conducted in English. But how many of the public were really conversant with English? It was hard to say.
Whatever is not in English is, of course, in Chinese. Most small and many large businesses keep their accounts in Chinese. The newspapers with the biggest circulations are in Chinese. Street signs and public notices are in English and Chinese. Shop signs and advertisements are often in Chinese alone. But this is written Chinese, which does not quite correspond to any spoken language. How many of the public were really able to read and write Chinese? It was hard to say.
One thing that was common knowledge was that to get about in Hong Kong and Kowloon the most useful language to speak was Cantonese. But there would certainly be a proportion of the households even in town and may be a large proportion in parts of the New Territories where Cantonese was not understood- where even an enumerator who spoke both Cantonese and English would not get by. And there are many dialects of Cantonese, some very broad. Would an enumerator who spoke city Cantonese be able to put across his questions to the villagers of Yuen Long, who speak Nam Tau dialect, or to the Tanka boat people, and understand their answers?