21. Most of the squatters in the valley were Cantonese and many had either lived in or visited Hong Kong before the second world war. Apart from Cantonese the main element consisted of Chiu Chow speaking people from the Swatow region. The range of incomes was very considerable. At one extreme there were families with incomes of $1,000 a month: in such cases the father might be employed by government or one of the large firms, while his children attended a middle school or held steady jobs in business. At the other extreme were families who relied on what they could earn from casual labour or by hawking, sometimes less than $100 a month. Most families however had a monthly income of between $150 and $300: in a typical case the father would be an artisan in a construction company or an assistant in a shop or restaurant: his elder daughter would work in a weaving factory, while his wife added to the family earnings by doing embroidery or sewing at home. The shortage of accommodation in the tenement buildings of the city, and its high price, was the main reason why most of these people were squatting in a valley where the risk of fire and disease was ever present, and which, by its very nature, attracted the drug trafficker, the petty gangster and other criminal elements.
22. The squatter area at Sheung Li Uk was far from being just a jumble of domestic huts with an illegal market at its entrance. It was in fact a complex and partly self-sufficient community. On the four acres of agricultural land more than forty different kinds of vegetable and fruit were grown for the city markets: there were four large flower nurseries and several families cultivated bean sprouts in cellars or dark rooms; some families also bred pigs. Business thrived and the valley contained 40 retail shops besides those in the market. There were also 100 workshops of which about twenty were engaged in the preparation of rattan and the manufacture of rattan furniture, often on a large scale. Among the other trades were shoe-makers, joss stick makers, tinsmiths and blacksmiths. Some of the workshops used power-driven machinery for the operation of substantial weaving factories and electroplating works. Besides all this there were two or three hundred small home industries, usually carried on by the womenfolk and the elder children. These included embroidery, glove-making,
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