POPULATION (Contd.)
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many other aboriginal tribes are slowly dying out,
They are now making an effort to settle on farm lands near Canton acquired by one of their number and in time to come, perhaps, this aboriginal people will have broken down the prejudice against them and manage to stay where they will. In the end the process of absorption, steadily proceeding, will submerge them in the mass of the Chinese.
The lecturer at Canton pointed out that the Tan-ka represent the remnants of one of the aboriginal tribes which inhabited Kwangtung and who, after being conquered and assimilated by the northern Chinese, are slowly dying out. Besides the Tan-ka there are other small surviving groups such as the Miao, Lolo, Loi and Iu tribes and other scattered groups in Kwangtung, Yunnan, Kweichow and Kwangsi. The Shanam group of the Tan-ka is in the lowest stratum of Chinese society an under-privileged disinherited and landless class. In social status and political rights they are even worse off than the ricksha coolies of Canton.
In these enlightened days, however, it is likely that the Chinese "untouchables" will eventually be given greater freedom to mix with their fellow men.
On looking up the old records of this Colony one realises, what would be expected, that the Tan-ka, finding something of an asylum in Hong Kong, immediately adopted this place as a new home, and many have settled ashore and founded villages or hamlets of their own. In a chronicle of some fifty years ago it is mentioned that research has shown how valuable these boat people were to the British in the earliest years of the occupation. Some of the data regarding the prohibition may be given: these people were forbidden by Chinese law since 1730 "to settle on shore or to compete at literary examinations, and prohibited by custom from intermarrying with the rest of the people." The result was that from the earliest days of the East India Company, the Tan-ka were always the trusty allies of the foreigners who came here to trade. They furnished pilots and supplies of provision to British men-of-war, troopships and mercantile vessels, even "at times when doing so was declared by the Chinese Government to be rank treason, unsparingly visited with capital punishment." They were the hangers-on of the foreign factories of Canton and of the British shipping at Lintin, Kamsingmoon, Tungku, and Hong Kong Bay. When the Colony was founded the Tan-ka formed the largest proportion of the Chinese population, and they were welcomed here, despite being considered by the other Chinese "the pariahs of South China, whose intimate connection with the social life of the foreign merchants in the Canton factories used to call forth an annual proclamation on the part of the Cantonese Authorities warning foreigners against the demoralising influences of these people."
They invaded Hong Kong the moment the settlement was started, living at first on boats in the harbour, but gradually settling ashore. The chronicle notes that they have maintained ever since almost a monopoly of the supply of pilots and ship's crews, of the fish trade and cattle trade, "but unfortunately also of the trade in girls and women." Most of the early cases of offspring by European fathers and Chinese mothers, were born of Tan-ka women.
It is notable that their numbers afloat do not tend to increase much, as successive census returns have shown, except insofar as the need for boats may increase, and the obvious solution of this is the Tan-ka tendency to settle ashore here, where they are already being absorbed to some extent into the general population.
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