HONG KONG BEFORE THE CHINESE
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experimental stations. And there is literary evidence for stating that all the hills between here and Canton were densely forested, as hills of similar geological structure still are in countries such as Japan, where the population does not destroy every tree before it is ten years old as they have been doing in South China for several centuries. Exactly what trees grew in these forests I cannot say; here is another missing piece in the puzzle which can probably be filled, as I shall soon suggest. The forests are supposed to have had two different kinds of human inhabitants, or at this time perhaps more than two, (a document of the early Yuan Dynasty mentions two types of hill-dwellers by name) but until further evidence comes to light, I suggest that in view of the small size of this territory, there is little reason to pre-suppose the existence of a third, and as I shall indicate later, my own preference is for a view that only one people lived here.
Of the two non-Chinese peoples mentioned, one, the Yaos, are well-known and documented from South and Southwest China, Vietnam and Laos. Their languages have been studied, not an easy matter since their society comprises many small units, each possessing its own dialect and none having any form of writing; and work has been done on their customs and religion. There is an exhibit in the National Ethnological Museum at Leiden in Holland which shows the principal elements of their cultural and social life, including the type of house and the traditional patterns which they weave into their cloth, which in South China is made of wool. The exhibit at Leiden is particularly interesting because the adjoining showcase contains, or did contain when I visited that museum, an exhibit of a people from the island of Celebes who, although physically dissimilar in appearance, built somewhat similar houses and used almost identical patterns in their cloth, which however is bark-cloth. I asked the Assistant Curator whether the juxtaposition of the two exhibits was accidental or whether they had evidence of some connection between the Yao and the people of Celebes; he said that it was not fortuitous, because the resemblances were considerable, but there was no actual evidence of any connection and, as far as he knew, the peoples were of different racial types and spoke unrelated languages. Here is another gap to be closed.
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