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J. W. HAYES
Of these various groups of fishermen the trawlers were by far the most important. As has been said above, the Peng Wo Tong was organised from among them and does not appear to have included the fishermen from the smaller Tanka craft. This group seems to have based itself on Peng Chau for at least fifty years, and in all probability for a much longer period, between the formation of the Tong in 1857 and the destructive typhoon of 18th September 1906 which is said to have hit them very hard as many boats were at sea during the sudden storm and were lost. They were tied to the island by their links with the shopkeepers and wholesale fish dealers, or laans as they are known locally,20 The trawlers caught all kinds of fish and salted them in brine21 pending a return to harbour. There was a comparative lull in their fishing season between the Tin Hau festival in the third moon and the end of the seventh moon, when they returned to Peng Chau, gave their boats and tackle a thorough overhaul, allowed themselves the luxury of a holiday on land, and participated in religious activities which included the inevitable season of Chinese opera. The opera performances lasted for about five weeks, by tradition overlapping the end of the third moon and the beginning of the fifth. There is no doubt that these trawlers and their crews added considerably to the bustle and prosperity of the island.
Besides the Tanka there were also Cantonese families who made their principal livelihood from fishing. I spoke to one old man of seventy-three (born 1891) whose whole life had been spent, as was his father's before him, "on the surface of the sea” ✯❀ as he put it. This family were Puntis from Tung Kwun and my informant said he was the fifth generation on Peng Chau. There is no doubt that they were land people, but they earned their living from the sea using small boats called and operating several stake nets at various points round the island's coast. They fished mostly by day in the waters round Peng Chau, to which they returned at night-fall. There were over twenty of these boats when my informant was a boy.
Beside the Cantonese fishermen, there were also some Hakkas with, at that period, as much interest in the sea as the land. The first ancestors of the CHUNG family came to Peng Chau at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An account of their