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J. W. HAYES
However, the Cantonese, Hakka and even Hoklo fishermen lived on land and were still landsmen who could live in both worlds. The first two, if not always the third, could cut their own firewood, and grass for breaming, whereas I am led to believe that in the anchorages, which were nearly always in populated places, the Tanka fishermen had usually to buy these necessities from the villagers. The reason usually given for this is that the villagers had planted the trees which supplied the firewood and paid rent to the imperial government or, more often, to some powerful clan.42 A less striking, but equally practical reason, I was told on Peng Chau, was that fishermen did not wish to carry the grass or poles used in breaming their craft, in order to save valuable space. Breaming facilities were not always charged for, it seems, though on Peng Chau a breaming charge of 20 cents per boat was levied by the personnel of the military post before 1899 — the sort of "squeeze" by which soldiers supplemented their pay. The military post seems to have been a late innovation, prior to which no breaming charges are believed to have been levied by Peng Chau's land dwellers. On nearby Cheung Chau the WONG clan owned the main breaming beaches in the main anchorage and in a secondary one at Sai Wan, also much used by the boat people. They charged a fee for their use, part of the proceeds going to the upkeep and ceremonies connected with the clan's main ancestral grave on the island.43 Of course the boatmen could go to some deserted beach, but they were hard to find since villagers were well distributed in the coastal areas and islands by the nineteenth century and there were few areas capable of returning crops left undeveloped.44 In any case, there were no amenities, such as shops and temples, to tempt fishermen to such places; whilst, as Miss Ward remarks in her study of the Kau Sai fishing village in the Port Shelter area of Sai Kung, boat people are not the sea rovers drifting from place to place they are commonly imagined to be, but have been linked to a home base over a long period.45 This seems certainly to have been true of Peng Chau in the period under review.
In a mixed community of the small size of Peng Chau it is hardly surprising that no district associations similar to those of Cheung Chau and Tai O were established.46 The Cantonese residents were relatively few in number, whilst the Hakka clans had their own family ties and, at the grave festivals and the