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NOTES AND QUERIES
Apart from being an old landmark, the main interest of the present stone is that it bears the characters Kwan Tai Lo (# #). Sayer discusses (pages 90-92) the various meanings which have been attributed to this phrase at one time or another. Among them are suggestions that the name Kwan Tai Lo was the original Chinese name for Hong Kong Island (a small fishing village of this name was listed in the first Hong Kong Government Gazette of 15th May 1841; it was located at East Point near the present Daimaru Department Store); that the name was associated with the famous Admiral Kwan who fought the British in 1841; that the character 'Kwan' was an alliteration for the English word 'Queen'; and finally that the name is descriptive for a road which, like a petticoat girdle, encircles the island. As he says, the name "has evoked endless speculation". Another suggestion is that it was the personal name of a girl from the boat people who led the British round the island.
II. LITTLE HONG KONG (**)
The Setting. With the exercise of a little imagination Little Hong Kong is still, in its outward appearance, the world of the Chinese peasant before 1841. Substitute rice fields for vegetable plots and chicken farms, clear away their associated structures and the modern buildings in the surrounding area, concentrate your attention on the groups of old structures that form the nuclei of the two old villages and you are back in one of the most beautiful valleys on old Hong Kong Island. It was up this valley that Sir George Staunton, the eminent sinologue and Third Commissioner in the Amherst Embassy to Peking in 1816, strolled from the Aberdeen anchorage the following year to visit the village — in so doing to give his name to Staunton Creek now, 150 years later, being reclaimed from the sea.4
The Southern Side of Hong Kong Island in 1841. When the British came in 1841 the population of Little Hong Kong was around 200 persons (the Census of 1856 gives 229). One of the visiting British officers at that time was impressed with the villages and the scenery. "In general", he wrote, "the south side of Hong Kong Island is far more picturesque and less bleak than the north. The villages we saw, unlike the mat-huts in the harbour, are exceedingly neat in appearance with blue-tiled and white-walled houses". The village inhabitants, too, were given a good charac-