HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH
135
the
There are, of course, other books on the same subject topography of Kwangtung province for instance or that of Tung Kun district which once included San On district.2 Many of them contain identical phrases and documents and do not add much to the material contained in the San On topography, which is sufficient basis for a history of this region during the last 500 years. Some earlier material is contained in family records and one or two phrases in books; but it is scant, and the date where there is no printed record occurs very early for a place within the Chinese Empire.
And yet the region we are describing cannot be properly understood without some consideration of its prehistory. A place on the seaboard generally has a complicated agglomeration of races in its population, and not only does our region illustrate this, but it also has a complex kind of seaboard. To its west is a wide river estuary which brings down mud from all over Kwangtung province and deposits it along the coast. There is a good deal of flat plain which has been partly created by the deposit and partly by rice growers and reclamation, especially round the coast of Deep Bay. Around these plains are steep hills, the most westerly being the T'un Mun3 range on the mainland and the island of Tai Yü Shan or Lantao. There are many rocky islands with high peaks to the south, the biggest of which are Tsing I, Lamma, and Hong Kong and narrow straits through which the tide sweeps in an east-west direction, the most important being known as K'ap Shui Mun, Lai Yü Mun, and Fat T'ong Mun.5 The sea is roughest towards the south and east, and the country around this part and as far as Mirs Bay is very rugged and not easily accessible. There are many isthmuses and shallows, the most important being Mirs Bay itself, the Taipo Sea and the Sha Tau Kok isthmus, above which is the highest mountain of all Ng T'ung. The reader is invited to identify these names on the accompanying map* if he does not know them already.
This region has a country population consisting of four distinct communities known in Chinese as the Tanka, the Hoklo, the Punti and the Hakka.
2 廣州縣誌 and 東莞縣誌
3 屯門
4 大嶼山 or 大溪山
5 汲水門 鯉魚門 佛堂門
* Plate 16.