THE ISLANDS AROUND HONG KONG
W. SCHOFIELD*
Present Inhabitants of the Islands
At present, there are four races living in the Islands: they live very much mixed together.
1. Tan Ka (literally "egg people"); these are boat-people who speak a dialect of Cantonese, they live a great part of their lives on the water, but sometimes settle on land.
2. They are an outcast race, and in the old times they were not admitted to the civil service exams. They are usually quite illiterate. They sometimes live in boats hauled ashore, or in more or less boat-shaped huts, as at Shaukiwan and Tai O. All their chief centres are harbours: Cheung Chau, Aberdeen, Tai O, Potoi, Kau Sai, Yaumatei. They were formerly pirates.
They are the only modern people who might claim, perhaps, to be descended from the most ancient inhabitants.
Cantonese; these form the majority of the population in Lantua, Cheung Chau, and Lamma: their chief centres are Tai O, Tung Chung, and Cheung Chau. They speak various sub-dialects; a common one is the Po On dialect; this is widely spoken by the people both north and south of the frontier.
* Mr. Walter Schofield (1888-1968) was a Cadet Officer in the Hong Kong Civil Service (1911-1938). Mr. Schofield was District Officer, South, during much of the inter-war period (see his Memories of District Office South, New Territories of Hong Kong, in Vol. 17 (1977) of this Journal, pages 144-156). This present paper is taken from the notes prepared by Mr. Schofield for a talk he gave in August 1937. It gives a useful glimpse of life in the Islands in the years before the coming of the Japanese as seen by a highly knowledgeable observer. In the paper Mr. Schofield gives translations of the place names listed. In many cases these translations were and are doubtful owing to lack of evidence of the original form of the name. These translations have been left in this version of the paper with notes added where present usage clearly differs from that given in the paper.