110
JAMES HAYES
that every spot in the varied surface of the isle is either reduced beneath the government of industry, or made tributary to the beauty of the landscape.
Turning to the inhabitants of the villages I will say something about the boat people below; they were, it seems, both Cantonese and Hakkas. The former occupied the larger, longer settled villages like Little Hong Kong and Wong Nei Chung. The latter were to be found in the smaller villages and hamlets such as the Chai Wan villages and Tai Tam Tuk. The Cantonese are the older and more numerous inhabitants of the Kwangtung province, but the Hakka constituted a numerous and distinct secondary body, speaking their own dialect; some would say language, which is quite different from Cantonese. The two groups appear to have occupied separate settlements in the island of Hong Kong, though the population of the larger coastal fishing and market villages was mixed.
18
The village people of that time were generally members of either a single or a few clans, descended from founding ancestors who had come to the area in the preceding century or even before. For instance, the ancestor of the Chow clan of Little Hong Kong—in 1841 it shared the settlement with at least two or three others—came into the area in the mid-17th century. According to a letter I received from Mr. Y.K. Chow, J.P., in 1967, the founding ancestor's son Yuc-tsun (†Œ) was born in Hong Kong in 1667. By 1841 their descendants had been settled for seven to eight generations and were clearly well rooted in the local soil. In Pokfulam, the Chan clan had been there since the eighteenth century. At a hearing on 6 July 1893 of the Squatters Board, set up to examine the claims of villagers in 1890, a man of 71 stated that he had been born and lived there ever since. "I claim 15 and 4/10th mows of fields. They are all together in one place. This land was left to my ancestors. My father and ancestors have been there 100 years." The Wong Nei Chung families, which belonged to several clans, were probably longer settled still. A woman, Ip Chan Shi, giving evidence before the Squatter Board in 1891 about various properties belonging to her late husband, who had died the previous year aged 55, said that he had four houses in the village altogether and that his family had been in the village for "many generations".
+19