111
Another Ip (Yip), a man of 60 who was a Lukong or Chinese policeman and owned two houses, said he was 10 years of age when the Colony was annexed and that "the village was the same when I was a boy as it is now. All the families mentioned in this paragraph were Cantonese.
+20
As already stated above, it would seem that the inhabitants of the market towns were of mixed origin. The American Baptist missionary, Revd. Issacher J. Roberts of the Hong Kong Mission, reported from “Check Chu” on January 1st 1843 that the village contained "eight or ten hundred Chinese who are divided among the Canton, Kek [Hakka] and Teichau [Chiu Chow] dialects.”21 In an earlier report, undated save “1842", he gave a fuller account which, however, placed the population at a considerably lower figure:
“Have gone around and counted families of Check Chu (note: present Stanley) three kinds of inhabitants
1) Punti, the dialect I learned
2) Hoklo [probably the Teichau dialect spoken of in 1843],
dialect of Dean [another Baptist missionary]
3) the Hak-kah
Check Chu including all the shops without families and hence not reckoned as citizens and some scattered families in the suburbs has:
Punti, 63 families and shops at
an average of 4 to each
252
Hoklo, 27 families and shops at
an average of 4 to each
108
Hak-kah, 55 families and shops at
an average of 4 to each
220
Total 145 families
580 persons
Half or more of the 145 are shops leaving less than a hundred citizens families. Of the 580 perhaps 100 can read. The wom-