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practices dating back to the complainants childhood and before suggests that the Tanka were using the Tai Tam Tuk anchorage from at least the very beginning of the nineteenth century.
I turn now to the important question of how far back was Hong Kong occupied? This is practically an impossible question to answer for lack of sufficient information. As in many other places, like Tsuen Wan and north-west Kowloon, the present old, local, formerly tenant families appear mainly to have come into the area after the Great Evacuation of the Coast ordered by the Kanghsi emperor, 1662-69, and many of them not until the eighteenth century or even after. Yet it is an interesting fact that the maps in a later 16th century geographical work on Kwangtung, the Yueh ta-chi(A) contain names that are familiar to us today, on Hong Kong island as well as on the other islands and mainland of the Hong Kong region. Thus we find Chek Chu (Stanley), Tai Tam, Wong Nei Chung, Tit Hang, Chun Hoi and Shau Kei Wan, as well as Hong Kong itself, implying surely, that these places were settled at that time or were at least resorted to periodically. Also, the Tang correspondence from the 1840s quoted above specifically refers to recultivation of their land in various places in the late seventeenth century — though not necessarily by the former tenant farmers after revocation of the edict of 1662 referred to above. We also learn that the Tang land on Hong Kong island was entered in the Tung Kwun district land registry, suggesting that the registration might well be earlier than 1573, at which date the San On district was carved out of Tung Kwun and established as a separate county.
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The island was certainly well-established in settled communities long before 1841. The temples alone give proof of that. To this day, two existing temples at Stanley, and two at Aberdeen (one at the former village and one on an islet now joined by reclamation to Ap Lei Chau) and the Tin Hau Temple at Tin Hau Temple Road, Causeway Bay (formerly called Hung Heung Lo or "Crimson Incense Burner") contain items that go back to the eighteenth or very early nineteenth century. There were others now demolished or resited that probably predated 1841. Details are given in the Table below.
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