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JAMES HAYES
equally there is no reason to doubt that arrangements similar to those at Stanley and Shau Kei Wan were to be found there.
This account does not claim to be a comprehensive account of Hong Kong before 1841, but aims to stimulate an interest. If it reaches members of old Hong Kong village families by one reason or another, I hope it will encourage them to dig into their family chests to see if anything remains that will fill out the story.
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NOTES
The material for this essay is varied. I am in considerable debt to several good friends; Ian Diamond, Tom Poon, Anthony Siu Kwok-kin, Patrick Hase, and Carl Smith among others. Nineteenth-century writers, including officials, especially those who saw Hong Kong in its early colonial years, are also valued contributors to the story. Correspondence in the possession of the Tang family of Kam Tin figures prominently. I have also been fortunate to have spoken with old persons in their 'seventies' and 'eighties' back in the 1960s. They were able to give valuable information about life in their youth, when the lifestyle and appearance of the Hong Kong villages and boat people's anchorages had changed relatively little since the 1840s, compared with the total obliteration and change all too frequently experienced in the past fifteen years. These interviews took place in a variety of places; in an old tenement in Shaukeiwan, in one of the old hillside villages there, in a resettlement estate, in a Housing Society estate for fishermen's families, on a friend's pleasure craft manned by a boatman whose family had been living on boats in Deep Bay for generations, on a working cargo boat in a typhoon shelter, in a converted stake-net fisherman's hut, in a village house overwhelmed by squatter huts, and so on. Each of these locations testified to how modern Hong Kong was dealing cards to the persons concerned and their families, swept along or thrust to one side in the maelstrom of intensive postwar development and redevelopment. To all the above contributors, I tender thanks and appreciation.
1
C.J.C. in Revd G.N. Wright and Thomas Allom, China Illustrated in a Series of Views (London and Paris, Fisher and Co., 1843), Vol. 1, p. 17 in my set, "Harbour of Hong Kong”.
2 Harley Farnsworth MacNair, Modern Chinese History Selected Readings (Shanghai, Commercial Press, Second edition, 1927), p. 169.
3 W.L. Bales, Tso Tsungtang, Soldier and Statesman of Old China, (Shanghai, Kelly and Walsh, 1937), p. 69.
4 The Letters of Queen Victoria, A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, ed A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, (London, John Murray, 1908), Vol. 1, p. 262.
5 Following G.B. Endacott's History of Hong Kong (Oxford, University Press, 1958), p. 18.
6
Sessional Papers (Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong) 1884-85, p. 2.