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The shops in the market towns supplied all the items that the village shops were unable to stock. Besides “regular” market towns like Yuen Long and Tai Po with their fixed marketing days to regular schedules, the Hong Kong region included a number of coastal market centres places like Cheung Chau, Peng Chau, Tai O in the Islands and Sai Kung in the eastern New Territories. My enquiries show that there were quite large concerns in such places. They were usually "mixed goods" establishments. At Sai Kung (land pop. 512 in 1911) one of the larger shops well-remembered by old local people may serve as an example. Its signboard, which survived until twenty years ago, carried a statement of its principal items of business. It dealt in wine, rice, grass cloth rolls from Suzhou and Hangzhou, preserved fruits, fishing nets and shue-leung (a preservative used for dyeing nets), oil, firewood, salt, bamboo and other "mountain goods", for all of which it proclaimed itself sole agent. At the same time, I was told, shops like this would slaughter pigs and make their own Chinese wines.
Such shops could survive, and even flourish, in a market town and especially in the coastal market centres where there were boat people in the anchorages, from both local and visiting boats, to swell the number of customers coming from the many villages of the marketing area. But such businesses could only exist in these market centres. In a region characterized, in the main, by scattered small villages and hamlets with the market towns not too far away on foot or by boat, village shops of the larger kind were simply non-starters.