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BARBARA E. WARD
Eyes and ears alone would be enough to inform anyone who cared to notice that the Boat People (who very sensibly go barefoot when on board) have the usual complement of toes and speak Cantonese, albeit often with a broad accent and always with the specialised vocabulary necessary to their water-borne way of life. I have discussed these matters and the questions of non-Han descent and non-Chinese customs elsewhere. Very briefly my argument is that because both additions to and departures from the floating populations have been more or less continuous it is probable that the genetic endowment of the Boat People is neither more nor less “non-Han” than that of most of the other Cantonese-speaking inhabitants of South China. It is true that Boat People are usually easily recognisable; so are sailors everywhere. Browner complexions, rolling gait, small leg muscles and heavy shoulder development are readily explicable by a life lived mainly out-of-doors on boats which have to be poled and rowed, and working at fishing or shifting cargo. There are also certain peculiarities of dress and ceremonial, but, as this account of life in a Hong Kong fishing community will show, Tanka social structure and ideology are unequivocally Chinese.
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Rather less than half the Boat People in Hong Kong are fishermen. The rest are engaged in various forms of water carriage (both within the Colony and between it and neighbouring Chinese and Portuguese ports), and in providing services within the larger local anchorages — hawkers, sellers of water and ice, floating restaurants and so on and so forth. The most numerous of the carriers are the almost square Kam Shing Teng, the junk lighters which attend the ocean-going ships in the harbour or line the waterfront by day, and return to their accustomed anchorages in the typhoon shelters, where they traditionally moor in regular, named “streets” by night.
The 150,000 or so dwellers on the harbour junks are the most urbanised of Hong Kong's Boat People. They have close business, and sometimes marriage ties with firms of launch and lorry owners and many of them are members of one or other of the several transport associations which help to organise much of the business and social life of the waterfront for land and water people together. The fishermen, even those who live in the