30
BARBARA E. WARD
important centres by 1970.
The inshore fishermen were, and are, at once more numerous and more scattered. Certainly many of those who normally venture no more than about four miles from the coast at the furthest, do have their home bases alongside the deep-sea craft in the large, well-known fishing towns, but large numbers of them return to small traditional anchorages in the more than thirty fishing villages which are to be found on the coasts of the mainland and islands. The populations of these smaller fishing centres vary from a few dozens to a few thousands; the majority can be reckoned in hundreds.
I first went to Hong Kong in the summer of 1950, less than a year after the victory of the Chinese People's Government in China. For obvious reasons it was not an appropriate time for a foreigner to undertake participant observation on boats that had constantly to traverse Chinese national waters and visit Chinese ports. Moreover, I am a bad sailor. These two considerations ruled out the deep-sea fishermen and the long distance carriers from the start. There remained two major categories of Boat People who usually stayed within British waters: the inshore fishermen and the people of the harbour.
The latter were, as I have indicated, an essentially urban population and exceedingly numerous; the former lived characteristically in the small floating settlements that fringed the rural areas. Because the basic field method to be used was participant observation, I chose for intensive study one such community of inshore fishermen. It lay, as it still lies, on one bank of a narrow strait between two small islands in the Port Shelter section of the eastern waters of the Colony. Its name was Kau Sai.
2. KAU SAI: TOPOGRAPHY, LAND USE AND CHANGE
The inshore waters of Hong Kong are remarkably beautiful. In many ways reminiscent of the Western Isles, though without quite such a mountainous backdrop, the scenery combines the blue of the sea with the green of the hills in a particularly satisfying way. Drowned valleys give the mainland coasts their