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deep indentations. There are [more than 230] islands.
One of them, placed almost in the centre of the Port Shelter area on the eastern side of the Colony and separated by a strait less than fifty yards wide from its neighbour, is Kau Sai island. The sheltered area lying between the two islands westward of the narrows (Kau Sai Strait) is Kau Sai Bay, referred to by the locally based fishermen always as “our own bay” (boon waan). Stretching north along the western shore immediately proximate to Kau Sai Strait is the village of Kau Sai. In 1950 it comprised 17 houses, all but two occupied by 50-plus speakers of the Hakka language, and was regarded as a home anchorage by the almost 500 Cantonese speaking inhabitants of some 61 boats. The two non-Hakka households contained 6 ex-Boat People.
The largest, most elaborate and best kept building was a temple dedicated to Hung Shing Kung, a deified official of the T'ang dynasty who holds a watching brief over the fortunes of all manners of men, particularly those who have to do with boats and the sea. An unroofed patio on the left side of the main hall of the temple was used as a schoolroom, weather permitting. Unswept and dirty it contained about ten clumsily botched-up desks and a few equally ramshackle chairs. The rest of the temple building was fairly regularly swept and dusted by one of the shore dwelling ex-fishermen, an elderly fellow, no longer capable of work at sea, who had been given the post of caretaker a few years before. The temple had a concrete floor, a gilded inscription over the entrance, and contained a number of images and the usual ritual appointments. Its granite block walls were surmounted by an upward curving roof of blue-green porcelain tiles.
Some of the houses were built or partly built of granite blocks, too, but more were constructed of once-whitewashed mud or mud-bricks. Their floors were all of beaten earth. Near each Hakka house stood a pig-sty, often tumbledown and usually doubling as a latrine for humans. There were two shops. The larger was owned and run by an ex-fisherman, with the help of his wife and daughter; the smaller one, next door, was in the hands of the younger brother of the Hakka village "headman".