16
Shunde
Dongguan
Sanshui
Gaoyiu
2
3
I
I
1
1
N
|
10
2
Out of delta region
Non-Cantonese
5
&
13
2
1
-
1
4
Hang Kong
1
༣
2.
3
1
8
Unidentified
18
30
72
132
17
422
Total
20
46
105
186
193
550
Source: Hong Kong Record Series #144. The Supreme Court of Hong Kong. Probate Jurisdiction - Wills.
From the 894 Chinese wills of the period between 1850-1906 deposited in the Hong Kong Public Records Office, 550 were believed to be held by merchants. Merchants were defined here as owning business, joining in partnership and holding properties. As indicated in table 1, there were 128 out of 550 who stated their native origins. Most of them came from the Pearl River Delta region, Xiangshan men being the largest in number, followed by Nanhai, Xinning, Xinhui, Shunde, Dongguan, Panyu and so on. More interesting, though they had been doing business in Hong Kong for a number of years, they did not claim they were Hong Kong people. Instead they identified with their native place. More frequently they were probably absent from Hong Kong and had resided in Canton and Macau. A puzzling question is that a large portion of these 442 persons had not told in their wills where they came from. Can we take it for granted they did not state it because there was no need to specify as they had identified with Hong Kong? Nevertheless, there were eight cases reported where they were definitely identified as Hong Kong persons. Some claimed “Victorians", some were "Hong Kong people" and some identified with the place where they lived such as Kowloon, Shaukiwan, etc.
It is supposed that during the nineteenth century the majority of the Chinese in Hong Kong did not settle permanently but returned home or moved to other places in China. They retained ties with their home villages in China. As a scholar points out, wealthy Hong Kong Chinese usually held landed property in Hong Kong, but from the wills we know there were also frequent references to fields and houses in the home villages and houses in Canton, Foshan and Macau. The landed properties they held were mostly houses and land, and little were shares