EASTERN PEACE:
SHA TAU KOK MARKET IN 1925
PH. HASE
147
Introduction
The aim of this article is to describe the old Sha Tau Kok Market and its economic life as it was in 1925 before the market moved across the frontier into the New Territories. Before doing so, however, a sketch of the earlier history of the market, and the effects on it of the new frontier are given, with a brief description of the roads and ferries which lay at the heart of the market's prosperity in the early years of this century.
Sha Tau Kok before 1898
Mirs Bay is a forbidding place.** Its coast is almost uniformly mountainous. There is very little flat land: only patches here and there where one of the mountain streams reaches the sea. The mountains behind the coast are steep and high, reaching 3,000 feet in the Ng Tung Shan (芽嵘山) at the north-west corner of the Bay, immediately behind Sha Tau Kok. Many support patches of forest. Tigers, deer, wild boar, and other wild life were common here until recent times. The description of Hsin An County in the 1688 Gazetteer, 'The County is made up of many high mountains and lofty peaks, which rise up immediately from the shores of the deep sea,'2 is particularly true of the Mirs Bay area.
Despite the forbidding nature of the Bay, however, the area attracted imperial attention from an early period. An imperial salt commission was active here from the tenth, or even the fifth century. The imperial pearl monopoly, too, was active in the bay, probably from the eighth century. During the Ming, however, imperial interest in the area waned. The pearl monopoly ended its local activities in 1374, as a consequence of the exhaustion of the beds, and growing concern in enlightened circles.
* In this article, placenames within Hong Kong are transliterated as in the Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories, (Hong Kong Government, 1969); placenames in China are transliterated into Cantonese, using the same transliteration standards as in the Gazetteer, with the characters for the placename, and a pinyin transliteration, on first occurrence.
** See Map 1
Page 165
Page 166