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and, of these, Sham Chun and Cheung Chau were towns ten times larger than Sha Tau Kok.
There were, however, some trades not found at Sha Tau Kok. There was no book-seller, no oil-press, no quilt-maker, no sauce maker, no beancurd maker or dealer, and no vegetable dealers other than casual hawkers. Books required in any number - such as the school text-books or the annual almanac - were either stocked in the general stores, or else brought into the market by hawkers carrying them from Sham Chun. For other books, or for quilts, or for bulk purchases of vegetables (for instance, to buy turnips enough to make the New Year's Turnip Pudding), villagers had to go to Sham Chun. For cooking oil, villagers used lard, or else they went to buy it at Sham Chun. The translation of the anti-Customs extract printed above specifically states that one grievance of the villagers was the duty exacted on cloth taken to Sha Tau Kok for dyeing (it would probably have attracted duty on both "import" and "export"), so it would seem likely that there was a cloth dyer in the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; if so, Customs exaction may have driven it out of business, for there was no such establishment in the town in the 1920s. By 1925, villagers usually took their cloth to Kowloon to be dyed.
One feature of the market which does seem rather special is its Indigeneity. Of the 49 shopowners of whose origin something is remembered, 38 at least were from the Shap Yeuk area, and a further eight from "China" - some at least of these last would have been from the China parts of the Shap Yeuk area. Only two Hoklo shops are remembered, and no Punti ones, with the possible exception of one doctor from Sham Chun (the prostitutes, though, were all Punti girls from the City). Furthermore, most of the shops whose owners are now forgotten were the smaller ones - the most likely to have been from the immediate area. The 18 largest shops were all indigenous. 72 This differs from many of the small towns of the area, where non-indigenous groups were very important. 73 The memory of the elders is that Sha Tau Kok was emphatically a Hakka market, and one very deeply rooted in the local village society. Even the coming of the new frontier does not seem to have broken the essentially indigenous nature of the market. The Shap Yeuk was founded so that the villagers of the area could have their own market, and run it themselves, and the wishes of the founding fathers were, clearly, achieved.