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the town would bring baskets of vegetables to sell retail on street in Wang Tau Street. Some sold their vegetables at Yim Liu Ha - even before the hawkers started to migrate across the frontier there was some trading here. The saltworkers had no fields, and had to buy all their food - since there was about 100 of them, this represented quite a market. Usually, those villagers trading vegetables with the saltworkers at Yim Liu Ha would exchange their vegetables for salt, which they then hawked around the villages away from the market. One or two villages specialised in this vegetables and salt trade. Yet others specialised in exchanging vegetables for fish (usually the poorer quality, or broken, fish), which they then hawked around villages away from the market.
The villages further from the market found the vegetable trade difficult, and they usually did not take part in it. Their specialty was fuel. The villages near the market had cut all the trees in the vicinity of the village, except for the untouchable Fung Shui groves, long before, and they were seriously short of fuel as a consequence. The remote mountainside villages of the Shap Yeuk area, however, still had plenty of wood, but were usually short of cultivable land. The economy of these villages depended, essentially, on exchanging firewood for rice. Village women would leave these villages at day-break, carrying loads of about 75 catties of wood, cut and dried, and prepared to suit the particular needs of the specific market aimed at. The boat-people required wood cut into very small and even billets, to fit the tiny stoves on board their boats. The saltworkers needed wood cut to larger sizes to feed their furnaces and stoves. Individual villager or shopkeeper households needed wood cut to medium sizes. Individual fuel-selling villages tended to specialise in one or other of these markets. The best-placed fuel-selling villages, those whose wood reached the market first, tended to sell their wood in whole loads, 75 catties at a time. Those who reached the market later tended to have to sell their wood retail, catty by catty, originally in Wang Tau Street, later from the Railway Station forecourt. It was the custom that, if someone bought a whole load of wood, then the seller had to carry it all the way to the buyer's house, no matter how far from the market. Individual seller villages tended to develop a close relationship with individual buyer villages and households - often buyers would look out for sellers they knew, and order a load of fuel for the next market day. As with vegetables, so villagers who sold fuel to the saltworkers or fishermen sometimes exchanged their wood for salt or fish, which they then hawked through the villages away from the market.