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in the market would sometimes be carried round by hawkers who brought them from the bigger cities further away. Twice a year, in the Spring and the Autumn, these hawkers would carry around the villages the vegetable seeds needed for the forthcoming half year. The villagers did not know how to produce good vegetable seed for themselves. There were some specialist villages in China which produced large quantities of seed. There the hawkers bought their stock. The hawkers kept the locations of these villages a secret - no villager contact seems to know where their seeds came from." Many of these hawkers who carried things around the villages were Hoklo: few local people entered this trade except for the people who hawked salt and fresh fish around the villages near their homes. There were quite a significant number of these itinerant hawkers, who bought in the towns and carried wares around the villages: unfortunately, very little is known about them.
Some local villagers did make a living in the itinerant sweet trade. In Tsat Muk Kiu there was a villager, for instance, who made sweets and hawked them through the Wu Kau Tang and Plover Cove villages. These sweet hawkers often sold their wares, not for cash, but for broken metal which they then sold on to the market town blacksmiths, who were always short of metal.
The coolie trade was not very formally organised. Those stores wanting coolies to carry goods would let it be known, and would hire whom they pleased from those who showed an interest - most shops in the carrying trade developed a relationship with a particular group of women, however, - or the women from a particular village or section of a village - and always called on that group for coolies. After the 1870s, many of the young adult men of the Sha Tau Kok area began to travel abroad for a few years to make their fortunes. It is likely that, before local society began to be marked by this temporary emigration of young adult males, the local coolies had been young men, but, by 1900, the trade was mostly conducted by women. Thus, the Colonial Secretary hired 11 persons in 1899 to carry his baggage from Wo Hang near Sha Tau Kok to Tai Po - a full day's march of 12 miles - and 7 of the 11 were women. In the 1920s, shops in the market at Sha Tau Kok would sometimes send groups of women as far as Tsuen Wan (more than 15 miles away) to bring back goods for sale not available nearer at hand (pineapples especially) - a very long day's work. Many of the carrying coolies came from the lowland villages - the women of the mountainside villages were probably too.