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villages and depopulated districts”, and by 1906 they were remarking on villages “with no adult males left at all.” As noted above, the district officer in 1912 also identified heavy temporary emigration of young adult males as a notable feature of the New Territories. Up to the 1870s, the emigration noted by the missionaries was of indentured coolies, leaving by ones and twos following inducements offered by more or less dubious emigration agents, and the missionaries castigated it as a "slave trade." However, after the reforms of the coolie trade in the 1870s, emigration became more respectable, with elders of the villages arranging for the emigration for a few years of groups of youths from the village, through well-trusted contacts with particular shipping lines.
A tablet of 1894 in the main temple of the Sha Tau Kok area (the Kwan Tai Temple at Shan Tsui), lists the donors to the temple rebuilding of that year. The elders decided to seek donations in the first place from residents of the Sha Tau Kok area living away from home. Over a thousand donated and are listed, with their place of residence given. Apart from a substantial group living in Hong Kong, villagers of the area were at that date living in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria in Australia, in New Zealand, in Hawaii, British Columbia, California, Peru, Panama, and many other places. Today, in villages of the area such as Shan Tsui or Sheung Wo Hang, elders will state that the best of the older surviving houses in the village were built by people who returned from emigration to marry and raise their families in the village in the period 1910-1930. In a few, portraits of these rich returned emigrants still hang on the walls of the houses they built. Similar tales are told of rich returned emigrants in Sha Tin; the village of San Tin there was founded by a returned emigrant of Au Pui Wan village about 1890-1895. For most of Tsuen Wan district, the 1911 Census does not give enough information to identify villages with abnormal population balances, but there is a further tablet recording donations to a temple rebuilding there, in this case of 1900, which demonstrates that some hundreds of the villagers of that area were abroad then. Those villages which can be shown to have had villagers living away from the village from the Shan Tsui tablet, or which have "returned emigrant” houses, all have low male-female ratios in 1911. There can be no doubt that the information at Appendix I and Table 31 shows the degree to which, and the area where, early emigration was a significant social factor in the New Territories.
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