# ROS
No. 13.-CENSUS of HONGKONG for the following Years, exclusive of MILITARY and NAVAL DEPARTMENTS, CREWS of MERCANTILE SHIPPING in the HARBOUR, and POLICE.
1870-71, 1872.
1876.
1881.
Registrar General's Office, Victoria, Hongkong, 1st June, 1881.
C. O.
13140
205
RECOD
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL. HONGKONG
1
STATEMENT OF HIS EXCELLENCY GOVERNOR SIR JOHN POPE HENNESSY, K.C.M.G.,
ON THE CENSUS RETURNS AND THE PROGRESS OF THE COLONY.
JOHN GERRARD, Acting Registrar General,
At the Meeting of the Legislative Council on Friday, the 3rd June, 1881, in laying the census returns on the table, His Excellency said:--Gentlemen, you are aware that, under instructions from Her Majesty's Government, the census was taken in this Colony on the 3rd of April last. The former census was taken at the end of 1876. It was submitted to Sir ARTHUR KENNEDY a few days before he left the Colony for Queensland, and it became my duty to make a brief report upon it. It is unusual, almost unprecedented, for the same Governor to have to make reports upon two successive censuses. A census is generally taken every ten years, but it happens that only four years and four months have elapsed since the last census in this Colony. But apart altogether from what may be unusual in official procedure, I find, looking at the returns I am now about to put upon the table, that there is something unusual in the important facts they disclose. A comparison of the census of 1881 with the census of December 1876, shows an amount of real progress and substantial prosperity in the short space of four years such, as I believe, can only be equalled in the Australian Colonies, and which is, perhaps, unprecedented in any of the Crown colonies.
In putting these census returns before you, and in moving, as I shall do at the end of my statement, that they be printed, I desire to give every Member of the Council an opportunity of making any remarks he may think fit upon them. They will enable the Council to answer three questions. They will enable you to decide how far the Colony of Hongkong has really fulfilled the objects for which it was established; they will enable you also to determine whether it is true, what you have all heard said so often (out of Hongkong, or by unobservant residents in it), namely, that there are no trades and manufactures whatever in this colony; and these returns will also enable us to decide a question much discussed here now,-whether the recent transactions in land, the important sales and transfers of land, that have taken place of late, are speculative, or whether they are really bona fide the result of healthy commercial progress, and a matter of necessity.
With respect to the latter point, I am placing upon the table a return which has been prepared in the Survey Department in consequence of a minute of mine, in which I directed attention to the publication in the Daily Press of the 11th May, 1881, of a statement of transactions in landed property in Hongkong, and called upon the proper officers to have that return checked and verified. Accordingly, that return, which, no doubt, you have all seen, was transmitted to the Acting Surveyor-General. He has now furnished us with an authentic statement of the transactions, from the Land Office books, that have taken place in the transfer and sale of property from the first of January last year to the 11th of May this year. To be brief, I think, on the whole, he corroborates what appeared in the Daily Press; and the summary he gives at the end is to this effect :-Total value of properties bought by Chinese from foreigners, $1,710,036; total value of properties bought by Chinese from the Government, $17,705; total value of properties bought by foreigners from foreigners, $216,750; total value of properties bought by foreigners from the Government, $5,060; total value of properties bought by foreigners from Chinese, $16,450.
Now, this large item of $1,710,000 on the transfer of property, almost entirely for commercial purposes, to the Chinese community since January last year, is undoubtedly an event of great importance.
Is it speculative, or is it justified by the returns I am now laying on the table? In the first place, what do we learn from the census returns of the Registrar-General? We find that the population has risen from 139,144 in 1876 to 160,402 in 1881, showing, in four years and four months, an increase of 21,258, and of this increase the Chinese population account for 20,532. The Registrar-General adds, that the European and American community is larger by 273; that the increase is among the British, Portuguese, Germans and Italians, and is that of women and children; that the male adult population of Europeans and Americans has decreased. This fact is of interest, because, whilst, taking...