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The sanitary conditions and lack of housing accommodation and water supply called for concerted action in December. The Emergency Refugee Council, the Wai Yeung Association, the Tung Wah Hospitals Committee and allied Chinese charitable bodies were approached and asked to assist in establishing camps in Chinese territory just across the border. At the same time St. John Ambulance Association was asked to furnish medical aid to the camps in Chinese territory. As the result of intensive propaganda in the New Territories, the bulk of the refugees were induced to return to their villages in Kwangtung. By the end of 1938 there were about four thousand refugees in Government camps in the New Territories apart from those in the towns and villages of the New Territories, and about three thousand in Government camps in the urban area.
In addition, there were in an internment camp rather over 1,100 Chinese soldiers out of an original total of about 1,300 healthy and wounded soldiers who had sought safety in these territories during the operations on the Hong Kong-Kwangtung border at the end of November.
Some idea of the extent of the refugee problem can be gauged from the fact that 305,957 more persons arrived in the Colony by railway and by ocean and river steamer than departed. This figure does not include numbers arriving by sampan, junk, ferry, launch and on foot. It represents an addition of more than one third to the normal estimated population of the Colony. As might be expected, a proportion of the cases of cholera, small-pox and cerebro-spinal meningitis which had to be dealt with in the Colony were imported from Kwangtung and other infected parts of China.
One of the more remarkable features of the situation in connexion with the refugee problem in Hong Kong in 1938 was the immediate response on the part of all classes of the community to appeals for help for the refugees. So much was this the case that it was found necessary to warn organizations of the desirability of working through a single co-ordinating voluntary body.
In order to stimulate further the generous response for help for the refugees, not only in the colony but in South China as a whole, in the autumn of 1938 a Hong Kong and South China Branch of a fund called the British Fund for the Relief of Distress in China was opened. Up to the 31st of December, 1938, the total contributions to this branch of the Fund amounted to $389,824.16. The Fund was organized with the idea of centralizing, as far as possible, all charitable efforts at obtaining donations for the relief of distress in South China, including Hong Kong. It did not itself undertake any actual relief work, this being entrusted to such existing relief bodies as were equipped for this purpose, and, in particular, to the Hong Kong Emergency Refugee Council.
On the 14th of December, 1938, a Chinese Sub-Committee of the Fund was appointed to canvass for further subscriptions from the Chinese community.