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being made of blue or sun-dried bricks. The door posts and lintels are of dressed granite slabs with tiled roofs on rafters made of China fir. The floors are generally concreted, and frequently paved with red brick or with granite. Well built and handsomely decorated temples exist in all the important villages, and in many places large and expensively constructed buildings, in which the ancestral tablets are kept, were seen. As usual in China the streets are narrow and paved with large slabs of stone. Such drainage as exists is on the surface, underground drains never being used in Chinese villages.
In their surroundings and the generally peaceful life they led, everything conspired to make the people of the New Territory a conservative-minded and generally amenable body, and Lockhart said of them, "Taken as a whole the inhabitants may be regarded as an industrious, frugal and well-behaved people". It may be appropriate at this stage to mention who they were. He found 161 Punti or Cantonese villages with a population of some 64,000 persons and 255 Hakka villages, most of them smaller and more remote than the Cantonese ones, with a population of 36,000 people. He also mentions the boat people, of whose numbers he was unable to obtain an estimate. He does say, however, that they formed a class by themselves and were looked down upon by the land population.
Neither Punti nor Hakka are native to the district or to the province. The former, says Lockhart, are supposed to have come from the provinces bordering on the south of the Yangtse river and made their way to South China during the early periods of Chinese history. They were firmly established in the south during the time of the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1278) and, as he observes, it is a fact that most of the Punti inhabitants easily trace their descent from ancestors who were settled in the San On district in that period, or elsewhere in the Kwangtung province. The Hakka, or "strangers" as the term signifies, are, he says, supposed to be descended from the Mongols and to have reached the southern provinces when the Mongol dynasty was overthrown about the middle of the 14th century. They are regarded by the Punti as aliens, and speak a dialect quite distinct from the Cantonese. They are a hardy and frugal race and are generally found in the hill districts. As a rule, Cantonese and
78
J. W. HAYES
being made of blue or sun-dried bricks. The door posts and lintels are of dressed granite slabs with tiled roofs on rafters made of China fir. The floors are generally concreted, and frequently paved with red brick or with granite. Well built and handsomely decorated temples exist in all the important villages, and in many places large and expensively constructed buildings, in which the ancestral tablets are kept, were seen. As usual in China the streets are narrow and paved with large slabs of stone. Such drainage as exists is on the surface, underground drains never being used in Chinese villages."
In their surroundings and the generally peaceful life they led, everything conspired to make the people of the New Territory a conservative minded and generally amenable body, and Lockhart said of them, "Taken as a whole the inhabitants may be regarded as an industrious, frugal and well-behaved people". It may be appropriate at this stage to mention who they were. He found 161 Punti or Cantonese villages with a population of some 64,000 persons and 255 Hakka villages, most of them smaller and more remote than the Cantonese ones, with a population of 36,000 people.' He also mentions the boat people of whose numbers he was unable to obtain an estimate. He does say, however, that they formed a class by themselves and were looked down upon by the land population.
Neither Punti or Hakka are native to the district or to the province. The former, says Lockhart, are supposed to have come from the provinces bordering on the south of the Yangtse river and made their way to South China during the early periods of Chinese history. They were firmly established in the south during the time of the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1278) and, as he observes, it is a fact that most of the Punti inhabitants easily trace their descent from ancestors who were settled in the San On district in that period, or elsewhere in the Kwangtung province. The Hakka, or "strangers as the term signifies, are, he says, supposed to be descended from the Mongols and to have reached the southern provinces when the Mongol dynasty was overthrown about the middle of the 14th century. They are regarded by the Punti as aliens, and speak a dialect quite distinct from the Cantonese. They are a hardy and frugal race and are generally found in the hill districts. As a rule Cantonese and
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