HONG KONG BEFORE THE CHINESE
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of these sites in this territory and three have been expertly excavated with results which are well known to many of my hearers this evening. There can be no doubt that the people who left those deposits were a fishing community and the direct ancestors of our present boat population, either the Tanka13 or the Hoklo155 or, as I believe more likely, of both. At the same time, the patterns on the pottery excavated from these sites clearly connect the culture both with other sites excavated elsewhere on the coast of China and those excavated further south, much further south; and the shape of the stone adzes connects them, I am told, with other boat-making cultures in the Pacific. These sites therefore are an important link between a people who are now culturally and sentimentally Chinese but were not so as recently as 200 years ago; and who earlier still formed part of a wide-flung and comparatively advanced culture. Boat people by various names, but answering the same description, are mentioned frequently in the literature of the Tang,139 Wu-tai105 and early Sung132 periods. They are described as numerous, which they still are, bellicose, which they certainly are not, and dangerously hostile to the Chinese settlers, which brings to my mind the couplet: Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Later on, in the Tsing12 Dynasty, we find a change of tone; and official documents both from the local officials to Peking, and from the Manchu Emperor himself to the inhabitants of Kwangtung63 and Fukien,49 speak of the boat people as a hard-pressed community to whom their landward neighbours are called upon to stop being beastly. I think the latter assessment might be somewhat nearer to the truth if it could be applied not only to the Tsing period but to the whole of the last 1,000 years, and not only to the boat people but to the tribes of the hills.
A practical suggestion which I should like to make regarding the excavations of the former coastal sites, having regard to their number and to the meagreness of the resources, both pecuniary and human, available for this work, is that some archaeologists who are familiar with this type of site should conduct a search north of the axis of tilt of the New Territories. All the sites so far excavated have been on the side which is going down, that of Hung Shing Yel56 having first come to light as a result of the sea cutting into a sandbank. But on the other side of the territory,
¦
HONG KONG BEFORE THE CHINESE
55
of these sites in this territory and three have been expertly excavated with results which are well known to many of my hearers this evening. There can be no doubt that the people who left those deposits were a fishing community and the direct ancestors of our present boat population, either the Tanka13 or the Hoklo155 or, as I believe more likely, of both. At the same time, the patterns on the pottery excavated from these sites clearly connect the culture both with other sites excavated elsewhere on the coast of China and those excavated further south, much further south; and the shape of the stone adzes connects them, I am told, with other boat-making cultures in the Pacific. These sites therefore are an important link between a people who are now culturally and sentimentally Chinese but were not so as recently as 200 years ago; and who earlier still formed part of a wide-flung and comparatively advanced culture. Boat people by various names, but answering the same description, are mentioned frequently in the literature of the Tang,139 Wu-tai105 and early Sung132 periods. They are described as numerous, which they still are, bellicose, which they certainly are not, and dangerously hostile to the Chinese settlers, which brings to my mind the couplet: Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Later on, in the Tsing12 Dynasty, we find a change of tone; and official documents both from the local officials to Peking, and from the Manchu Emperor himself to the inhabitants of Kwangtung63 and Fukien,49 speak of the boat people as a hard-pressed community to whom their landward neighbours are called upon to stop being beastly. I think the latter assessment might be somewhat nearer to the truth if it could be applied not only to the Tsing period but to the whole of the last 1,000 years, and not only to the boat people but to the tribes of the hills.
A practical suggestion which I should like to make regarding the excavations of the former coastal sites, having regard to their number and to the meagreness of the resources, both pecuniary and human, available for this work, is that some archaeologists who are familiar with this type of site should conduct a search north of the axis of tilt of the New Territories. All the sites so far excavated have been on the side which is going down, that of Hung Shing Yel56 having first come to light as a result of the sea cutting into a sandbank. But on the other side of the territory,
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