132
JAMES HAYES
settlements and missions from the earliest days of the Colony, the Kowloon peninsula must have been the scene of much missionary effort. Five years before the cession of Kowloon Captain Fishbourne wrote:47
44
Missionaries of all the Protestant denominations, English, American, Dutch, Swedish, German, were in the habit of itinerating through the villages in Hong Kong and islands near.
**
From various accounts it seems that these missionaries were often well received and, as William Burns wrote on one occasion, some of the local villagers were said to be "very friendly to the new or foreign doctrine".48
One group which made the Hakkas their special field of endeavour was the Basel Mission, a German body which took up work in the Hong Kong region in 1847.49 Although its activities spread gradually over much of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, it also established chapels and schools in Hong Kong, Kowloon, and later the New Territories. One of my informants (b. 1897) has been a member of their church since his earliest years and his father was a member before him. The son has told me that early in this century the Ho Man Tin area was known as "the Christian Valley", presumably because of the sustained efforts made by members of the Basel Mission. The work amongst these people is said to have been conducted from an out-station in Sham Shui Po, a small market town on the north side of the Sino-British frontier of 1860.50
In conclusion, I would like to observe that Kowloon has many points of interest—I have not, for instance, touched on the early commercial and industrial enterprises that were established there in the course of the last century51, and I hope that this short account of various aspects of its history under British rule will encourage others to make their specialist contributions to the study of that hitherto neglected subject: the history and institutions of the Chinese inhabitants of 19th century Hong Kong.52
132
JAMES HAYES
settlements and missions from the earliest days of the Colony, the Kowloon peninsula must have been the scene of much missionary effort. Five years before the cession of Kowloon Captain Fishbourne wrote: 47
44
Missionaries of all the Protestant denominations, English, American, Dutch, Swedish, German, were in the habit of itinerating through the villages in Hong Kong and islands
near.
**
From various accounts it seems that these missionaries were often well received and, as William Burns wrote on one occasion, some of the local villagers were said to be "very friendly to the new or foreign doctrine”.48
One group which made the Hakkas their special field of endeavour was the Basel Mission, a German body which took up work in the Hong Kong region in 1847.49 Although its activities spread gradually over much of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, it also established chapels and schools in Hong Kong, Kowloon, and later the New Territories. One of my informants (b. 1897) has been a member of their church since his earliest years and his father was a member before him. The son has told me that early in this century the Ho Man Tin area was known as "the Christian Valley", presumably because of the sustained efforts made by members of the Basel Mission. The work amongst these people is said to have been conducted from an out-station in Sham Shui Po, a small market town on the north side of the Sino-British frontier of 1860.50
In conclusion, I would like to observe that Kowloon has many points of interest-I have not, for instance, touched on the early commercial and industrial interprises that were established there in the course of the last century51, and I hope that this short account of various aspects of its history under British rule will encourage others to make their specialist contributions to the study of that hitherto neglected subject: the history and institu- tions of the Chinese inhabitants of 19th century Hong Kong,52
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