HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH
155
not a general practice, it was probably due to the easiness of running before the wind that the ships could become such large hulks. Unfortunately, we do not know who built them.
By the eighth century, the boats had become huge. "Ladders several tens of feet high had to be used to get on board." The trade was organised. Foreign captains had to be registered with the Office of Trading Ships, which inspected manifests and collected export and import duties. These captains had legal powers to deal with offending passengers when at sea.
In 758, the Mohammedans had so much the upper hand in Canton that they yielded to the temptation of sacking and burning the city and making to sea with the loot. However, trade continued to flourish, the principal imports being, according to Soleyman, ivory, frankincense, ingots of copper, turtle shells, and rhinoceros horns (with which the Chinese used to make girdles), and the principal exports: silk and porcelain.
The foreign ships also carried as passengers Chinese Buddhists visiting the holy places in Java and India. In the biographies of sixty pilgrims composed by I Ching,12 37 of them took the sea route to India. Some of these went from the Tonkin delta region, but the majority started from Canton or returned thither. The compass was still unknown in those days, and the first mention of its use for navigation in Chinese literature occurs at the beginning of the 12th century.
V. T'UN MUN
In the preceding sections, a picture has been given of the elements which made up the population of South China up to the end of the T'ang dynasty. We now come to our region — the peninsula South East of the Canton delta, and we must do our best to piece together such fragments of historical knowledge that we can find into a sequence which will indicate how its population developed and thrived.
The first historical reference to any place in the region occurs in a list of itineraries from China to the Persian Gulf collected
11 Tang Kuo Shih Pu, by Li Chan.
12 義淨,大唐西行求法高僧傳
HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH
155
not a general practice, it was probably due to the easiness of running before the wind that the ships could become such large hulks. Unfortunately we do not know who built them.
By the eighth century the boats had become huge. "Ladders several tens of feet high had to be used to get on board." The trade was organised. Foreign captains had to be registered with the Office of Trading Ships which inspected manifests and collected export and import duties. These captains had legal powers to deal with offending passengers when at sea.
In 758, the Mohammedans had so much the upper hand in Canton that they yielded to the temptation of sacking and burning the city and making to sea with the loot. However, trade continued to flourish, the principal imports being, according to Soleyman, ivory, frankincense, ingots of copper, turtle shells and rhinoceros horns (with which the Chinese used to make girdles), and the principal exports: silk and porcelain.
The foreign ships also carried as passengers Chinese Buddhists visiting the holy places in Java and India. In the biographies of sixty pilgrims composed by I Ching,12 37 of them took the sea route to India. Some of these went from the Tonkin delta region, but the majority started from Canton or returned thither. The compass was still unknown in those days, and the first mention of its use for navigation in Chinese literature occurs at the beginning of the 12th century.
V. T'UN MUN
In the preceding sections a picture has been given of the elements which made up the population of South China up to the end of the T'ang dynasty. We now come to our region — the peninsula South East of the Canton delta, and we must do our best to piece together such fragments of historical knowledge that we can find into a sequence which will indicate how its population developed and thrived.
The first historical reference to any place in the region occurs in a list of itineraries from China to the Persian Gulf collected
11 Tang Kuo Shih Pu, by Li Chan.
12 義淨,大唐西行求法高僧傳
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