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that is, the nomadic population, of Britain, do belong to a series of ethnic communities genealogically linked to the settlement of Romani immigrants in the sixteenth century, who now speak Romanes-linked creole dialects, as well as standard English." Several times in the early 1970s I was still able to converse with pupils in dialects that teachers had assured me were quite unknown to "their" Gypsies. Now it is much harder to catch teachers out this way. Work for Gypsies has become a small part of Britain's "Race Relations Industry". The word "Gypsy" has been ethnicized.
The case with the fisherfolk of Hong Kong is exactly the reverse. Originally thought to be a distinct ethnic community, the thrust of modern scholarly research since the mid-1950s is that they are no such thing, that the vast majority are Cantonese, ethnically indistinguishable from the majority of Hong Kong inhabitants.
The pre-War view, however, of the British administration in Hong Kong was that the boat people comprised two of the four ethnic groups native to Hong Kong. S.F. Balfour wrote: "This region has a country population consisting of four distinct communities known in Chinese as the Tanka, the Hokio, the Punti and the Hakka."18 By the "Punti" he meant the local Cantonese; by the 'Hakka' the descendants of late Han migrants from Northern China. Both the "Tanka" and the 'Hoklo' were boat-dwellers, fisherfolk. The Hoklo, a small minority of the boat people, mostly in the north-east of the New Territories, spoke a variety of Fukien dialect. The Tanka spoke Cantonese, but were believed to have another dialect of their own, to be in fact not Han Chinese at all, but, said Balfour, drawing on Chinese sources, "a branch of the Man tribe."
In fact, it was generally believed that there existed in South China an aboriginally-descended aquatic people called the Tanka boat-people like the Hoklo. In Hong Kong they were fishermen, but in the Pearl River delta, and further north along inland waterways, they were transporters, salt-traders, prostitutes and followers of numerous other pariah occupations that could be based on a boat. Detailed studies in the 1930s by the new school of sociologists based at Lingnam University did not challenge this assumption.10 They were backed up by historian colleagues who traced back a recorded history of the Tan people to T'ang times. Then, Ho Ke-en concluded, Tan "was broadly equivalent to Man", a name covering several non-Han tribes in South China, but "in its narrow sense it designated one particular South China tribe". In the Sung period, he tells us, "the Tan people began to live on boats,
EDUCATION AS A BY-PRODUCT OF FISH MARKETING
125
that is, the nomadic population, of Britain, do belong to a series of ethnic communities genealogically linked to the settlement of Romani immigrants in the sixteenth century, who now speak Romanes-linked creole dialects, as well as standard English." Several times in the early 1970s I was still able to converse with pupils in dialects that teachers had assured me were quite unknown to "their" Gypsies. Now it is much harder to catch teachers out this way. Work for Gypsies has become a small part of Britain's "Race Relations Industry”. The word “Gypsy” has been ethnicized.
The case with the fisherfolk of Hong Kong is exactly the reverse. Originally thought to be a distinct ethnic community, the thrust of modem scholarly research since the mid-1950s is that they are no such thing, that the vast majority are Cantonese, ethnically indistinguishable from the majority of Hong Kong inhabitants.
The pre-War view, however, of the British administration in Hong Kong was that the boat people comprised two of the four ethnic groups native to Hong Kong. S.F. Balfour wrote: "This region has a country population consisting of four distinct communities known in Chinese as the Tanka, the Hokio, the Punti and the Hakka." 18 By the 'Punti" he meant the local Cantonese; by the 'Hakka' the descendants of late Han migrants from Northern China. Both the "Tanka' and the 'Hoklo' were boat-dwellers, fisherfold. The Hoklo, a small minority of the boat people, mostly in the north-east of the New Territories, spoke a variety of Fukien dialect. The Tanka spoke Cantonese, but were believed to have another dialect of their own, to be in fact not Han Chinese at all, but, said Balfour, drawing on Chinese sources, "a branch of the Man tribe."
In fact it was generally believed that there existed in South China an aboriginally-descended aquatic people called the Tanka boat- people like the Hoklo. In Hong Kong they were fishermen, but in the Pearl River delta, and further north along inland waterways, they were transporters, salt-traders, prostitutes and followers of numerous other pariah occupations that could be based on a boat. Detailed studies in the 1930s by the new school of sociologists based at Lingnam University did not challenge this assumption. 10 They were backed up by historian colleagues who traced back a recorded history of the Tan people to T'ang times. Then, Ho Ke-en concluded, Tan “was broadly equivalent to Man", a name covering several non-Han tribes in South China, but "in its narrow sense it designated one particular South China tribe". In the Sung period, he tells us, "the Tan people began to live on boats,
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