MARINE DEPARTMENT LIBRARY
140. Table XXVI gives statistics for the past ten years of the numbers of marriages registered, civil and religious ceremonies, and marriages between parties of Chinese race, and of the amounts of fees collected. It will be seen from this that the number of marriages regis- tered annually has risen every year except in 1962-63 and 1964-65, each of which was a 'blind year' with no first day of Spring in it, and there- fore unpopular for marriages between Chinese.
141. Table XXVII shows the ages or age groups of the husbands. and wives married during the year as stated in the marriage certificates. This shows that 200 of the husbands and 3,511 of the wives were under 21 at the time of their marriage, and therefore required the consent of their parents or guardian or (in 50 cases) of the Registrar as laid down in Sections 15 and 16 of the Ordinance. The distribution of husbands and wives as between the various age groups followed more or less the same pattern as in 1964-65 with the 21-25 age group the most popular for wives and the 26-30 group most popular for husbands.
142. There appears to be a definite trend for girls to marry younger, the numbers of girls marrying under 21 having grown as follows:
% of all marriages under Ordinance
1961-62
1962-63
1963-64
1964-65
1965-66
Number
1,676
14.18
1,868
16.70
2,488
19.59
2,733
21.68
3,511
22.60
143. Many of the older husbands and wives had already been married before by customary ceremonies. Such marriages are expressly authorized by Section 39(2) of the Ordinance, which provides that the parties to a customary marriage may, if they so desire and provided they have not living any other undivorced spouse, contract with each other a marriage under the Ordinance, and that this shall not be deemed to prejudice the previous customary marriage. There are two reasons why people already married by a Chinese customary ceremony remarry under the Ordinance. Either they have become Christians and wish to be formally remarried in their Church for religious reasons; or more usually not having a marriage certificate that is acceptable to public authorities, local or foreign, they marry in a Registry in order to obtain an official marriage certificate that will be accepted everywhere as
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