ENG-1959 — Page 37

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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

for the purposes of this Chapter. In addition, the number of recorded journeys made both ways across the frontier in any one year can be equal to or greater than the estimated total number of the population.

The population increased during 1959 by some 113,000 to reach an estimated total of 2,919,000. Of this increase 84,329 was due to the excess of registered births over registered deaths, and 28,181 to recorded immigration. The actual number of registered births was 104,579 in 1959 compared with 106,624 in 1958 and of registered deaths was 20,250 compared with 20,554 in 1958. These figures yield for 1959 a birth rate of 36.6 per mille and a death rate of 7.1 per mille, on a mid-year population of 2,857,000. For the first time since the end of the war the number of recorded births has fallen compared with the previous year.

This decline is interesting but no particular significance can be attached to it in the absence of any analysis of the structure of the Colony's population to which it can be related. Such an analysis should be possible after the Census in 1961, and until then it is only possible to speculate on the possible reasons for the decline.

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URBAN POPULATION

At the end of 1959 the number of British subjects from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, excluding Service per- sonnel and their dependents, numbered about 15,000. The total of non-Chinese residents and visitors (shown in brackets), excluding British nationals, was about 11,500; of these the most numerous national communities were:

American, 3,831 (1,861 residents); Portuguese, 1,941 (1,573 residents); Filipino, 994 (369 residents); Japanese, 536 (278 residents); Dutch, 391 (275 residents); and Indonesian, 395 (240 residents). The districts of Kwangtung which have supplied the largest elements of Hong Kong's urban Chinese population are neighbour- ing Po On and Tungkwun, Waiyeung and Muiyuen (principally Hakka), Chiuchow, the so-called Four Districts (Sunning, Sunwui, Hoiping and Yanping), Namhoi, Punyü, Shuntak and Chungshan. Other elements in the urban population include a Fukien com- munity and numbers of overseas Chinese whose families originally came from Kwangtung or Fukien.