ENG-1960 — Page 60

POPULATION

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The districts of Kwangtung which have supplied the largest elements of Hong Kong's urban Chinese population are neigh- bouring 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.

The chief linguistic characteristic of the urban area is that, although a wide variety of Chinese languages and dialects are used in daily life, Cantonese is the lingua franca. The other languages or dialects most widely heard are Hakka. Chiuchow, Kuoyü (the national language), the Shanghai dialect and, of course, English, the popularity of which has increased considerably in the last fifteen years. Before the war the movement to popularize Kuoyü in China affected the Colony very little, but the war took many local residents into China, and many came back afterwards with some knowledge of Kuoyü. Though this language is not normally spoken by Cantonese people in Hong Kong, a far greater number understand it now than before the war.

NEW TERRITORIES

The indigenous inhabitants of the New Territories consist of four principal groups: Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo and Tanka. Although these groups show differences in physical appearance, dress, organization and custom, which suggest that they are racially distinct, it is safer to treat them as linguistic rather than racial

groups.

The Cantonese occupy the best part of the two principal plains in the north-western sector of the New Territories, and own a good deal of the most fertile valley land in various other areas. The oldest villages, those of the Tang clan in Yuen Long district, have a history of continuous settlement since the late eleventh century, during the Southern Sung dynasty, with whose imperial family the clan was connected by marriage. Villages in the Tung Chung valley, on Lantau Island, date back to the early Yuan dynasty, in the late thirteenth century. Subsequent migrations have brought Cantonese from many districts of Kwangtung, and they

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