The Hoklos, a smaller group with a knack for handling light, fast boats, once lived entirely on boats and worked as shrimp fishermen. They moved ashore many years ago and now have their chief settlements on Cheung Chau and Peng Chau, a few miles west of Hong Kong Island.
By the testimony of historians, the Tanka people, who dominate the colony’s fishing industry, are the oldest surviving group in Hong Kong. Antedating the Chinese, they lived in the area when the Cantonese came along to push them off the land and generally treat them like despised inferiors. They lived entirely on boats, and when the British traders arrived, the Tanka had no compunctions about dealing with them in defiance of the Chinese Emperor’s orders. Over 90 percent of them speak Cantonese, with a small number speaking Hoklo and other dialects. Hardy and conservative, they avoid city ways, live on their junks and sampans and follow their own distinctive festivals and religious ceremonies. Since World War II they have begun to send their children to schools ashore and to become more directly involved in the economic life of the colony.
World War II provided a turning point in the fortunes of those boat people who operated cargo lighters in the harbor. Heartily disliking the Japanese, they used false-bottomed boats to secrete food stolen from their cargoes and then distributed it among the half-starved population ashore. They were the only residents permitted to eat in the large hotel restaurants like those at the luxurious Peninsula in Kowloon. Most of them, wholly unfamiliar with chairs, ate by squatting on the chair-seats as they had squatted on deck while eating at sea. Nowadays, they are more sophisticated, and in spite of their non-Chinese origin, as intensely Chinese as any group in the colony.
Because of the floodtide of tourists which has swept into Hong Kong in the last few years, it has become a conversational bromide to say that the influx will soon destroy its colorful Chinese community. To accept such a doctrine is to overestimate the impact of tourism and underrate the resistance of the Chinese.
The Hong Kong tourist is a highly localized phenomenon. Except for a fast motor tour through the main roads of the New Territories and a short whirl around Hong Kong Island, he rarely wanders more than a mile from the island and Kowloon terminals of the Star Ferry. He shops, gawks, eats at a few restaurants which are more tourist-oriented than Oriental, and is gone, leaving nothing but the click of the shopkeepers’ abacuses to mark his passage.