as we are informed has a population of between 100,000 and 200,000, or including its suburbs 300,000 at the least, we are still far below the right population number. Again the writer in the 'Chinese Repository' with his average of 237,000 says, he thinks the district of Singan would fall below the average number. There is no doubt it would fall below the average number of some of its neighbouring districts; but instead of San On only having less than 237,000, another writer[1] gives the population of San On as somewhere about 240,000. If the latter is anywhere like the correct figure for San On, then the Höng Shán district has probably an immensely larger population.
We cannot perhaps be far wrong—speaking of necessity in the vague way in which the Chinese delight to speak of numbers—in thinking that the population of the Höng Shán district runs well up, if not even far up, into the hundreds of thousands at all events.
Though all in the district do not speak the Höng Shán dialect, yet on the other hand it must he remembered that large numbers are found of Höng Shán speakers elsewhere in China and of the treaty ports, &c., as well as in foreign lands: so that we may safely say that the language is spoken by hundreds of thousands of Chinese, perhaps we might well say by many hundreds of thousands.
Different languages and dialects.
The population of the Höng Shán district is not wholly composed of Cantonese. A rough estimate puts the Hakka population as one fourth of the whole. Whether this estimate, for it is nothing more, is an accurate one or approaches anything near truth it is impossible to say. The Hakkas are said to live mostly in villages inhabited wholly by themselves; and in the mountainous portions chiefly, as in upland valleys,
though, of course they are to be found in the district city itself, and are to be met with scattered over the district in the same way as in other parts of this region of country. The statement of the fact that nearly all the professors of the tonsorial art, in this part of China, are Hakkas would be almost sufficient proof alone that they are to be found everywhere; for how far can one travel in this much-shaved empire without coming across a barber? The villages of Chim Chung (尖涌) and Kwú Yau (古祐) are inhabited by both Hakkas and Puntis.
There is also quite a number of Hoklos as well in the Höng Shán district; but they do not approach to anything like the number of the Hakkas. How many there are of them, it is impossible to say. The villages they occupy are Wú Shek (烏石), Yung Mak (雍陌), P'ing Lám (平嵐), K'iú T'aú (橋頭), and A Kong (鴉江) . It would be an interesting study to compare the speech of these people with that of the portion of the country—be it the neighbourhood of Hoi Fúng, Lúk Fúng, Swatow, or Amoy—from which they emigrated, and note the influences of the new habitat on their language.
But notwithstanding the Hakkas and Hoklos, the greater part of the population of the Höng Shán district are so-called Cantonese speakers—so-called, as the district possesses a dialect of its own in which, not only the pronunciation of many of the words, but also the greater part of the whole series (three are the same) of the nine or ten tones diverge to a greater or lesser extent from the standard of correct Cantonese pronunciation, to say nothing of the use of different words to express the same ideas. It must not, however, be supposed that a uniform dialect pervades the whole district. Far from such being the case, there are a number of local peculiarities to be detected. And there are also places where the dialects of some of the neighbouring districts hold
