The Chinese one sees on the street range from jockey-sized runts to towering giants; from tiny women weighing perhaps 90 pounds to queenly six-footers; from the palest of white skins to a deep walnut brown. Many have features which seem more Slavic or Polish than anything classifiable as Chinese. There are almond eyes and pop eyes; slit eyes and bug-eyes. Noses tend to be a little less prominent and less sharply defined than European noses, but exceptions occur. The bloated red nose of the dedicated drinker never shows itself, except on a Caucasian face. Dark hair is almost universal and bald heads less common than in an American crowd. Pudgy types occur with some regularity, but tremendously fat people are rarely seen. About half the people who live in the urban areas were born in the colony and most of their ancestors came from Kwangtung, the Chinese Province immediately north of the Hong Kong border. Kwangtung was also the birthplace of the majority of the recent refugees from Red China. Eight-tenths of the city-dwellers speak the dialect of Cantonese used in Canton City, where the British traders were based before Hong Kong became a colony. This dialect and others closely related to it are the _lingua franca_ of the colony’s urban Chinese, but there are 96 Cantonese dialects in existence, many of them unintelligible to users of the Canton City dialect. The babble of urban tongues includes Hoklo, Sze Yap and Hakka, all from different parts of Kwangtung, Shanghainese (chiefly heard at North Point and Hung Hom in the colony), Chiuchow (in the Western District), Fukienese (at North Point) and Kuoyu, or Mandarin (near Hong Kong University and at Rennie’s Mill Camp). In the New Territories, where even a Westerner can detect differences of dress and custom, the Cantonese hold most of the flat, fertile farmland and speak a dialect which puzzles city Cantonese. Ancestors of the Cantonese farmers have lived in the New Territories for nine centuries. The Hakka people, whose women may be identified immediately by their broad-brimmed straw hats with a hanging fringe of thin black cloth, settled the same area at about the time of the earliest Cantonese, but were pushed into the less desirable farmland and generally dominated by the Cantonese. They fought each other intermittently for centuries, but the feud has died down and they now share several villages peacefully, frequently intermarry, and restrict their warfare to husband-wife squabbles. The Hakkas of the eastern New Territories operate their own single-masted, high-hull boats for hauling farm produce and ferrying passengers. 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.