On Cheung Yung, thousands of Chinese ride up Victoria Peak on the tram, buying toys and other presents for the children at improvised stalls along the way. Picnickers cover the top of every hill in the colony. Kite-flyers observe the day by the curious sport of kite-fighting, which involves manipulating one kite so that it knocks another out of the sky or snaps its string. The hill-climbing custom supposedly began when a Chinese father of long ago saved his family from a plague by taking them into the mountains. A veritable regiment of gods, ghosts and spirits—some beneficent, some wicked—have their special observances during the year. Buddhist and Taoist deities have a tendency to overlap, just as followers of Taoism may be equally ardent Buddhists. Once the two religions battled and persecuted each other like the religions of the West, but they have long since settled down to peaceful coexistence. There is no reliable count of their membership in Hong Kong, though the Buddhists claim around 500,000 adherents. An unspecified, but probably small number of Chinese are Buddhists, Taoists and Christians simultaneously, or at least they consider themselves so. Confucianism also has its following in the colony, but its places of worship are generally merged with Buddhist and Taoist temples. Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have been at work in Hong Kong from its beginning as a colony, founding schools and caring for the poor. Neither group made much headway in attracting converts until the late 1940s, perhaps because of the ironbound Chinese resistance to every form of foreign influence. But the Communist regime on the mainland has proved a stimulant to Christianity in Hong Kong. The well-financed and highly effective work of Protestant churches, particularly among refugees from Red China, has won them many converts, and the number of Protestant parishes has greatly increased in the last few years. Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and other denominations have made substantial gains. The number of Roman Catholics, who are equally active in educational and welfare fields, has grown from 43,000 in 1951 to 180,000 in 1962. They are currently making about 15,000 converts a year, and 12,000 of these are adults. Some of their mission priests, who have found conversions much more difficult to achieve in Japan, believe that the terror and hopelessness of life under the Chinese Communists have turned many Chinese refugees to Christianity. Enrollment in Catholic schools of the colony is well over 100,000, and two-thirds of their enrollment is non-Catholic. Like every other Christian group in the colony, the Catholics have given help without drawing denominational lines.