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130 who subsequently seated himself on the throne of China (A.D. 1280), the last Emperor of the Sung Dynasty, then a young child, was driven with the Imperial Court to the South of China and finally compelled to take refuge on board ship, when he continued his flight, accompanied by a small fleet. Coasting along from Foochow, past Amoy and Swatow, he passed (about 1278 A.D.) through the Ly-ee-moon into the waters of Hongkong. After a short stay on Kowloon Peninsula, he sailed westwards until he reached Ngaishan, at the mouth of the West River (South-west of Macao). But meanwhile the Mongols had taken possession of Canton and hastily organized a fleet with which they hemmed in the Imperial flotilla on all sides. The Prime Minister (Luk Sau-fu), seeing all was lost, took the youthful Emperor on his back, jumped into the sea (A.D. 1279) and perished together with him.

Within a few months previous to this event, the Imperial Court had rested for a while in the little bay of Kowloon, called Matauchung. Tradition says that Kowloon city and the present hamlets of Matauchung and Matauwai were not in existence at the time, and that the Imperial troops were encamped for a time on the hill now marked by the inscription, whilst the Court were lodged in a roughly constructed wooden palace erected at a short distance from the beach, on the other side of Matauchung creek, at a place now marked by a temple. There, it is said, the last Emperor of the Sung resided for a while, on ground now British and in sight of Hongkong, waiting for news from Canton concerning the movements of the Mongols, and hoping in vain to receive succour from that treacherous city.

Tradition further states that, ever since the downfall of the Sung (A.D. 1279) and all through the reign of the Mongol Yuen Dynasty (A.D. 1280 to 1333), Hongkong was a haunt of pirates. The bay of Shaukiwan (close to the Ly-ee-moon pass) and the bay of Aberdeen (close to the Lamma channel) were specially dreaded by peaceful traders, because piratical craft used to issue thence plundering or levying black-mail on passing junks. These pirates, it is said, were generally engaged in fishing whilst men