Page:The China Review, Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East, Volume 22 1RZBAQAAMAAJ.pdf/90

 as all who know anything about the Chinese are aware. In an article, on the population of the Chinese Empire, in the Chinese Repository for 1833, the following is one of the arguments adduced for believing the population of the entire empire to be (in round figures) 333,000,000:&mdash; This estimate of the population of the Höng Shán District would appear to err largely on the side of moderation, Macao alone, as we have seen, having a Chinese population of over 60,000. In fact this estimate of 237,000 or more would seem scarcely to provide sufficient people to populate one of the towns in Höng Shán, Síú Lám&mdash;though to be sure it is the largest in the district and its inhabitants do not speak the Höng Shan dialect&mdash;to say nothing of all the other numerous towns and villages with their teeming populations, and Macao too would be left out of the calculation. Of Höng Shán, Dr. Henry says:&mdash;

To try again to form some rough estimate of the population of the Höng Shán district.: with a population say of 360,000,000 the average for the whole empire is 268 persons to the square mile, while the average in the nine southern and western provinces is only 154 to the square mile; now there were 289 inhabitants to the square mile in Great Britain in 1881 (being a greater number to the square mile than in some of the principal countries in Europe). Keeping the above in one's memory, let the following extract be read:&mdash; Now with the computed population of 19,200,000 to the whole of the Kwong Tung Province, there would only be 245 inhabitants to the square mile; were the population 30,000,000, it would be 389 to the squresquare [sic] mile: in one case far below, and in the other far above, that of Great Britain. The area of the whole province is stated to be 78,250 miles. Kwong Chau Fu, with its fourteen districts contains a ninth of the area of the whole province. If it were all equally thickly populated as the delta of the Canton River which delta, the writer, already quoted, considers as roughly coinciding with the Kwong Chau Prefecture&mdash;then, supposing the population to be not less than say, 30,000,000, it would give us an average of 383 inhabitants per square mile, a total of 3,372,315 for the whole prefecture, and 240,879 for each of the fourteen districts of which Höng Shán is one. This calculation brings us to about the same conclusion as the writer in the Chinese Repository with his more than 237,000. But even by this process, of calculation, if the large town of Síú Lám has at least 300,000 inhabitants and the district city Shek Kéí, four or five miles of Macao,