It was on the basis of her ethnography of the boat-people in Hong Kong that Barbara Ward developed her interpretations of ‘conscious models’ in the Chinese context. The boat-people are the indigenes of the region around the present city of Canton, and were the original inhabitants of the area now called Hong Kong. This book is a collection of papers collected together here were all written at different dates. They fall fairly naturally into four groups. A group of essays on the boat-people of Hong Kong and South China, a second group on different socio-economic topics and third, two somewhat tentative papers on socialization.