Hong Kong was no barren, undiscovered land
Since over 30,000 years ago, humans have inhabited parts of the New Territories. More trickled down to the area during the Tang dynasty as Guangzhou flourished into a major trading port, but large-scale immigration didn’t happen until the Song dynasty. As the Mongols pressed their invasion from the north, many Chinese refugees fled south to Hong Kong. The five major families that settled in the New Territories then are the Deng, Peng, Hou, Wen, and Liao clans, with more clans to follow.
The peace did not last forever, as a great shake-up during the early Qing dynasty uprooted entire communities for decades. To battle anti-Qing loyalists based in Taiwan, the Qing Emperor issued a series of Great Clearance edicts that required coastal areas in southern China—including Guangdong and Hong Kong—to be cleared out.
When the ban was lifted in the late seventeenth century, some Hong Kong locals—also known as Punti—returned to the place, along with newcomers that belonged to the Hakka, Tanka, and Hokkien ethnic groups. Together, these people groups became the indigenous inhabitants of Hong Kong, living with their clans in coastal or walled villages as either fishermen or farmers.