Hong Kong's fishing people – the Tanka and, smaller in numbers, the Hoklo – lived and sometimes died aboard their boats. Junks and sampans, anchorages and channels, winds and tides marked their days. In the 1930s local salon photographers had left romantic images of them: misty bay scenes and picturesque boats. Hedda Morrison, by contrast, saw the boat people with a clear, direct gaze and captured the prosaic details of their daily life. The people were almost all illiterate. Their lives were rough, filled with challenge and hardship. Yet they were suffused with sea-knit community, with weather-beaten contentment. Integrating every aspect of practical existence and spiritual belief, fishing life brought blessings that the canny land dwellers rarely knew.

Hedda Morrison's photographs of boat life, most taken around Aberdeen and Shau Kei Wan, are generally rather more distant than the best of her street studies. An exception is the image of two women, where she is crouched at the feet of a poling sampan woman. The greater personal distance evident in most of these fishing photographs reflects the boat people's customs: outsiders were generally shunned, Europeans were rarely seen and strangers never boarded boats uninvited. Still, even if tentatively, Morrison worked her presence into the labyrinth world of
the anchorages, exploring out along gangplanks, merging into the backs of boatyards.

In addition to its fishing craft, Hong Kong had numerous other small working boats and
various related anchorage activities. But this section, to reflect the photographs, focuses on