York Lo: Lee Man Rubber Manufactory (利民橡膠製品廠) Top: Wong Kwai and brief profile of Lee Man Rubber (KSEN, 1954-12-23); Bottom: two examples of rubber shoes made by Lee Man in the 1950s (WKYP, 1958) Another major rubber shoe manufacturer in HK in the 1940s through 1960s was Lee Man Rubber Manufactory, whose “Fly Gun” brand of rubber shoes was popular […]
» Read more
York Lo: Private Technical Schools – World, Southeast and Columbia While the government and many industry organizations have played a role in providing the necessary vocational training for various industries in HK, several private technical schools emerged in the 1930s to 1950s to fill the unmet need of training workers for the burgeoning electronics industry. Of these, the most famous […]
» Read more
IDJ: When Hong Kong was liberated after the surrender of the Japanese, one of the first groups to arrive was “Shield Force.” This mainly comprised 3,000 Royal Air Force personnel who had been diverted from their expected task of building Pacific island aerodromes to assist the Allied advance towards Japan. Not all RAF personnel in the war were involved in flying […]
» Read more
York Lo: Norman F.C. Li (李福杖): Audio Visual Equipment and Plastic Bag Pioneer Elephant founder Norman Li introducing the “Victoria 8” film projector with a dual 35/70 mm film gauge produced by the Italian maker Cinemeccanica in 1963 (Elephant Holdings FB page) The Li family of Bank of East Asia, as covered in Frank Ching’s Li Dynasty and known for its […]
» Read more
York Lo: Lau Chi-yuen (柳子元) of Wilman Rubber (惠民橡膠廠) and South Ocean Rubber Works (南洋橡膠化工廠) Left: Lau Chi-yuen in the early 1950s (KSEN, 1953); Right: Production of rubber shoes at the WIlman Rubber plant in 1955(KSEN, 1955-12-26) Earlier on the website, we covered several players in the once prosperous rubber shoe industry in HK from the 1930s through the 1960s […]
» Read more
York Lo: The Rise and Disappearance of Kin Son Electronic (建生電子) Left: So Kin-keung (front) Right: article about Kin Son’s earnings in 1991 (WKYP, 1991-10-4) In 1995, the business world in Hong Kong was shocked by the unraveling of the publicly listed Kin Son Electronic (Holdings) Ltd, starting with the disappearance of its chairman So Kin-keung (蘇健強) in Shenzhen in […]
» Read more
HF: The following article about James Matheson was written by Alain Le Pichon and first published in the Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, edited by May Holdsworth and Christopher Munn. The publisher, HK University Press, has kindly granted permission for it to be posted here, but retains copyright over this material from 2012. Thanks to SCT for proofreading the retyped […]
» Read more
York Lo: The Kam Family of Hocan and Jardines For the past century, the Kam family has been important players in the import export industry in Hong Kong, starting with Kam Cheung-yan and his brother Kam Cheung-fai who were compradors for the major foreign owned trading houses such as Gerin Drevard and Jardines, and later as proprietors of their own […]
» Read more
HF: The Hong Kong Maritime Museum website currently has an online exhibition representing a small portion of the photographic glass plates from its Hong Kong & Whampoa Dockyard collection. All images below are courtesy of the Museum. The Museum website says, with slight adaptation,”The consolidation of the Hongkong Whampoa Dockyard (HWD) with the Taikoo Dockyard in 1973 represented the most significant […]
» Read more