York Lo: Friends & U’Land (友聯磁磚潔具): Leading Distributor of Sanitary Ware Left: Ad of Friends & U’Land in the 1950s (HKBCA Yearbook); right: an old ad of Friends Company listing all the products it carried (U’land website) Earlier on the website, we covered three leading pioneers in the HK plumbing industry. Another important player in the industry was Friends & […]
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Hugh Farmer: Dairy Farm was incorporated in 1886 in Hong Kong by Scottish surgeon Sir Patrick Manson and five prominent Hong Kong businessmen, Sir Paul Chater, Mr Phineas Ryrie, Mr Granville Sharp, Mr WH Ray and Mr JB Coughtry. Manson worked in Hong Kong only from 1883 to 1889. Initially there were 80 cattle which had been imported from Scotland and total […]
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York Lo: Lee Yu Kee, Kitson and Tung On – Pioneers of the HK Plumbing Industry Plumbing is a specialized and lucrative segment of the HK construction industry and this article profiles three of the pioneering firms who were leaders in the plumbing business – Lee Yu Kee, Kitson and Tung On and the stories of the families behind them. […]
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York Lo: From Shanghai to HK and West Africa: The Global Quests of 4 Hong Kong Enamelware Makers From the 1940s through the 1960s, Hong Kong had a vibrant enamelware industry, which like the cotton spinning industry was dominated by Shanghainese industrialists, who brought with them from Shanghai their technological know-how in addition to financial and human capital. When these […]
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York Lo: The Lo brothers and Nam Sang Building Construction (南生營造) Lo Hoi-ming (left) and Lo Yuk-ming (right) as directors of HKBCA in the mid-1950s (HKBCA yearbook) In the 1950s and 1960s,Lo Hoi-ming (盧海明) and his younger brother Lo Yuk-ming (盧煜明) were key figures in the HK real estate and construction industry whose Nam Sang Building Construction Co developed many […]
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Hugh Farmer: 1984? Not G Orwell but PF Leeds who in that year published a detailed account of the history of public transport in HK. This includes an account of the the development of trams here. Tram P F Leeds (1984) pages 9-12 & 36-37 This includes : -further illumination of the twenty years before the company actually started operations. […]
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Hugh Farmer: Tymon Mellor has sent a “Report on the Commercial Development of the Port of Hongkong by John Duncan, M. Inst. C.E., Chartered Civil Engineer, Port Engineer, Hong Kong which was laid before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the Governor on 19th December 1924.” Report on the Commercial Development of the Port of Hongkong 1924 Duncan […]
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York Lo: From dyestuff and enamelware in Shanghai and HK to chemical plants in Malaysia, Singapore and Nigeria– the industrial journey of the C.K. Koo family When it comes to high profile family feuds of the super-rich in Hong Kong, the sagas of the Kwok brothers of Sun Hung Kai Properties and Nina Wang of Chinachem Group had captivated the […]
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York Lo: K. Jamson(占臣) – the global journey of a HK shoe and luggage company over the past nine decades Jamson store on the left on Johnston Road in Wanchai in 1955. Earlier in the group, we covered several famous localshoe companies from the 1950s and 1960s such as Po Shing, Sanda, Crane and Yau Sun. Founded in 1930, K. […]
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Hugh Farmer: Kowloon Dairy Company was established by George Ahwee [dates?] and Rudy Choy (Nov 1910-29 Apr 1992) in 1940. The Kowloon Dairy website suggests ” It was a fantastic partnership when Ahwee and Choy co-founded the company as the former was a “devotee of animal husbandry, especially of dairy cattle, and Choy was an amateur jockey”. I wasn’t quite sure […]
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