York Lo: King of Entertainment: Wong Kow (黃球) and his Mayflower (五月花) group of restaurants and nightclubs Left: Wong Kow; Right: Matchbox for the Mayflower Restaurant group in the 1960s which list the phone numbers for all four of its restaurants and Oriental Ballroom. Wong Kow (1921-2017) was a major figure in the HK restaurant and entertainment industry in the […]
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Elizabeth Ride has sent BAAG Report KWIZ #77, dated 15th December 1944, and noted earlier: After KWIZ #4, the Naval section is not included in the AWM papers, and does not appear again until KWIZ #66, and then in a slightly different format. The image shown on the Home Page and below is of the Japanese oil transport ship Sanko […]
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Amelia Allsop, Collections and Research Manager at The Hong Kong Heritage Project has kindly sent this extract from the quarterly Newsletter Past & Present Issue 13. Part of the Newsletter is about The Peninsula Hotel, which started life as an up-market transport hotel serving passengers arriving both by railway and ship. The HK Industrial History connection? Jock Inglis was General Manager of […]
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York Lo: International Restaurant & Nightclub Holdings (國際酒樓夜總會置業 Earlier in the group, we have covered Ruby and Oceania Hawaii, two publicly listed restaurant groups from the 1970s and 1980s which had since faded into history. Another major listed restaurant group from the same era was International Restaurant & Nightclub Holdings (hereafter referred to as “IRN Holdings” to differentiate it from […]
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HF: IDJ has very kindly upgraded two of the photographs and the map included in the following article. In 1977 (?) the Water Supplies Department published a report publicizing the construction of Plover Cove reservoir which had been officially opened in January 1969, though the height of the dams was subsequently raised, this being completed in 1973. Two stages are […]
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HF: If you visit Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market during the day you may well think it’s closed, ready to be fenced off and facing imminent demolition. However, piled boxes of fruit on the surrounding streets and inside locked wire cages within indicate there’s life in the old place yet. If you want to see the market fully functioning […]
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Elizabeth L Johnson wrote an article about “Patterned Bands” in the New Territories which was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, Volume 16, 1976. [HF: I have been unable to copy the Chinese characters which appear in the article.] The article begins: These notes on a form of peasant textiles are based on research conducted in Kwan […]
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York Lo: Dickson and Hopson: the Tales of Two Handbag Companies Dickson and Hopson are two players in the handbag business in Central with similar sounding names and over half a century of history but catering to two different segments – the earlier focused on the higher end clientele while the latter caters to the mass market with its own […]
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Further to Dan Waters article “A Joss-stick Mill in Tsuen Wan” published August 26 2013 Here is a photograph of a water powered tilt-hammer used in crushing the production of incense. It is taken from a 1952 book “Hong Kong” by Harold Ingrams published by her Majesty’s Stationary Office, London in 1952. The book contains a chapter on Hong Kong’s […]
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York Lo: Yau Yue Commercial Bank (有餘商業銀行) Leaders of Yau Yue Commercial Bank at its opening ceremony in 1953 (WKYP, 1953-10-23) Founded in 1953, taken over by HSBC in 1966 and closed in 1969, Yau Yue Commercial Bank was one of the less covered Chinese-owned banks in the post-War era thanks to its smaller size and short history and the […]
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