Yolande van Daatselaar from Delft in the Netherlands has recently been in touch. She says she is the proud owner of a beautiful camphorwood chest, with pearl inlay, bought by her grandfather in Hong Kong during one of his trips as a sailor on the Holland Amerika Line some time between 1946 and 1960. She doesn’t know exactly when. Yolande wonders […]
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HF: This lengthy report was “Presented to the Legaslative Council by the Command of His Excellency the Governor”, on the 1st November 1885. I present it with no further comment except that I hope it may be of value to anyone studying the early history of public water supply in Hong Kong. The contemporary photograph added to the original report […]
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Robert Taylor was manager of the Green Island Cement Company from about the late 1920s until the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and again for a short period after its liberation. He was born on 2nd June 1888 and died in January 1974 in his 86th year. Immediately prior to the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong he was a volunteer […]
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HF: It’s hard to walk along Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui these days without being accosted by someone offering the ubiquitous copy watches or gentlemen’s tailor sir. There may be several of the latter dotted around TST, Wanchai and Central but as Stuart Heaver recently wrote in an article for the SCMP the number of tailors in Hong Kong has suffered […]
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Elizabeth Ride has British Army Aid Group (BAAG) records of shipping movements for 1944-45 in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation in World War Two. These provide information not only about the ships themselves but what cargo was being brought into and out of Hong Kong during the latter stages of WW2, passengers carried, and of godowns, docks etc that were […]
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IDJ: When Cheung Wah Shipbuilding & Engineering Company was the labour supply contractor for the construction of Castle Peak Power Station they had to bring in several hundred and later probably thousands of workers daily to what was then a remote site. Eventually the ARGOS Bus Co was created by Cheung Wah using a fleet of secondhand double-deckers from the UK […]
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HF: “The bazaar was set up in the 1970s when the government moved hawkers off nearby streets to its site opposite Sham Shui Po Police Station. More than 100 textile vendors once crammed into the site, which resembles a small squatter village with its patchwork roof of corrugated metal, plastic sheets and tarpaulins. Although they are set out along a […]
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Elizabeth Ride has British Army Aid Group (BAAG) records of shipping movements for 1944-45 in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation in World War Two. These provide information not only about the ships themselves but what cargo was being brought into and out of Hong Kong during the latter stages of WW2, passengers carried, and of godowns, docks etc that were […]
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Stephen Davies recently wrote an article for the SCMP about maritime street names in Hong Kong. He noted, “considering Hong Kong is one of the world’s great ports, street names with maritime connections are remarkably few – no more than 10 per cent of the total. But that is enough, when loaded into a database and tested for patterns, to add […]
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Maureen Fan left a comment below Carles Brasó Broggi’s article Shanghai Spinners: Pioneers of Hong Kong’s Industrialisation. This reads in part: Thank you for your informative article. My grandfather Robert Fan Wenzhao (1893-1979) was the architect who designed the HK Spinners factory at Cheung Sha Wan, including the workers dormitories, a dining hall, a recreation area, basketball and volleyball courts and […]
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