HF: The Tai Lam Chung Reservoir was the first reservoir built in Hong Kong after the Second World War. Construction work commenced in 1952, was completed in 1957 and officially opened by the Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham on 7th December of that year. The reservoir, with a storage capacity of 20 million cubic metres, was formed by a main dam across the […]
» Read more
A woman feeling unwell from smoke inhalation was sent to hospital after a blaze broke out in a Hong Kong industrial building on Thursday. Emergency crews were called to Kai Tak Factory Building on King Fuk Street in San Po Kong, where a second-floor unit had burst into flames at about 12.15pm. The cause of the fire has not yet […]
» Read more
Waste Disposal in Hong Kong Text extracted from ‘Engineering in Hong Kong-50 years of Achievements’ published 1997. Many thanks to IDJ for sending this. The EPD first drew up plans for the development of a network of refuse transfer stations and three strategic landfills in the late 1980s. In order to tap private sector expertise in waste management, the department […]
» Read more
Tsang King Man wrote a report for the Individual Planning Workshop in 1985, as part of the partial fulfillment for an MSc, titled An Appraisal of the Squatter Factories Clearance Policy in Hong Hong. The images included in the report were not of a high quality. Many thanks to IDJ for making them more presentable. They appear to be have been taken […]
» Read more
HF: Quite a while back Elizabeth Ride told me about an exhibition which included the following information forming part of a WW2 BAAG report. The subject of this exhibition and when it took place are unclear. Furthermore the date of the report is not known, though it must have been from 1943/44. The only reference is a code reading FDR/2B/59 written […]
» Read more
HF: In his book, The Atlas: Archaeology of an Imaginary City, a mixture of fact and fiction about Hong Kong in the past and future, Dung Kai Cheung, Louis, writes about Sugar Street (糖街) in Causeway Bay. Dung recounts the local legend that the Hong Kong Mint, based there from 1866 to 1868, failed because, in spite of melted silver being […]
» Read more
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 […]
» Read more
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 […]
» Read more
In our Queries and Answers 5 Eric Spain had an enquiry about salt production in Mui Wo. He remembers seeing some RAF aerial photographs which showed salt pans there. [presumably immediately before, during or shortly after WW2?]. Frank Watson and Namussi added information to Q+A 5 which is linked below. HF: Further information can be found in a post I made on gwulo.com […]
» Read more
HF: Our Q+A 26 Tsing Shan Mine (Castle Peak area)? – Japanese occupation, WW2, linked below, asks about a possible mine or mines in the Castle Peak (青山) area as a British Army Aid Group (BAAG) report of 1944 mentions a “rumour” of a mine there. Tsing Shan is the name of the well-known monastery located at the eastern foot of the […]
» Read more