York LO: Kin Sun Manufactory (建新織造廠) and Longfellow shirts Left: Kin Sun’s ad in Singapore in 1953 warning customers about counterfeited Longfellow shirts (南洋商报, 10 April 1953, Page 7); Right: Kin Sun Manufactory in Sham Shui Po on the right. The bamboo structure was for lowering a coffin from the second floor which was common practice before the 1960s (Uwants) […]
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HF: We have two articles about Imperial Airways, both linked below. I thought it would be useful to have a general history of this now almost forgotten company which through various merges eventually became British Airways. Any information about or images of the airline in Hong Kong would be of great interest. “Imperial Airways was the early British commercial long […]
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York Lo: Great China Match Co. (大中國火柴廠) Great China Match Factory in Peng Chau in 1956 (Land Use Survey, HKU Libraries collection) Founded in 1939, the Great China Match Factory on Peng Chau was once the largest match manufacturer in Hong Kong, with over 1000 workers at its peak in the late 1940s and its “Kowloon” and other brands of […]
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This article was written by Christopher Munn, and first published in the Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, edited by May Holdsworth and Christopher. The publisher, HK University Press, and author have kindly granted permission for it to be posted here. Thanks also to Christopher for sending the first image of the E-Sing bakery. The second image was included in the original […]
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York Lo: Rosalind Henwood of Flying Cargo – Pioneer of the Air Freight Industry in Hong Kong According to HKTDC, there were 1314 air cargo forwarders in HK employing 17287 that handled 4.5 million tons of air freight in 2016 and the HK International Airport also ranked first in the world in terms of international air cargo throughput last year. […]
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Melanie Li, Manager – Corporate and Community History at the Hong Kong Heritage Project (HKHP), has kindly given permission for the following script archived at HKHP to be used on our website. HF: Thanks to IDJ for image separation and enhancement, and for supplying their captions. The Shanghai Gas Co., Ltd. (Shanghai Gas) was formed in 1865 to provide […]
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Dr. François Drémeaux, Honorary Professor, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong, is currently working on the presence of French companies in Hong Kong during the interwar period. He has kindly sent three charts showing a selection of these companies. The first one shows: Les principales compagnies maritimes françaises à Hong Kong (1918-1941) I have copied the company names […]
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York Lo: Fung Tang: The Firm, the Family, the Transpacific Metals Trade and Tin Refinery For almost three quarters of a century from the 1870s to the 1940s, HK-based Fung Tang (馮登記, Fung Tang Kee in Chinese) was a powerhouse in the transpacific metals trade with branches in Shanghai and three cities in Yunnan, affiliates in the US and Japan and […]
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Stephen Davies: The Isthmian Shipping Line (1910-1974) was initially a strange, hybrid beast – American but set up in London with a British management agency, the Federal Steam Navigation Co (ex-the famed Money & Wigram, itself an offshoot of the EIC when that lost its monopoly in 1833). I think the key point is its connection with US Steel – […]
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HF: This is an initial attempt to analyse the impact of World War One on industry in Hong Kong. First some rather surprising evidence of pro-German feelings immediately prior to the outbreak of WW1. During research at the national archives in Berlin for his forthcoming book, The Germans and Hong Kong, 1843-1997, Bert Becker, associate professor of history at the […]
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