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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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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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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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: The venerable firm of Arnholds, Karberg Company was founded in 1866 and I believe has had a continuous presence in Hong Kong, barring when it was liquidated during World War One, currently as Arnhold which deals in building materials and engineering equipment distribution. The early days of the company were written about by the equally venerated Hong Kong historian Carl Smith […]
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York Lo: Big and Tall from Nanking Rd to Nathan Rd: Jefferson Young (楊撫生) of Crane (鶴鳴), Chancellor (大人), Da Da (大大) and the rise and fall of his retail empire The 1986 closure and liquidation sale of Da Da department store (which means “Big Big” in Chinese), one of the most prominent casualties of the confidence crisis at […]
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“Lloyd International Airways Ltd was a private, British independent airline formed in 1961 to operate worldwide charter flights It commenced operations with a single Douglas DC-4 piston airliner from Cambridge Marshall Airport. Lloyd International concentrated on passenger and cargo charters with four-engined, long-range aircraft. It also had links in Hong Kong since its inception and flew to the Far East regularly. During the mid-1960s, the airline began re-equipping its […]
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Roy Eric Xavier, Director, Portuguese and Macanese Studies Project at the University of California, Berkeley, USA has kindly granted permission to reproduce the second part of the following article. He stresses that this is still a draft and subject to revision. Roy runs the absorbing website Far Eastern Currents which covers a wide range of research into the Macanese Diaspora especially in Macau and Hong […]
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“Born and raised in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, at the heart of eastern China’s silk-producing Yangtze River Delta region, Zhao began his more than 40-year career as a ronghua creator as a 19 year old at a state-owned factory. The art of making ronghua – literally “velvet flower” – dates back to the Tang dynasty (618-907) and refers to the creation of not […]
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