HF: Can anyone supply further information about The Oriental Construction Company which the 1905 advert below says were Consulting and Supervising Engineers and Contractors with branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Manila. The ad says the company were specialists in railways, mines, water supplies, reinforced concrete and concrete piles. Their 1905 Hong Kong office was in the Alexandra Buildings. This […]
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A tenuous, but intriguing, connection to Hong Kong’s disposal of sewage and refuse in around the 1880s. Can anyone confirm this link and suggest which of William Warner’s methods were adopted here? “The firm of Goddard and Massey started with Henry Goddard and appears to have had its origins in Nottingham between c1844-48. In 1848 Henry Goddard is listed as an ironmonger […]
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Our article about the origins of the Aberdeen Gasometer led us to discover that it was originally constructed by Samuel Cutler & Sons of Millwall, London and Telford, UK. This in turn provided both Stephen Davies and IDJ with the opportunity to link this particular gasometer design to Cutler’s Patent Guide Framing which was patented in 1888. Very familiar to any UK city […]
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HF: Our article, Tung Tai Tseung Kee & Company, 同泰祥記, engineers and shipbuilders, 1897 to c1945, mentions “The proprietor of the firm, Mr Lan Fat, was born in San On Province, China, received his education in Hongkong, and was afterwards apprenticed as a draughtsman to Messrs. Fenwick & Co. for nine years. He was then for nearly two years engineer […]
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Can anyone provide further information about the GEC of China Ltd in Hong Kong? This 1924 advert has their location at Queen’s Buildings In Hong Kong. Until corrected I am presuming that the company was a subsidiary of the British General Electric Company (often abbreviated to GEC) which came into being in 1886 (1888?) when the original General Electric Apparatus […]
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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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HF: The 1923 HK Telegraph advert shown below shows the Oil Tank Steamer Paludina one of several ships built by the Hongkong & Whampoa Dockyard for the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company. The company operated from about 1898 to 1955 when Shell acquired the company’s assets, essentially bringing its fleet of ships in-house. I don’t know whether Anglo-Saxon operated a HK office though given its size […]
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Andrew Wood’s article, The Silver Mine of Silver Mine Bay, contains the following: “By 1888, Ho’s engineers had driven at least four adits – horizontal tunnels – deep into the granite… An aerial ropeway took the ore from the mine over rice fields and a hill to a smelting works near the seashore 3000 feet (900 metres) away on the north side […]
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York Lo (with additional information by Peter Li): I searched the Chinese name of Chan Kim Ming and came up with one entry. The article below from 1963 was published when a Japanese businessman by the name of Sasaki, the CEO of Japan Paper and Pulp, visited Hong Kong together with a Mr Cox, accompanied by his wife, from Bell […]
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York Lo: Shanghainese Builders in Hong Kong (Part Two) – Hsin Chong and Hsin Heng In 1928, two aspiring builders from Ningbo – Godfrey Yeh and Johan Zee – co-founded Hsin Heng Construction in Shanghai and quickly made a name in the industry with projects such as the famous Chien-tang River bridge in Hangzhou. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese […]
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