York Lo wrote a short biography of Kwok Tak-seng included in Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography. Kwok is probably best known as one of the founders and chairman of Sun Hung Kai Enterprises which became Sun Hung Kai Properties. However before this he was involved in Hung Cheong Import & Export Ltd which was the HK agent for YKK Zippers, […]
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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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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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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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York Lo: As well as Chan Kim Ming, I have also looked into Susan (Susie) Loo, the operator of Sky Hawk Cafe in Kweilin during WW2. According to Chinese sources, her original name was Chan Sue-chun and they listed her as married to a KMT military official with the last name Wei rather than Chan Kim-ming. She was subsequently executed on […]
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Robert Woodburn: Most of the two and a half years I spent in Hong Kong in the 1950s was at RAF Kai Tak. However, in October 1954 I was posted from Kai Tak to the Army base at Sha Tin as a Senior Aircraftman. My living quarters was situated just off the main Sha Tin road and I was transported daily to the […]
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Elizabeth Ride has sent two pages of BAAG Counter Espionage Precis No. 1, 21st January 1944, which concern Chan Kim Ming and Susan Soo. This adds to information about Chan and Soo included in our article, Bobbie (Bobby) and Frank Gardner and Chan Kim Ming in Macau, 1944, BAAG report, linked below. Chan Kim Ming also known as, Jimmy Chan, Chan Yat Ming, Chan […]
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HF: The SCMP of 6th April 2016 contained an article about the preservation of Ho Hung Yee’s umbrella stall. It will be dismantled and “may” be permanently exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of History. The article begins: “Atop the slopes of Central’s Peel Street, a modest crowd stood admiring a historic umbrella street stall for the last time on […]
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IDJ has sent a series of articles about managers at Taikoo Dockyard: “Kenneth Edward Grieg, was born in Perth in 1882 and went to school at Perth Academy. At sixteen he entered on an engineering apprenticeship in the Caledonian Railway locomotive shops at Perth but went to the North Eastern Marine Engineering Co. at Wallsend-on-Tyne in 1900 to complete his […]
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