HF: In January 1904 Alfred Dickinson and Company, the consulting engineers for Hong Kong Tramways Ltd wrote to the under-secretary of state at the Colonial Office. The letter states that the company had discussed with Sir Paul Chater the possibility of constructing a tramway system on the Kowloon Peninsula and of extending this as far as Shum Chun in China. […]
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York Lo: Crowning Achievement: Crown Motors (皇冠汽車) and 50 years of Toyota in HK Article about the opening of Crown Motors in 1966 with picture of one of its Toyotas (KSDN, 1966-12-21) Earlier on the website we covered three auto dealers which primarily focused on British cars that are part of the Inchcape group – Metro, Dodwell and Gilman. The […]
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York Lo: From Dodwell Motors and Gilman Motors to Metro-Dodwell and MD Motors As a result of a series of acquisitions by the Inchcape group in the late 1960s, Metro Cars, the distributor of Austin automobiles covered earlier merged with Dodwell Motors and Gilman Motors to form Metro-Dodwell, the largest auto dealer in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. Below […]
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HF: IDJ has sent in this report about the first private submarine built in Hong Kong. As he says this shows how versatile the students of the Far East Flying Training School (FEFTS) could be in their endeavours. As you will see Mr Yuen constructed another submarine. I am presuming this was also made in Hong Kong though this is […]
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York Lo: Metro Cars (新英華汽車) and Austin automobiles in HK (1953-1970) Left: Metro Cars building in Tsuen Wan in the 1960s; Right: ad for Austin’s A40 model in 1959 (WKYP, 1959-4-14) Before the onslaught of Japanese automobiles in the 1970s, British cars dominated the roads of Hong Kong and Austin was a particularly popular brand in the 1950s and 1960s, represented […]
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‘Maverick’ has kindly sent this film of the Wo Hop Shek Spur Line. It has moments of great charm and nostalgia for those old enough to remember single line branches – children running at the station along side the train as it pulls in, the safety system of passing a token (what was the particular system with a large loop […]
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Fung Chi Ming: The type of man-powered transport known in English as “sedan chair” has different regional names, including jiao (轎) in China and kago (駕籠) in Japan. In Hong Kong, where it is no longer used as a means of passenger transport, it is known in local Cantonese dialect as san-dau (山兜, “mountain cabin”), kin–yue (肩舆, “shoulder carriage”) and […]
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IDJ has sent a fairly detailed account of The Hongkong Electric Tramway which appears in a book published in 1908 linked below. This includes details of: – the construction of the Tramway, the consulting engineers being Alfred Dickinson & Co of Birmingham, UK, and the contractors Dick, Kerr & Co of London – the track dimensions and length, along with […]
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IDJ: Imperial Airways (Far East) Ltd Many people in Hong Kong have no concept of how airlines developed in the territory despite air services being their primary means of transport overseas. Airline services arrived late in Hong Kong relative to the rest of the world. Not until 1936, when the UK based Imperial Airways was slowly extending its routes from […]
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This article about Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala was written by Sooni Shroff-Gander and first published in the Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, edited by May Holdsworth and Christopher Munn. The publisher, HK University Press, has kindly granted permission for it to be posted here, but retains copyright over this material from 2012. HF: Regrettably I have been unable to find any image of […]
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