James Chan: Dragages Hong Kong, is a very familiar company name on signs at major construction projects around Hong Kong. It’s parent company is Bouygues Construction The company was founded in Vietnam in 1902 as Société Française Industrielle D’Extreme-Orient. It undertook its first project, the dredging and maintenance of a 2,000 kilometre canal system in the Mekong Delta. In 1910 […]
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IDJ: Before HAECO came into existence, three companies offered aircraft maintenance services at Kai Tak. JAMCO and PAMAS merged to become HAECO (Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company) on 1 November 1950. CNAC disappeared from the scene in 1949 when the government in China changed hands and CNAC’s assets were then subjected to a long drawn out legal battle in the […]
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IDJ has sent these extracts from a 1908 book which describe the company and show photographs of its operations. The company was founded in 1862, The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (now known as Towngas) was Hong Kong’s first public utility and its original generating plant, the first in Asia, stood on the waterfront at West Point near Whitty Street. […]
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Vaudine England has kindly sent a link to what she describes as a typically 1900-era directory of the European empires in the east. The author was D Warren Smith. We have already posted the following extracts from this account, Part One – Industries in Hong Kong, Part Two – Shipyards in Hong Kong, and Part Three – The Peak District […]
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CM Fung: Dan Waters’ recollections: Dan Waters said “he remembers that when he arrived in HK in the 1950s it was possible to be taken up Sunset Peak (Tai Tung Shan) on Lantau island in a sedan chair. $30 to the top; or $15 half way up which Dan seems to remember was quite common.” Fung Chi Ming’s feedback: I […]
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York Lo: Triangle Motors (合眾汽車) – from Shanghai to HK and from Opel to Isuzu Leon Zigal and the first Opel in Hong Kong (Eagles and Dragons) Founded in Shanghai in 1931 by Leon Zigal (1900-1962) and relocated to HK in the late 1940s, Triangle Motors has been an important player in the distribution of automobiles and trucks in HK and […]
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“If you missed the last Star Ferry at 1:30am, [back in the 1960s] you could hire a walla-walla (jip6 laa1 jip6 laa1 嘩啦嘩啦), a kind of small motorised water taxi that plied the waters between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. “The name came from the sound of the boats when they were cruising,” says retired journalist Li Ping-sum,who grew up in Yau Ma Tei. […]
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Tymon Mellor: Hong Kong International Airport handles over 1,000 aircraft movements a day, a long way from the first Hong Kong airfield at Sha Tin, where at 5:10pm on 18th March, 1911 Charles Van den Born, a Belgian undertook the first powered flight in the territory. Flying a 1910 Farman Mk II bi-plane named “Wanda”, he made a short flight […]
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Earlier on the website, we profiled the major taxicab companies in HK from the 1920s to the 1960s. The late 1960s saw the dissolution of the large taxicab companies and the emergence of driver-owned taxis driven by regulatory changes and the proliferation of transportation vehicles such as minibuses and unlicensed cabs (also known as “white plate cars”) to meet the […]
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IDJ has sent the PF Leeds 1984 extract below concerning Trams in Kowloon. HF Presumably “the company” means Hong Kong Tramways. (Note: In 1902 Hong Kong Tramway Electric Company Limited was founded. In the same year the company changed its name to Electric Traction Company of Hong Kong Limited. And in 1910 the name changed again to The Hong Kong […]
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