rather than unemployment. He adds that the colony’s predominantly young
population would necessitate a sharp increase in government spending for
schools and hospitals. Like Mr. Barton, he recognizes that thousands of
additional jobs must be ready for young people when they begin moving
into the employment market.
He regards the preservation of Imperial Preference as vital to the colony
in meeting Japanese competition, but he believes that Hong Kong will not
be injured by the European Common Market if the colony’s economic needs
are recognized in the agreement.
Although the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank is commonly viewed as the
incarnation of everything British, its founders included an American,
two Parsees, two Germans and an Ottoman Jew. For many years it has been
a leader in employing and training Portuguese office workers, accepting
them on individual merit instead of drawing a rigidly British line. The
bank celebrates its centennial in 1964.
John L. Marden is the chief executive of a company which dates from 1933
under its present title, but has corporate origins going back to the
opening of the China trade. The Wheelock Marden companies have interests
in shipping, shipbuilding, textiles, finance, aviation, land, insurance,
merchandising and many other lines.
Among Hong Kong’s industrial assets, Mr. Marden lists its freedom from
controls, its political stability, its low income tax on individuals and
corporations and its resistance to inflation.
It is his conviction that Hong Kong industry should concentrate on
quality products, and those which require a high labor content. He cites
transistor radios of the less complicated type as an example of the
colony’s high-labor products.
“I think we should emphasize that there is something more at stake than
profits,” Marden says. “The colony is seeking to create 300,000 new jobs
for the young people who will be coming on the job market soon; if we can
do this without appealing for outside aid, then we’ve made a contribution
to the economy of the entire free world.”
In the past, he believes, colony industries just took orders as they
came. Now, in his opinion, the industries must develop their own
marketing facilities to discover what products are needed, and then work
to meet these needs. He feels that there must be greater diversification
if Hong Kong is to hold its place in the industrial world.
These three men, like practically every leader in its industrial and
political community, are acutely conscious of the many hazards that Hong
Kong faces.
And not one of them acts or speaks as though he were not solidly
confident that Hong Kong will overcome its handicaps and external dangers
and go on to greater prosperity.
CHAPTER FIVE
High Land, Low Water
“It is unfortunate that the space between the foot of the
mountains and the edge of the sea is so very limited.”—HALL &
BERNARD, _The Nemesis in China_, 1847
Hong Kong has always had more land and water than it could use, because
most of the land is a hilly waste and most of the water is salty.
From the first years of the colony until today, the persisting shortage
of usable land and fresh water has confronted every governor with a
problem that he could neither solve nor ignore. They have all wrestled
with it, none more vigorously than the governors of the last fifteen
years, and the problem has become more costly, complex and acute than
ever.
In any community, land and water problems are related to each other;
in the peculiar circumstances of Hong Kong’s climate, geography and
population, they intersect at more points than Laocoön and the serpents.
Consider the governor’s alternatives: If he stores the entire run-off of
the summer rainy season in the reservoirs it will barely meet the minimum
needs of the urban millions on Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and it will
cause the withering of the crops of farmers in the New Territories during
the winter dry season. If he cuts the city supply, how can he meet the
ever-increasing needs of the new industrial centers, like Tsuen Wan and
Kwun Tong, that the government is building on land reclaimed from the sea?
The if’s are endless: If he stops the reclamation program to reduce
the demand for more water, real estate costs will climb so fast that
local industries will price themselves out of the export market. If he
builds all the reservoirs the colony needs, who will pay for them? If he
doesn’t, how can the fast-growing population of the colony survive? If
the reservoirs displace more farmers, who will raise the food?
The present disposition of the colony government is to provide as much
additional land and water as it can, and let the if’s fall where they
may. To that end, it has spent about $60 million on reclamation and
$55 million to increase its water supply since World War II. Over the
next decade, its further expenditures in these two areas may reach $300
million. Many projects have not yet been authorized, but much of the
preliminary surveying has been done. With the need for them becoming more
imperative as the colony’s population continues to increase, it is not so
much a question of if as of when.
Allocation of several hundred million dollars to correct deficiencies
of the topography is none too large for the job that must be done. When
one has noted that Hong Kong has a sheltered deep-water harbor (probably
the bed of an old river that flowed from west to east), that one-seventh
of its land is arable, and that its mines and quarries yield a modest
amount of iron ore, building stone, kaolin clay, graphite, lead, wolfram
and a few other minerals, one has exhausted the list of its terrestrial
assets. Its liabilities are unlimited.
Three broken lines of perpendicular hills cut across the colony from
northeast to southwest, with irregular spurs branching off haphazardly;
two dozen peaks poke up from 1,000 to 3,140 feet. Eighty percent of the
surface is either too steep for roads or buildings, too barren to grow
anything but wiry grass or scrub, too swampy to walk through or so hacked
up by erosion that it is worthless and an eyesore. The rest, except for
farmland, is either in forest or packed with people in numbers ranging
from 1,800 to 2,800 an acre. Rivers tumble from the high hills in all
directions, but they are short and unreliable, mostly summer torrents and
winter trickles.
Hong Kong’s weather is impartially disrespectful toward annual averages,
periodic tables and the population. Rainfall averages about 85 inches a
year, with the rainy season extending from April through September. There
have been long summer droughts and ruinous winter floods. On July 19,
1926, it rained nearly 4 inches in one hour and 21 inches in 24 hours.
Prevailing winds blow from the east in every month but June, and the
colony’s fishing settlements have been located to protect them from it.
The protection avails nothing against typhoons, which usually form in the
Caroline Islands, curve northwards over the Philippines and hit Hong Kong
from all angles, principally during the June to October season, though
there is no month which has not had at least one of them. Four out of
five bypass the colony, but the fifth may inflict devastation on ships,
boats and shoreline villages. It never snows and freezing temperatures
are extremely rare, yet the high, year-round humidity can put a raw edge
on cool wintry days and make summer clothing stickily uncomfortable.
Except for flat farmland in the northwestern New Territories, topsoil is
thin, highly acid and leaches badly during the rainy season.
This chronicle of drawbacks only tends to revive the question every
British administrator since 1841 must have asked himself: Why did we ever
settle this hump-backed wasteland? They have answered the question by a
dogged and unremitting effort to make it a habitable place.
The first English traders had scarcely settled along the north shore of
Hong Kong Island when it became evident that there was a shortage of
suitable land. The slopes of Mt. Gough and Victoria Peak rose steeply
behind Queen’s Road, the only street along the shore. Holders of
waterfront lots on the road extended them toward the harbor pretty much
at random, giving them more level land but creating a jagged shoreline
unprotected by any seawall. Several governors sought to build a straight
and solid seawall, but the lot-holders balked at paying its cost.
Two poorly constructed seawalls, erected in piecemeal fashion, were
wrecked by typhoons before the government was able to push through a
unified seawall and reclamation scheme. By 1904, a massive seawall
stretched along the island front for two miles, and Queen’s Road stood
two blocks inland from the harbor. Most of the colony’s principal office
buildings have been built on this reclaimed land.
Once the value of reclamation had been proved, the whole northern shore
of the island was gradually faced with a seawall. Much of the Wanchai
district rose from the sea in the 1920s and its new-found land was soon
covered with tenements or bars and cabarets catering to the sailors’
trade. Swamps became solid ground and promontories were swallowed up by
the seven-mile-long reclamation.
Starting in 1867, a succession of seawall and land-fill projects altered
the size and shape of the Kowloon Peninsula.
By the time of the Japanese invasion, a total of 1,425 acres, or more
than two square miles, had been reclaimed. The gain was twofold, for it
not only added level land, it absorbed all the fill from sites where
obstructing hills had been cut down to make existing ground usable.
The foundation of the colony’s tourist industry and air cargo business
rests on land reclaimed from Kowloon Bay and converted into an
international airport. Its name and its origin go back to 1918, when two
real estate promoters, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Au Tak, organized the Kai Tak
Land Development Co. to create building sites by filling in the northern
end of Kowloon Bay. Homesites and an 800-foot-long airstrip were in use
on the land by 1924, with Fowler’s Flying School the first aviation
tenant. Government took it over in 1930, improving and enlarging it in
preparation for the first international flight, an Imperial Airways’
weekly service to Penang started March 24, 1936, linking with the main
route between England and Australia. Four other international airlines,
including Pan American and Air France, joined the formation before the
Japanese seized the field in 1941. The Japanese extended its area and
built two concrete runways, but its buildings were bombed into rubble
before the war ended.
Restored to full operations in 1947, Kai Tak handled the strangest
one-way traffic boom in its history. In one month of 1949, 41,000
passengers were flown in from China to escape the advancing Communist
armies. Mainland service ended a year later, and traffic declined to
one-third of its former volume. The field itself, penned in by rocky
peaks, had reached the limits of its development, and the largest
four-engined ships were rapidly outgrowing it. For jets, it would be a
cow pasture at the bottom of a canyon.
The Department of Civil Aviation, after concluding that nothing further
could be done to expand the existing field, began casting around for
alternate sites. Fourteen of them, including Stonecutters Island and
Stanley Bay, were ruled out for excessive cost, inaccessibility, or risky
topography before the experts decided to put the airport right next to
the old one, on a strip of land that didn’t then exist.
The government put up the money and the job of building a promontory
7,800 feet long and 800 feet wide that would point directly into Kowloon
Bay began in 1956. A few hills would have to be knocked down to clear the
approaches, but disposal of the dirt would be simple, since 20 million
cubic yards of fill were needed to build the promontory. The new airport
runway was to have a length of 8,350 feet, extending the full length of
the reclaimed strip and well beyond its landward end.
Three thousand laborers, most of them hauling dirt by hand, worked nearly
three years to lay down the man-made peninsula. Although it was near
the old airport, it overcame the earlier field’s approach limitations
by being pointed straight at the 1,500-foot-wide harbor entrance of Lei
Yue Mun, and at the opposite end, having the Kowloon hills truncated to
permit another clear shot at the runway, depending on which direction
best fitted weather conditions.
The new runway went into use in 1958, with the completion of the terminal
coming several years later. Temporary terminal buildings bulged with
incoming tourists, but they were moved through these buildings fairly
well. Most colony residents are hardly aware of the arrival and departure
of the huge jets, though they shake the earth with their thunder as
they pass over Kowloon. Kai Tak has become a full 24-hour airport. Its
200-foot-wide runway is stressed to take a maximum plane weight of
400,000 pounds, well above the limit of the heaviest airliners. From the
air it looks like a super-highway lost at sea.
[Illustration: North from Victoria Peak. The colony government and main
business section are chiefly based on Hong Kong Island, foreground.
Kowloon Peninsula and the long runway of Kai Tak Airport lie at top
center. The New Territories start with the mountains in the background,
extend north to the Red China border. Hong Kong is one of the busiest
seaports in the world.]
[Illustration: Hong Kong in a hurry. Queens Road Central, in the colony’s
commercial center, swarms with pedestrians in a typical noon-hour rush.]
[Illustration: A Chinese funeral procession. Chief mourners ride in a
rickshaw. Street bands, drummers, and cymbal players march with them.
Firecrackers are exploded along the way to dispel evil spirits.]
[Illustration: Many picturesque laddered streets, such as the one above,
climb the slopes of Victoria Peak in the heavily populated Western
District of Hong Kong Island. Passable only by foot or in sedan chair,
they also serve as playgrounds for children and runs for dogs, cats, and
chickens.]
[Illustration: Night view of Government House, executive mansion of Hong
Kong’s British Governor. Behind it are Victoria Peak and tiers of fine
apartment buildings.]
[Illustration: Billy Tingle, the colony’s best known athletic instructor,
demonstrates the game of cricket to young pupils at the Hong Kong Cricket
Club.]
[Illustration: In contrast to Hong Kong’s many fashionable and modern
houses and apartment buildings, thousands of tightly packed boats serve
as floating homes in the mud flats of Aberdeen, on Hong Kong Island.
Periodically they are damaged or destroyed by typhoon.]
[Illustration: Bearded monsters like the one above adorn the prow of
rowing shells which participate in Hong Kong’s annual Dragon Boat
Festival races, part of a colorful religious observance held annually in
the late spring.]
[Illustration: Workmen unload 800-pound hampers of vegetables from Red
China at Lo Wu, where a railroad bridge crosses the Sham Chun River on
the Hong Kong-China border. The Communist flag flies above guard post at
the right.]
[Illustration: A marine police inspector at Hong Kong hauls in a
water-logged sampan used by six refugees in their escape from Red China.
They spent three nights and two days in the leaky craft before a fishing
junk picked them up near Lantau Island. Because of the overwhelming
number of refugees arriving in Hong Kong police were forced to return the
six to Red China.]
[Illustration: This Hong Kong heroin addict has been reduced to near
starvation by his craving for the drug. Drug addiction in the colony is
closely related to crime and poor living conditions.]
[Illustration: A hollowed-out wooden doll found in the home of a dope
smuggler. The heroin cache, covered with a closely fitted lid, was
difficult to detect.]
[Illustration: Girls at work in the vast spinning room of the South Sea
Textile Manufacturing Co. at Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, one of the world’s
most modern textile mills.]
[Illustration: By contrast, a woman uses a primitive wooden plow to till
a rice field in the New Territories, where power equipment is too large
and too costly for the tiny farms.]
[Illustration: A carpenter at a Shau Kei Wan shipyard on Hong Kong Island
uses an ancient bow type of drill in building a Chinese junk.]
[Illustration: At another yard in Shau Kei Wan, a workman employs a
portable electric power drill. Primitive and modern tools often are used
side-by-side in the changing and expanding Hong Kong boat industry.]
[Illustration: A young refugee Chinese girl paints artificial birds at
the China Refugee Development Organization factory in Kowloon, where
about 40,000 of these wire paper and cotton birds are produced every
month for sale overseas.]
[Illustration: A welfare pioneer, Gus Borgeest established a farm colony
on desolate Sunshine Island, Hong Kong, to teach refugees how to raise
crops on marginal land. With him is his wife, Mona, and Ruth, one of
their daughters.]
[Illustration: A freighter moored to a Hong Kong harbor buoy off-loads
its cargo into junks and lighters. There most cargo is handled in this
way, rather than by transferring it directly to piers.]
[Illustration: Fishing junks sail along Tolo Channel, one of the
deep-water inlets in the Eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. The bleak
hills are characteristic of the colony’s predominately rocky, barren
terrain.]
[Illustration: Refugees from Red China collect tin, tar paper, scrap
lumber and sacking for use in making their flimsy shelters. Multi-story
concrete resettlement developments are gradually replacing such shacks in
Hong Kong.]
Opening of the new Kai Tak Airport brought the colony an additional gain
by freeing 70 acres of the old field for industrial development.
Less than half a mile from the seaward end of Kai Tak, the first new town
in the government’s history is being built—Kwun Tong, an industrial,
commercial and residential area along the northeastern shore of Kowloon
Bay. A ten-year project of large extent, it required the removal of a
whole range of hills. The spoil was then hauled to the bay and dumped
behind a protecting seawall 2,477 feet long. The leveled hills and the
land reclaimed from the sea will provide a 514-acre site, close to a
square mile, for an industrial center whose population is expected to
reach 300,000 within a few years.
Digging and filling began in 1955 and have proceeded with such speed that
today, in order to get a panoramic view of the project, one has to go to
a hill three quarters of a mile back from the seawall. Block after block
of multi-storied factories stretch along the sea front, approximately
eighty of them, several blocks deep in the industrial zone between the
seawall and Kwun Tong Road, which cuts directly across the town. On the
landward side of Kwun Tong Road, the commercial and recreational zones
are beginning to take shape; behind them, the long files of resettlement
estates housing 60,000 persons and various government-aided housing for
another 15,000. Privately built houses are also being developed.
Kwun Tong has all the noisy, dusty confusion of any construction job in
progress, but there are already 15,000 people working in its completed
factories, making cotton yarn, furniture, garments, and other products.
Most of the factories are humming and a few betray signs of hasty
organization. One plant spent two years tinkering with stop-gap orders
for simple novelties while its management tried to find some profitable
use for a million dollars’ worth of fine machinery standing idle under
its roof.
Kwun Tong will never be a beauty spot because its main function is
industrial. Nearly half its total area will be reserved for homes and
commercial use, however. Proceeds from land sales are expected to repay
the government for its $17 million investment in Kwun Tong.
Tsuen Wan, a second industrial town about eight miles northwest of Kwun
Tong in the New Territories, has reclaimed around 70 acres from the sea.
Gin Drinkers’ Bay, an adjoining inlet used for ship-breaking, is being
filled in to provide 400 more acres of industrial sites. No one knows
the origin of its name but it no longer matters; this glass will soon
be filled with earth. When completed, Tsuen Wan will be a town of about
175,000 people.
Specialized reclamation projects have been pushed ahead at many other
spots. At North Point, on Hong Kong Island, 12,000 people live in tall
apartments built on recently reclaimed land. The new City Hall opened in
1962 on reclaimed waterfront land in the Central District. Five blocks
of the central waterfront, just west of the reclaimed land on which the
Star Ferry’s Hong Kong Island terminal sits, are being extended several
hundred feet into the harbor for more building sites.
The principal land-fill operations have been restricted to the island
and Kowloon Bay, except for Tseun Wan. The limitation has been human,
rather than geographic; most urban workers can’t afford to travel to
outlying locations and they don’t want to anyway. They plainly prefer the
excitement, gossip and sociability of the crowded cities.
Nevertheless, central reclamation possibilities are running out, unless
the government proposes to pave its entire harbor. As a more likely
alternative, it sent engineers out in 1957 to study reclamation sites
in the bays and shallow inlets of the New Territories. Five have been
tentatively chosen that could be developed to create 3,000 more acres
of land. The cost would come to more than $83 million, so there’s no
eagerness to tackle the project at once.
The never-ending task of providing more land for the colony’s growing
population would be meaningless without the assurance of an adequate
water supply. At this stage in the colony’s development, even when the
work of increasing the water supply is proceeding on a scale no previous
generation would have attempted, the builders and planners are not
deluding themselves. They know that when they have completed the last
unit of the reservoir system under construction, the needs of the colony
will probably have outstripped its capacity. There were times in the past
when some optimistic governor, presiding at the opening of a new dam or
reservoir, fancied that the problem had been met. The next drought was
sufficient to knock his hopeful predictions into a cocked hat.
Hong Kong has never been inclined to waste water. On the rare occasions
when its people had a full supply, as in certain periods of 1958 and
1959, its maximum average consumption ran to about 88 million gallons a
day for nearly 3,000,000 people. New York City, with just under 8,000,000
people, consumes about 1 billion 200 million gallons a day. Because of
an unparalleled water-supply system, Americans are the world’s champion
water-wasters. An American will use 100 gallons a day, compared with 27
gallons per person in Hong Kong, and about 50 gallons per person in Great
Britain.
There are compelling reasons why Hong Kong residents will not waste
water. The colony, unlike New York City, cannot draw from a watershed
covering several states. Except for a relatively small amount piped in
from Red China since 1960, it has had to rely on surface water collected
entirely from its 398¼ square miles of land area, which is about
one-fourth larger than New York City. And it has to get the water while
the getting is good; during the annual five-month dry season, the surface
run-off averages only 600,000 gallons a day.