The Hong Kong History Podcast

It must be obvious from what we’ve looked at so far that because of its importance to sea trade – then as now ninety per cent and more of international flows of goods – and to the economies of Britain’s empire, coal stores mattered. It is easy to see why. Until the early twentieth century, and not always even then, no ship could carry enough coal to fuel it from its starting point to wherever it w...

To begin with in the 1840s, the almost exclusive use for coal in Hong Kong was to fuel the steam engines of ships. William Tarrant, a very typical Hong Kong denizen then as now, or how a no-one can become a someone once the pond is small enough – claimed in 1848 that “the whole quantity consumed in Hongkong including the barracks during a year, does not probably exceed a thousand tons.” We know th...

Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s because as demand rose, so the amount of coal needed to be kept on hand increased accordingly: from around 3,000 tonnes in 1844 to more like 10,000 tons twenty years later and, forty years after that, 100,000 tons. That’s a lot of real estate. Ad ho...

Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880s – were chronically inefficient consumers of it to boot. Up until the 1860s, a typical 700hp engine would have needed up to 50 tonnes of coal a day. Hong Kong’s Harbour Master’s statistics are pretty useless and there is no hard data on steamship nu...

Britain’s huge advantage economically was its early development both of a coal industry and of a seaborne coal trade. Hong Kong’s big disadvantage is that had few natural mineral resources and no coal. As Britain aggressively expanded its empire in the mid-19th century, it could do so using steam ships supplied with coal from Britain. We can see that at work in a wonderful infographic created by t...

If you go to the Hong Kong Cemetery, you can find two memorials, placed there from their original positions in Hong Kong’s streets, to British and American steam warships. One is to the men of a sailing brig, HMS  Vestal , who died 1844-47, her battles against the pirates much assisted by the steam paddlers HM Ships  Vixen  and  Vulture . The other, to the casualties of HMS  Rattler  and the USS ...

The answer – well, an answer – is coal. How so? Generally, the take on the British victories tends to emphasize the fairly sorry state of the Qing military in terms of funding, equipment and training, and those forces’ huge disadvantage faced with massive broadsides of British ships and the lethal firepower of the British infantry’s muskets. It isn’t much commented on in the umpteen histories of t...

In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage. The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong Kong, usually began...

You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network –  slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B. But if one means what we’re all familiar with, timetabled services run by comp...

Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But, assisted by a bit of fossicking in archives, maps can also tell stories all by themselves. Maps of Hong Kong tells lots of them. Like the way the small island everyone these days knows as Ap Lei Pai came to have that name…and how it’s the wrong one....

Wrecks were pretty commonplace in 1892 and were at best usually a nine days wonder. However, the loss of the P&O Company’s SS  Bokhara  was something else. News stories ran all over the world for almost two years. A presentation silver plate was sent by Queen Victoria to the head of the rescuers of the few survivors. There was involvement by the Governor of Hong Kong, a visit by the C-in-C of...

Shanghai and Hong Kong have been the starting point for more ‘sail a Chinese built junk across the seas’ than anywhere else. Hans van Tillburg has identified sixteen 19th century junks reported arriving on the west coast of North America. I’ve tallied thirty three reported on from around 1900 to c.1990. In Hong Kong the story starts with the  Keying  in 1846 and ends – maybe – with the  Taiping Pr...

There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, for example, but looking at all the known ships that have had ‘Hong Kong’ in their names (about 127 of them) offers interesting perspectives on Hong Kong’s maritime story. Who called their ships after our home city? Not the big local colonial shipowner...

Imperialist Britain spread modern-style, rules governed, organized sport – very much the creation of a newly leisured, comparatively affluent early Victorian world – all over the world. One of those sports, though never up there in popularity and participation like football and cricket, was sailing. Hong Kong was a home for recreational sailing almost as soon as the British grabbed it in 1841. It...

The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are not movers and shakers. Yet it is those lives, humdrum and invisible though they often are, that actually make moving and shaking possible. In being moved and shaken, it’s we nobodies who actually do the moving and shaking. Chance can sometimes reve...

Almost wherever you are there will be streets named after town worthies, or national eminences, or significant entities and events. Sometimes, particularly in larger towns, the names can reveal additional historical detail. What the main trades were and where they concentrated, for example. In Hong Kong over one hundred street names reveal details of Hong Kong’s maritime story, particularly in its...

Over around a century and a half Hong Kong’s story has been told by professional and amateur historians. A few names became scores following the explosion in Hong Kong studies after the 1970s. Today there are as many and more netizens and bloggers. We don’t often know much detail about any of the handful of colonialist pioneers of the 1890-1960 period. They’re just authors’ names. Most of them are...

In this final episode of season two Stephen Davies talks about Hong Kong as a port. He takes us through its gradual rise from after the Second World War up until 2010 when it registered as the world's largest port, and then its slow decline after that. Along the way we talk about Chinese junks and the general modernization of ships in general operated from Hong Kong.

In this episode Stephen discusses the social unrest in Hong Kong during the 1960s & 70s and follows with a look at how the issues were resolved during the 1970s. The episode includes an eyewitness account from Stephen himself, and a mystery of why his visit at the time was never recorded.  As always Stephen has a number of stories to tell along the way including a discussion on police cor...

In this episode Stephen talks through the ups and downs of the Hong Kong Fishing Industry. He also discusses the kids of boats that were being used and why many continued to use traditional boats well beyond their years. On land he talks about the development of the fish markets associations that ensured the fishermen received a proper price for their catch.

In episode eight Stephen explains how after the Second World War Hong Kong became a global powerhouse in ship breaking and then how that slowly transformed into one of the world largest container ports. We discuss how shipping changed during the period including a story of a concrete ship.

In the first episode of a new series Dr Stephen Davies discusses post war Hong Kong and the challenges it faced. With the population tripling in a short period, a damaged harbour and a changing view towards colonies, the city had much to figure out in a short period of time. You can find Stephen's books, Transport to another world: HMS Tamar and the sinews of empire https://www.amazon.com/Transpor...

In this episode Stephen takes us through the days before the Japanese invasion to a detailed account of the invasion itself and then onto a short discussion about the war days in Hong Kong. The podcast finishes with an account of the Royal Navy sailing into Hong Kong to accept the Japanese surrender. You can subscribe to the podcast on, Google Podcasts https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93...

In this episode Stephen and DJ discuss the period leading up to the First World War, what happened in Hong Hong during the war and the period after. They compare Shanghai with Hong Kong at the time and talk about the advantages Hong Kong had leading up to the Second World War. You can subscribe to the podcast on, Google Podcasts https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlaG9uZ2tvbmdoaXN0...

In the fourth episode Stephen takes us through the turn of the 20th century up until World War 1. We discuss the rapid change in shipping during the period, defending the island as well as the typhoons that would sweep through the territory. You can subscribe to the podcast on, Google Podcasts https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlaG9uZ2tvbmdoaXN0b3J5cG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC54bWw Appl...