Hong Kong Annual Report, 1955/Chapter 1

Hong Kong residents, as they saw 1955 out, called it an ordinary year. Hong Kong's definition of the word "ordinary", however, needs examination. The last decade has conditioned the Colony to spectacular events. Development and change, on a scale which visitors usually consider remarkable, tend to be regarded in the Colony itself as commonplace.

1955, people say, has been an ordinary year. It has seen the Government's announcement that a thorough investigation is to be made into the problem of driving a tunnel underneath the world-famous harbour, making it possible to pass by car in less than five minutes from Garden Road to the foot of Kowloon Peninsula. Yet typical of Hong Kong public reactions, the fact that a tunnel would probably cost the tax-payer HK$160,000,000 did not figure large in the discussions that followed the announcement. Comment centred on whether it would not be preferable, instead of a tunnel, to have a bridge.

The year also saw the start of work on a $110,000,000 project to revolutionize Kai Tak Airport by the construction of a 7,200-ft. runway on an artificial promontory reclaimed from the sea and projecting out into the waters of Kowloon Bay. In danger of being knocked off the international airline map by reason of its airport being too small and dangerous for the Comet and the lager conventional airliners, Hong Kong has now taken steps to keep itself firmly on the map. The airport project, when completed in 1958, will provide, for the first time since aviation started in the Colony, facilities for day and night operation all the year round.

A $125,000,000 reservoir is in course of construction at Tai Lam Chung, and during the year the Colony learnt without emotion that yet another reservoir, on the same scale, is likely to follow this one.

An important reclamation of waterfront in the heart of the Central District has provided land for the erection of a City Hall, long the subject of debate between those who think that Hong Kong should be more of a cultural centre and those who think it never will be.

The 200-bed Tsan Yuk Maternity Hospital, of which the foundation stone was laid by the Duchess of Kent in 1952, was opened this year, and it was announced that Kowloon Hospital would be replaced by an entirely new Kowloon General Hospital, situated in King's Park. More than double the size of the existing Queen Mary Hospital, it will have 1,275 beds, a special children's section with 200 beds, and staff quarters. Costing $50,000,000, it will be the largest general hospital in the Commonwealth.

Some idea of the bold conception and design behind these and other schemes, in which Hong Kong plans for its future, can be obtained from the various models and drawings reproduced between pages 156 and 157. To complete the impression, it should be added that the building programme for the resettlement of refugees and other squatters, one of the largest and most swiftly executed poor man's housing schemes in the world, continued without interruption, while beneath the multifarious activity which has always been characteristic of the Colony, the very basis of its livelihood was all the time changing.

When China's entry into Korean War produced international restrictions on trade with China, Hong Kong suffered within a few months the almost total loss of the great entrepôt trade on which it had depended for a hundred years, and which was thought to be the chief source of its prosperity. Yet, in the words of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, broadcasting to the people of Hong Kong during his visit in August, "instead of interpreting all this as a threat to its existence, Hong Kong has accepted it as a challenge to its well-known ingenuity and resilience". Almost bereft of its entrepôt trade, the Colony has switched over its energies to manufacturing. The change has happened with such rapidity that there are still many countries in which people find it hard to believe that goods marked "Made in Hong Kong" really are made in the Colony. On many occasions, and in many countries, Hong Kong has been falsely accused of putting its trade mark on goods manufactured elsewhere and which, the Colony's detractors have said, were merely being re-exported. Yet this extraordinary change from an entrepôt to a largely manufacturing economy is already far advanced, and has proceeded apace during 1955.

This may serve to give some idea of what Hong Kong people mean by an ordinary year.