CODE RAD
Reference.
19
Mr Wye
Wntry.
HONG KONG QUOTES
нив 10214
8 OCT 1993
1. Herewith a few quotes on Hong Kong, the meagre result of several hours' searching at the weekend. Visitors; clearly do not have future Prime Ministerial speeches in mind!
2. "Just as Gibraltar dominates the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, so does Hongkong dominate commercially the entrance to the South China Seas... Like Gibraltar... it is almost entirely unproductive...
(H A Giles, A Glossary of Reference on Subjects connected with the Far East, Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1900, p.125.)
"The place has no history prior to its occupation by the British." (S Couling, The Encyclopedia Sinica, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 -originally Shanghai Kelly and Walsh 1917.)
[In 1839] "Opposite, on the mainland, where now stands
the glittering sky-scrappered mass of Kowloon, was a peninsula of low rocky hillocks, among which trees grew in isolated clumps in the neighbourhood of secluded villages, near which were small patches of cultivation."
(Austin Coates, Prelude to Hong Kong, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, p.192.
"So like a fanfare, as the vapours burnt away, a last phenomenon of China is revealed to you; a futuristic metropolis like something from another age or another sensibility, stacked around a harbour jammed fantastically with ships the busiest, the richest and the most truly extraordinary of Chinese cities, identified in the new orthography as Xianggang.
(Jan Morris, Xianggang Epilogue to an Empire, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990, p.17.)
"I remember that in the year [1863-64] ... when I came this way by sea to take up my post as Governor of Canton, the houses I saw in Hong Kong scarcely numbered a third of those today. Now, more than ten years later, streets run in all directions and tall buildings stand everywhere. It has become a veritable metropolis...
(Kuo Sung-t'ao 1876, on his way to take up his post as the first Chinese ambassador to the west, in J D Fordsham, editor, The First Chinese Embassy to the West, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, p.7.)
"...the actual position attained by Hong Kong as an emporium of trade, a centre of industry and one of the great shipping ports of the world, furnishes an unanswerable defence both of the choice of the site and the political structure erected on it. (A Michie, The Englishman in China during the Victorian Era, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900. Vol. I, 273-74.)
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