about 17 square miles in area, and of a width varying from one to three miles. The entrance from the East is by a deep water channel through Lyemun Pass, five to nine hundred yards wide. On the western side the harbour is protected by a group of islands pierced by channels of various depths. The largest of these islands is Lantau which is nearly twice the size of Hong Kong Island. This harbour, lying midway between the main ports of Haiphong in Indo-China and Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River, has become the gateway to South China and has grown to be one of the greatest seaports in the world.
The ceded territory of Kowloon originally consisted of a number of low dry foothills running southward from the escarpment of the Kowloon hills in a V-shaped peninsula two miles long and nowhere more than two miles wide. Most of these foothills have now been levelled and the spoil used to extend the area by reclamation. The town of Kowloon now covers the whole of this peninsula and a part of the leased territory to the north of it. It contains the Colony's main industrial area, one of the two principal commercial dock- yards, wharves for ocean-going ships, and a large residential suburb. Its population in 1941 threatened to overtake that of Victoria. The terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway, which connects at Canton with the network of the Chinese railways, is at the extreme southern tip of the peninsula. The Unicorn range of hills, even more precipitous though less high than those on the island, forms a barrier between Kowloon and the remainder of the Kowloon Peninsula.
A large part of the New Territories, both islands and mainland, is steep and barren. Before the war considerable areas were afforested, but one of the results of the occupation of the Colony by the Japanese was the felling of the vast majority of the trees for firewood, with the consequence that now only a few isolated woods remain, principally in the vicinity of villages. The highest point is the mountain called Taimoshan (3,141 feet) which lies seven miles northwest of Kowloon. To the northwest of this mountain, and extending to the marshes on the verge of Deep Bay stretches the Colony's largest area of cultivable land. The eastern half of the New Territories mainland is covered by irregular mountain masses deeply indented by arms of the sea and narrow valleys. Wherever cultivation is made possible by the presence of flat land and water, villages exist and crops are raised. Intricate terracing brings the maximum land under cultivation and the Chinese farmers, though ready to adopt any modern methods which are suited to local conditions and whose value has been demonstrated to them by practical tests, find in fact that there are few directions in which their traditional methods can be improved upon.
138