2
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
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 repro- duced 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 the 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.