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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
side a group of islands, which include Tsing Yi, Lantao and Lamma, provide effective shelter. The importance of Hong Kong has hitherto depended on this harbour, and on its favourable position at the mouth of the most important river system in South China, within easy reach of Canton, South China's largest city.
The ceded territory of Kowloon originally consisted of a number of low, dry foothills running southward from the Kowloon hills in a V-shaped peninsula 2 miles long and nowhere more than 2 miles wide. Here and there on the peninsula were a few small Chinese villages. Most of the foothills have now been levelled, and the rock and soil thus cut away have been used to extend the land by reclamation from the sea. The town of Kowloon now covers the entire peninsula and stretches without interruption northward into the New Territories, the boundary of which is noticeable only from the name of Boundary Street, which marks it. Further on, the Kowloon hills set a final limit to this northward urban expansion, but around the sides of the harbour, westward toward Laichikok and eastward to Ngau Tau Kok, Kowloon is extending its urban arms to embrace several rural areas with villages established there for hundreds of years. Kowloon contains the Colony's main industrial area, one of the two principal commercial dock- yards, the largest wharves for ocean-going ships and, in the area known as Kowloon Tong, a large residential suburb. At the extreme southern tip of the peninsula, known as Tsimshatsui, is the terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway, which passes from Kowloon under the Kowloon hills and through the New Territories to Canton.
A large part of the New Territories, both islands and mainland, is mountainous and barren. The highest point, situated approximately in the centre of the mainland, is Taimoshan (3,140 ft.). The second and third highest points are both on Lantao Island: Lantao Peak, or Fu Yung Shan (3,061 ft.), which is the western of the two, and Sunset Peak