234
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
cargo. During the year, in the internal trades, these craft trans- ported more than 690,000 tons of cargo inward and 124,000 tons outward, whilst in trade with China they imported large quantities of foodstuffs; their total external trade for 1958 amounting to about 1,426,000 tons inward and 108,000 tons of cargo outward. About 1,500 junks operate inside Hong Kong Harbour itself, transporting thousands of tons of cargo to and from ocean-going shipping.
The shipyards and marine engineering establishments in the Colony maintained a satisfactory level of both repair and main- tenance work on ships calling at the Port in 1958. Over one hundred new vessels were constructed to the order of locally- based owners and for others overseas in the Persian Gulf, Malaya, the Pacific and America.
The services of the Ship Surveys staff of the Marine Department and of the resident Surveyors of Lloyd's Register of Shipping, Bureau Veritas, Norske Veritas and the American Bureau of Shipping are in constant demand by the thousands of ships of all nationalities which use the Port. Government Surveyors, apart from ensuring the observance of the International Conventions on Safety of Life at Sea and Load Lines, were fully occupied during 1958 in tonnage computations and checking standards of crew accommodation for the new ships built and the ships applying for registration, under the British flag, at Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Register of Ships now embodies half a million gross tons of shipping, of which 117 are foreign-going steam or motor vessels of over 500 gross tons. The Examination Centre at Hong Kong, serving the needs of navigating and engineering officers and crews manning this fleet, is the only centre between Calcutta and Melbourne presently engaged in this work and, together with the Hong Kong Technical College, gives full facilities for examinations for all Certificates of Competency of Common- wealth validity, and for Certificates in Radar Maintenance and as Radar Observer.
A Port Welfare Committee attends to the welfare of crews of visiting ships by allocating money provided by private donation and Government grant to organizations devoted to this work. This year the Committee distributed $180,000.