HISTORY
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and Des Voeux Road to the city. Large reclamations were made in the Wan Chai area in the years 1921-9.
Increasing urbanization led also to the problem of water supply, and the start of a century long race between water capacity and population. Prior to 1941 successive water schemes were inaugurated at Pok Fu Lam (1864), Tai Tam (1889), Wong Nai Chung (1899), Tai Tam Tuk (1917) and the Jubilee reservoir in the Shing Mun Valley in 1935.
THE CHINESE REVOLUTION AND TWO WORLD WARS
The Chinese Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. There followed a long period of unrest in China and again large numbers of refugees found shelter in the Colony. One of its leaders, Sun Yat-sen, -who headed the Kuomintang republican group centred in Canton, had been deeply influenced by the British institutions he had seen while a student in Hong Kong. Chinese participation in the first World War was followed by strong nationalist and anti-foreign sentiment inspired both by disappoint- ment over their failure at the Versailles peace conference to regain the German concessions in Shantung and by the post-war radicalism of the Kuomintang. The Chinese wanted to abolish all foreign treaty privileges in China. Foreign goods were boycotted and the unrest spread to Hong Kong where a seamen's strike in 1922 was followed by a serious general strike in 1925-6 under pressure from Canton. This petered out, but not before considerable disruption of the life of the Colony. Britain, as the holder of the largest foreign stake in China, was the main target of this anti- foreign sentiment, but Japan soon replaced her in this position. Japanese plans for political aggrandizement in the Far East became apparent when she seized the opportunity of the first World War to present her Twenty One Demands to China early in 1915. In 1931 she occupied Manchuria and her attempt to detach China's northern provinces led to open war in 1937. Canton fell to the Japanese in 1938 and was followed by a mass flight of refugees to Hong Kong. It was estimated that some 100,000 entered in 1937, 500,000 in 1938 and 150,000 in 1939 bringing the population at the outbreak of war to an estimated 1,600,000, and it was thought that at the height of the influx about half a million were sleeping in the streets.
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