HAPPY VALLEY
Reference to the old maps of the Colony show that for a good many years, and certainly into the Sixties, the name of Wongnychong, which we identify to-day as Wongneichong, was given to an area, or a Village, near Causeway Bay, where the name Whitfield is now applied. It would be interesting to know how the error, for such it seems, arose, and at what date the name came to be applied by the authorities to the village at the interior end of Happy Valley. We have seen (27-7-33) that the name Happy Valley was definitely assigned to the place some time in the Fifties, and it is so marked in a map of 1857.
In view of the rapidly developing suburb, with many flats of a most up-to-date character going up in this area, a review of the history of the valley will not be out of place.
352
The old records show that Happy Valley district was first intended by British subjects to be the principal business centre of the island. However, the prejudices of the Chinese merchants against the fung shui of the district, and the malignant fever "which emptied almost every European house in the neighbourhood almost as soon as occupied", caused the business settlement to move gradually westward. The subsequent reclamations in the city of Victoria enabled a postponement of the move towards the Valley, but pressure of population, combined with the healthiness of the neighbourhood, now, following drainage and modern sanitary knowledge, have had the effect contemplated so many years ago, of developing the locality as a big residential suburb, which already has assumed the dimensions of a small town. In anticipation of this, in the Forties and Fifties a number of European houses were erected on the slopes above the Valley, most of them of a somewhat unsubstantial nature, with matshed roofs; though later a number of wooden houses with stone foundations and brick lower storeys were erected, the woodwork being imported from Singapore, where European wooden bungalows were in favour, and where experience in their erection had been enjoyed for over twenty years, Singapore having been founded in 1819. A remnant of one of these old houses remained just at the back of Wongneichong village up to about 1924, when it was pulled down.
It was an old-fashioned brick house of two storeys, and had nearly the whole upper part blown off by the big typhoon of August 1923.
The Chinese name Wongneichong literally translated means "yellow muddy creek", and no doubt arose from the fact that the valley is intersected by a stream - now confined in a large nullah to prevent the periodical flooding which occurred up to recent years, and this stream opened into a tidal basin, which must have been muddy indeed, largely from the silt coming down.
The whole valley was given up to the growing of rice at the time of the British occupation, and the villagers were largely peasants, with a few fisherfolk as well. Some of the families resident in the area to-day trace direct descent from ancestors who lived in Wongneichong long before the advent of the British.