70.
A TALK ON THE OLD DAYS
Sometimes one comes across a few lines in the middle of an article on old Hongkong days which provide a valuable clue to the past. An example of this is a lecture on "Old Hongkong", which the Rev. Mr. T. Pearce gave before the Union Church Literary Society on March 9, 1905,
from which I take the following interesting extracts.
The lecture was divided under four heads - (1) The name Hongkong: (2) Original inhabitants or settlers: (3) How and why Hongkong became British and (4) The conditions of life in Hongkong during the earliest years of British occupation.
Mr. Pearce said that one of the first uses which the Chinese discovered for Western drains and sewers was to tunnel under houses with a view to robbery.
In that way after weeks of work, burglars robbed the bank of India of $100,000 worth of bullion. In the same way 22 persons tunnelled into a drain and escaped from prison. The speaker's predecessor in the London Mission, Dr. Legg, said that he revealed to the Governor a plot by which 83 prisoners were on the verge of escaping through the sewers. As for piracy, the volumes written by the learned Registrar of the Supreme Court Mr. Norton Kyshe, were partly occupied by many stories of piracy...
There were two graphic and picturesque accounts of Hongkong, one by Mr. Tarrant and the second by Dr. Legg. Both were keen observers and both asked us to take a walk with them and in our mind's eye see what they saw. The starting point would be West Point just beyond the (old) Sailors' Home. There were the huts and tents of the 55th Regiment. The populous district to the eastward is still called Saiyingpun (West Camp) but that area was then undiversified by a single building. Passing eastward over the barren hillside till they came to what was now the site of the Government Civil Hospital, this area was considered desirable for European residents and two houses were there -- one of which was owned by Messrs. Gibb, Livingston and Co.
Taipingshan was then reached, and it was Dr. Legg who told us that up and down and athwart the hillside were thread-like paths with a Chinese house here and there. This was the great plague area of 1894 and the description of the Chinese houses "here and there" seems to suggest that the Chinese were beginning to live as they listed and prepare the way for the outbreak of pestilence which decimated the area.
Continuing the course eastwards they came to Jervois Street, then in course of formation, and the houses on both sides were washed by the sea. The property between the north side of Jervois Street and the sea to-day would be valued at a very handsome sum.
Along the Queen's Road level there was the Central Market, already the focus of a good deal of activity, but the parallel streets leading up from Queen's to Hollywood Road were scarcely formed. There was then no indication of the lofty tenement houses with narrow staircases, the rooms divided into cubicles, and the high rentals of to-day.
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