NOTES ON HONG KONG LIBRARIES
65
be removed for use within the Court, in Chambers, or the Registry, but were not to be taken further: whether this applied only to barristers and solicitors, who were privileged to use the Library subject to the rules, or also to the Judiciary and Law Officers who were entitled to use it, is not clear.
Mr. J. W. Norton-Kyshe, the Registrar of the Supreme Court, whose useful history of the laws of Hong Kong is the source of the information on its Library, managed to persuade the Government in 1896 that an annual grant should be made for the purchase of books. In 1897 this amounted to $500, and in the following year it was doubled,12
Certainly the history of Hong Kong libraries in the nineteenth century is by no means restricted to those which have been considered in this article, although they are probably the most important. There must, for example, have been libraries in the various schools, both Government sponsored and others, though the condition of school libraries in the Colony even today suggests that they would not have been particularly well organised fifty or more years ago. Government departments other than the Supreme Court must also have had collections of books. All these possibilities, quite apart from the existence of private libraries, both Chinese and English, need to be investigated. What has been discovered so far, however, contributes to refute the common notion of Hong Kong as a cultural desert, and to indicate that library history in Hong Kong goes back almost as far as the history of the Colony itself.
NOTES
1 V. H. G. Jarrett, under the pseudonym of 'Colonial' contributed a series of articles to the South China Morning Post between 17th June, 1933 and 13th April, 1935 on "Old Hong Kong". Typescripts of these articles were rearranged alphabetically by subject and bound in four volumes (unpaginated) in the S. C. M. P. Office. By kind permission of the Managing Director, a Xerox copy of this set is available in the University of Hong Kong Library. This extract is from the article headed "Public Library."
2 Hongkong Register, vol. 25, 1852, pp. 94-5.
3 At this date (1852) prices were normally quoted in Spanish or Mexican dollars, equivalent to about 4/2d sterling.