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twelve o'clock gun firing is due to the liberality of Mr Magniac (a partner) of Messrs. Jardine Matheson and Company, who, when the Home Government ceased to provide this small return for the heavy Military Contribution forwarded annually from this Colony, purchased a gun, etc. and had it fixed up at Messrs. Jardine's, where it is fired daily.
Although their gun is still at East Point, not far from where Jardine's started trading in 1841, their head office moved to Central District as long ago as 1864. It has been said there is not one field of commerce in which it does not hold a prominent position and its 'tentacles' extend to interests in many other firms.
Hong Kong Land
The Colony's leading businessmen have usually had considerable interests in land, and it was thus fitting that two of them, Paul Chater (later Sir Paul) and James Johnstone Keswick, should be prime movers in the Hong Kong Land Investment and Agency Company which was incorporated in 1889. The latter, as Taipan of Jardine's, following in the footsteps of his great-uncle William Jardine, was also founding chairman of Hong Kong Land. James was the first of six Keswicks, spanning five generations, to hold the position.
The company soon began buying sites and erecting office buildings. Between June 1904 and December 1905 it erected Hong Kong's first 'skyscrapers', five major buildings each of five or six storeys, which dwarfed the two and three-storey structures surrounding them.
Hong Kong Land acquired Humphrey's Estate and Finance Company, which owns residential property in Mid-Levels, in 1972, and for 14 years 'Land' had a controlling interest in the Dairy Farm, Ice and Cold Storage Company. Today, the latter is once again an independent public company. In its centenary year Hong Kong Land owned some six-million square feet of commercial space of which five-million is in the so-called 'Core Central' area. The firm has been described as "... perhaps the most valuable property company in the world and certainly in the region ...." Whether this is true is not known. Certainly, today, some Japanese companies hold considerable interests in real estate on a global scale.
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