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VIEW OF SASSOON FARM.
VIEW
OF KAILUNWAN FARM.
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INTRODUCTORY.
ONG KONG in the popular Western view is a mere dot on the China Sea." Virtually it is no more than that; actually it is the connecting link between the East and the West, a port of the greatest magnitude and one of the brightest gems adorning the diadem of the British Empire. Just a trifle over seventy years ago it was a "barren rock," To-day it
has close on a million inhabitants, and besides its vast mercantile interests. it is second to none in the Orient as a financial, engineering and educational centre. Long before the Dairy Farm Company came into existence the want of a pure and adequate milk supply was acutely felt. It was the one drawback to existence on an otherwise beautiful and hospitable island. Such milk as came from native buffaloes and the few sickly, ill-kempt, unscientifically treated imported animals was not good for the community. Sold without license or restriction, without proper inspection and safeguards it was far from pure. Infants could not thrive upon it and those who partook did so at risk of infection from unhealthy cows, from the hands or clothes of dirty milkers, or from other forms of contamination, for in no substance do harmful bacteria spread more rapidly than in milk. Dr. (now Sir) Patrick Manson, a practising physician in Hong Kong, was the first to submit to the community a dairy farm scheme in concrete form. The scheme was at the time considered a bold one, for no more unpromising field for such an enterprise could well be imagined than the steep, granite slopes of what was once facetiously described as the Island of Fragrant Waters." Hong Kong had no pasture lands, not even a blade of natural grass that a dairy animal could live upon. Scarred with deep ravines, strewn with the immovable wreckage of some great upheaval, a maze of pinnacle-pointed hillocks, the island offered no opportunity for the agri- culturist. Blind quartz and disintegrated granite supported a plentiful but useless mountain growth, a few stunted shrubs, and here and there some clumps of distorted China pine. Such were the conditions that faced the pioneers of the Dairy Farm thirty-four years ago. It was no land of pro- mise they set to work upon. Yet, to-day there exists on the South-West corner of the Island what has developed, in spite of difficulties and anxieties
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