IV
FINANCE
Site and Buildings
1. The University Committee of 1939 recommended the removal of the University to a site outside the very crowded municipal limits of Hong Kong. The present site of remarkable natural beauty, on a hill sloping sharply to the harbour had become for Hong Kong what the College gardens are for Cambridge and Oxford. But the site was never planned as a whole and hence it has been used very uneconomically. A consideration that weighed when the transfer of the University was recommended was that the University was impeding the natural growth of the city of Victoria. A Committee in 1940 reconsidered the whole matter with great care and produced plans and drawings to show that properly used the site would easily accommodate a University twice as large as Hong Kong University then was. Provision to meet municipal claims was made by a proposal to surrender part of the site for town extension and for road construction. By levelling and filling, the existing inadequate land for games could be very greatly increased. These plans and detailed recommendations were almost certainly lost in the Japanese destruction of the University records. But sufficient of the proposals is remembered by the members of this Committee to cause it to differ from the 1939 Committee's view that a change of site was essential for University development.
2. A new Science building was completed about three months before the Japanese invasion. It largely sufficed to take existing classes in Chemistry, Physics, Botany and Zoology, the land architect was instructed to plan so that in the near. future the building might be adopted for the Chemistry Department alone. For a University such as is now projected this block should be assigned to the Chemistry Department, and additional accommodation would have to be provided of no less space for Physics. Before the war this would have cost about £25,000 to £30,000. Accommodation for Botany, Geology and Geography would also be necessary at a cost somewhat less, perhaps £15,000, since accommodation for research work in Marine Zoology is already provided in the new Fisheries Reserch Instituts. UNESCO inventories for the re-equipment of Laboratories in devastated areas, which have been of great value to us show that the cost of new equipment will be about £40,000.
3. No reliable estimate of the cost of the repairs of the buildings of the Faculties of Arts and Science is possible. Information about the cost of building in Post-war Hong Kong is not yet to hand.
All building materials except bricks and cement will have to be imported and the demand is very great. A sum of £15,000 for this work does not seem too high. The buildings of the Medical Faculty had, before the war, ceased to be adequate and they have been so sited ageinst the hillside that extensions are impossible. Repairs to Medical buildings may cost £8,000. Re-equipment of the laboratories for Anatomy and Physiology, Pathology and Biochemistry is likely to cost at least £25,000 on the UNESCO minimal basis.
/4.