CO129-594-1 Rehabilitation of Hong Kong University. For extracted photographs see CN 3-45- Advisory Committee report 29-3-1946 - 3-7-1946 — Page 194

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Site and Buildings

1.

The University Committee of 1939 recommended the removal of the University to a sito outside the very crowded municipal limits of long long. The present site of remarkable natural beauty, on a hill sloping sharply to the harbour had become for long, Long 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 uneconomicully. consid ration that weighed when the transfer of the University was recommended was timt the University was impeding the natural growth of the city of Victoria. Comittee in 1940 reconsidered the whole matter with great care and ioduced plans and drawings to show that properly used the site would easily accomodate a Univer-

ity twice as large as Hong Long University then was. Provision to meet municipal clainu was ade 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 ropesula is remembered by the members of this Committee to cause it to differ fro. the 1939 Committee/timt in their Primion a change of site was essential for its development.

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2. A new science building was completed about three months before the Japanese invasion. It was planned to take existing classes in chemistry, Physice, botany and Zoology, but the /and architect was instructed to plan so that in the near future the building mig t be acopted for the Chemistry Department alone. For a University such as is now projected this block should be assigned to the Chemistry Depart,ent, and additional accommodation would have to be provided of no less space for inysics. before the war this would have cost about £25,000 to 130,000. 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 Research Institute. 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 coat of building in lost-war Hong Kong is not yet to hund.