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In 1933 the price of progress had to be paid, but the site has
been put to not unprofitable use by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as
its Head Office.
The free grant of land had actually been made five years earlier
in 1874, so even in those halcyon days, certain plans took a long time to
But the spirit of the founding fathers must have been strong
materialise.
for the City Hall was erected by public sub-scription.
The nucleus of the library was formed by a collection from the
Morrison Education Society which donated 3,000 of the original 8,000
volumes; and a further 320 religious and devotional books in Chinese.
The lending library housed 3,287; so by 1871 there were about 12,839
volumes, with about 500 borrowers. Queen Victoria herself autographed a
few of her personal gifts of rare books. In that year, visitors to the
reading room numbered 1,412 non-Chinese and 628 Chinese on a monthly average.
It is rather interesting to note, however, that unlike the then museum which
was reserved in the mornings for Chinese and in the afternoons for non-
Chinese, with Saturday mornings reserved for Chinese women and children
only, the library appears to have had a more liberal policy of admittance,
but as the Chairman was a senior Jardines man, I leave the deduction to you.
One can always play games with numbers in Hong Kong; but I find
the collection of 12,000 volumes in 1871 curiously comparable to the book
stock of about 10,748 when the present City Hall Library was opened in
March 1962.
Today, we have a total bookstock of about 390,000 volumes in
our various libraries.
In 1971 1.2 million issues for home reading were recorded and
900,000 books issues were recorded for books read or consulted within the
libraries' premises. Some 65% of all the books read or consulted were
information books of a serious nature.
/Impressive
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