HONGKONG.
PRAYA RECLAMATION SCHEME.
(1.)
(Mr. Chater to Acting Colonial Secretary.)
HONGKONG, 13th July, 1887.
SIR,
I have the honour to submit to His Excellency the Officer Administering the Government a project for the reclamation of the foreshore extending from the Gas Works near West Point to the Swimming Bath at Government Wharf.
It is generally recognized by those who are professionally competent to judge, including the Surveyor General of the Colony, that the silting up of the entire foreshore of the City of Victoria, due to a great extent to natural and unavoidable causes, is going on upon a scale so extensive as to make it impossible to prevent or even partially arrest the evil by the employment of steam dredgers, and that, therefore, the only alternative left to the Colony is to convert into healthy dry land the belt of noxious black mud foreshore which at present poisons the whole of the neighbourhood with its pestilential exhalations during the hours of low tide.
His Excellency General CAMERON, who, since his assumption of the Government, has manifested so keen an interest in the initiation of sanitary measures, will not fail to appreciate the enormous benefit to the Public Health which would accrue from the removal of so grave a danger to the Community as that presented by the actual condition of our Praya foreshore.
But this project of proposed new reclamations will recommend itself to His Excellency's approval on grounds equally important, i.e., the increased room which it will throw open for new buildings and dwelling houses, and the consequent relief that it will afford to the present overcrowded condition of the City in the very centres where that overcrowding exists.
The project aims at pushing out into deep water the entire Marine frontage of the City of Victoria, at present left for the most part high and dry at low tide, and by placing the new Praya Wall 250 feet, on an average, outside of the present Praya, thus securing an average depth of twenty feet of water along the sea-wall even during the lowest tides, and thereby giving ships of fairly deep draught access to the proposed new quays along their whole extent. I have now had for some years considerable practical experience of sea reclamations in Hongkong, having been instrumental in the carrying out of large works of this kind in equally deep water at Kowloon, Shektongtsui, and Kennedytown, and my opinion that the present project may be realized without any engineering difficulty is fully confirmed by the Surveyor General, whom I have professionally consulted.
A work of the magnitude here suggested may perhaps at a first glance be deemed far too ambitious, and His Exceller 'y may consider it too costly for the resources of the Colony, but the chief featu of the scheme is that, while benefiting the Government and the community at lar, it may be effected without involving the expenditure of one single dollar of public funds, unless the Government desires to participate also in the reclamations in respect of such of its own properties as are situated along the Praya, and for which I estimate it may obtain at auction sale a net profit of no less than $1,500,000 after paying all expenses attendant on the work of reclamation.
In Hongkong, land has now attained such high values, in consequence of the increased prosperity of the Colony and the influx of population, that it is found remunerative even to reclaim sites from the sea at great expense to the owner.
The Honourable F. STEWART, LL.D.,
Acting Colonial Secretary.
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