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"There can be no doubt about the merits of your scheme which strongly appeals to my partners and myself and to which we contribute £10,000 believing that a University in Hong Kong will be to the advantage of our Colony and the Empire."

Voicing as they did in November 1929, their disappointment, Messrs. John Swire & Sons Ltd., in a letter addressed to His Excellency the Governor explained that their hope was that not only would the Engineering Faculty provide British firms in China with practical engineers who would help to create a greater feeling of unity between Chinese and British but also

"which is much more important than private advantage, that it would help to meet the great Chinese demand for qualified practical engineers in all kinds of enterprises all over the country by means of Chinese trained up in British ideas and standards of machinery and steelware."

The expectation was in fact that just as the Hong Kong University was to be an instrument for making the King's English predominant in the Far East, so the University's Faculty of Engineering was to contribute towards the expansion of British Commerce. Sir Frederick Lugard argued, with Messrs. John Swire & Sons Ltd., that a man trained in the engineering formulae of other western nations would not understand British catalogues and engineering particulars, and would draw up his specifications in accordance with the gauges and standards with which he was familiar.

33. The University was opened in 1912 and the Court of the University at one of its earliest meetings resolved that one of the main objects of the University was to afford a higher education in applied science. In 1914 came the great war and ever since the end of the war China has been in a state of almost continuous civil war and anarchy. The engineer has therefore not yet had his chance in China. But, these difficulties apart, there stood from the beginning in the way of the Engineering Faculty anomalies which were not perhaps at first fully appreciated. The engineering courses of the University of London were adopted as models, but the very small part which engineering graduates who had been whole-time students of engineering in the Universities of Britain were then playing in British engineering enterprises had not apparently been investigated, nor does any consideration seem to have been paid to the process by which those British engineers who had never been through a university course--and they were then and still are the great majority-had secured their theoretical and practical training. The process was and is apprenticeship supplement- ed by evening classes. A survey of the provision made for Technical and Further Education in England and Wales which was published in 1924, pointed out that institutions in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, New- castle, Bristol and Nottingham which are all now Universities or University Colleges, were, when the Royal Commission on Technical Education was making its inquiries in 1882 and 1883, merely technical schools whose activities were mainly confined to evening classes.

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34. Education in China had been for centuries a literary one and there still yawned a great gulf between the educated man and the man who worked with his hands. There had grown up in the Colony a certain number of organized engineering industries-the Kowloon and Taikoo Docks for example. But the foremen of these concerns were all Britishers (as they still are) and there had been no attempt to produce locally any labour, other than that which may be called purely mechanical, though some of the leading Chinese had become by experience experts at their work and capable of directing the ordinary foreman.

35. A technical Institute was in existence but the instruction which that Institute provided had not touched the artizan class, as indeed it is scarcely touching it today. It was established and is maintained for another purpose. Some of the Government schools in Hong Kong had begun to provide some instruction in chemistry and physics and drawing and possibly some applied mechanics were included in the curriculum of these schools. But the education given even in the most highly developed schools in the Colony was (and is) very largely a training in language. This was and is inevitable, for English to the Chinese is a foreign language and a very difficult one and it would have been a fatal mistake to have excluded the study of Chinese from