ENG-1957 — Page 13

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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

which are thrusting 14 and 15 storeys into the sky. Other tall buildings, faced with the local grey granite, with here and there a veneer of marble or aluminium, are still un- marked by the weather.

The seven-minute ferry trip across Victoria Harbour brings the traveller to more scenes of building activity. In Victoria, where British merchants established their first settlement less than 120 years ago, the skyline is fretted with scaffolding as builders add yet another storey to one or other of the city's skyscrapers. Heaps of sand, stone, granite chips, cement and other impedimenta of the builders' trade spill from the narrow confines of building lots across the pavement into the roadway; contractors' trucks are every- where, carrying loads of that same impedimenta, or bamboo poles, or gangs of cheerful labourers, or perhaps taking spoil to a dumping ground.

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The reason for establishing a colony in Hong Kong was explained to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1847 by an officer on the staff of the first Governor, Sir Henry Pottinger. He said: 'In the first instance, it was chosen by Captain Elliot from the fineness of the harbour.' The choice was indeed well made with 17 square miles of land-locked water of a depth sufficient for the largest ships, Victoria Harbour is one of the finest natural ports in the world, and its surrounding hills give shelter from the pre- vailing monsoon. From the harbour developed Hong Kong's entrepôt trade; and from that trade grew, first, the city of Victoria and, rather later, the city of Kowloon. But although nature had designed the perfect harbour, she had not provided anything like a perfect site for a city. The Island (which comprised the Colony's whole territory for 20 years) had scarcely any flat land. The 'Times' on 17th December, 1844, had complained roundly: 'The place has nothing to recommend it, if we except the excellent harbour. The site of the new town of Victoria . . . . is most objectionable, there being scarcely level ground enough for the requisite