REVIEW
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buildings, and the high hills, which overhang the locality, shut out the southerly winds and render the place exceeding- ly hot, close and uncomfortable.'
Certainly, from the very first, the infant Colony, narrowly confined between the precipitous face of Victoria Peak and the harbour that had caused its being, felt pangs of over- crowding. Builders perforce had to seek sites on the hills; and, at the same time, residents began to look enviously at the sea. Reclamation was started within ten years of the Colony's foundation, and, with it, the quarrying and cutting back into hills which is an essential preparation for much of Hong Kong's building. Spoil removed from the hills is dumped into a convenient bay, extending the building space in two directions at once. These twin processes which catch the traveller's attention today-the processes of reclamation and site formation-have a continuous history of more than a hundred years.
Although the Kowloon peninsula was ceded to Britain in 1860 and the Colony thereby gained three and a half square miles, the new land lay on the mainland and the problem of congestion on the Island continued. The prosperity and security of the Colony attracted immigrants from China by the thousand, and, whenever China passed through one of its periodic convulsions, the stream became a torrent. Refugees from the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions started a tradition of 'squatting' in Hong Kong which has been repeated at frequent intervals in the Colony's history.
By the 1890's Victoria was expanding rapidly and many of its solidly built districts endure to the present day. Europeans tended to congregate in some districts, leaving others exclusively to the Chinese. The homes of well-to-do Chinese and Europeans were made for 'gracious living'; thick-walled, and with broad verandahs, they were usually surrounded by large gardens. In search of open sites and coolness, the European population had already begun to scale the Peak; in 1888 the wire-rope tramway, a spectacular
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