ENG-1988 — Page 22

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STATE OF THE ARTS

With concerts and performances being given in such venues as the Hong Kong University's Loke Yew Hall and the stage of the China Fleet Club, it was a widely lamented fact that the cultural desert was a stain on the landscape that was beginning to look as if it might be permanent. Something had to be done to remedy it.

At first, the new Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, was preoccupied by more urgent and basic needs. For with the end of the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 came hundreds of thousands of refugees. Grantham's priorities were clear: the people must be housed and their well-being secured. Having launched what would become one of the world's greatest public housing schemes, covering today more than 45 per cent of the population, and having encouraged the growth of new industries by refugee capitalists from the north (primarily textiles and garments), Grantham sought to tackle other needs. A new airport was required at Kai Tak for a new era of jet airliners, led by Britain's ill-fated Comets. And, under the constant taunts of a dogged newspaper editor, Mr Henry Ching of the South China Morning Post, a new City Hall would be built on the site of the new Central reclamation, 200 metres north of the original shoreline.

The airport is not a totally irrelevant factor in this chapter on Hong Kong's cultural development, for the new runway established Hong Kong firmly on the crossroads of Asia. With China no longer open, Japan emerging from American postwar occupation, and Southeast Asia hesitantly recovering from colonial slumber and negligence, war- time occupation and imperial dissolution, the new Kai Tak runway opened a gateway to Hong Kong that would prove crucial to the interchange of ideas and influences with the outside world.

No less important was the new City Hall, opened by Grantham's successor, Sir Robert Black in 1962, fulfilling a pledge made almost 30 years earlier when the old one was torn down. Thus in the barren desert a small shrub appeared which would grow to a large tree with abundant flowers ever blooming in the years to come.

Initially it was dismissed even by the more astute of Grantham's officials as a white elephant. But to the Governor, a promise was a promise, and he handed over the finished project to the Urban Council, then virtually another government department, led by an official chairman, with an official membership and a handful of appointed members, later to be supplemented by elected councillors.

High Priority

In those days, the Urban Council had hardly outlived its prewar reputation as the Sanitary Board, established over a century ago following trenchant criticism of appalling squalor and to enforce effective hygiene laws and regulations. It was still considered the 'department' which cleared nightsoil, killed live cattle and pigs for sale to the markets and cleaned urban streets, with garbage disposal occupying a high priority. In its new 'Urban Council' role it sought a new identity. The hopes of a political minority for an elected municipal council, with control of education and housing, were dashed when the Legislative Council rejected the reform plans of Sir Mark Young, the first postwar Governor, following the outbreak of the Chinese civil war. The Urban Council thus needed a new raison d'être and the virtual dumping of 'cultural activities', parks and libraries into its lap was a gift from the gods. It hungrily seized on these responsibilities as a new and exciting challenge. The 10-storey City Hall and its complex of theatres and the memorial garden was a symbol of its metamorphosis, and indeed in time, of Hong Kong's, with its distant promise of a desert that would bloom. Venues, of course, are not everything. There must be players, musicians and performers – and even more important, a receptive and ticket-buying public who wish to see and hear