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A COMPLETELY NEW PORT

breakwater will be to provide protection from south-westerly seas for the new port facilities on Lantau.

The concept of a spacious haven with ships in it but no lighters at work on them may be puzzling at first. But it becomes clearer if we remember that the fourfold increase in demand that the port development programme has to meet over the next twenty years will essentially be a demand for additional container-handling capacity, not for increased buoyage, lighterage and related waterfront facilities. Not surprisingly, it is at container terminals that containers are most speedily and efficiently handled. Lighterage means dispersed muscle; in the container age the muscle has to be concentrated.

In 1991, a total of 104 million tonnes of cargo was handled in the harbour, of which about 50 per cent was containerised. By 2006 this percentage could well have increased to around 60. Conversely, the trade in conventional cargo has remained relatively static. Mid-stream cargo work will continue, since existing practices of trade in south-east Asia, with vessels serving less sophisticated ports, will have to be catered for. But what is now a proportional decline in conventional handling will in due course become an absolute decline. Some shipping specialists, peering far ahead, envisage a day when the sight of a barge working in or near the heart of a modern harbour will be as rare as is the sight of a horse and cart making goods deliveries in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square.

That day is of course still far off. There are 75 mooring buoys in Victoria Harbour and, under PADS, there are no plans to increase them. Nor are there plans to reduce them. For many years to come the Old Harbour will be the same impressively busy scene as it is today 'order in chaos' Jan Morris called it, relishing the bustle of lighters and other harbour craft criss-crossing the water.

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Over at the opposite end of the territory, beyond the new town of Tuen Mun, a brand-new port for Pearl River freight traffic will be developed below the westerly slopes of Castle Peak. This port will be a modern replacement for the existing riverine facilities at quays in Kowloon and elswhere. A main reason for establishing a river trade terminal in Tuen Mun will be to divert such traffic from the Ma Wan Channel, which is narrow and angular and has strong tidal flows.

Interestingly, the Castle Peak river port will revive a long dormant line of South China trading activity in this area. It will be not far from the site of an ancient harbour, long ago silted up, where a thousand years ago foreign vessels gathered to do trade with China. A monument to the importance of that trade is a splendid Buddhist monastery on the hills which can trace its origins back to the days of the old entrepôt.

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All harbours ancient and modern, and whatever their methods of operation roads to serve them. The road construction schemes which will underpin container port developments over the next twenty years add up to a formidable mega-project in their own right.

We have already highlighted the Lantau Fixed Crossing which will be linked with a new six-lane highway along western Kowloon. Two more examples must suffice: Route 3, which will serve as a short cut traversing the hills between Tsing Yi and the new town of Yuen Long to the north, will be part of a new road artery into China; and before the end of the century the new Western Harbour Crossing tunnel will link the Lantau port/airport developments with Hong Kong Island by means of an expressway.

Lastly we come to land, meaning the new land which will have to be created not just for the terminals themselves but for the industrial and back-up areas around them. Again, all

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