“It is unfortunate that the space between the foot of the mountains and the edge of the sea is so very limited.”
—Hall & Bernard, The Nemesis in China, 1847
Hong Kong has always had more land and water than it could use, because most of the land is a hilly waste and most of the water is salty.
From the first years of the colony until today, the persisting shortage of usable land and fresh water has confronted every governor with a problem that he could neither solve nor ignore. They have all wrestled with it, none more vigorously than the governors of the last fifteen years, and the problem has become more costly, complex and acute than ever.
In any community, land and water problems are related to each other; in the peculiar circumstances of Hong Kong’s climate, geography and population, they intersect at more points than Laocoön and the serpents.
Consider the governor’s alternatives: If he stores the entire run-off of the summer rainy season in the reservoirs it will barely meet the minimum needs of the urban millions on Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and it will cause the withering of the crops of farmers in the New Territories during the winter dry season. If he cuts the city supply, how can he meet the ever-increasing needs of the new industrial centers, like Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong, that the government is building on land reclaimed from the sea?
The if’s are endless: If he stops the reclamation program to reduce the demand for more water, real estate costs will climb so fast that local industries will price themselves out of the export market. If he builds all the reservoirs the colony needs, who will pay for them? If he doesn’t, how can the fast-growing population of the colony survive? If the reservoirs displace more farmers, who will raise the food?
The present disposition of the colony government is to provide as much additional land and water as it can, and let the if’s fall where they may. To that end, it has spent about $60 million on reclamation and $55 million to increase its water supply since World War II. Over the next decade, its further expenditures in these two areas may reach $300 million. Many projects have not yet been authorized, but much of the preliminary surveying has been done. With the need for them becoming more imperative as the colony’s population continues to increase, it is not so much a question of if as of when.
Allocation of several hundred million dollars to correct deficiencies of the topography is none too large for the job that must be done. When one has noted that Hong Kong has a sheltered deep-water harbor (probably the bed of an old river that flowed from west to east), that one-seventh of its land is arable, and that its mines and quarries yield a modest amount of iron ore, building stone, kaolin clay, graphite, lead, wolfram and a few other minerals, one has exhausted the list of its terrestrial assets. Its liabilities are unlimited.
Three broken lines of perpendicular hills cut across the colony from northeast to southwest, with irregular spurs branching off haphazardly; two dozen peaks poke up from 1,000 to 3,140 feet. Eighty percent of the surface is either too steep for roads or buildings, too barren to grow anything but wiry grass or scrub, too swampy to walk through or so hacked up by erosion that it is worthless and an eyesore. The rest, except for farmland, is either in forest or packed with people in numbers ranging from 1,800 to 2,800 an acre. Rivers tumble from the high hills in all directions, but they are short and unreliable, mostly summer torrents and winter trickles.