Hong Kong’s weather is impartially disrespectful toward annual averages, periodic tables and the population. Rainfall averages about 85 inches a year, with the rainy season extending from April through September. There have been long summer droughts and ruinous winter floods. On July 19, 1926, it rained nearly 4 inches in one hour and 21 inches in 24 hours.
Prevailing winds blow from the east in every month but June, and the colony’s fishing settlements have been located to protect them from it. The protection avails nothing against typhoons, which usually form in the Caroline Islands, curve northwards over the Philippines and hit Hong Kong from all angles, principally during the June to October season, though there is no month which has not had at least one of them. Four out of five bypass the colony, but the fifth may inflict devastation on ships, boats and shoreline villages. It never snows and freezing temperatures are extremely rare, yet the high, year-round humidity can put a raw edge on cool wintry days and make summer clothing stickily uncomfortable. Except for flat farmland in the northwestern New Territories, topsoil is thin, highly acid and leaches badly during the rainy season.
This chronicle of drawbacks only tends to revive the question every British administrator since 1841 must have asked himself: Why did we ever settle this hump-backed wasteland? They have answered the question by a dogged and unremitting effort to make it a habitable place.
The first English traders had scarcely settled along the north shore of Hong Kong Island when it became evident that there was a shortage of suitable land. The slopes of Mt. Gough and Victoria Peak rose steeply behind Queen’s Road, the only street along the shore. Holders of waterfront lots on the road extended them toward the harbor pretty much at random, giving them more level land but creating a jagged shoreline unprotected by any seawall. Several governors sought to build a straight and solid seawall, but the lot-holders balked at paying its cost.
Two poorly constructed seawalls, erected in piecemeal fashion, were wrecked by typhoons before the government was able to push through a unified seawall and reclamation scheme. By 1904, a massive seawall stretched along the island front for two miles, and Queen’s Road stood two blocks inland from the harbor. Most of the colony’s principal office buildings have been built on this reclaimed land.
Once the value of reclamation had been proved, the whole northern shore of the island was gradually faced with a seawall. Much of the Wanchai district rose from the sea in the 1920s and its new-found land was soon covered with tenements or bars and cabarets catering to the sailors’ trade. Swamps became solid ground and promontories were swallowed up by the seven-mile-long reclamation.
Starting in 1867, a succession of seawall and land-fill projects altered the size and shape of the Kowloon Peninsula.
By the time of the Japanese invasion, a total of 1,425 acres, or more than two square miles, had been reclaimed. The gain was twofold, for it not only added level land, it absorbed all the fill from sites where obstructing hills had been cut down to make existing ground usable.
The foundation of the colony’s tourist industry and air cargo business rests on land reclaimed from Kowloon Bay and converted into an international airport. Its name and its origin go back to 1918, when two real estate promoters, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Au Tak, organized the Kai Tak Land Development Co. to create building sites by filling in the northern end of Kowloon Bay. Homesites and an 800-foot-long airstrip were in use on the land by 1924, with Fowler’s Flying School the first aviation tenant. Government took it over in 1930, improving and enlarging it in preparation for the first international flight, an Imperial Airways’ weekly service to Penang started March 24, 1936, linking with the main route between England and Australia. Four other international airlines, including Pan American and Air France, joined the formation before the Japanese seized the field in 1941. The Japanese extended its area and built two concrete runways, but its buildings were bombed into rubble before the war ended.