Digging and filling began in 1955 and have proceeded with such speed that today, in order to get a panoramic view of the project, one has to go to a hill three quarters of a mile back from the seawall. Block after block of multi-storied factories stretch along the sea front, approximately eighty of them, several blocks deep in the industrial zone between the seawall and Kwun Tong Road, which cuts directly across the town. On the landward side of Kwun Tong Road, the commercial and recreational zones are beginning to take shape; behind them, the long files of resettlement estates housing 60,000 persons and various government-aided housing for another 15,000. Privately built houses are also being developed.
Kwun Tong has all the noisy, dusty confusion of any construction job in progress, but there are already 15,000 people working in its completed factories, making cotton yarn, furniture, garments, and other products. Most of the factories are humming and a few betray signs of hasty organization. One plant spent two years tinkering with stop-gap orders for simple novelties while its management tried to find some profitable use for a million dollars’ worth of fine machinery standing idle under its roof.
Kwun Tong will never be a beauty spot because its main function is industrial. Nearly half its total area will be reserved for homes and commercial use, however. Proceeds from land sales are expected to repay the government for its $17 million investment in Kwun Tong.
Tsuen Wan, a second industrial town about eight miles northwest of Kwun Tong in the New Territories, has reclaimed around 70 acres from the sea. Gin Drinkers’ Bay, an adjoining inlet used for ship-breaking, is being filled in to provide 400 more acres of industrial sites. No one knows the origin of its name but it no longer matters; this glass will soon be filled with earth. When completed, Tsuen Wan will be a town of about 175,000 people.
Specialized reclamation projects have been pushed ahead at many other spots. At North Point, on Hong Kong Island, 12,000 people live in tall apartments built on recently reclaimed land. The new City Hall opened in 1962 on reclaimed waterfront land in the Central District. Five blocks of the central waterfront, just west of the reclaimed land on which the Star Ferry’s Hong Kong Island terminal sits, are being extended several hundred feet into the harbor for more building sites.
The principal land-fill operations have been restricted to the island and Kowloon Bay, except for Tseun Wan. The limitation has been human, rather than geographic; most urban workers can’t afford to travel to outlying locations and they don’t want to anyway. They plainly prefer the excitement, gossip and sociability of the crowded cities.
Nevertheless, central reclamation possibilities are running out, unless the government proposes to pave its entire harbor. As a more likely alternative, it sent engineers out in 1957 to study reclamation sites in the bays and shallow inlets of the New Territories. Five have been tentatively chosen that could be developed to create 3,000 more acres of land. The cost would come to more than $83 million, so there’s no eagerness to tackle the project at once.
The never-ending task of providing more land for the colony’s growing population would be meaningless without the assurance of an adequate water supply. At this stage in the colony’s development, even when the work of increasing the water supply is proceeding on a scale no previous generation would have attempted, the builders and planners are not deluding themselves. They know that when they have completed the last unit of the reservoir system under construction, the needs of the colony will probably have outstripped its capacity. There were times in the past when some optimistic governor, presiding at the opening of a new dam or reservoir, fancied that the problem had been met. The next drought was sufficient to knock his hopeful predictions into a cocked hat.
Hong Kong has never been inclined to waste water. On the rare occasions when its people had a full supply, as in certain periods of 1958 and 1959, its maximum average consumption ran to about 88 million gallons a day for nearly 3,000,000 people. New York City, with just under 8,000,000 people, consumes about 1 billion 200 million gallons a day. Because of an unparalleled water-supply system, Americans are the world’s champion water-wasters. An American will use 100 gallons a day, compared with 27 gallons per person in Hong Kong, and about 50 gallons per person in Great Britain.
There are compelling reasons why Hong Kong residents will not waste water. The colony, unlike New York City, cannot draw from a watershed covering several states. Except for a relatively small amount piped in from Red China since 1960, it has had to rely on surface water collected entirely from its 398¼ square miles of land area, which is about one-fourth larger than New York City. And it has to get the water while the getting is good; during the annual five-month dry season, the surface run-off averages only 600,000 gallons a day.