The colony may have been mistaken from the start about its potential water resources; even before it was established, sailing ships stopped regularly at Hong Kong Island to draw clear, sparkling water from its hillside springs. After the island was settled the springs soon fell short of needs, and five wells were sunk to tap new sources of supply. Their levels, too, sank as rapidly as the population rose. Governor Hercules Robinson expressed his concern over the dwindling supplies by offering $5,000 in 1859 to anyone who could design a reservoir system adequate for 85,000 residents. S. B. Rawling, civilian clerk-of-works for the Army Royal Engineers, took the prize with a plan to build a 2-million-gallon reservoir at Pok Fu Lam, on the slopes of Victoria Peak, and carry the water through a ten-inch pipe to tanks above Victoria City.
Completed in four years, Pok Fu Lam proved to be short of the need even then, for the population had risen to 125,000. Striving to catch up, the colony installed a much larger reservoir above Pok Fu Lam, linked it to a pair of supplementary reservoirs, and discovered that the demand was still in advance of supply. Before the end of the century, new reservoirs had been added at Tai Tam and Wong Nai Chung, and the water finally reached the eastern sections of the city. Filtration through sand beds was also incorporated into the system.
None of these efforts satisfied the popular needs for long. Completion of Tai Tam Tuk Reservoir in 1917 near the southeastern end of the island raised the storage capacity to 1 billion, 419 gallons and everyone thought the problem was solved at last. A series of punishing droughts killed that bright hope, and the building of the Aberdeen Reservoirs rounded out all the parts of the island that could be drained for storage. Two reservoirs on the Kowloon Peninsula were tied to the island with underwater pipelines, but this was done only after a spring drought in 1929 had dried up five of the island’s six reservoirs, making it necessary to bring in water by ship from as far away as Shanghai.
The rain-gathering potential of the New Territories had been exploited by the 1930s with the construction of the Shek Li Pui and the Jubilee Reservoirs. When the Japanese arrived, they found 13 reservoirs with a storage capacity of 6 billion gallons. They let the mains deteriorate during their occupation of the colony, applying their own brand of water-rationing by cutting off all supply to entire sections of the colony whenever they chose to.
Following World War II, the government tried deep boring to reach underground water resources, but this turned out to be scarcely worth the effort. After years of surveying and study, engineers laid out the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir System, at the central western end of the New Territories. This called for construction of a two-section dam 2,300 feet long and 200 feet high. This gigantic main dam, built entirely of concrete, created a reservoir of 4 billion, 500 million gallons. Twenty-three miles of “catchwaters,” or concrete channels to trap run-off from the rains, funneled the surface water from 11,000 acres into the reservoir. It took eight years to construct, being completed in 1960 at a cost of almost $25 million.
None of these large dams served the needs of the hundreds of small villages in the New Territories, which still relied on wells and streams or threw up earth dams in hilly areas to form their own miniature reservoirs. After World War II the colony government and the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association, a private philanthropic body, furnished grants of cement to replace these crude and leaky installations with concrete dams and concrete-lined wells, plus pipes to carry the water into the villages.
Rice crops in the New Territories were dependent on their own irrigation systems, traditionally constructed of earth channels and dams. They were laid out with evident shrewdness to cover the greatest possible area, but the dams and channels had to be nursed along constantly to prevent leaking and to keep them from becoming choked with weeds. The government and the Kadoorie Association also furnished materials to replace these systems with concrete dams and channels. Nearly 600 dams and more than 220,000 feet of channels have been improved in this way since World War II.
When the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir was under construction, a very delicate balance of catchwaters and irrigation channels had to be worked out so that the reservoir collected all the excess summer rain not required for irrigation, but did not draw off the sparse winter rains which farmers had to have. The farmers’ initial assumption when they saw the huge catchwater channels passing the farms on their way to the reservoir was that they were being robbed of water; it took considerable diplomacy and convincing proof to allay their suspicions.
Farmers who learned that their villages were about to be inundated by the big reservoir were even less happy. They rejected the government’s proposal to move them to another rural area and insisted on moving, if move they must, to the developing industrial town of Tsuen Wan. They received the full market price for their farm property and were resettled in new houses at Tsuen Wan, with shop space they could rent to replace their farming income. A few holdouts threatened to stay in their old homes until the reservoir floated them to glory, but belatedly reversed themselves and walked out on dry land.
The Tai Lam Chung relocation was hardly concluded when the government found itself involved in an even knottier problem. Continuing demands for more water forced the construction of still another dam—Shek Pik, on Lantau Island. This was a remote part of the colony, much larger than Hong Kong Island, but completely without roads until 1957. A few government people visited the island regularly, but its isolated villages, with their square stone towers or “cannon houses,” were more likely to regard all visitors as pirates until proved otherwise. Armed and alert, they holed up in the towers to defend themselves against marauders who still stage occasional raids in sparsely settled areas.