Junk in New Territories 1948.JPG

This is towards the end of the "round robin" tour conducted by Roland Brooks in the week 14 February 1948. Having gone, it would appear, anti clockwise from Kowloon Hospital :

- he watched an Atlas plane at Kai Tak load up and take off

- passed high above some Coastal villages 

- saw a train crossing to Kowloon - Frame 47-40-01 (see Brooks photo gallery)

- and an old stone footbridge 

- passed through a town with several covered trucks (army type?) 

- passed some Chinese women with baskets crossing a bridge 

- went to a border crossing (perhaps) with barricade and Union Jack 

- and some 'official' building alongside with high barricade fencing and also Union Jack 

- then to a town where people were operating a pump into a channel

- then he passed a tall pagoda !

- on the far right of the pagoda there was a large stone arch with what appears to be a haystack or thatched roof in foreground.

- from there Roland appears to have driven  to the coast, towards a house and what appears to be a (swing?) bridge on the left of the frame 50-06-00

- and as can be seen in this last frame 50-15-11 he takes shots of a junk (and sampans). Where was this?

Was he just north of Tai Po? and then retraced the route back to Kowloon.

That was the end of his filmed 'round robin' - it would seem to have been anti-clockwise from Kowloon Hospital - so big question is where along that route would he have seen the pagoda? Could he have seen it in the distance on the other side of the border as Dave W suggests -  perhaps north of Tai Po - and is that where the "border scenes" are located? 

Roland knew HK very well - he arrived there as a boy of 14 and grew up in HK - he spoke fluent Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka. He was involved in the "Jockey (Riding) Club" - knew Fanling and was even a jockey at Happy Valley when in his teens. He was some 20 years an officer in the HK Fire Brigade and his brother-in-law (also in Stanley POW) was in the HK police - transferring in 1956 to Kenya as a Commissioner. Roland was no tourist, he was very familiar with the whole region..

Suziepie