Photos of old Hong Kong

Reader Fred has kindly sent in a set of Hong Kong photos from 1979. Here's a link to the first photo, then just keep clicking the 'next image' link to see the rest.

MrB

Reader Geoffrey has sent in some interesting family photos, together with some background information. He's also asked for help in identifying some of the locations, and what's going on in the photos.

There are six photos, so use the "next image" link to see the next photo, and use the "original" link if you want to see a larger version of the image.

Many thanks to Geoffrey for sharing these, and now on to the first photo...

MrB

Reader Geoffrey has sent in another set of family photos:

I came across this photo album supposedly belonging to my grandpa (he was a keen photographer), once again one of many old things which I was able to dig out from my grandaunt's home. Anyway, thought you would be interested in this photo montage (is this the right word?) of various street scene in HK, quite possibly dating back to just before the war in 1940.

As you could see, there are some known locations, especially the one featuring what's currently a school/temple on Shan Kwong Road in Happy Valley. And those two pics of TST, any idea on the rooftop of which building were these photos taken? The rest I am going to have to leave them to you or for that matter other viewers of your website. 

I've set the date to 1940 for each of the photos, but if you believe the date should be earlier or later, please leave a comment on the photo. I hope you can help identify their loction too - though bear in mind that they may not all have been taken in Hong Kong.

You can click the "next image" link to see the next photo in the series, and click the "original" link if you want to see a larger version of the image. Here is the first photo.

Thanks again to Geoffrey for sharing his photos.

MrB

A very colourful set of photos from Tom Briggs.

MrB

Reader Fiona has forwarded a good set of 15 photos from the 1960s. Here's the first photo, then click "Next image" to move through the set.

Many thanks to Fiona for sending them over.

MrB

Rarer than photos, but all the more enjoyable for that. Received by email:

Have enjoyed viewing Michael Rogge's videos of Hong Kong from the 1950s. There are clips from 1953 of the Shek Kip Mei Fire, Coronation and Typhoon that pounded Hong Kong. Here is the link to all his videos, and the best of all is the video of himself walking down Battery Path into Central. 
 
Here is a link to his webpage and more photos from an interesting era.

Over the last few weeks I've posted up over 200 photos taken in the late 1950s. Where did they all come from?

As the title for the album says, they are “Fred Evans' photos”. Fred is a family friend, who lives a few houses down the hill from my mum. She heads along there every week for Sunday lunch with him and his wife. One time he mentioned that he'd been out in Hong Kong with the army, and had some photos. The message was duly passed on to me, and so when I visited mum last year, we arranged for a time to go and see Fred and his photos.

I only expected to see a handful of photos, but instead out came an album. Fred had been a keen amateur photographer, and had taken several hundred photos while he was in Hong Kong. Of course most are of his army life, but there are also plenty of photos of the countryside, local people, and visits into the city.

He arrived in June 1957, stationed in Hong Kong with the 1st Royal Tank Regiment. He was based at Sek Kong throughout, sailing home again in October 1959.

As he talked me through the album I took photos of his photos with my digital camera. You'll see that some came out better than others – when they look blurry it's my shaky hand that's the cause, not Fred's! I also tried using MrsB's MP3 player to record Fred talking, except that ran out of battery half way through without me noticing...

But there should be a second chance, as I'll be visiting the UK again in February 2008. So if you have any questions for Fred, or requests for better copies of any of the photos, please let me know in the comments.

Readers Moddsey, Raymond and Oldtimer have already done a great job of filling in the background information about what you can see in many of the photos. I hope you'll add further comments if you have any memories or information to share. I also hope to persuade Fred to get connected to the internet, so we can hear from him directly.

I hope you enjoy the photos.

Regards, MrB

The Univerity of Hong Kong's Museum & Art gallery occasionally run free exhibitions of old photos. They currently have an exhibition entitled "Early Hong Kong's Kowloon Peninsula", which runs until 16 Mar 2008. I went along this morning, and enjoyed it. The photos cover the late 1800's up til the 1960's, and include many of the areas we've looked at in photos here.

MrB

PS Raymond, several of Kowloon's old cinemas are shown, so you may be interested in visiting.

We received this by email, linking to some good photos:

Hello there Mr B & Mr Tall,

Greetings.

It is not that often that one sees pictures of people in old HK pics especially Westerners. I've come across a couple of links from Flickr that shows a French family living in Chatham Rd. Kowloon around 1910.

Marie-Félicité Grandel (1870-1950) , husband Jean-Baptiste Jules Semichon (1867-1915) plus two daughters and an amah. Very nice pictures from old glass plates. All together 28 shots. Quite animated too which is also unusual for photos from the Victorian/Edwardian era.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bjacques/sets/72157594150897836/
And if one should peruse further in the relevant sets of photos then one can see pictures that were taken before the family moved out to HK as well as pictures taken after they had moved back to France (to a place called Clamart). The link is posted here below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bjacques/sets/

So one can sort of follow their lives (especailly Marie-Félicité's) from the late 1890s to say 1915-ish.

Question is what did they do out there in HK? The husband is working for some local hong or the French legation? Maybe you chaps can find out from the local HK archives if time permits.

Their genealogy can be traced from this French site,
http://clamart.genealogie.free.fr/index.htm

Fascinating stuff.

Kind regards,

Kent

Sorry, I remember seeing cinemas, but not sure which ones. Now if there had been photos of ARP tunnels ... ;)

MrB

The 'Historical Photographs of China' site has a large collection of photographs, including many from the G. Warren Swire collection. Many of his photos are work-related, documenting Butterfield & Swire's operations around China. So expect lots of photos of ships and dockyards, but there are some interesting photos of general Hong Kong scenes too.

The other collections at that site also include a few photos of Hong Kong, so I found the easiest way to see all the Hong Kong photos is:

 - Click 'All images' from the Collections menu on the left

 - In the top-right grey section,
      Set Nb/p to 100
      Type Hong Kong in the first 'Text Search' field
      Tab to the next field and change 'In all fields' to 'Title'

 - Click ok

It returned 321 photographs, displayed in pages of 100.

MrB

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the update. I understand the difficulties involved, so don't worry if they can't be found. But we'll keep our fingers crossed that the photos surface at some point - sounds like there are some great photos there.

Regards, MrB

Aha! Just had a look, and you're right there are some good photos there. The old tram-ride video is well worth a watch too.

If you're already logged in to facebook, here are links to the photos, videos, and the group.

In 1966 Peter was in the Merchant Navy, and made several visits to this part of the world. I saw him on our recent trip to the UK, and asked if he had any photos from that time. Luckily for us he has 20+ slides taken in and around Hong Kong, and was willing to lend them to me to bring back and scan.

Here are the first few, dated September 1966.

Unfortunately at this point my scanner decided that it also needed a vacation. Once I've fixed or replaced it, I'll scan in the remainder.

Click on a thumbnail for a larger view, then on the 'original' link (you'll need to be logged in) if you want to see the full-size version. Peter says he'll add his memories of the photos, but please add your own comments to the individual photos (especially the two street scenes) if you recognise them.

MrB

The scanner is home again with a brand new bulb, so here are the rest of the slides.

There are two more from the September set:

Then we switch to a second set dated November 1966.  It starts with fishing junks out in the South China Sea:

Then there is a sequence of photos as he sails towards Hong Kong Harbour from the East, then in past Shau Kei Wan and Kai Tak airport:

It looks as though they continue to sail round past TST and Ocean Terminal, then up the coast towards Yau Ma Tei:

I was very excited when I stumbled across the collection of photographer Harrison Forman. There are over 300 photographs taken in Hong Kong in 1941 - fantastic!

I though that the PRO and the Public Library were the only government-run image collections. But here's another, as introduced by the AMO: The Museum of History's Online Catalogue.

It uses yet another system to index and view images, with its own strengths and weaknesses. First if you try it and nothing happens, which browser are you using? I tried with Firefox several times, but it only worked when I switched to IE (Internet Explorer).  Even with IE, when I clicked an image thumbnail to see a larger copy, the pop-up window was usually blank. The museum staff say when this happens just press the F5 key, and the image appears. That worked for me.

If you can get past those problems, the search works well and there is a good collection of images, including many I hadn't seen before.

It's worth visiting their resource centre if you have time.  (You have to make an appointment, but I was the only person there when I visited, so I don't think you'll have any trouble getting in). There you can use a much faster tool to search their photo collection, and can scroll through images as fast as you can view them. Much quicker than searching via the internet. It also seemed to me that the search in the resource centre shows results that don't appear in the internet search.

Hi Amanda, I'll pass on the question, and let you know what I hear back. It'll take a while as unfortunately Fred has no connection to the Internet.

Were there any of Fred's photos where you think you can see your father?

And if you have any of your farther's photos from that time online, please feel free to leave a link so others can see them.

Regards, MrB

Sorry Amanda, the reply from Fred is that he doesn't remember that name.

You're welcome to use this site to try and find other friends that might have known your father in Hong Kong. Here's a few tips if you do.

Good luck,

MrB

Phil, yes, that's a good one. Here are some other albums I came across when searching for photos of the KCR terminus:

• Facebook have a couple more (you may need to login to view): Hong Kong Old Pictures , and Hong Kong Old Pictures (before 1950's)
• Webshots has Old HKG by cheungsamfung, or you can do a search on the whole site, which has some good ones mixed in with the irrelevant.
• Picasa has albums of old photos from Daemen, cpwells, and Tim.
• There are photo areas on several of lthe local discussion forums, but only some threads are for old photos. eg itcafe, discuss.

For groups of photos (ie not a person's own album), or an ongoing project like dboo, I like to subscribe to them in an RSS reader. Then I can see new photos as they are added.

David

HMCS Prince Robert saw the start and the end of WII in Hong Kong. In November 1941 it was one of the two ships that delivered the Canadian soldiers to Hong Kong. Then in 1945 it was one of the first allied ships to return to Hong Kong as the Japanese surrendered.

The main website covers the life of the ship Prince Robert. Here are some sections that are specific to Hong Kong:

• 1941. Voyage to HK. Story & Photos.
• 1945. Japanese, and Canadian POWs. Story & photos.
• 1945. Around HongKong. Story & Photos.
• Prince Robert in Hong Kong. Story & Photos.
• 1945. return to Hong Kong. Story & Photos. [With mention of a kamikaze boat now on display in Canada - maybe from Lamma?]
• 1945.The first allied ship into HongKong harbour? Story.
• 1945. Martin McGregor's photos. 6 galleries in all.
• 1945. Rolan Poirier's photos. Gallery 3 and onwards have Hong Kong photos.
  

Thanks to Gweipo for letting us know there's an exhibition of Yau Leung's photos at Picture This, running 'til Dec 6th.

I have a book of his photos (ISBN 962041697X) that includes several of the photos in the exhibition. There's no English text, but the pictures are excellent.

MrB

There's an exhibition of old photos from Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong in Exhibition Gallery 3 (on the ground floor) of the Central Library from 9-16th of December.

I happened to see it advertised when I was at the library today. I enjoyed it - not worth making a special trip to see, but worth a visit if you're in the area.

More details on the library website.

Chris King has uploaded some more of his videos to Facebook, and reader Kent has emailed to say that a few of them can now also be seen on Youtube.

The Corbis website is a commercial site selling images. The images are from professional photographers, and so are of a good quality.

If you use their advanced search, you can search for photos taken in a certain location during a given range of years.

eg a search for photos taken in Hong Kong between 1850-1960 returns 96 images. Unfortunately it looks as though not all photos have a date set. Those won't show in a date-search like the example I used.

Happy browsing!

The HKU Museum on Bonham Road is running an exhibition of 100 old photos from Cheng Po Hung on this topic, from now until 28 June. Details here.

I had a quick look around today, but not surprisingly my 5-year old daughter didn't want to linger. Worth a second visit.

In the original article I mentioned John Thomson, and linked to a gallery's website with a handful of his photos.

The Wellcome library has a much better collection - over 100 photos of Hong Kong from this period. Well worth a look. (Clicking an entry in the list will show you a thumbnail and some background information. Click the thumbnail to see a larger version.)

An email from Stephen Pannell introduces the Pathe archive. This company produced the newsreels that were shown in cinemas, before TV news became widespread.

A quick search for 'Hong Kong' shows 170 films covering the period from 1920-1970. So, looks like there is lots to see.

Unfortunately it isn't the easiest of sites to use. I can't see any way to watch a film online (you have to download it first), or to embed it on another website.