This week's guest post from Rob Weir introduces a collection of military sites around the Hong Kong coastline from the 1930s. They're small enough to be easily overlooked, but they have an interesting history.
The Machine Gun Posts are first found in the 1935 Hong Kong Defence Plan, where they are listed at various beaches assessed as potential landing sites for an invader, both on HK Island and the Mainland. Here are their locations shown on a map. (e-mail subscribers, please click here to view the web version of this page and see the map.)
Whether they were built before then is unknown, however within a couple of years their usefulness was in question, firstly on the Mainland with the construction of Pillboxes on the Inner Line, and then on the Island when the New Policy determined that, effectively, only the Island was to be defended. All beaches were then considered as landing places, and were to be defended with Pillboxes. These were subsequently built, often within a few metres of the Machine Gun Post position.
What remains today?
The markers on the map are colour-coded to show if any remains of a site still exist (yellow), or if the site has been cleared (red). With the exception of a few built in still-isolated areas, most have succumbed to development, their original positions now hundreds of metres from the nearest water amid buildings and streets.
This photo shows <Read more ...>
