Then & now: life on the ocean wave

As a major international port city from the beginning of British rule, Hong Kong has always lived by the sea. Whether through fishing or other associated enterprises, its connections to the water have been vital.

Hong Kong men had "gone down to the sea in ships" since the colony's beginnings. Many of those who would form a prominent early local elite were of Tanka, or boatpeople, origin - on one side of the blanket or the other: many were illegitimate Eurasians.

More than a few were virtual pirates, and some - having worked with or otherwise facilitated the British during the first Anglo-Chinese war - found it a little too "hot" to remain in China and decamped to Hong Kong.

For several decades, most crewmen on shipping lines that passed through Hong Kong were Lascars. Now largely forgotten, "Lascar" was a generic term for Asian Muslim seamen; while most were Bengalis, some were Malays and Javanese - who formed a minority within a minority in Hong Kong.

Upper Lascar Row and Lower Lascar Row, just below Central's Hollywood Road, recall those men's presence. Lascars mostly vanished from the late 1940s, as other ethnicities became more broadly represented within shipping lines. The Philippines - an island nation with abundant internal shipping routes - now supplies a significant proportion of the world's merchant seamen.

The Blue Funnel Line, based in Liverpool, England, and with services to the Far East and Australia, generally employed ethnic Chinese for its deck and engine room crews. This was, at least in part, because the owner, Alfred Holt, preferred for safety reasons that his ships be manned by teetotallers - as many Chinese mostly were, and remain. Lascars, by contrast, were known to "cut loose" when on shore, and binges were commonplace. For decades, the Blue Funnel Line had a dedicated terminal on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, known as Holt's Wharf.