The wave from nowhere

About 15,000 people died in Hong Kong's 'tsunami' of 1937. The most chilling aspect is that every typhoon approaching the region carries the seeds of a repeat disaster. Simon Parry reports

It came in the dead of night and stole away more lives than any storm recorded in the city before or since. At the time, they called it a tidal wave - but if the term had been coined by then, it might have been remembered as Hong Kong's tsunami.

Fifteen thousand people - 5,000 on land and 10,000 on boats around Hong Kong - perished in 1937, when a typhoon triggered a wave that sent a 9-metre wall of water racing down Tolo Channel and raised the water level in Victoria harbour by 5.5 metres.

Entire villages around Sha Tin and Tai Po were wiped out, an orphanage full of sleeping children and babies was destroyed, a railway line was washed out and 1,200 passengers on board a luxury cruise ship had to be rescued as their vessel foundered off Green Island.

On Hong Kong Island, hundreds died as water coursed through harbour-side streets, electrical fires razed buildings and the highest winds recorded plucked fish from the water and flung them against windows 27 metres above ground.

In an age when natural disasters were an almost annual occurrence in Hong Kong, this was a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions - a night when the forces of nature conspired to deliver the deadliest and most unexpected of blows.

The most chilling aspect of the calamity, however, according to a retired academic who has researched the disaster in the wake of the December 26 tsunami, is that it could happen again today with as little warning as on the night of September 1, 1937.