Paul Chan Mo-po remembers the day his house caught fire. He was seven years old and his family was living in a squatter hut on a hillside close to the Shek Kip Mei police station.
'It was Chinese New Year,' says Chan, who grew up to become a member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council and chairman of the Legal Aid Service council. 'We were going to see some relatives but we had to walk because the bus was too expensive.'
In the 1950s and early 60s hundreds of thousands of people lived in squatter camps around Hong Kong: most were refugees from the mainland who fled the country after the communist takeover in 1949. Chan's father had been in Hong Kong since 1946 and refused to return to the mainland after Mao Zedong seized power. His wife managed to get here in 1952 and Chan was born three years later. By 1960, the number of refugees in Hong Kong had exceeded 1 million and more were flooding in at a rate of 9,000 per month, leading to extreme deprivation. Disease and malnutrition were commonplace.
'I have three younger sisters and a brother,' says Chan. 'In the squatter hut it was difficult for us. We couldn't sleep in the evening, especially when it rained; we needed to use umbrellas even inside. A very bad typhoon [Wanda] hit the camp in 1962 and our roof just blew away.'
Nine years previously a fire had destroyed the Shek Kip Mei squatter huts and displaced more than 50,000 people. The number of homeless refugees persuaded the colonial government to begin work on resettlement projects: high rise blocks that had tiny apartments based on an allocation of 24 square feet per adult, half that for a child. Even so, the squatter camp continued to grow. Every time a fire cleared the slopes of Shek Kip Mei new huts would be built. In 1963, Chan's family was living in one that had been made from highly flammable scraps of timber and plastic.
'We saw smoke after we had been walking to my relatives house for an hour or two,' says Chan. 'We realised our squatter camp was on fire. We went back but the police would not allow us in. From where we stood we could see that our hut had been consumed by the flames. All we had left were the clothes on our backs.'
Pockets of poverty remain in Hong Kong but when Chan was a child, the city had some of the worst slum conditions in the world and it became a prime target for aid agencies, including Foster Parents Plan (FPP), which arranged for Hong Kong children to be sponsored (the word used 50 years ago was 'fostered') by individuals, families or companies in wealthier parts of the world, especially the United States and Australia.