Then & Now | Hong Kong ‘a barren rock’? Who coined the phrase that contrasted the new colony’s beginnings with the extraordinary city it became?
- The phrase ‘a barren rock with nary a house upon it’, used to describe Hong Kong Island, was attributed to a British prime minister, Lord Palmerston
- In fact it was a British naval surgeon and botanist who came ashore around Waterfall Bay in 1816 who wrote of seeing ‘barren rocks’ and ‘miserable mud-huts’
Hong Kong Island had been known to European mariners since at least the early 17th century. East Lamma Channel waters – in particular, the sheltered passage between Ap Lei Chau and Shek Pai Wan (modern Aberdeen) – and the Pok Fu Lam coastline around Waterfall Bay were accurately surveyed and marked on Admiralty charts in 1742, during Commodore George Anson’s global circumnavigation, extensively described in A Voyage Round the World (1748).
But beyond Waterfall Bay’s reliable, year-round supply of potable fresh water, the island itself – merely one among hundreds of others scattered across the Pearl River entrance – remained undocumented in Western sources.
That famously dismissive Victorian quote – that Hong Kong Island was merely “a barren rock with nary a house upon it” – became a derisive metaphor for the new colony, almost as soon as the British flag was raised there in 1841.
Over time, this expression starkly contrasted Hong Kong’s initially unlikely early beginnings with the extraordinary city that subsequently evolved.
Attributed to 19th century British prime minister Lord Palmerston – who had never been anywhere near the place – the scanty details that informed his opinion most likely originated from a few brief descriptions found in a much larger work, published some two decades earlier.