Short Reads
The Standard Chartered Bank’s new building was built on the site of its old headquarters, and when it was finished it was taller than Hong Kong Bank’s new headquarters.
The island of Gili Tepekong off the coast of Bali was named after the Great Earth God, Tua Pek Kong, a guardian deity among the Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia.
In 1988, Pope John Paul II elevated Catholic Bishop John Baptist Wu Cheng-chung to Cardinal. The Hongkonger would ‘play an important role in the initiative to improve Sino-Vatican relations’.
A trippy scene straight out of Alice in Wonderland, a commentary on the relationship between humans and nature – young artists are adding colour to Hong Kong when the city needs it the most.
Designed to cause the most intense physical pain and psychological anguish, ancient China’s five punishments ranged from amputation and torture to horrific death.
Five people were murdered in their sleep and one wounded when Li Man-pun attacked them with a heavy butcher’s knife in May 1930. He tried to commit suicide, but was overpowered by a cook.
The Kind Kitchen, an initiative by NGO ImpactHK, is open all year round and serves the homeless, street cleaners, the elderly in need of food support, ethnic minorities and refugees.
Empress Lü skilfully dealt with letter from a neighbouring ruler whose insolence is comparable with British tabloid The Mail and its recent attack on Rayner of the UK Labour Party.
Hong Kong’s internal network, the MTR, was linked with its main line to China, the KCR when the Kowloon Tong interchange station was finished in 1982.
British servicemen in Hong Kong often started relationships with bar girls or prostitutes, putting them up in subdivided flats in the city. A number of these relationships led to happy marriages.
Climate change, as always, takes a back seat to politics and industry, with no leaders held accountable, and our own apathy drags us towards the end.
A collection of more than 42,000 photographs, taken by artist and academic David Clarke, and covering 25 years, is now available as a free-to-use archive for anyone interested in Hong Kong and its history.
Followers of the three Abrahamic religions do not get along. Why, then, has there rarely been disharmony in China between followers of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism?
Connaught Centre, now known as Jardine House, with its distinctive porthole windows, was Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper for several years.
Deadly periodic fever had been documented for centuries before an Italian doctor named it malaria based on the theory that breathing vapours from stagnant waters caused it. The mosquito-parasite link came later.
Once a vibrant, cosmopolitan, world-class city second only to London in commercial importance, Calcutta (now Kolkata) provides a bleak template for the Hong Kong of tomorrow.
Spats over behaviour at reopened land borders between the two nations soured the occasion, while history shows what can happen when neighbours forget how close they really are.
Historically a black swan was a metaphor for something thought not to exist – in Roman times a good wife, later an ‘honest lawyer’. Then explorers discovered black swans were real.
After a bomb exploded in a Hong Kong department store, threats of more bombs, and a ransom demand, were made to police. A hoaxer who admitted making them ‘just for fun’ was arrested and jailed.
Despite assurances, history shows ‘foreign’ residents are briskly discarded when their presence appears more nuisance than benefit – just look at Indonesia.