Then & Now | Heritage buildings in Hong Kong: why conservation has never been a priority
In post-war Hong Kong, widespread poverty meant the provision of basic necessities such as housing, education and health care took precedence over heritage conservation
Why are so few of Hong Kong’s old buildings still standing? A cursory glance at any “Old Hong Kong” picture book, heritage website or academic history reveals an extensive Victorian-Edwardian city that remained largely intact well into the 1960s. So what happened to it all – and when, and why?
One underlying factor seldom mentioned is that from around 1900 to 1938, Hong Kong (including the rural New Territories) had a population of about a million, which, while this number fluctuated depending on political and economic conditions, was less than one-seventh of today’s population. Between 1947 and 1952, as the Chinese civil war raged, and the Communist Party consolidated its rule, more than 1.5 million refugees decamped from the mainland to Hong Kong, almost tripling the city’s population. Many newcomers were of reproductive age, and in direct consequence, Hong Kong’s population has increased by about a million a decade ever since.
Continuous population growth, more than any other single factor, has shaped what modern Hong Kong looks like. As the local birth rate slowed by the 1980s, a trend common to all post-industrial societies, continuous inward migration from the mainland (supposedly for family reunion, but generally suspected in recent years to form part of a deliberate policy for the dilution of Hong Kong’s distinct society) has continued to swell the population.