Opinion | Why is Hong Kong’s ‘bucolic’ New Territories blighted by rusty shipping containers?
- Poetically pitched to tourists as ‘the land between’, in reality the region resembles a scrapyard
- Its countryside and attractive traditional villages are strewn with containers used as storage, workshops and housing
It would be unjust to compare the late Malcolm Purcell McLean with the mythical Pandora, who opened that box of hers and released all the evils of the world.
Other entrepreneurs had realised it saved a lot of hassle if you put cargo into a container for loading onto a truck or a ship rather than lugging it aboard bit by bit, but it was the tough-talking, no-nonsense North Carolinian who, to go for the obvious metaphor, thought out of the box, back in the 1950s.
McLean built what would later become the standard shipping container, dubbed the 20-foot-equivalent unit or TEU, and the vessels, known as box ships, to carry them. Cue redundancy for myriad stevedores.
Cue rant. Wherever you go in the New Territories – not so long ago pitched to tourists rather poetically as The Land Between – a TEU soon pops into view. Function naturally preceded form in the design of the rust-smeared, aesthetically impoverished containers strewn about and used as storage sheds, workshops and not-so-temporary housing.
It’s understandable in a way. They’re robust, waterproof, easily secured, larger than some Hong Kong apartments and, at HK$15,500 or so second-hand, very much cheaper. But the sad truth is that whether you blame lackadaisical officialdom for messing up on zoning or land owners with scant regard for the natural environment that sustained their forefathers, parts of what used to be the most bucolic corners of Hong Kong now resemble a scrapyard.