Travellers' Checks | The Kowloon-Canton Railway, forerunner of Hong Kong’s high-speed rail link, once connected the colony to Europe
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“The railway from Kowloon to Canton is to be formally opened to-day over its entire length,” ran the main editorial in the October 4, 1911, edition of The Hong Kong Daily Press.
Proudly noting that a year had already passed “since the British section of the line was opened to traffic,” the newspaper not only celebrated the grand opening but also keenly anticipated a direct overland link with Europe.
“There is now a much better prospect than heretofore of the great trunk line of railway from Canton [Guangzhou] to Hankow [Wuhan] being constructed within a reasonable period of time,” it predicted, “and we may therefore indulge the hope that before ten more years are past it will be possible to travel the whole way from Kowloon to Calais [France] by rail in less than a fortnight.”
More than two decades later, though, Carl Crow’s Handbook for China (1933) was still looking forward to the day when “the Canton-Hankow Railway […] will place Canton and Hongkong in direct rail communication with Paris”.
The northbound line finally opened in 1936 (the same year that Imperial Airways began the first scheduled flights from Hong Kong to Europe), but stopped at the southern bank of the Yangtze River. Train carriages were carefully ferried across on steam barges to resume their journey north. Smoother rail links between Hong Kong and Europe were made potentially possible by the opening of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge in 1957, but the cross-border railway between Hong Kong and the mainland had been closed since 1949.