How shiny new University of Chicago campus in Hong Kong is remembering the dark past of site it’s built on, including notorious detention centre known as ‘the zoo’
- Area that once held prisoners of 1967 riot in ‘subhuman conditions’ to host replica of an early 20th century British naval gun
The University of Chicago’s Hong Kong campus will soon play host to a replica of an early 20th century battery gun as part of efforts to preserve the history of the Pok Fu Lam site, which once housed a detention centre nicknamed “the zoo” for its tough conditions.
The model will be installed as early as next summer on a 90-year-old gun emplacement, which was formerly used to defend the city from Japanese invaders in the second world war.
The space was originally part of Jubilee Battery on Mount Davis, which was built in the 1930s and contained three BL six-inch-calibre Mark VII naval guns, each weighing 6,835kg and measuring almost 7 metres long.
Two of the guns were destroyed by the British army to prevent them falling into enemy hands when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945. The third was gone by 1946.
Professor Lee Ka-yee, chairwoman of the faculty advisory board for the university’s Hong Kong branch, said the replica was currently being designed and would be manufactured by a company in mainland China.