The Hong Kong History Podcast

It must be obvious from what we’ve looked at so far that because of its importance to sea trade – then as now ninety per cent and more of international flows of goods – and to the economies of Britain’s empire, coal stores mattered. It is easy to see why. Until the early twentieth century, and not always even then, no ship could carry enough coal to fuel it from its starting point to wherever it was bound and then back home again. Until perhaps 1900, any ship – merchantman or warship – would need to take on coal three or four times on its way from Europe to Hong Kong and as many times on the way back. Having access to, but much more important firm control over, what were called coaling stations – fuel stops – really mattered. Hong Kong, it soon turned out, was the British Empire’s most important coaling station – called a First Class Coaling Station – in East Asia. The important point is that no other Western power at the time had any equivalent until the late 1890s, and that’s ignoring two other things. The British merchant fleet was half or more of all ships afloat so it tended to carry disproportionate amounts of everyone else’s cargoes, coal included. Second, because Britain was the world’s largest producer of coal until the late 19th century a lot of other nation’s coal at ‘their’ coaling stations – there were lots all over the world with 50% or so not British controlled – tended to come from British coalfields. Given frequent 19th century big power rivalry as western empires aggressively expanded, stopping others grabbing ‘your’ coal mattered. That’s why, from the 1880s through to the early 1900s, as worries about imperial rivalries in the China Seas escalated, Hong Kong suddenly started acquiring all those huge gun batteries you can see on Mount Davis, at Pinewood Battery above HKU, at Lei Yue Mun, at Stonecutters Island, on Devil’s Peak and so on. Their function was to prevent any foreign naval power from stomping into Hong Kong and taking control of its coal and coaling facilities.

To begin with in the 1840s, the almost exclusive use for coal in Hong Kong was to fuel the steam engines of ships. William Tarrant, a very typical Hong Kong denizen then as now, or how a no-one can become a someone once the pond is small enough – claimed in 1848 that “the whole quantity consumed in Hongkong including the barracks during a year, does not probably exceed a thousand tons.” We know this was piffle, but it does indicate that from a landlubber’s point of view there seemed to be very little coal around. As we’ve noted, the demand for coal for shipping grew and grew. It’s now time to note that after 1864, what William Tarrant had seen as demand for not much more than for stuff to warm barracks in winter, also grew and grew. We need to remember that in the late 19th century, pretty much anything that whirred and whizzed, thumped and banged, or rumbled and rolled did so thanks to steam. And for steam, one needed coal because coal was by far and away the most thermally efficient fuel for boiling water. In the early 1860s Governor Sir Hercules Robinson saw that better lit public streets in Hong Kong would help reduce crime. So, he backed the founding of the Hongkong & China Gas Company, which in 1864 opened its gasworks in Shek Tong Tsui at Whitty Street, which supplied 500 street lights. To make gas one must have coal. It was the beginning of twenty-five years of increasing public and private demand for coal – to power pumps to pump out dockyards, drive machinery in ropeworks, sugar refineries, textile mills, cement works and, briefly in the 1870s, Hong Kong’s mint for stamping out coins. From the late 1860s to pump the public water supply from reservoirs. As of 1890 to generate electricity for homes, offices, telegraphic communication, and tramcars. For public and private transport – launches and ferries of course – but also the Peak Tram and, from 1910, the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Electricity turned out to be coal’s most important modernizing use in Hong Kong’s economy. In the 125 years Hong Kong has been generating electricity, power output has increased 105,000-fold. Even though today some 70% of that power is produced by burning gas, Hong Kong still uses 37,000 times more coal a year to generate electricity than it did from Hong Kong’s first power station over a century ago, although there are only seventeen times as many people! Put bluntly, we each of us use about two thousand times more electrical power in our daily lives than our forebears did 120 years ago.

Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s because as demand rose, so the amount of coal needed to be kept on hand increased accordingly: from around 3,000 tonnes in 1844 to more like 10,000 tons twenty years later and, forty years after that, 100,000 tons. That’s a lot of real estate. Ad hoc solutions ruled the roost over the first twenty or so years – including that of the P&O Company that stored its coal afloat in a hulk (ship without masts or sailed), the ex-East Indiaman, the Fort William from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to have been the most usual solution. The Fort William is the only coal hulk ever mentioned. Most coal was stored on land, which provoked an expected NIMBY reaction. Efforts were always being made to get it out of sight…well, out of the gweilos’ sight. The happy solution turned up in 1860 after the 2nd Opium War. The Kowloon Peninsula was empty of upmarket gweilos and out of their sight. Perfect. For the next eighty years it became the site of most of the largest coalyards both for commercial use and for the Royal Navy. Hong Kong Island didn’t escape entirely, but the coalyards got shoved out to the edge, first in Wan Chai and then in the North Point/Taikoo area. After WW2 demand for coal for fuel disappeared in favour of oil, so coalyards dwindled to two large government owned and operated yards at Lai Chi Kok and the Taikoo end of North Point. That’s until the 1970s oil shock, when suddenly Hong Kong’s electricity generating stations decided coal was cheaper. That’s how come in the last 50 years (c.1975-2025) Hong Kong has imported SEVEN TIMES more coal than it imported in its first century during the heyday of the steam ship. Happily for us all, the two power companies store what is at any one time about 250,000 tons of the stuff way out of sight on the west coast of Lamma Island and at Castle Peak beyond Tuen Mun.

Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880s – were chronically inefficient consumers of it to boot. Up until the 1860s, a typical 700hp engine would have needed up to 50 tonnes of coal a day. Hong Kong’s Harbour Master’s statistics are pretty useless and there is no hard data on steamship numbers before 1873. In that year 1579 steamers entered the port. Data suggests ships loaded around 100 tons of coal on average when they called at Hong Kong, so we’re looking at an annual demand for bunker coal in 1873 of around 150,000 tons. The average ship delivering coal from the 1840s until the 1870s was a sailing ship and only carried about 400 tons, so we’re looking at anything up to one ship a day having to arrive in Hong Kong to ensure there was enough coal to meet the demand. To begin with coal was mostly a cargo of opportunity. Because, for colonial Hong Kong’s first forty or so years, demand in China for British products was very weak, ships leaving from Britain carried coal as ballast so the voyage could earn some money. Later, they carried British goods to Australia, picked up a cargo of coal there for Hong Kong, and then loaded tea to take back to Britain.Only certain organizations with predictable demand – like the P&O steamship company or the Royal Navy – had regular, dedicated deliveries. For the rest, it was down to the market to ensure that supply matched demand. Mind you, however it was shipped for whatever reason, coal was a tricky cargo. There are lots of stories of coal carrying ships catching fire (in certain conditions coal will spontaneously combust) and exploding or sinking. There are others of the cargo shifting in strong weather and ships capsizing – a few ships are reported setting out from Britain with coal for Hong Kong and never arriving, just disappearing somewhere en route.

Britain’s huge advantage economically was its early development both of a coal industry and of a seaborne coal trade. Hong Kong’s big disadvantage is that had few natural mineral resources and no coal. As Britain aggressively expanded its empire in the mid-19th century, it could do so using steam ships supplied with coal from Britain. We can see that at work in a wonderful infographic created by the father of such things, the French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard, who illustrated Britain’s global coal export trade in 1850, 1860 and 1864, by which time 64,000 tons of the stuff were coming to HK. That expansion along with the number of steam ships, meant the problem of getting the coal the 14,000 miles from Britain around the Cape of Good Hope to places like Hong Kong got worse. The obvious answer was to find coal nearer to the places that needed it and we can see efforts to that end almost as soon as the dust had settled from the 1st Opium War. There’s evidence of some of the earliest coal being mined in Australia being imported by the early 1850s. So did coal from the on-again, off-again mines from the deposits in Labuan, first discovered in 1847. Coal from Keelung in Taiwan was arriving in Hong Kong by the end of the 2nd Opium War. In the early 1860s there’s even coal recorded for sale from the Lackawanna mines in Pennsylvania, USA, as well as from Canada and New Zealand. The first coal from Australia arrived in Hong Kong in the 1840s, but was a sporadic arrival until more regular shipments in the 1870s through 1880s. From that last decade onwards more and more of Hong Kong’s coal came from Japan to the point that by the mid-1890s it was Hong Kong’s main supplier. Coal from North China only began to make a serious contribution by the 1920s. That was until WW2, when everything changed. Post-war, that as from the 1970s has seen HK’s most recent coal high, ten times the amount of coal used in Hong Kong’s first century have fuelled Hong Kong’s growth engine, the main sources of the coal being South Africa and Indonesia. All up, in modern Hong Kong’s 180 plus years of existence, not far off half a billion tonnes of coal have arrived to fuel its growth from all over the world.

If you go to the Hong Kong Cemetery, you can find two memorials, placed there from their original positions in Hong Kong’s streets, to British and American steam warships. One is to the men of a sailing brig, HMS Vestal, who died 1844-47, her battles against the pirates much assisted by the steam paddlers HM Ships Vixen and Vulture. The other, to the casualties of HMS Rattler and the USS Powhatan, both steamers, who died fighting a pirate base near Macau in 1855.The steamships were just four of the many serving in Chinese waters between 1844 and the early 20th century that were engaged in suppressing the endemic piracy that plagued coastal waters and some major rivers. Their huge advantage over the pirates – apart from generally better weaponry – was their complete independence of the weather. When the navy had recourse only to sail it could be seriously handicapped, as might have been the case in 1849 in the action against Shap Ng-tsai in Mirs Bay, that was a success because HMS Columbine could be towed into action by the P&O paddle steamer Canton. That use of steam power was possible, of course, because of the coal shipped out from Britain stored in British controlled locations like Singapore and Hong Kong. We can see Hong Kong’s first coal store – quite a big one – very clearly labelled on the detailed map of Central by Lt T.B. Collinson RE of 1845. My rough calculation has it storing around 3,000-5,000 tons of coal.

The answer – well, an answer – is coal. How so? Generally, the take on the British victories tends to emphasize the fairly sorry state of the Qing military in terms of funding, equipment and training, and those forces’ huge disadvantage faced with massive broadsides of British ships and the lethal firepower of the British infantry’s muskets. It isn’t much commented on in the umpteen histories of the Sino-British wars in the 1840s and 1850s, but there was another huge advantage. For the second time in the history of warfare (everyone forgets about the 1st Anglo-Burmese War and the paddle steamer Diana) ships could be moved about independent of the wind. During the 1st Opium War, Britain was able to call on the services of not just one but 17 – yes seventeen – steam-powered warships. They could, and did, tow troopships when the wind failed. It was the same with the heavily gunned sailing ships of the line, which could be towed to where they were needed if there was no wind. The armed steamers, especially the shallow draft Nemesis, could go where the sailing vessels could not. No coal, no steam ships…and maybe a different outcome. In the 2nd Opium War almost all the British and French naval ships involved were either paddle or screw propelled steamers, so the technological advantage at sea, if not on land, was even greater because China’s navy had yet to modernize.

In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage. The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong Kong, usually began with expats doing their thing…and too often doing it with a nasty racist bias. That’s partly because one leg of that arrival, as it were, lay in the importance of sport to British military life. Both routes led sooner or later to the establishment of clubs and associations that did not exclude people on grounds of their ethnicity…well, not so much. On the way we’ll see how the origins of one of Hong Kong’s best known sporting outfits – the South China Athletic Association – had its origins in what became China’s first national football team. 

You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network –  slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B. But if one means what we’re all familiar with, timetabled services run by companies with several identical or similar vessels, the story is more nuanced. Ferries were right in there at the start with respect to linking Hong Kong to the PRD. But as far as links within HK itself - what most of us think of as a ferry - they’re actually quite a late comer. By the time the first ferry service of the sort we’d all recognize started up, modern Hong Kong was over half a century old. How come? It’s an intriguing story of changing maritime technology on the one hand and, on the other, the effects of socio-economic change on demand for properly organized local public transport ferry services.

Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But, assisted by a bit of fossicking in archives, maps can also tell stories all by themselves. Maps of Hong Kong tells lots of them. Like the way the small island everyone these days knows as Ap Lei Pai came to have that name…and how it’s the wrong one. Or how a reservoir for a flour mill came to be called Little Hawaii. Or that Round Island (Ngan Chau) off Repulse Bay got be charted as Ma Kong for 80 years and longer. Or why Tai Mo Shan was once called Lantau Falso. Or that Violet Hill on Hong Kong Island nearly became Mount Hamilton. And, of course, that Hong Kong Island wasn’t called that at all.