HONG KONG

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 August 1940, Page 6

HONG KONG

BRITAIN’S EASTERN COLONY

A CENTURY’S GROWTH. HEAVY FORTIFICATIONS. Since Japan launched her undeclared war against China. Hong Kong has taken on a new grim form as a military outpost on the South China coast, and the recent cabled reports of the evacuation of women and children show that the decks are being cleared for any eventuality that may arise. For decades, Honk Kong, founded about 100 years ago. was a serene, humdrum China "coast trading centre, with ships, banks and the usual English colonial accompaniment of clubs, cricket, golf, horse-racing and dinner parties. Along with Singapore naval base and the fortified United States island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, Hong Kong now stands as the third leg in that tripod of Anglo-Saxon power and influence in south-east Asia. Nobody claims that it is invulnerable, or of highest strategic value. But it is British soil, and for a century has been the seat of British authority in this part of the world.

Politically. Hong Kong is organised much like the colonies of Bermuda, Kenya and Mauritius. It has its governor, colonial secretary, chief justice, military and naval commanders, its Legislative Council, public health service, and all similar government machinery with which possessions that have not attained dominion status are operated. FORMER TRADING PORT. The colony was originally founded on Hong Kong Island, which was ceded to Great Britain in 1841, after the Opium War. Later, in 1860, the Convention of Peking added the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island; under a final treaty in 1898 the area known as New Territories, adjacent to Kowloon and including Mirs Bay and Deep Bay, was leased to Britain for 99 years. It was from Canton that British traders, largely of the East India Company, discouraged after over two centuries of trouble with Viceroys, finally chose Hong Kong Rock till then only a pirates’ lair—as the base for their permanent settlement. Now there rises from the harbour a great glittering city, with palaces, the cathedral, colleges and barracks, modern warehouses and offices.

Writing in the National Geographic Magazine, of a visit paid to Hong Kong in April, Mr F. Simpich states that to get into the harbour, through Lyemum Pass, your ship must wait while British naval boats draw aside a net of cables hung from floating barrels —a barrier set to stop any invading submarines. Mines protect some other entrances to colonial waters.

From high up on peaks that rise about the harbour, grim guns frown down at you, he says. Their evil snouts seem to snarl a warning, “Keep out.” although at Happy Valley race track, right under the guns, thousands of holidaymakers cheer the running China ponies. Marching, blue-clad schoolboys halt to let a line of trucks go by—trucks hauling still more guns up to the peaks, and manned by bearded ' Indian soldiers in coloured turbans and khaki shorts. KOWLOON DEFENCES.

Chinese girls in bobbed hair and split skirts, out for a picnic, pause to smile at British Tommies digging bomb shelters just behind a fashionable bathing beach, where machine-gun pillboxes squat among summer cottages. Enough barbed wire to fence in all the cattle in Texas stretches and tangles about hilltop searchlight posts, powder magazines, gun emplacements and across valley trails, up which enemy landing parties may try to march.

At a Kowloon church fair —and Kowloon is that part of Hong Kong which stands on the mainland peninsula just across the narrow bay from Hong Kong Island—you see excited Chinese and Portuguese boys and girls throwing darts, eating and singing. All are oblivious to the line of 44 brandnew tanks just unloaded from a ship and rumbling past to be added to the colony’s ever-growing defensive machinery.

Across New Territories, followingthe ridges towards the west, runs what people there call the Kowloon Maginot Line. Here is yet more barbed wire, iron-doored powder magazines, new forbidden trails built for. men. mules and guns, and still more hidden cannon emplacements. Off to the north, beyond more hills. | roost the watchful Japanese soldiers. I holding their line from Mirs Bay to Canton.