Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built with experiments in layouts, attempts to tame long-form articles, items from my scrapbook.
-| November 2024 |-
REBEL REBEL
The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is a close cousin to Extinction Rebellion, both are premised on pushback to an encroaching effacement of other cultures, other minds. In HK’s case, one reason is to inject a patriotic education curriculum into the syllabus. Umbrellas in these situations were deployed to shield from tear gas and pepper spray. This inaugural movement for basic human rights for the citizens of HK took place in 2014, and was over with in 79 days.
TEAR GAS
Nighttime faceoff between police and citizens in the Mong Kok neighborhood, October 17. foto: ed jones agence france-presse getty images
• citizens figured out how to defuse incoming tear gas: first cover with traffic cone, then pour water into hole at top.
VIGIL 4 TIANANMEN
There has been a candlelight vigil held in Victoria Park every June 4, in memory of 1989 Tiananmen. In 2021, Kayla Chan, 25, showed up.
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In 2014, police showed up at the candlelight vigil and released tear gas. In 2023, Victoria Park taken over by a jigsawed carnival and bazaar combination, featuring foods from different regions in China.
Place of Dead Roads
Gear via nakedcapitalism 10.22.2019: Dr Wong Tsu @HongKongHFF
... an example of what sets apart HKers from other protesters around the world. [L]eaflets are left on "refurbished" shops to explain the reasons behind these targeted actions. Also note: *no looting*. #antiELAB #HongKongProtesters #HongKong.
2018 TRIAL
Nine defendants stood trial for disturbances caused by the Umbrella Movement: Lawmakers Tanya Chan and Shiu Ka-chun; veteran democrat Lee Wing-tat. Founders of the movement pastor Chu Yiu-ming, sociology professor Chan Kin-man, law professor Benny Tai. Activist Raphael Wong; student leaders Eason Chung and Tommy Cheung.
I have nothing to plead. The person you’re prosecuting at this moment is not [Eason Chung, i.e., Defendant 7], nor is it D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D8 or D9.
Today, you are prosecuting anyone and everyone who participated in the Umbrella Movement. You are prosecuting all who cherish HK. So, your Honour, what you need to know is not D7’s background, or why he joined the movement. What your Honour needs to know is the background of everyone who joined the movement.
Those who willingly gave their time, their effort, their past, their future (gore lui, mei loy), and their lives for the people of HK. Why do they stay in this city without giving up, even when hope is as faint as the light of a firefly?
Your Honour, if you wish to seek the answers, you won’t simply find them in written statements, a few letters, or some impassioned speeches. We refused to be subservient to provisions, to authority, and to institutions.
We want to venture into an unknown world. A world where history and the present are entangled, where individual endeavours interact with unanticipated turns of events. We are about our world, not our position in it. In this process, there is no saint to follow, to lead. We are confused. We worry about the self that we strive to construct will collapse and be obliterated. Yet, we will someday rise from ashes. This belief is all we can hold on to right now.
Whether you are a judge, a barrister, a teacher, a pastor, a journalist, a correctional service employee, a legislator, a student, an assistant, a supporter or an opponent – before these identities, we are first of all human being.
If this holds true, if we indeed are human beings, I have no need to make an appeal. All of us, sitting here today, have a responsibility to step out of a courtroom, out of the legislature, out of the media landscape, to leave all intermediaries, and get to know the world in person. To experience the world ourselves. None of this can be explained in this courtroom.
Showing dexterity for cursive, students spray on school walls: Rioting > 10 years in prison. But we have no choice., and wear Guy Fawkes masks to graduation. foto: tyrone siu reutersfoto: tyrone siu reuters
S.O.S. U.S.A.
2019 was a turning point. The U.S. had passed a ‘HK human rights and democracy act’ that year; citizens mostly were jubilant. They had also been paying scant attention to other human right protests; when Black Lives Matter coalesed in 2013, in response to the death of George Floyd. Then the head of Human Rights Watch was denied entry in January 2020.
ASYLUM
Citizens show support for Edward Snowden by carrying signs: Stop Human Rights Violation; Protect Privacy and Liberties; Stop Surveillance Operations; Big Brother Is Watching You; HK Hero Home; No Extradition. Minor at a rally carried a sign in one hand and a mask of Snowden in the other.
HK LENNON WALLS
Citizens, especially students, took up the practise of mounting lennon walls: large assemblages of post-it notes scribbled with political thoughts. The first john-lennon wall was in then-communist Prague, where paint was, still is, the pen of choice.
SLAVE Efforts in Hong Kong to halt the selling and buying of young Chinese girls into bondage, as was common in China, resulted in the hiring of Phyllis Harrop to be the government’s liaison.
In 1938, legislation to abolish the mui-tsai system was signed into law, and PHYLLIS HARROP was appointed assistant secretary for Chinese affairs. When Phyllis answered the ad in 1937, she thought that she was being hired as a secretary. She had gone to Shanghai from England in 1929 to see the world. There she worked as a secretary until an ill-fated marriage to a German baron in 1934. Leaving him, she worked in Japanese-dominated Manchuria and had some contact with the world of the secret service. Now, in Hong Kong, she was given an assignment to protect young girls.
One raid that Phyllis had conducted in person had discovered seventeen transferred girls who were about to be shipped abroad. Phyllis set about preparing herself for her real job, becoming as soon as possible proficient in Cantonese and the relevant laws of Hong Kong. She built up a staff of Chinese women not afraid to work hard, and two police inspectors and a sergeant were seconded to her. As well as that team there were about one hundred Chinese detectives. It was not easy. The police department, instructed to refer to her all cases concerning women and children or family affairs, objected to having to deal with a woman. She found that notice of a forthcoming raid on a “sly brothel” (i.e. illegal) was leaking out so that any evidence of law-breaking had disappeared by the time the police arrived.
Subsequently she made a practice of going on raids and was seen as quite a character, as well as a friend, among the Chinese. Phyllis took her work seriously but she did not take herself seriously, laughingly describing her job as “protecting wayward girls”. Phyllis gives her formal title in “Hong Kong Incident” (1942) as “nui wa man dai yan”. It meant, literally and inaccurately, the lady secretary for Chinese affairs’. But it meant colloquially “big lady”.
“The German presence in occupied Hong Kong wasn’t entirely negligible. Germans observed during the actual course of the fighting included an officer and a civilian wearing a swastika emblem on his lapel. Both apparently made some attempt to intercede with the Japanese forces on behalf of their fellow Europeans. Shortly after the takeover, on December 30 1941, a number of German officers with nazi armbands are said to have watched the allied POWs being herded into captivity. One Indian eye-witness reported, ‘I have noticed many German advisers and I understand that the Germans are in charge of artillery operations’. At one point in the early months of the Occupation a German gestapo man in Hong Kong was said to have commented ‘that the Japanese would never have got where they were if it had not been for the Germans’. The Defag Co., a subsidiary of the industrial giant I.G. Farben, was observed to have entered along with the Japanese. [I.G. Farben, the parent company of Bayer, manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust.] Civilian visitors in the following year included Dr Erich Kordt, the German chargé d’affaires in Nanking.”
At the beginning of the second week of the war [January 1942], the controller of land transport issued a notice in the Gazette Extraordinary stopping all private motoring and limiting the sale of gasoline to certain designated pumps where officers of the Transport Service checked on all persons desiring to buy it. Nearly all the privately owned cars and trucks in the Colony had been requisitioned much earlier in the conflict; but this order stopped what remained of private traffic. The buses had been requisitioned, and the streetcar service, which for days had run only dawn to dusk, was now indefinitely suspended.
Shop fronts throughout the business district were boarded over; such business as was being done, with a few exceptions, carried on through little peepholes or half-sized doors in the boarding. Everywhere glass store fronts and window panes were criss-crosed with pasted slips of paper to prevent them from shattering with the constant reverberations of shellfire and the continual thudding of exploding bombs or shells.
The streets were sprayed with a rubble of plaster and bricks and were in some places piled so high with debris as to be impassable. Many houses and buildings, particularly those of the older type of construction, were pulverized. The unremitting shelling made whole blocks uninhabitable even in areas where the actual damage was relatively lighter. As the hostilities progressed, more and more of the mid-level and Peak dwellings were literally blown off the side of the hill – among them the residence of the American consul-general, whose home was totally wrecked.
☯
☰ heaven
☱ lake
☲ fire
☳ thunder
☴ wind
☵ water
☶ mountain
☷ earth
MATINEE
For when you wanna stay in the mood
Bio of heavyweight champion boxer Jim Corbett (1866-1933), and the newly enacted Marquis of Queensbury Rules for the “sweet science.” Errol Flynn plays Corbett, William Frawley the manager, and Jack Carson the right-hand man. When not in the ring, 'gentleman jim' (1942 1h44m) woos Alexis Smith in 1880s San Francisco.
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Rocky Graziano (1919-1990) was 28 years old when he won the 1947 world middleweight champion title. Paul Newman plays him for the film version, knowing in his heart that 'somebody up there likes me' (1956 1h53m), perhaps because Pier Angeli is his wife.
During the Second World War, a German lieutenant in Occupied France is assigned to quarters in a house where a retired man lives with his niece. Even though the soldier openly admires the library and can play the piano, his hosts sit and smoke or knit, and do not react nor speak, finding their words in 'le silence de la mer' (1949 1hr27m): as a duel turns into a duet of old-world manners. Howard Vernon is the lieutenant, Nicole Stéphane the niece, Jean-Marie Robain the uncle. In French.
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Having lost the Second World War, an axis general (George Coulouris) tells senior staff: “Stay alive, preserve our 'master race' (1944 1h53m). Stay alive. Until we meet again. Dismissed.” The general then goes into a stage-sized Belgian town to assume a normal life.
Akira Kurosawa sets his film of Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play 'the lower depths' (1957 2h17m) in a shantytown, by a garbage dumping ground, in Edo-era Japan. Toshiro Mifune plays the thief Sutetkichi: Jigoku no sata mo, kane shidai (money buys your fate in hell). In Japanese.
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Takashi Shimura is a doctor and an alcoholic in postwar Japan, known as the 'drunken angel' (1948 1h42m) who will treat anyone, no questions asked. Toshiro Mifune, in his debut, is the small-time gangster, who shows up at the clinic with a bullet lodged in him. In Japanese.
Luciano de Ambrosis is an unhappy child, witness to parental discord, infidelity, and worse. His nanny Nicoletta Parodi seems the only adult who knows that, in truth, 'the children are watching us' (1943 1h24m). Sensitive direction by Vittorio De Sica.
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Patricia Gozzi is abandoned by her father at a girls’ boarding school. Hardy Kruger is the shell-shocked ex-soldier who enters her life. He will then contrive a ruse so that all 'sundays and cybele' (1962 1h51m) could help him recover his shattered self – during the holiest hours of the week – doubtful for her, but medicine for him. In French.
Following mystical premonitions they cannot explain, 'three strangers' (1946 1h32m), cross paths and recognize in each a common cause. Peter Lorre, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sydney Greenstreet get to then perform a rite before an altar that will unlock the promise of untold wealth. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson ripples the script, forming gaps where editor George Amy drops in ever-widening cliff hangers.
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When the maid to ailing shipping magnate Lloyd Nolan answers the doorbell, in a mid-century haute-chinois mansion on top of a San Francisco hill, the front door opens to reveal a 'portrait in black' (1960 1h52m), where Lana Turner is the wife, Anthony Quinn her lover, Sandra Dee her stepdaughter, and John Saxon the beau. Anna May Wong, in her last film role, plays the maid.
Opening night of a new Broadway production is jinxed when a 'murder at the vanities' (1934 1h29m) stops the show. Kitty Carlisle and Carl Brisson are the top-billed stars. Gertrude Michael is a spiteful actress, and Charles Middleton plays Ming the Merciless. The chorus line includes Lucille Ball, Ann Sheridan and Alan Ladd.
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Bubbles is the latest burlesque sensation; off-stage, her roommate, trained in ballet, needs employment. They are showbiz entertainers who must 'dance girl dance' (1940 1h30m) to pay the rent. Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara are the roommates, and the direction by Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) sets this film apart from an oft-told tale.
The ballerina turns out to be a flop on the burlesque stage, and the audience lets her know it. In a unique case of vaudeville verité, she addresses the hecklers:
In 1925 Montana, brothers Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch own a cattle ranch. Single-mom Kirsten Dunst runs a roadhouse diner nearby, with help from waiter-son Kodi Smit-McPhee. In the end, one of them will get to unleash the 'power of the dog' (2021 2h6m). Based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. Directed by Jane Campion.
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Two “wickies”, strangers to each other, sign up for a three-month stint to tend to 'the lighthouse' (2019 1h49m) on a Welsh rock in a late 19th century sea. After being dropped off, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson will defend and fight seagulls, meet shape-shifting antique being Proteus, and learn to co-exist.
❝One could make an animal, a tissue, transparent! One could make it invisible! All except the pigments — I could be invisible!❞ – Jack Griffin
Based on sight gags and stagecraft, The Invisible Man and its sequels helped nudge theatre to keep up w/ the maturing motion pictures behemoth. Based on a victorian fantasia on the consequences of scientific frontiers.
1. The Invisible Man (1933)
A scientist’s unholy experiments into invisibility is realized, and now he regrets it.
Claude Rains is the Invisible Man, slowly turning homicidal due to the formula’s side effect. “… a few murders here and there.” Gloria Stuart as his fiancée, E.E. Clive is the constable, Una O’Connor the innkeeper.
2. The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
In an altruistic moment, the mad scientist’s brother re-creates the invisibility formula in order to release a man on death row and to find the real killer. “I can’t find peace in the underworld.” Vincent Price is the brother who becomes the second Invisible Man, w/ Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Napier, Nan Grey.
3. The Invisible Woman (1940)
Kitty Carroll answers an ad to be a subject in a science experiment, and is bombarded by an invisibility ray. “I’m nothin’ but a nothin’.” Blackie and his gang get word of this miracle and become interested. John Barrymore is the mad scientist, w/ Oskar Homolka, Shemp Howard, Maria Montez, Anne Nagel.
4. Invisible Agent (1942)
When axis agents arrive to steal the invisibility formula, the grandson to the scientist runs off w/ the notebooks. Jon Hall then ingests the formula and parachutes into Berlin, to bring the war home, as the Invisible Agent. “I can’t tell you people apart.” Screenplay by Curt Siodmak. With Peter Lorre, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Albert Basserman, Ilona Massey, J. Edward Bromberg, Key Luke.
5. The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)
A mad scientist succeeds in stabilizing the invisibility formula and turns ghoulish. John Carradine is Dr Drury. “Pioneers have always to contend w/ fools.” Jon Hall returns again as the invisible one, w/ Gale Sondergaard, Lester Mathews, Halliwell Hobbes.
When a nearly intact tomb belonging to egyptian royalty was discovered in 1922, foreign correspondent John L. Balderston was there covering it for the New York World. The world then became somewhat familiar w/ the ancients’ belief in immortality as well as the science of embalming, an operation taking 70 days to achieve and presided over by Anubis. Balderston was later hired to produce the screenplay for a fantasia based on a fiction, fashioned from a backstory by Nina Wilco Putnam, on the life of 18th-c. french hypnotist Caliostro. The result dipped romance into ungodly goo that only Hollywood could concoct.
1. The Mummy (1932)
As the 1921 field expedition season opens in Egypt, members of the British Museum discover a coffin and a body inside. “The gods of Egypt still live in these hills, in their ruined temples.” Boris Karloff is the mummy Imhotep, awakened by tomb-hunters and pursuing the reincarnation of his princess Anck-es-en-Amon – in flapper-era London.
2. The Mummy’s Hand (1940)
Following a map, archaeologists find the tomb of the princess Ananka, and by breaking the seal of the seven jackals unleash a terror that has waited 3,000 years to be reborn. “We search for the tomb of a princess, and all we find is the mummy of a man.” Tom Tyler is the reanimated Kharis – imparting to the role his famous lurch and one dead arm. Eduardo Cianelli plays the high priest.
3. The Mummy’s Tomb (1942)
Opening his eyes for the first time as the mummy Kharis, Lon Chaney Jr will seek vengeance for the tomb desecration of his princess Ananka. “The curse on that tomb extends to the blood relations of all who entered it.” Turhan Bey is Mehemet Bey.
4. The Mummy’s Ghost (1944)
Ramsay Ames is the american reincarnation of the princess Ananka, and Lon Chaney Jr again plays the mummy Kharis, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to court her. “First it’s the Mummy. Now it’s a reincarnated woman!” John Carradine plays Yousef Bey, and George Zucco is Andoheb.
5. The Mummy’s Curse (1944)
Lon Chaney Jr is revived a third time as the mummy Kharis, and finds reason to wade into the Louisiana bayou where a crypt holds dead princess Ananka, his beloved Virginia Christine. “I can never get too much sun.” Peter Coe is Dr Ilzor Zandaabm, and Dennis Moore plays Dr Halsey.
HELLO
This is the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built with experiments in layout, attempts to tame long-form articles, and items from my scrapbook.
The Inquisition came to Portugal in 1567, and Coimbra was one of the three places tasked to conduct it. Afterwards, the University re-established freedom of research, strengthened their statutes, reorganized the syllabus to re-establish freedom of research, and put emphasis on an education in the vernacular.
⇞ UNIVERSITY OF COIMBRA
The University originally taught law, rhetoric, mathematics, theology, medicine, grammar, Greek. Seventy or so professors and lecturers manage five faculties: direito (law), mathematica,
medicina,
philosophia, theologia. The ordinary degree resulting in the title licenciado (graduate) will take five years. The degree of douto (learned) takes one more, plus a second examination. Medical students study for eight years. Semester starts in autumn and ends when spring is over. The university system is city-wide, and hosts sports and theater events for its citizens; participates in nurseries and kindergartens, botany and preservation.
Academic seasons are marked by rituals, originally symbolized as colors. End of semester is celebrated in the noisy Festa das Latas. The oldest is Queima das Fritas (Burning of the Ribbons), a totality that takes eight days to play out. The ribbons are
❚❘❚ light-blue = science [art];
❚❘❚ dark-blue= letters [mind];
❚❘❚ yellow = medicine [body];
❚❘❚ purple = pharmacy [body].
⇞ LIBRARY
⇞ STUDENT BODY
The estudantes (students) make up about a third of the town's inhabitants, and their graduation ceremonies take up the whole of May. A localized form of fado (sad song) is performed, by male students only, and only at 10pm on the steps of the Old Cathedral, with lyrics more intellectual and romantic than the genre requires: love songs tuned to passions and sentiments, perfuming the air with student lamentations until dawn.
⇞ FRATERNITIES
⇞ LUíS De CAMõES
⇞ CITY OF CULTURE
Up until the middle of the 20th century, Coimbra was largely inaccessible to travellers passing through. Sacheverell Sitwell visited in the 1950s, and found fault with the new:
█Namib Sand Sea became a world heritage site in 2013 because atmospheric conditions provide exceptional visibility of landscape features by day and the dazzling southern hemisphere sky at night. Essentially uninhabited except for several small villages, this much sand is an ideal laboratory to track dune types and elevations reach, monitor how playas are formed, and study the totality’s behavior to air currents.
Gazelles prance across Namib
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In 2013, a committee from the United Nations opened its 37th session in Siem Reap, Cambodia, then concluded while in Phnom Penh, Vietnam. A short list for world-heritage site designations was released: All have historical heft, and each imparts the gift of time travel. The criteria for induction, worked out by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is a parcel unique on Earth.
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Founded in the 1400s and developed to be a desert destination, Agadez was the southern gateway to the Sahara desert, the last town before reaching Tripoli, on the Mediterranean sea.
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For 3,000 years, people have lived in this dry desert in central Iran, adapting to and in symbiosis with the environment. A 2006 census of the Cultural Landscape of Meymand showed at that time a population of 673, living in 181 families: nomadic agro-pastoralists, moving twice a year and bringing livestock, to tend to orchards and small vegetable plots. In spring they go up the moutains, where their animals can graze, and live in stone-walled houses with thatched roofs of wild thistle. Winter is spent in the valley, their houses hand-dug from soft rock. Due to the harsh terrain, water is precious, so rivers and springs are diverted to reservoirs, while wells can bring water up from subterranean pools.
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The Medici Villas and Gardens in Tuscany was begun during the 1400s, and was altogether a new type of princely residence. Built in a pastoral setting, the gardens became stewards to their surroundings, while the residents lived for knowledge, the arts, and leisure = humanism.
First, though, the builder had to survey the grounds, adjust the landscape, lay down lawns, put up villas, all in a quest for resonance with nature = renaissance.
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Taking on its iconic form thousands of years ago, when the shinto school for ascetic buddhism was beginning to stir, Mount Fuji stands alone in the middle of Japan, showing superb symmetry no matter from which side the extinct volcano is viewed. Designated a sacred space in 2013.
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This 2013 cultural property is in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Ringed by mountains: an ancient city, guarded by walls and gates, containing several palaces, an astronomical and meteorological observatory, and a tomb complex, and became a welcoming place for philosophers to gather. The Historic Monuments + Sites in Kaesong are twelve separate structures and sites (which together make a geomantic map), to tease out how neo-confucian manners, buddhist feelings and taoist rites trickled into native customs, to show assimilation of the cultural, spiritual and political values, spanning five centures, of the various states that existed on the Peninsula.
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The masterpiece in absolutism was awarded in 2013 to Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, a german palace in Kassel on 590 acres. The garden is part french-formal, part italian-baroque, both can peek into the windows of the neo-classical residence, but shun an artificial ruin of a gothic-revival castle. The outdoor feature is an irresistible theatre of water, devised in long-ago 1689. Hydro-pneumatic devices and reservoirs use underground pipes to direct water flow, and manual labor is used to control the locks. The resulting orchestral maelstrom, abetted by rustling leaves, is made up of basins, ponds, grottoes, a lake, fountains, waterfalls of various heights, and a gone-wild rapid. Surveying all this from atop of the grounds is Hercules, 70.5m (231ft) tall and sheathed in copper, who came in 1701 and never left.
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The Basque historic whaling station in the fishing village of Red Bay, Labrador, together with other nearby whaling stations, helped turn whale-oil production into a large-scale business. This 2013 world heritage site is the earliest, most complete, and best preserved example into european whaling practices in the 1500s, a dangerous 80-year period of prosperity. Whaling crews would end up transporting millions of barrels of whale oil, from Newfoundland and Labrador, to Europe - a treasure then as valuable as gold brought home by conquistadors.
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This ancient city, Tauric Chersonese and Its Chora, is a preserved site in Ukraine, and an example of sensible land organization by a polis 'city'. Tauric Chersonese is a settlement made up of six urban neighborhoods, and chora 'retangular plots of equal sites' is the land alotted each household.
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This city sat along the Silk Road, became a trading gateway between east and west, where goods and cultural customs changed hands and minds. Bolgar Historical and Archaeological Complex contains epochs of history.
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When salt deposits were discovered under Poland, beginning in the 1200s, royal interest ensured this precious spice be granted native patronage. Now two of them, the Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines, is the epitome of technological human progress. Together, the two salt mines cover a walking distance larger than from Krakow to Warsaw: 252km (157mi).
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First it was a port in the Fiji Islands, then was a hub for sea routes from all directions, traveling through Melanesia on their way somewhere else, and became a town offering rest and recreation for sailors, and respite ships. The oldest social organization in Polynesia is here, so is the oldest hospitality house. The oldest Masonic lodge in Oceania (b.1875) still holds meetings, where they discuss articles in the Fiji Times (b.1869), still being printed. Festooned with mango trees and coconut groves, Lekuva seeped into history sometime during the 1950s.
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Two adjoining parks in Lesotho’s tundra country became an ecological landscape recipient in 2013 and now is one: Maloti Drakensberg National Park, home to endemic plants - tropical to alpine, birds, lakes, and interesting rocks.
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Where headwaters from five rivers originate is the land that gives life, Pimachiowin Aki, part of the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg people of Manitoba, Canada. They have a lifelong practise of 'keeping the land' ji-ganawendamang gidakiiminaan, making seasonal outings to commune with the goddesses and gods of the Fish, the Hunt, and the Gathering.
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Looking the same today as it did some four million years ago, Tianshan Xinjiang manifests ongoing biological and ecological evolutionary processes.
This 2013 natural property is a powerhouse combo made up of three parks and three nature reserves, each with their own values, and sits on land touching Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang), and China.
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eight polish tserkvas:
Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Chotyniec)
St Michael the Archangel (Turzańsk);
St Michael the Archangel (Smolnik);
St James the Less (Powroźnik);
Virgin Mary's Care (Owczary);
St Paraskevia (Kwiaton);
St Parskevia (Radruz);
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Seen in the proper light, these churches in the Carpathian Region, the Wooden Tserkvas of Poland and Ukraine, are depictions of the creation of the universe. To this day, parishioners go on high holy days and practice an unbroken liturgy, in buildings of horizontal-log construction on stone foundations, with three-sectioned interiors topped with domes - built between the 1500s to 1800s: renaissance to post-alchemy.
eight ukrainian tserkvas:
Birth of the Theotokos (Nizhny Werbiaz);
St Archangel Michael (Uzak);
Ascension (Jasin);
Holy Spirit (Rohatyn);
St George (Drohobych);
Holy Trinity (Zolkiew);
St Demetrius (Matkow);
Pentecost (Potylicz).
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Founded by pearl merchants in long-ago Qatar, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, this archaeological site recipient offers a singular insight into a history of the underwater pearl. Summer was its season, and folks up and down the coast, as well as from inland, would head for 'pearl town' to seek work: to dive and fetch them; to buy and trade them; or to protect the town and its wealth from outside attacks.
Children living in this oysterland treat pearls as toys, and play 'turtles and pearls'. The game takes place underwater, and players hold a pet turtle and jump in. The turtle is used as a projectile to hit at a colored pearl, on a game-board, among bowls of different-colored pearls: the aim being to hit another pearl of the same color out.
When a successful attack in 1811 finally managed to sack the enterprise, residents moved inland and rebuilt, abandoning their home, which was later discovered buried in sand. Al Zubarah is comprised of a fortified town, an inner and an (earlier) outer wall, screening walls, two forts overlooking the harbor, and a sea canal.
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The university in Coimbra was founded in 1290, the second oldest continuous institution of higher learning in Europe (the University of Paris is older).
In 2013 the town was deemed ... an integrated university city, with a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.
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The landmark in this natural property can be seen from miles around: a glacier-clad extinct volcano rising up on semi-arid savannah grasslands in the tropics. Mount Kenya, known to the Kikuyu tribespeople as mountain of brightness, was designated a world heritage site back in 1997, the second highest peak in east Africa. The site was extended in 2013 and renamed as Mount Kenya-Luwa Wildlife Conservancy, to include a traditional route for migrating African elephants, already roaming through different kinds of forests, home to rhinos and buffalos, baboons and bushbucks, white-tailed mongoose, x-size hogs and bush-pigs, leopards and hyenas.
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This complete and coherent grouprecipient is the Hill Forts of Rajasthan in northwestern India: six defense settlements spread across the rocky terrain of two mountain ranges, built by rajput (8th to 18th century) warriors who made use of natural defenses in the landsdcape to reinforce their might. These six forts are:
Amber, built with four gates facing the four cardinal directions. The principal buildings followed the contours of the hill and important rooms had a view of the lake.
Access to Chittaurgarh, draped over a hilltop, and the grandest of the six forts, can only be gained by passing through seven gates.
Built of yellow sandstone, Jaisalmer has a single gateway. The defensive walls, seen against the backdrop of the yellow desert, blended during a certain time of day, and turned invisible.
The defensive wall of Kumbhalgarh has seven stone gateways, each leading to a passage that zigzagged and pockmarked by small side cells.
Sitting high above dense jungles, Ranthambore has stonewalls, towers, strongholds, and four gates. The main approach is a steep ascent, with stairs cut into rocks.
Built where two rivers meet, Gagron sat on a flat hilltop and watched over trade routes.
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Part of the vast Eastern Mindanao Biodiversity Corridor, Mount Hamiguitan Range Wildlife Sanctuary is in a pristine peninsula and home to an aboriginal pygmy forest, an endangered eagle (left) and a threatened cockatoo (right).
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In the Mountains of the Pamirs, where the highest ranges on the Eurasian continent meet, there is a high-altitude park that undergoes frequent strong earthquakes. Seldom visited, sparsely inhabited hence unspoiled, Tajik National Park is otherwise home to endemic fish, indian goose, siberian ibex, marco-polo sheep, brown bear, and snow leopard – co-existing in a land of rivers (170), lakes (400), and glaciers (±1,000).
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Spewing lava consistently for centuries, a natural property since 2013, Mount Etna
in Sicily is alive, and a favorite haunt for volcanologists, near enough to monitor “ongoing volcanic landform processes” as they occur.
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There is a vast farm ranging across mountains in southern Yunan, its current condition shaped by countless hands for more than a thousand years, turning mountainsides into terraces, and each terrace a rice paddy plot. Honghe Hani Rice Terraces is irrigated by springs flowing into four trunk canals, which branch off into 392 ditches, the whole being maintained communally. The water comes from springs, which originate from clefts in granite rocks that channel rainfall collecting in sandstone deposits. The sandstone traps the water and releases it gradually as springs.
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Built for a sultan as a compound set within a rose garden, the Golestan Palace Complex is the real deal: seventeen palaces; a tall tower affording panoramic views; wind towers to funnel upper air so as to promote an indoor breeze. Built with geometric precision to achieve spacial volume and organization, the rose garden is split in two: a smaller one on a north-south axis, with passageway to a larger garden, along a northeast to southwest axis.
UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE Konohanasakuya-hime, the shinto spirit of Fujisan, is a volcano goddess, and presiding deity for the prevention of fires.
Fujisan
Taking on its iconic form some five thousand years ago, becoming the locus for ascetic buddhism of the shinto school (because blessed by superb symmetry?), Mt Fuji stands alone in the center of Japan, and has inspired artists for many centuries. Recognized as a “sacred space”, in 2013 Mt Fuji became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Each item, unto the crest of a wave, in cosmological Japan is imbued with its own kami “spirit”. The kami of Mt Fuji is a princess, her name is Konohana-sokuahime.
Mt Fuji, in shinto cosmology, is occupied by a kami “spirit”. The Japanese have imbued the world, unto a blade of grass, each with its own kami. Princess Konohanasakuya-hime is the kami of Fujisan, present wherever cherry blossoms are found on Mt Fuji: Fujisan-konohana-sokuahime “Fuji causing the blossom to brightly bloom”. The fujiko branch of shinto adds to the mountain a soul, endowing it with existence. Meanwhile, buddhists regard the volcano as a gateway to another world. The summit is ringed with eight peaks, and a hike to visit all of them can take about half a day.
While her husband Astraeus “dawn wind” teases primeval goddess Nyx “night” to leave the Sky, winged dawn goddess Eos “aurora” arrives in her twin-horse chariot to announce the advent of the Sun over Mt Fuji.
Hiking to the summit to greet the morning Sun is a common occurrence, and for as long as anyone can remember, there is and always has been, a choice of only four trails leading to the top. There is a term, as in “My goraiko was obscured by clouds and rain blotted out the horizon”. For lucky ones, though, the alpine sight of morning peeking over the horizon, the departure of night, can trigger a palpable shift, “something we all know happens regular, see but not see ...”
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goraiko, shinto speak.
A macabre fourteen square mile pine forest at the base of Mt Fuji, where it is dark on the ground and light at the top.
There is an immense pine forest, a lethal leafy labyrinth, ringing the north-west base of Mt Fuji. Aokiga-hara-jukai “the sea of trees” is alarmingly dark during daytime, and likened to a walk on the sea bottom. The forest floor still and silent, the treetops swaying and musical – leaves playing with wind and sunlight. Thought to be haunted, the forest is a suicide destination spot.
The village of Yoshida resides on the slopes of Mt Fuji, and plays host to an annual two-day fire festival, in honor of Kamuy-huci, the kami of fire.
The shinto embodiment of fire, hearth goddess Kamuy-huci, visits Mt Fuji once a year, wearing buddhist beads for a powwow with the kami of Fujisan. They meet at a trail stop on the way to the summit, in the village of Yoshida, rife with rustic rumors of interesting insights into a psychoanalysis of fire. Yoshida hosts an annual autumn fire festival, which is over and done with in one night and following day, involving practises to conclude the climbing season, and there is festival footage.
Mt Fuji has starred in numerous scifi scenarios, featuring hybrids as well as mutated Japanese beings born after the Second World War.
As a stand-in for the future-perfect landmark, Mt Fuji has has been featured in numerous scifi movies. “The X From Outer Space”(1967) begins with a helicopter landing in full view of the mountain, whose peak has also served as a staging ground for countless mutants born after the Second World War, beginning with Godzilla the fire-breathing giant lizard. Ready to fight and best them are supermen and superwomen in battle-suits, or else heroic beings from other planets, time travelers, as well as a legion of cyborgs and robots. The first to show up was Golden Bat aka Phantaman, who was sent forward in time to the year 1930 by Atlantis science. A few were born with fire powers: siblings Shiro and Leyu Yoshida; buddhist Izumi Yasunari. Tetsuo Shima (Akira) came to light in 1988, harboring the seeds of destructive psychic powers, while Iron Man (aka Tetsuo) was an 1989 cyborg with a tragic sex life.
The top image shows Mt Fuji in 2019, aboard the International Space Station.
Fujisan is a relatively young and active volcano, sixty-two miles south-west of Tokyo. It sits on a slab of rock at the “triple junction” position, radiating tectonically down towards the Filipino Plate, west towards the Eurasian Plate, and east to meet with the North American Plate – the Okhotsk. There have been twenty-one recorded eruptions, the last was an 8.4 on October 26, 1707, destroying seventy-two houses and three buddhist temples; powerful enough to blow a scoop out at the tip, forming a new crater on the eastern flank. A meteorological reading, from February 4, 2013, is typical of current times:
The volcano remains calm. However, an increased number of small quakes near and under Mt Fuji are visible on our latest data plot of nearby earthquakes (within 30 km radius). While all of these are very small and the number is certainly not alarming, the volcano remains interesting to watch. ...
REBEL REBEL
The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is a close cousin to Extinction Rebellion, both are premised on pushback to an encroaching effacement of other cultures, other minds. In HK’s case, one reason is to inject a patriotic education curriculum into the syllabus. Umbrellas in these situations were deployed to shield from tear gas and pepper spray. This inaugural movement for basic human rights for the citizens of HK took place in 2014, and was over with in 79 days.
TEAR GAS
Nighttime faceoff between police and citizens in the Mong Kok neighborhood, October 17. foto: ed jones agence france-presse getty images
• citizens figured out how to defuse incoming tear gas: first cover with traffic cone, then pour water into hole at top.
VIGIL 4 TIANANMEN
There has been a candlelight vigil held in Victoria Park every June 4, in memory of 1989 Tiananmen. In 2021, Kayla Chan, 25, showed up.
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In 2014, police showed up at the candlelight vigil and released tear gas. In 2023, Victoria Park taken over by a jigsawed carnival and bazaar combination, featuring foods from different regions in China.
City of Dead Roads
Gear via nakedcapitalism 10.22.2019: Dr Wong Tsu @HongKongHFF
... an example of what sets apart HKers from other protesters around the world. [L]eaflets are left on "refurbished" shops to explain the reasons behind these targeted actions. Also note: *no looting*. #antiELAB #HongKongProtesters #HongKong.
2018 TRIAL
Nine defendants stood trial for disturbances caused by the Umbrella Movement: Lawmakers Tanya Chan and Shiu Ka-chun; veteran democrat Lee Wing-tat. Founders of the movement pastor Chu Yiu-ming, sociology professor Chan Kin-man, law professor Benny Tai. Activist Raphael Wong; student leaders Eason Chung and Tommy Cheung.
The person you’re prosecuting at this moment is not [Eason Chung, i.e., Defendant 7], nor is it D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D8 or D9.
Today, you are prosecuting anyone and everyone who participated in the Umbrella Movement. You are prosecuting all who cherish HK. So, your Honour, what you need to know is not D7’s background, or why he joined the movement. What your Honour needs to know is the background of everyone who joined the movement.
Those who willingly gave their time, their effort, their past, their future (gore lui, mei loy), and their lives for the people of HK. Why do they stay in this city without giving up, even when hope is as faint as the light of a firefly?
Your Honour, if you wish to seek the answers, you won’t simply find them in written statements, a few letters, or some impassioned speeches. We refused to be subservient to provisions, to authority, and to institutions.
We want to venture into an unknown world. A world where history and the present are entangled, where individual endeavours interact with unanticipated turns of events. We are about our world, not our position in it. In this process, there is no saint to follow, to lead. We are confused. We worry about the self that we strive to construct will collapse and be obliterated. Yet, we will someday rise from ashes. This belief is all we can hold on to right now.
Whether you are a judge, a barrister, a teacher, a pastor, a journalist, a correctional service employee, a legislator, a student, an assistant, a supporter or an opponent – before these identities, we are first of all human being.
If this holds true, if we indeed are human beings, I have no need to make an appeal. All of us, sitting here today, have a responsibility to step out of a courtroom, out of the legislature, out of the media landscape, to leave all intermediaries, and get to know the world in person. To experience the world ourselves. None of this can be explained in this courtroom.
Showing dexterity for cursive, students spray on school walls: Rioting > 10 years in prison. But we have no choice., and wear Guy Fawkes masks to graduation. foto: tyrone siu reutersfoto: tyrone siu reuters
S.O.S. U.S.A.
2019 was a turning point. The U.S. had passed a ‘HK human rights and democracy act’ that year; citizens mostly were jubilant. They had also been paying scant attention to other human right protests; when Black Lives Matter coalesed in 2013, in response to the death of George Floyd. Then the head of Human Rights Watch was denied entry in January 2020.
ASYLUM
Citizens show support for Edward Snowden by carrying signs: Stop Human Rights Violation; Protect Privacy and Liberties; Stop Surveillance Operations; Big Brother Is Watching You; HK Hero Home; No Extradition. Minor at a rally carried a sign in one hand and a mask of Snowden in the other.
HK LENNON WALLS
Citizens, especially students, took up the practise of mounting lennon walls: large assemblages of post-it notes scribbled with political thoughts. The first john-lennon wall was in then-communist Prague, where paint was, still is, the pen of choice.
SLAVE Efforts in Hong Kong to halt the selling and buying of young Chinese girls into bondage, as was common in China, resulted in the hiring of Phyllis Harrop to be the government’s liaison.
In 1938, legislation to abolish the mui-tsai system was signed into law, and PHYLLIS HARROP was appointed assistant secretary for Chinese affairs. When Phyllis answered the ad in 1937, she thought that she was being hired as a secretary. She had gone to Shanghai from England in 1929 to see the world. There she worked as a secretary until an ill-fated marriage to a German baron in 1934. Leaving him, she worked in Japanese-dominated Manchuria and had some contact with the world of the secret service. Now, in Hong Kong, she was given an assignment to protect young girls.
One raid that Phyllis had conducted in person had discovered seventeen transferred girls who were about to be shipped abroad. Phyllis set about preparing herself for her real job, becoming as soon as possible proficient in Cantonese and the relevant laws of Hong Kong. She built up a staff of Chinese women not afraid to work hard, and two police inspectors and a sergeant were seconded to her. As well as that team there were about one hundred Chinese detectives. It was not easy. The police department, instructed to refer to her all cases concerning women and children or family affairs, objected to having to deal with a woman. She found that notice of a forthcoming raid on a “sly brothel” (i.e. illegal) was leaking out so that any evidence of law-breaking had disappeared by the time the police arrived.
Subsequently she made a practice of going on raids and was seen as quite a character, as well as a friend, among the Chinese. Phyllis took her work seriously but she did not take herself seriously, laughingly describing her job as “protecting wayward girls”. Phyllis gives her formal title in “Hong Kong Incident” (1942) as “nui wa man dai yan”. It meant, literally and inaccurately, the lady secretary for Chinese affairs’. But it meant colloquially “big lady”.
AXIS HK
“The German presence in occupied Hong Kong wasn’t entirely negligible. Germans observed during the actual course of the fighting included an officer and a civilian wearing a swastika emblem on his lapel. Both apparently made some attempt to intercede with the Japanese forces on behalf of their fellow Europeans. Shortly after the takeover, on December 30 1941, a number of German officers with nazi armbands are said to have watched the allied POWs being herded into captivity. One Indian eye-witness reported, ‘I have noticed many German advisers and I understand that the Germans are in charge of artillery operations’. At one point in the early months of the Occupation a German gestapo man in Hong Kong was said to have commented ‘that the Japanese would never have got where they were if it had not been for the Germans’. The Defag Co., a subsidiary of the industrial giant I.G. Farben, was observed to have entered along with the Japanese. [I.G. Farben, the parent company of Bayer, manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust.] Civilian visitors in the following year included Dr Erich Kordt, the German chargé d’affaires in Nanking.”
1944 OCCUPATION
At the beginning of the second week of the war [January 1942], the controller of land transport issued a notice in the Gazette Extraordinary stopping all private motoring and limiting the sale of gasoline to certain designated pumps where officers of the Transport Service checked on all persons desiring to buy it. Nearly all the privately owned cars and trucks in the Colony had been requisitioned much earlier in the conflict; but this order stopped what remained of private traffic. The buses had been requisitioned, and the streetcar service, which for days had run only dawn to dusk, was now indefinitely suspended.
Shop fronts throughout the business district were boarded over; such business as was being done, with a few exceptions, carried on through little peepholes or half-sized doors in the boarding. Everywhere glass store fronts and window panes were criss-crosed with pasted slips of paper to prevent them from shattering with the constant reverberations of shellfire and the continual thudding of exploding bombs or shells.
The streets were sprayed with a rubble of plaster and bricks and were in some places piled so high with debris as to be impassable. Many houses and buildings, particularly those of the older type of construction, were pulverized. The unremitting shelling made whole blocks uninhabitable even in areas where the actual damage was relatively lighter. As the hostilities progressed, more and more of the mid-level and Peak dwellings were literally blown off the side of the hill – among them the residence of the American consul-general, whose home was totally wrecked.
Tycoon How Aw-boon lived in a residence overlooking Happy Valley, on a Hong Kong mountain side with a steep grade. He and his brother had made their fortune in 1920s Rangoon, selling an analgesic balm which quickly becomes a staple in family medicine cabinets throughout Asia.
The late-1940s two-story house that How built for his family had verandahs surrounding the upper-floor, a swimming pool beneath a chinoiserie rock wall and a three-car garage. The property was otherwise sheer cliff, so How looked up at his vertical landscaping challenge, saw that it was edged with the Sky, and decided to build his Tiger Balm Gardens as an over-the-top sino folly. He had no plan drawings, but hired talent. The end result is realized by master craftsmen Kwek Hoon-sua and Kwek Choon-sua, brothers from Swatow, and their crew: tableaux arising from the tears of Taoism and the breath of Buddha. On top of this curated cosmology sits a seven-story snow-white pagoda.
The garden is accessible only by staircases, going up and down, which disorients and, if not for gravity, melts away a sense of bearing. The cement staircase system was created by adding buildouts and brackets to enhance existing rock. There are lookout points, nooks, bridges, caves. Vistas disappear when turning a corner, forks in the road accrue; seeming shortcuts to destinations will result in labyrinthean obstacles.
Visitors to this psychedelic park get ambushed by deities and demons. Cloud caves of heaven above, below the stockades of hell; both bound to make your acquaintance. Here are in-the-round depictions from Journey to the West, the punishments waiting in Hell for specific wrongs, and other mythologies, all created from several applications of plaster-of-paris shaped with chicken wire in wet cement, and painted with a confucian palette.
The Tiger Balm Gardens beguiles with the very first steps.
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The first distributor of the Model T by Henry Ford in Hongkong was Alex Ross & Co., with headquarters in Prince’s Building, Central District.
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Maintenance happened in the garage on Salisbury Rd in Kowloon, next to Star Ferry and the Kowloon Canton Railway terminus. Vehicles on offer were capable of 25 miles to the gallon and could be ordered in any colour as long as it was “blue or grey.”
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The typhoon of August 20 1927 damaged the garage, which had at the time twenty motor cars and six motor cycles.
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1920s
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In the beginning, there were very few movie houses wired for sound. The Majestic (1928) on Nathan Rd was one of the first, and their New Year’s offering for 1930 was technicolor Hollywood musical Paris, now a lost film. The Peninsula Hotel hosted casual tea dances by day and formal balls by night.
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Monthly magazine published by the Peninsula Hotel’s parent company, Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd.
(1886- )
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The Dairy Farm, Ice & Cold Storage Co., Ltd. was founded by Dr Patrick Manson with a herd of eighty cows. By the mid 20th century, there were 1,600 tuberculosis-free dairy cattle, chicken farms, and piggeries offered for retail using modern butchery methods. In addition to dairy and provision stores, Dairy Farm operated twelve soda fountains and restaurants. Cold storage facilities could handle imported refrigerated meats, game and poultry, quick frozen foods, canned, bottled and packaged goods, and dairy products of every variety.
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(1927- )
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In 1921, the people running the Hong Kong Hotel were approached by the government to build a hotel on the tip of Kowloon. On opening day in 1927, it was promptly requisitioned as temporary accommodation for British troops. The following year it was handed back to the owners, and a new opening date of December 11 1928 was announced, bringing local sheiks and flappers to its ballroom dance floor. During the Occupation, the hotel became headquarters for Lieut. Gen. Rensuke Isogai, who renamed it the Toa Hotel. After the war, the owners took it back, only to have it be requisitioned a second time for allied civil servants and ex-POWs. The Peninsula reopened again in 1946, resuming a tradition of supplying “hot” rhythm for the bright young people.
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Matchbox cover issued to officers during the Occupation, who had a right to use the facilities at the Peninsula Hotel, headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces.
1883
Waglan Island, on the eastern entrance into Hongkong harbor, plays host to a meteorological station, a saluting battery, and a lighthouse. These are navigational aids for guidance through a channel into a well-lit harbor “singularly free from submerged dangers.”
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1920
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Opening on New Year’s Day 1920, greeting guests from the Central District on a newly built road over the mountain, the “old lady on the Riviera of the East” could offer comfort already on “a well-made road, leading to the main steps, in front of which is a miniature Italian garden, artistically laid out and provided with a fountain.”
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From the main steps guests reach a spacious balcony which runs the entire length of the facade. There is a 3,500 sq-ft hall with its own verandah. Each bedroom measures twenty-foot square, and comes with its own white-glaze tiled bathroom featuring hot and cold water.
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Located on the Island side facing the sea, this “hotel without its like in the East” provided living quarters in the back for staff, and was originally conceived as a self-contained “pleasure resort.” During the war it was used by the Occupation, partly as a hospital, partly as a recuperation center.
(1868-1952)
Hong Kong Hotel, Queen’s Rd at Pedder St, is the first world-class hospitality house in Hongkong, where management has provided a special launch to meet ship passengers and ferry them to the hotel’s pier. A six-storey north wing facing the waterfront opened in 1893, but was consumed in a fire in 1926.
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(1892-1951)
Beginning around 1892, entrepreneural brothers Sam and Marcus Samuel began to ship kerosene in bulk to China, where they found a ready market. Then partnering with Royal Dutch Petroleum for a joint venture, they became Asiatic Petroleum Co. Today it is whatever Shell Oil’s latest brandname is called.
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The end of Pedder St runs into the Asiatic Petroleum Co. building, where a clock tower once stood. On the right (not shown) is Jardine’s headquarters. On the left (also not shown) is the Hong Kong Hotel, making the two-block long Pedder St the “financial district of Hongkong, China.”
(1866- )
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Hongkong was founded as a British colony in China, “neither a settlement nor an acquisition of natural resources,” but to trade in the Far East. Government was to serve the interests of merchants, and the first to make use of the opportunity was Jardine Matheson & Co. Followed soon enough by Dent & Co., Lindsay & Co., Dodwell & Co., and John D. Hutchison. There was also a cargo-&-passenger shipping company, Butterfield & Swire, which had an office in Shanghai, opened in 1866. Now they came to Hongkong, began to diversify, went into the sugar refining trade. Then the partnership with Richard Shackleton Butterfield was severed, and the firm’s remaining two partners, brothers John Samuel and William Hudson, rebranded the company as Swire’s. After the Second World War, they opened up an aircraft repair shop at Kai Tek Airport, as a springboard into the emerging commercial airline field.
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(1850-now )
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More ancient than Harrods, Lane Crawford Department Store was founded by one Thomas Ash Lane, formerly a butler in the East India Co. factory at Canton, who went to Hongkong in the early 1840s and, together with Ninian (Norman) Crawford, went into business carrying goods. They opened their doors in 1846.
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(1828- )
In 1828, Scotsmen and “country merchants” William Jardine and James Matheson became partners, buying Malwa opium in Bombay from a Parsee merchant named Framjee Cowasjee to sell in Canton. Organized and efficient, they soon controlled approximately one-third of foreign trade with China, most of it in opium.
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The men who worked Jardines Matheson were expected to be disciplined sailors, yet like all Europeans would have been familiar with a bar room drink of alcohol, tobacco juice, sugar and arsenic called a “canton gunpowder.”
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Here is James Matheson’s verdict for one of his ship masters: “The Gazette was unnecessarily delayed at Hongkong in consequence of Captain Crocker’s repugnance to receiving opium on the Sabbath. We have every respect for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited for the drug trade.”
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This is William Jardine’s recruitment letter to a European missionary who can speak Chinese: “We have no hesitation in stating to you that our principal reliance is on opium. Though it is our earnest wish that you should not in any way hinder the grand object you have in view [distributing the Bible translated into Chinese], by appearing interested in what by many is considered an immoral traffic; yet such traffic is so absolutely necessary to give any vessel a reasonable chance of defraying her expenses that we trust you will have no objection to interpret on every occasion when your services may be requested.”
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Tiger’s Mouth
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A twenty-mile wide gulf in South China is home to Canton, Macao and Hongkong. The river flowing into it is short, being a coastal convergence where three other rivers meet. Banks were once lined with banana and sugar-cane groves, with orange trees and rice paddies.
European sailors came and before long had given a name to where the delta begins and the river ends: Bocca Tigris, mouth of the tiger, to denote the dangers going upriver.
Halfway to Canton was an island, and where a warehouse with a wharf was situated. Business was conducted in Canton, where a stretch by the Pearl River was turned into an on-site compound for European and American companies, in the business of making trade here, in the golden triangle of China.
South China Sea +
More than two hundred species of fish call the Pearl River Delta home. Bream, herring and dace. Anguilla Marmorata and ratmouth barbell. The mandarin, the bighead and four varieties of carp – silver, grass, golden, common.
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