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The Trams Take the Praya Statute, certification and the electric tramway’s two-stage opening, Hong Kong, 1902–1904

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Research article The Trams Take the Praya Statute, certification and the electric tramway’s two-stage opening, Hong Kong, 1902–1904 Histsyn · Independent research Compiled 13 October 2026 (reworked from the draft of 5 October 2026) · Endnotes and bibliography after The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Abstract Hong Kong’s electric tramway opened the way its statute required, in portions and on the record. The Tramway Ordinance, No. 10 of 1902 built the machinery in advance: no portion might carry the public “until the same has been certified to be fit for such traffic by the Director of Public Works… and the Governor-in-Council has, by notification in the Gazette, authorised the same to be opened” (s.25). The record keeps the sequence: the trial trips of July 1904 (“the clanging of the alarm-bell… the first tram”); the Rules made under s.36 on 27 July and gazetted as Not...
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Waiting for the Gun: Hong Kong's Typhoon Warning of 18 September 1906

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Research article The Fatal 18th The typhoon of 18 September 1906, the boat population, and the warning question the record judged itself Histsyn · Independent research Compiled 12 October 2026 · Endnotes and bibliography after The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Abstract The deadliest day of colonial Hong Kong’s first sixty years came with half an hour’s warning. On the morning of Tuesday 18 September 1906 a small typhoon of “phenomenal violence” crossed the harbour in under two hours. The Observatory’s own notice, printed the same day, states the limit the record would spend the next nine months examining: the storm “gave no indication of its existence until close to the Colony”. The order to hoist the Black Drum went out at 8.00 a.m., the barometer then reading 29.604; the gun followed within the half hour — at a minute the newspapers could not agree on (8.05, 8.30, 8.40, ...
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