書史 - Histsyngraphy

Research article Winter by the Pound The Ice House and the first ice trade, Hong Kong, 1843–1876 Histsyn · Independent research Compiled 13 October 2026 · Endnotes and bibliography after The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Abstract Four years after the founding, a tropical city began buying winter by the pound. The record of the first ice trade is retail and administrative: a private cargo reported in 1843 (“ex Omega from Chusan”); an editorial in 1844 asking the Government for land (“Are we to have an Ice House in Hongkong?”); the opening notices of July 1845 (5 cents per pound, then 6 by August); the shareholders’ list under L. A. Stone; and, in October 1846, the Colonial Office’s approval of “the grant of a piece of ground rent free for a public Icehouse” — the grant the 1844 editorial had asked for. The city then fixed the building into its own geography: the c...

Research article The City That Begged for Rain Hong Kong’s recurring water anxiety, 1851–1988 Histsyn · Independent research Compiled 12 October 2026 · Endnotes and bibliography after The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Abstract Hong Kong’s water history is not the history of one drought; it is the history of a recurrence, and the recurrence is written in the colony’s own words. On 26 May 1886 Government House warned the Commodore that the Colony was “on the eve of a water famine ” — the phrase enters the colonial record that year, in Sessional Paper No. 42, and the answer is the Navy’s three-inch pipe, Lane Crawford’s lighters and the Public Works Department’s water-boat. In December 1901 the Public Works Committee minuted a city of 211,900 inhabitants “now confronted by a serious water famine”; Chatham’s report of 26 February 1902 answers with t...