UNIVERSITY OF HK MUSEUM
Bona Mugabe?Or is every African student at UHK
suffering the torment of HK's curiosity.
Gorgeous old granite building just along from the regular part of the campus. And don't you just love the carved panels out the front.
In all our years in HK I had no idea that this was here and that, even better, it was free to the public. It's only a short bus ride - Bus # 23 - from our place too, so how good is that?
Although they are best known - except not to me - for their regularly changed special exhibitions, they have the most stunning standard collections ...
... and their blue and white china collection is so yummmm! Only I couldn't take a photo to show you because I'd already got in trouble for taking the one above.
At the moment, they are having an exhibition of Historic HK Transport Photos and it's most interesting, but the best bit of the day was Maria seeing a photo from 1965 of a "bank run" on Heng Seng Bank and going "Oooh, I was there that day!" and so we all started looking for her in the crowd. No success. She said what happened was "There was a rumour going round that Heng Seng Bank was about to collapse so we all raced to our nearest branch to withdraw all our money. I don't know WHAT I was thinking!", so it looks like HK's tendency to "Ahhhh! THREATDOWN!" goes back a long way.
Maybe back from the earliest days of the city. The Redoubtable Mrs Walker said that, several years ago, she was at an exhibition here of historical photographs of HK's 1843 outbreak of bubonic plague. However, that's not a good example because bubonic plague is a genuine reason for "Ahhhh! THREATDOWN!" Or maybe that's the reason for this constant "Chicken Little-ing" ... a genuine reason for panic back at the birth of the city; so, from then on, everyone thought "If it can happen to us once, it could happen again." and so they stay in a constant state of over-cautious ALERT!
There is something very, very interesting about that plague, and this time I'm not talking about how it stopped at exactly the borderline between the British-built part of the city and the Chinese-built part of the city. I know I've told you all this before; about how the British went in (those were some brave health officers) and discovered that the Chinese had faked the sewerage systems; that they'd dug holes that they'd covered with the standard sewerage covers, but there wasn't really any drains or anything to take the sewerage away. And so they bulldozed the entire areas of Sheung Wan and Kennedy Town - where the plague was - and they were rebuilt under strict British supervision and HK hasn't had a bubonic plague outbreak since.
No, this time I'm talking about something totally different: about how, in Fergus Hume's novel "Mystery of a Hansom Cab" there's a sequence where our hero visits an opium den in Sydney, Australia, and it describes how the place is jam-packed with desperately worried-looking Chinese all listening in horrified silence as someone reads, in Chinese obviously, from a newspaper. The novel assumes that this is what happens everyday in opium dens but we all know that this is just naivity; that Fergus Hume had only once ever been to an opium den and what he actually witnessed and saw as "normal" was an exceptional event ...
... and if you look at when the novel was written and ask yourself "What was occuring somewhere back in China that had these folks so 'knicker-knotted'?" what you find is that it co-incides with this outbreak of bubonic plague in HK.
Works for me! To be in Sydney back in the 1840s, you would have had to have passed through HK, and undoubtedly all these Sydney HK-folk would have left loved ones behind, and so, yes, an outbreak of plague would definitely have them all running to the local opium den to find out what was happening. I imagine that the local opium den would have been the only place in the entire city that imported HK newspapers, and, also, could afford long telegraph messages from home for more immediate updates.
However, once again we've strayed wayyy off topic, so let's rein it in again. University of Hong Kong's Museum! Free! On the #23 bus route! Interesting stuff! Regularly changed special exhibitions! Blue and white china collection! 985 Nestorian crosses. High quality religious stuff. Check it out!
... and their blue and white china collection is so yummmm! Only I couldn't take a photo to show you because I'd already got in trouble for taking the one above.At the moment, they are having an exhibition of Historic HK Transport Photos and it's most interesting, but the best bit of the day was Maria seeing a photo from 1965 of a "bank run" on Heng Seng Bank and going "Oooh, I was there that day!" and so we all started looking for her in the crowd. No success. She said what happened was "There was a rumour going round that Heng Seng Bank was about to collapse so we all raced to our nearest branch to withdraw all our money. I don't know WHAT I was thinking!", so it looks like HK's tendency to "Ahhhh! THREATDOWN!" goes back a long way.
Maybe back from the earliest days of the city. The Redoubtable Mrs Walker said that, several years ago, she was at an exhibition here of historical photographs of HK's 1843 outbreak of bubonic plague. However, that's not a good example because bubonic plague is a genuine reason for "Ahhhh! THREATDOWN!" Or maybe that's the reason for this constant "Chicken Little-ing" ... a genuine reason for panic back at the birth of the city; so, from then on, everyone thought "If it can happen to us once, it could happen again." and so they stay in a constant state of over-cautious ALERT!
There is something very, very interesting about that plague, and this time I'm not talking about how it stopped at exactly the borderline between the British-built part of the city and the Chinese-built part of the city. I know I've told you all this before; about how the British went in (those were some brave health officers) and discovered that the Chinese had faked the sewerage systems; that they'd dug holes that they'd covered with the standard sewerage covers, but there wasn't really any drains or anything to take the sewerage away. And so they bulldozed the entire areas of Sheung Wan and Kennedy Town - where the plague was - and they were rebuilt under strict British supervision and HK hasn't had a bubonic plague outbreak since.
No, this time I'm talking about something totally different: about how, in Fergus Hume's novel "Mystery of a Hansom Cab" there's a sequence where our hero visits an opium den in Sydney, Australia, and it describes how the place is jam-packed with desperately worried-looking Chinese all listening in horrified silence as someone reads, in Chinese obviously, from a newspaper. The novel assumes that this is what happens everyday in opium dens but we all know that this is just naivity; that Fergus Hume had only once ever been to an opium den and what he actually witnessed and saw as "normal" was an exceptional event ...
... and if you look at when the novel was written and ask yourself "What was occuring somewhere back in China that had these folks so 'knicker-knotted'?" what you find is that it co-incides with this outbreak of bubonic plague in HK.
Works for me! To be in Sydney back in the 1840s, you would have had to have passed through HK, and undoubtedly all these Sydney HK-folk would have left loved ones behind, and so, yes, an outbreak of plague would definitely have them all running to the local opium den to find out what was happening. I imagine that the local opium den would have been the only place in the entire city that imported HK newspapers, and, also, could afford long telegraph messages from home for more immediate updates.
However, once again we've strayed wayyy off topic, so let's rein it in again. University of Hong Kong's Museum! Free! On the #23 bus route! Interesting stuff! Regularly changed special exhibitions! Blue and white china collection! 985 Nestorian crosses. High quality religious stuff. Check it out!
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