BRITISH COLONY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 154, 1 July 1940, Page 6

BRITISH COLONY.

CENTURY'S GROWTH.

MODERN FACILITIES.

HEAVY FORTIFICATIONS. KOWIOON DEFENCE SYSTEM. Since Japan launched her undeclared war against China, Hongkong has, almost overnight, taken on a new, grim form as a military outpost on the South China coast, and now women and children are being evacuated to clear the decks for any eventuality that may arise.

For decades Hongkong, founded about 100 years ago, was a serene, humdrum China coast trading centre, with ships, foanke and the usual English colonial accompaniment of clubs, cricket, golf, horee racing and dinner parties.

> Along with Singapore naval base and the fortified United States island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, Hongkong now stands as the third leg , in that tripod of Anglo-Saxon power and influence in south-east Asia. Xobody claims that it is invulnerable, or. of highest strategic value. But it is British soil, and for a century has 'been the eeat of British authority in this part of the world.

Politically, Hongkong 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 Hongkong island, which wae 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 Mire Bay and Deep Bay, wae 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 Hongkong Rock—till then only a pirates' lair—as the base for their permanent settlement. Xow tihere rises from the harbour a great glittering city, with palacee, the cathedral, colleges and ■barracks, modern warehouses and offices.

Writing in the "National Geographic Magazine" of a visit paid to Hongkong 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 holiday-makers 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 fndian 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 Hongkong which 6tands on the mainland peninsula just across the narrow bay from Hongkong Island—you see excited Chinese and Portuguese boys and girls throwing darts, eating and singing. All are oblivious to a line of 44 brand new tanks just unloaded from a ship and rumbling past to be added to the colony's evergrowing defensive machinery.

Across New Territories, following the 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 hill?, roost the watchful Japanese soldiers, holding their line from Mirs Bay to Canton.