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Defending coal
It must be obvious from what we’ve looked at so far that because of its importance to sea trade – then as now ninety per cent and more of international flows of goods – and to the economies of Britain’s empire, coal stores mattered. It is easy to see why. Until the early twentieth century, and not always even then, no ship could carry enough coal to fuel it from its starting point to wherever it was bound and then back home again. Until perhaps 1900, any ship – merchantman or warship – would need to take on coal three or four times on its way from Europe to Hong Kong and as many times on the way back. Having access to, but much more important firm control over, what were called coaling stations – fuel stops – really mattered. Hong Kong, it soon turned out, was the British Empire’s most important coaling station – called a First Class Coaling Station – in East Asia. The important point is that no other Western power at the time had any equivalent until the late 1890s, and that’s ignoring two other things. The British merchant fleet was half or more of all ships afloat so it tended to carry disproportionate amounts of everyone else’s cargoes, coal included. Second, because Britain was the world’s largest producer of coal until the late 19th century a lot of other nation’s coal at ‘their’ coaling stations – there were lots all over the world with 50% or so not British controlled – tended to come from British coalfields. Given frequent 19th century big power rivalry as western empires aggressively expanded, stopping others grabbing ‘your’ coal mattered. That’s why, from the 1880s through to the early 1900s, as worries about imperial rivalries in the China Seas escalated, Hong Kong suddenly started acquiring all those huge gun batteries you can see on Mount Davis, at Pinewood Battery above HKU, at Lei Yue Mun, at Stonecutters Island, on Devil’s Peak and so on. Their function was to prevent any foreign naval power from stomping into Hong Kong and taking control of its coal and coaling facilities.
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55:19
Using coal
To begin with in the 1840s, the almost exclusive use for coal in Hong Kong was to fuel the steam engines of ships. William Tarrant, a very typical Hong Kong denizen then as now, or how a no-one can become a someone once the pond is small enough – claimed in 1848 that “the whole quantity consumed in Hongkong including the barracks during a year, does not probably exceed a thousand tons.” We know this was piffle, but it does indicate that from a landlubber’s point of view there seemed to be very little coal around. As we’ve noted, the demand for coal for shipping grew and grew. It’s now time to note that after 1864, what William Tarrant had seen as demand for not much more than for stuff to warm barracks in winter, also grew and grew. We need to remember that in the late 19th century, pretty much anything that whirred and whizzed, thumped and banged, or rumbled and rolled did so thanks to steam. And for steam, one needed coal because coal was by far and away the most thermally efficient fuel for boiling water. In the early 1860s Governor Sir Hercules Robinson saw that better lit public streets in Hong Kong would help reduce crime. So, he backed the founding of the Hongkong & China Gas Company, which in 1864 opened its gasworks in Shek Tong Tsui at Whitty Street, which supplied 500 street lights. To make gas one must have coal. It was the beginning of twenty-five years of increasing public and private demand for coal – to power pumps to pump out dockyards, drive machinery in ropeworks, sugar refineries, textile mills, cement works and, briefly in the 1870s, Hong Kong’s mint for stamping out coins. From the late 1860s to pump the public water supply from reservoirs. As of 1890 to generate electricity for homes, offices, telegraphic communication, and tramcars. For public and private transport – launches and ferries of course – but also the Peak Tram and, from 1910, the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Electricity turned out to be coal’s most important modernizing use in Hong Kong’s economy. In the 125 years Hong Kong has been generating electricity, power output has increased 105,000-fold. Even though today some 70% of that power is produced by burning gas, Hong Kong still uses 37,000 times more coal a year to generate electricity than it did from Hong Kong’s first power station over a century ago, although there are only seventeen times as many people! Put bluntly, we each of us use about two thousand times more electrical power in our daily lives than our forebears did 120 years ago.
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58:39
Storing coal
Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s because as demand rose, so the amount of coal needed to be kept on hand increased accordingly: from around 3,000 tonnes in 1844 to more like 10,000 tons twenty years later and, forty years after that, 100,000 tons. That’s a lot of real estate. Ad hoc solutions ruled the roost over the first twenty or so years – including that of the P&O Company that stored its coal afloat in a hulk (ship without masts or sailed), the ex-East Indiaman, the Fort William from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to have been the most usual solution. The Fort William is the only coal hulk ever mentioned. Most coal was stored on land, which provoked an expected NIMBY reaction. Efforts were always being made to get it out of sight…well, out of the gweilos’ sight. The happy solution turned up in 1860 after the 2nd Opium War. The Kowloon Peninsula was empty of upmarket gweilos and out of their sight. Perfect. For the next eighty years it became the site of most of the largest coalyards both for commercial use and for the Royal Navy. Hong Kong Island didn’t escape entirely, but the coalyards got shoved out to the edge, first in Wan Chai and then in the North Point/Taikoo area. After WW2 demand for coal for fuel disappeared in favour of oil, so coalyards dwindled to two large government owned and operated yards at Lai Chi Kok and the Taikoo end of North Point. That’s until the 1970s oil shock, when suddenly Hong Kong’s electricity generating stations decided coal was cheaper. That’s how come in the last 50 years (c.1975-2025) Hong Kong has imported SEVEN TIMES more coal than it imported in its first century during the heyday of the steam ship. Happily for us all, the two power companies store what is at any one time about 250,000 tons of the stuff way out of sight on the west coast of Lamma Island and at Castle Peak beyond Tuen Mun.
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56:24
Shipping coal
Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880s – were chronically inefficient consumers of it to boot. Up until the 1860s, a typical 700hp engine would have needed up to 50 tonnes of coal a day. Hong Kong’s Harbour Master’s statistics are pretty useless and there is no hard data on steamship numbers before 1873. In that year 1579 steamers entered the port. Data suggests ships loaded around 100 tons of coal on average when they called at Hong Kong, so we’re looking at an annual demand for bunker coal in 1873 of around 150,000 tons. The average ship delivering coal from the 1840s until the 1870s was a sailing ship and only carried about 400 tons, so we’re looking at anything up to one ship a day having to arrive in Hong Kong to ensure there was enough coal to meet the demand. To begin with coal was mostly a cargo of opportunity. Because, for colonial Hong Kong’s first forty or so years, demand in China for British products was very weak, ships leaving from Britain carried coal as ballast so the voyage could earn some money. Later, they carried British goods to Australia, picked up a cargo of coal there for Hong Kong, and then loaded tea to take back to Britain.Only certain organizations with predictable demand – like the P&O steamship company or the Royal Navy – had regular, dedicated deliveries. For the rest, it was down to the market to ensure that supply matched demand. Mind you, however it was shipped for whatever reason, coal was a tricky cargo. There are lots of stories of coal carrying ships catching fire (in certain conditions coal will spontaneously combust) and exploding or sinking. There are others of the cargo shifting in strong weather and ships capsizing – a few ships are reported setting out from Britain with coal for Hong Kong and never arriving, just disappearing somewhere en route.
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56:33
Where did the coal come from?
Britain’s huge advantage economically was its early development both of a coal industry and of a seaborne coal trade. Hong Kong’s big disadvantage is that had few natural mineral resources and no coal. As Britain aggressively expanded its empire in the mid-19th century, it could do so using steam ships supplied with coal from Britain. We can see that at work in a wonderful infographic created by the father of such things, the French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard, who illustrated Britain’s global coal export trade in 1850, 1860 and 1864, by which time 64,000 tons of the stuff were coming to HK. That expansion along with the number of steam ships, meant the problem of getting the coal the 14,000 miles from Britain around the Cape of Good Hope to places like Hong Kong got worse. The obvious answer was to find coal nearer to the places that needed it and we can see efforts to that end almost as soon as the dust had settled from the 1st Opium War. There’s evidence of some of the earliest coal being mined in Australia being imported by the early 1850s. So did coal from the on-again, off-again mines from the deposits in Labuan, first discovered in 1847. Coal from Keelung in Taiwan was arriving in Hong Kong by the end of the 2nd Opium War. In the early 1860s there’s even coal recorded for sale from the Lackawanna mines in Pennsylvania, USA, as well as from Canada and New Zealand. The first coal from Australia arrived in Hong Kong in the 1840s, but was a sporadic arrival until more regular shipments in the 1870s through 1880s. From that last decade onwards more and more of Hong Kong’s coal came from Japan to the point that by the mid-1890s it was Hong Kong’s main supplier. Coal from North China only began to make a serious contribution by the 1920s. That was until WW2, when everything changed. Post-war, that as from the 1970s has seen HK’s most recent coal high, ten times the amount of coal used in Hong Kong’s first century have fuelled Hong Kong’s growth engine, the main sources of the coal being South Africa and Indonesia. All up, in modern Hong Kong’s 180 plus years of existence, not far off half a billion tonnes of coal have arrived to fuel its growth from all over the world.
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