What street names say about Hong Kong’s maritime past
Colonial bias has left much of the city’s Chinese maritime heritage off the map, a historian writes
For no good reason, apart from a lifelong obsession with ships, the sea, seafarers and my Hong Kong home, I have found myself wondering what our street names can tell us about the city’s maritime story. So recently I started conducting a little exercise in the arcane study of street names, “hodonymy” to its fans, to find out whether those with a maritime link – by subject, date or location – would reveal any interesting patterns.
So far, I’ve come up with 114 street names, deliberately omitting those related to seashore topography – Headland Road, Deep Water Bay Road, Beach Road and the like. I have stuck with Hong Kong’s day-to-day maritime business, the people who did the work, the things they worked on or with, and the seaports with which Hong Kong has traded, such as Amoy, Newchwang, Foochow and Ningpo. As a result of my limited Chinese, and some doubts about what I should include, this is a work in progress.
Considering Hong Kong is one of the world’s great ports, street names with maritime connections are remarkably few – no more than 10 per cent of the total. But that is enough, when loaded into a database and tested for patterns, to add to what we know of Hong Kong’s maritime story, to reflect the biases of colonial officials who chose the names and the resolutely unmaritime – even anti-maritime – cultural proclivities of Hong Kong’s Chinese population.
Take location, for example; 70 per cent of the names on my list are on Hong Kong Island. Of those, the overwhelming majority are on the north side, with almost two-thirds located between Causeway Bay and Kennedy Town.
