Life.Culture.Discovery.

How Nepalese Gurkhas helped put down the riots in Hong Kong in 1960s

In Gurkha Odyssey, Peter Duffell, former commander of the British forces in Hong Kong, tells the story of 200 years of service by the Nepalese Gurkhas

In this edited excerpt, Duffell describes a city rocked by riots during the 1960s – events that resonate today as the city again struggles with unrest

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1st Battalion 2nd Gurkha Rifles on riot control duty on Nathan Road, in Kowloon, Hong Kong during the Star Ferry Riots, April 1966. Photo: courtesy of the Gurkha Museum

Published: 3:00pm, 17 Nov 2019Updated: 3:00pm, 17 Nov 2019

We had our first taste of impending troubles in Hong Kong caused by the Cultural Revolution during the Easter holiday of 1966. On April 6 in the late afternoon we had returned to Queen’s Hill [barracks, in the northern New Territories] from a battalion command post exercise testing our vehicle-mounted radio systems and were looking forward to the Easter break.

We picked up some news of rioting in Kowloon and decided that we would leave the radios mounted in their vehicles in case a call came. At 1am that call did indeed come. Without warning we were rudely awakened by the brigade duty officer and told to move the battalion immediately to Kowloon in support of the police, to help contain serious and widespread rioting.

I harried the company commanders and Gurkha officers to rouse their men and load our internal security equipment, weapons and ammunition. We reached the Kowloon police compound in Nathan Road from way up in the New Territories before the British battalion had debouched from Gun Club Barracks 500 yards away.

Aside from echoes of the Cultural Revolution to the north, the immediate catalyst for the severe Kowloon disturbances was a protest at the raising by 5 cents of the first-class fare on the Star Ferries operating between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. But the three nights of disturbances were symptomatic of wider social discontents – the gap between rich and poor and the frustrated ambitions of the young.

Gurkhas patrolling in Sha Tau Kok, a town on the border.

The density of population in the urban area of Kowloon allowed rioting to spread rapidly. What was clear when we arrived was that the disturbances – rioting and looting, the long lines of burnt-out buses – had by the early hours exhausted the police. Additional assistance was urgently required. The centre of the disturbances was the broad Kowloon thoroughfare of Nathan Road and its immediate byways.