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.