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.

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.

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.