In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage.

The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong Kong, usually began with expats doing their thing…and too often doing it with a nasty racist bias. That’s partly because one leg of that arrival, as it were, lay in the importance of sport to British military life. Both routes led sooner or later to the establishment of clubs and associations that did not exclude people on grounds of their ethnicity…well, not so much.

On the way we’ll see how the origins of one of Hong Kong’s best known sporting outfits – the South China Athletic Association – had its origins in what became China’s first national football team.

You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network – slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B. But if one means what we’re all familiar with, timetabled services run by companies with several identical or similar vessels, the story is more nuanced. Ferries were right in there at the start with respect to linking Hong Kong to the PRD. But as far as links within HK itself - what most of us think of as a ferry - they’re actually quite a late comer. By the time the first ferry service of the sort we’d all recognize started up, modern Hong Kong was over half a century old. How come? It’s an intriguing story of changing maritime technology on the one hand and, on the other, the effects of socio-economic change on demand for properly organized local public transport ferry services.

Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But, assisted by a bit of fossicking in archives, maps can also tell stories all by themselves. Maps of Hong Kong tells lots of them. Like the way the small island everyone these days knows as Ap Lei Pai came to have that name…and how it’s the wrong one. Or how a reservoir for a flour mill came to be called Little Hawaii. Or that Round Island (Ngan Chau) off Repulse Bay got be charted as Ma Kong for 80 years and longer. Or why Tai Mo Shan was once called Lantau Falso. Or that Violet Hill on Hong Kong Island nearly became Mount Hamilton. And, of course, that Hong Kong Island wasn’t called that at all.