The other day, when I was indulging myself in some random historical research, I came across the curious note in the history of the Peak District that one of the earliest pioneers to live on the mountain among the clouds, was one E.R. Belilios, was taken up and down to his office in Central by a camel. Conveniently, he also kept a zoo along Caine Road.

1880s Travel by Sedan Chair

1900 Family and sedan chair

Then, I came across another piece. This was written of the time just before the First World War. Describing the patterns of leisure for Hong Kong's hero, the businessman, it indicated what this busy warrior of commerce might do after emerging from his counting house in the afternoon.

At 5 p.m. (at any rate on the north-east monsoon is blowing in the wintertime) The Englishman strolls to the Cricket Club or the immortal Tadpole has rigged up cricket nets. For Tennis he must take a chair to the Ladies Recreation Club on the Middle Levels and for polo a rickshaw to East Point ..

I have given enough to give a flavor of the times so different from our own, when if we have the convenience of the motorcar we also suffer its blight as I lamented last time.

For me these scraps of information about the modes of transport in the old days in Hong Kong set me wondering what was the journey up to the club like pollution free days?

For that I needed to consult old prints and photographs, maps and directories and any surviving old Government land records.

This research path is not complete yet; and I have to report that it is not the easiest task to delve into the past in Hong Kong.

What have I found so far?

First, if we go back as far as the 1860s, when it would appear that some steps were taken by the government of the day to construct some form of road or paved track up to the Peak, as a means of access for the Sanitarium soon to be converted into a mountain retreat for the Governor, we discover that the southern edge of the town was the newly laid out Botanical Gardens beyond those towered the bare, forbidding slopes of the Peak ranges. Programs to clothe these barren slopes with trees lay in the future.

The most imposing building in this area was the Albany, a long collonaded residence for Government officers. This was situated where the children's playground in the Gardens now is located. The present day Albany, the soon-to-be completed residence for the Dame of Hong Kong [Lydia Dunn, first Chinese woman member of the House of Lords] and other fortunate occupants of these beautifully situated and luxurious apartments, is of course across the road winding up the hill.

There was a road leading from Garden Road, the main avenue from the military cantonment of the Victoria Barracks, which gave access to the old Albany.

Behind the Albany we can vaguely make out from an early photograph, there were only one or two houses or bungalows, one named the Blue Bungalow, here a few rural pioneers wishing to escape and the "crowds" of Wellington Street, Lyndhurst Terrace, Caine Road and parts of the not yet fully built up Robinson Road, had set up residence.

The picture that the early maps show this area is of deep gullies such as the famous Glenealy Ravine, cut up by little water courses feeding the private water tanks of those frontier houses. The site which was to be eventually granted to the persevering ladies of the Recreational Club, Inland Lot 898, where the original four tennis courts were to be cut out from the hillsides scrub, shown on the illustrating section of the map of Central Hong Kong drawn in 1889, adjoined filter beds for the town's water supply coming from the Pok Fu Lam Reservoir in the conduit, still existing in sections along the hillside path above the university.

This is about all I've been able to find out so far about the history of Old Peak Road, which as one might expect was the Peak Road at that time. And as to my original aim to try to discover what a journey from downtown was actually like involving the use of the sedan chair carried by a team of coolies and to find out what one might see as one was born upward between the counting houses, few government offices and, of course, the recently constructed residence for His Excellency the Governor, to the rural retreat where the Ladies of the Colony were to find their recreation, well, obviously I have a long way to go. The distance may be short, but the historical gradient like a physical one is steep and arduous.