Jervois Street
Jervois Street is a street in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong. On 28 December 1851, a fire broke out and burned down Sheung Wan Market and hundreds of Chinese houses all around it resulting in 30 deaths; the fire led to the redevelopment of the whole district, supervised by Major-General William Jervois Commander and Lieutenant Governor of Hong Kong. Queen's Road Central Morrison Street Hillier Street Cleverly Street Mercer Street Bonham Strand Cosco Tower Wellington Street List of streets and roads in Hong Kong Media related to Jervois Street at Wikimedia Commons
Lan Kwai Fong
Lan Kwai Fong is a small square of streets in Central, Hong Kong. The area was dedicated to hawkers before the Second World War, but underwent a renaissance in the mid-1980s, it is now a popular expatriate haunt in Hong Kong for drinking and dining. The street Lan Kwai Fong is L-shaped with two ends joining with D'Aguilar Street. Lan Kwai Fong as an area is defined by D'Aguilar Street and the smaller lane, Lan Kwai Fong, an L-shaped, cobble-stoned lane. Both streets turn 90 degrees to form a rectangle, it is near the Mid-Levels. Its eating and drinking establishments are considered upmarket in price and the area is considered a tourist spot. From the west side of the rectangle, Wo On Lane and Wing Wah Lane extend to host several more spots for drinks and food; the area arguably extends to Wellington Street and Wyndham Street, through to the Hong Kong Fringe Club. It is home to a small number of art galleries. Before the Second World War, Lan Kwai Fong was dedicated to hawkers. In early days, the square housed many mui yan, or marriage arrangers, a role held by females.
Mui yan were marriage intermediaries between two families in traditional times. It was thus known as Hung Leung Hong. Between 2011 and 2015, a massive change was underway, following Zeman's decision to replace his block in Lan Kwai Fong; this led to a substantial area of Lan Kwai Fong becoming a construction site. The crowds during special occasions such as Halloween or New Year's Eve put the place at a literal standstill with the large numbers. Police control is employed at such times. In recent years, street performing has become a new scene in Hong Kong's street culture; some of the performers decide to set their stages at Lai Kwai Fong with the medium of singing and playing guitar in an acoustic setting. On 1 January 1993, 21 people were killed and 62 injured in a large-scale human stampede whilst celebrating the New Year's Day in Lan Kwai Fong. More than 15,000 people were crammed into the area for the New Year countdown at the time; the Hong Kong government appointed then-Court of First Instance judge Kemal Bokhary to conduct an inquest into the disaster.
The stringent crowd control measures now in force at major holiday events are a direct consequence of the inquest's recommendations. There are several ways to access Lan Kwai Fong other than taxi, which include: Public transport MTR, Central Station, Exit "D2" Airport Express, Hong Kong Station, Exit "B2" or "C" Public bus, route no. 12M, 13 and 40M List of buildings and areas in Hong Kong List of restaurant districts and streets List of streets and roads in Hong Kong Mid-levels Soho, Hong Kong Tourism in Hong Kong Wan Chai Official website of Lan Kwai Fong Association Official website of Lan Kwai Fong Group Official website of Lan Kwai Fong Entertainments Cheng, Sea-ling. "Consuming Places in Hong Kong: Experiencing Lan Kwai Fong". In Mathews, Gordon. Consuming Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press. Pp. 237–262. ISBN 9789622095465
Elgin Street, Hong Kong
Elgin Street is located in Central, Hong Kong. It was named after 8th Earl of Elgin. One of the earliest streets in Hong Kong, it was known as "Mud Street" by the locals, as the street became muddy on rainy days; the street ends high at Caine Road. The street is divided into two sections by the junction with Staunton Street; the upper section is less steep than the lower. One can find several stalls selling miscellaneous things, which are heaped on the ground, on the sloping street. There were two dai pai dongs operating on the street near Hollywood Road, but one of them was forced to closed in 2005. Many international restaurants and a comedy club can be found on the upper section of the street. List of streets and roads in Hong Kong Soho, Hong Kong Map of Elgin Street, Hong Kong "The Muddy Elgin Street", Hong Kong Commercial Daily
Beach
A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are made from rock, such as sand, shingle, pebbles; the particles can be biological in origin, such as mollusc shells or coralline algae. Some beaches have man-made infrastructure, such as lifeguard posts, changing rooms, showers and bars, they may have hospitality venues nearby. Wild beaches known as undeveloped or undiscovered beaches, are not developed in this manner. Wild beaches can be preserved nature. Beaches occur in areas along the coast where wave or current action deposits and reworks sediments. Although the seashore is most associated with the word beach, beaches are found by lakes and alongside large rivers. Beach may refer to: small systems where rock material moves onshore, offshore, or alongshore by the forces of waves and currents; the former are described in detail below. There are several conspicuous parts to a beach that relate to the processes that shape it; the part above water, more or less influenced by the waves at some point in the tide, is termed the beach berm.
The berm is the deposit of material comprising the active shoreline. The berm has a crest and a face—the latter being the slope leading down towards the water from the crest. At the bottom of the face, there may be a trough, further seaward one or more long shore bars: raised, underwater embankments formed where the waves first start to break; the sand deposit may extend well inland from the berm crest, where there may be evidence of one or more older crests resulting from large storm waves and beyond the influence of the normal waves. At some point the influence of the waves on the material comprising the beach stops, if the particles are small enough, winds shape the feature. Where wind is the force distributing the grains inland, the deposit behind the beach becomes a dune; these geomorphic features compose. The beach profile changes seasonally due to the change in wave energy experienced during summer and winter months. In temperate areas where summer is characterised by calmer seas and longer periods between breaking wave crests, the beach profile is higher in summer.
The gentle wave action during this season tends to transport sediment up the beach towards the berm where it is deposited and remains while the water recedes. Onshore winds carry it further inland enhancing dunes. Conversely, the beach profile is lower in the storm season due to the increased wave energy, the shorter periods between breaking wave crests. Higher energy waves breaking in quick succession tend to mobilise sediment from the shallows, keeping it in suspension where it is prone to be carried along the beach by longshore currents, or carried out to sea to form longshore bars if the longshore current meets an outflow from a river or flooding stream; the removal of sediment from the beach berm and dune thus decreases the beach profile. In tropical areas, the storm season tends to be during the summer months, with calmer weather associated with the winter season. If storms coincide with unusually high tides, or with a freak wave event such as a tidal surge or tsunami which causes significant coastal flooding, substantial quantities of material may be eroded from the coastal plain or dunes behind the berm by receding water.
This flow may alter the shape of the coastline, enlarge the mouths of rivers and create new deltas at the mouths of streams that had not been powerful enough to overcome longshore movement of sediment. The line between beach and dune is difficult to define in the field. Over any significant period of time, sediment is always being exchanged between them; the drift line is one potential demarcation. This would be the point at which significant wind movement of sand could occur, since the normal waves do not wet the sand beyond this area. However, the drift line is to move inland under assault by storm waves; the development of the beach as a popular leisure resort from the mid-19th century was the first manifestation of what is now the global tourist industry. The first seaside resorts were opened in the 18th century for the aristocracy, who began to frequent the seaside as well as the fashionable spa towns, for recreation and health. One of the earliest such seaside resorts, was Scarborough in Yorkshire during the 1720s.
The first rolling bathing machines were introduced by 1735. The opening of the resort in Brighton and its reception of royal patronage from King George IV, extended the seaside as a resort for health and pleasure to the much larger London market, the beach became a centre for upper-class pleasure and frivolity; this trend was praised and artistically elevated by the new romantic ideal of the picturesque landscape. Queen Victoria's long-standing patronage of the Isle of Wight and Ramsgate in Kent ensured that a seaside residence was considered as a fashionable possession for those wealthy enough to afford more than one home; the extension of this form of leisure to the middle and working classes began with the development of the railways in the 1840s, which offered cheap fares to fast
Cantonese
Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi, it is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western world. While the term Cantonese refers to the prestige variety, it is used in a broader sense for the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese; when Cantonese and the related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities.
Although Cantonese shares a lot of vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is; this results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, the traditional English name of Guangzhou; this narrow sense may be specified as "Canton language" or "Guangzhou language". However, "Cantonese" may refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper. Speakers called this variety "Canton speech" or "Guangzhou speech", although this term is now used outside Guangzhou. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech".
Academically called "Canton prefecture speech". In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province speech", or as "Chinese". In mainland China, the term "Guangdong speech" is increasingly being used amongst both native and non-native speakers. Given the history of the development of the Yue languages and dialects during the Tang dynasty migrations to the region, in overseas Chinese communities, it is referred to as "Tang speech", given that the Cantonese people refer to themselves as "people of Tang". Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Yue branch of Chinese varieties, it is called "Standard Cantonese"; the official languages of Hong Kong are English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has many different varieties. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals.
It is used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese; as in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent and vocabulary. Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. Despite the cession of Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas, making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories.
On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century, although its influence still remains strong within the region. While the Chinese government vehemently discourages the official use of all forms of Chinese except Standard Chinese, Cantonese enjoys a higher standing than other Chinese langua
Land reclamation in Hong Kong
The reclamation of land from the ocean has long been used in mountainous Hong Kong to expand the limited supply of usable land with a total of around 60 square kilometres of land created by 1996. The first reclamations can be traced back to the early Western Han Dynasty, when beaches were turned into fields for salt production. Major land reclamation projects have been conducted since the mid-19th century. One of the earliest projects, the works were completed in two phases; the second added 50 to 60 acres of land in 1890 during the second phase of construction. It was one of the most ambitious projects undertaken during the Colonial Hong Kong era, it expanded the land around Praya Central. The new towns were built on reclaimed land, such as Tuen Mun, Tai Po, Sha Tin, Ma On Shan, West Kowloon, Kwun Tong and Tseung Kwan O; these were built in a series of three phases. Several projects in and around Victoria Harbour, constructed for various purposes; this includes transportation improvements such as the Hong Kong MTR Station, Airport Express Railway & Central-Wanchai Bypass, as well as public recreation space such as the Central Harbourfront Event Space, Tamar Park and the Hong Kong Observation Wheel.
In October 2018, a development project was announced with the intention of creating 1700 hectares of land in the form of new islands off the east coast of Lantau, to house an estimated 1.1 million people. The project has an estimated cost of 500 billion Hong Kong dollars. Much reclamation has taken place in prime locations on the waterfront on both sides of Victoria Harbour; this has raised environmental issues of the protection of the harbour, once the source of prosperity of Hong Kong, traffic congestion in the Central district, as well as the collusion of the Hong Kong Government with the real estate developers in the territory. Hong Kong legislators passed the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance in 1996 in an effort to safeguard the threatened Victoria Harbour against encroaching land development. Land reclamations of the People's Republic of China Society for Protection of the Harbour Enhancing Land Supply Strategy Reclamation History Maps of the reclamations Detailed list of historical land reclamation projects in Hong Kong Chen Yu, "Transformation of waterfront space in Asian cities: Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai", National University of Singapore, 2009 "Enhancing Land Supply Strategy: Reclamation Outside Victoria Harbour and Rock Cavern Development"
Belcher's Street
Belcher's Street is a main street in Kennedy Town of Hong Kong. It joins west Queen's Road West. A small section in its west end built a turn around for Hong Kong Tramway; the street was named after Edward Belcher, a Royal Navy officer who surveyed the harbour of Hong Kong in 1841. The Ex-Western Fire Station, located at No. 12 Belcher's Street, was converted into the Po Leung Kuk Chan Au Big Yan Home for the Elderly. It is located along the Central and Western Heritage Trail. List of streets and roads in Hong Kong Belcher Bay The Belcher's HKU Station a station of the MTR, with one exit in Belcher's Street Google Maps of Belcher's Street
