Queensway Government Offices
The Queensway Government Office Building is a skyscraper located in the Admiralty district of Hong Kong. The tower rises 56 floors and 199 metres in height; the building was completed in 1985. It was designed by Mr K. M. Tseng of the Architectural Services Department; the Queensway Government Offices, which stands as the 54th-tallest building in Hong Kong, is composed of commercial office space. The roof of the Queensway Government Office Building is adorned with a dragon logo, the symbol of Hong Kong; the site of the office building was part of the larger Victoria Barracks site, transferred from the British Forces to the Hong Kong Government for redevelopment. The Victoria Barracks Planning Committee proposed building a "large secretariat building" in the vicinity of Flagstaff House, but the government instead decided to build a courthouse and the government office building on Queensway. Food and Environmental Hygiene DepartmentFormer agencies: Civil Aviation Department – now located at Hong Kong International Airport List of tallest buildings in Hong Kong Media related to Queensway Government Offices at Wikimedia Commons
Antiquities and Monuments Office
The Antiquities and Monuments Office was established in 1976 under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance to protect and preserve Hong Kong's historic monuments. Housed in the Former Kowloon British School, the AMO is responsible for identifying and researching buildings and items of historical interest, as well as organising and coordinating surveys and excavations in areas of archaeological significance; the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong government manages the Office. The AMO is the executive arm of the Antiquities Authority, a portfolio of the Secretary for Home Affairs; the Government's problematic and confusing framework was exposed by the battle to preserve Queen's Pier. The director of Hong Kong University's architectural conservation program, said that the government needed to clarify relations and responsibilities between the board, the office and the Antiquities Authority. One of the duties of the Office is to foster public awareness of Hong Kong's heritage through education, publicity programmes and the setting up of heritage trails and exhibition centres.
The Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre and the Ping Shan Tang Clan Gallery cum Heritage Trail Visitors Centre are under the management of the Office. The adaptive reuse of some historic buildings are organized by the Office, which provides subvention to the Hong Kong Archaeological Society for excavations and surveys of unexplored heritages. Antiquities Advisory Board Heritage conservation in Hong Kong
Simplified Chinese characters
Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language; the government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s to encourage literacy. They are used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong and the Republic of China. While traditional characters can still be read and understood by many mainland Chinese and the Chinese community in Malaysia and Singapore, these groups retain their use of simplified characters. Overseas Chinese communities tend to use traditional characters. Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name colloquially; the latter refers to simplifications of character "structure" or "body", character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, more complicated forms.
On the other hand, the official name refers to the modern systematically simplified character set, which includes not only structural simplification but substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese characters. Simplified character forms were created by reducing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of Chinese characters; some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the same pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character the simplest amongst all variants in form. Many characters were left untouched by simplification, are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies; some simplified characters are dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters in those where a component is replaced by a simple symbol.
This has led some opponents of simplification to complain that the'overall process' of character simplification is arbitrary. Proponents counter that the system of simplification is internally consistent. Proponents have emphasized a some particular simplified characters as innovative and useful improvements, although many of these have existed for centuries as longstanding and widespread variants. A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, but was retracted in 1986 for a variety of reasons due to the confusion caused and the unpopularity of the second round simplifications. However, the Chinese government never dropped its goal of further simplification in the future. In August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters; the new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was implemented for use by the State Council of the People's Republic of China on June 5, 2013. Although most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s, character simplification predates the PRC's formation in 1949.
Cursive written text always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print are attested as early as the Qin dynasty. One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lufei Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China. Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and therefore proposed that a reform be initiated, it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or abolished. Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, "If Chinese characters are not destroyed China will die". Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the economic problems in China during that time. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China.
In 1935, 324 simplified characters collected by Qian Xuantong were introduced as the table of first batch of simplified characters, but they were suspended in 1936. The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. Within the PRC, further character simplification became associated with the leftists of the Cultural Revolution, culminating with the second-round simplified characters, which were promulgated in 1977. In part due to the shock and unease felt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's death, the second-round of simplifications was poorly received. In 1986 the authorities retracted the second round completely. In the same year, the authorities promulgated a final list of simplifications, identical to the 1964 list except for six changes (including the restoration of three characters, simplified in the First Round: 叠, 覆, 像.
Yale romanization of Cantonese
The Yale romanization of Cantonese was developed by Gerard P. Kok for his and Parker Po-fei Huang's textbook Speak Cantonese circulated in looseleaf form in 1952 but published in 1958. Unlike the Yale romanization of Mandarin, it is still used in books and dictionaries for foreign learners of Cantonese, it shares some similarities with Hanyu Pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, is represented as p. Students attending The Chinese University of Hong Kong's New-Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center are taught using Yale romanization. Only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. Modern Cantonese has up to seven phonemic tones. Cantonese Yale represents these tones using a combination of diacritics and the letter h. Traditional Chinese linguistics treats the tones in syllables ending with a stop consonant as separate "entering tones".
Cantonese Yale follows modern linguistic conventions in treating these the same as the high-flat, mid-flat and low-flat tones, respectively. Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems by Meng Haoran: Cantonese phonology Jyutping Guangdong Romanization Cantonese Pinyin Sidney Lau romanisation S. L. Wong Barnett–Chao Romanisation Yale romanization of Mandarin Yale romanization of Korean Gwaan, Choi-wa 關彩華. English-Cantonese Dictionary - 英粤字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization. Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-970-6. Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia. Cantonese. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08945-X. Ng Lam, Sim-yuk & Chik, Hon-man. Chinese-English Dictionary 漢英小字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization, Mandarin in Pinyin. Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-922-6. Comparison chart of Romanization for Cantonese with Yale, S. Lau, Toho and LSHK MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary Online Chinese Character to Yale Romanization of Cantonese lookup Conversion tool
Court of Final Appeal (Hong Kong)
The Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal is the final appellate court of Hong Kong. It was established on 1 July 1997, when Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong began, replacing the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the highest judicial institution under Hong Kong law. With its constitutional role defined in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, the Court of Final Appeal exercises its judicial powers independent of interference; the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal Ordinance and the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal Rules set out the functions and procedures of the court. The Court of Final Appeal has no original jurisdiction. An appeal can either originate from the Court of First Instance. All appeal cases are heard by a bench of five judges consisting of the Chief Justice, three permanent judges and a non-permanent judge. If the Chief Justice does not sit in an appeal, the three permanent judges will sit with a Hong Kong non-permanent judge and an overseas non-permanent judge. Before 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was a British Dependent Territory, the power of final adjudication on the laws of Hong Kong was vested in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
The sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997. Based on the one country, two systems principle, Hong Kong retains its autonomous power and maintains its own legal system; the Court of Final Appeal was thereby established in Hong Kong. Since it serves as the court of last resort, thus executing the power of final adjudication on the laws of Hong Kong. Under the Basic Law, the constitutional document of Hong Kong, the special administrative region remains a common law jurisdiction. Judges from other common law jurisdictions can be recruited and serve in the judiciary as non-permanent judges according to Article 92 of the Basic Law. Judges appointed pursuant to Article 92 have served in the judiciaries of England and Wales, New Zealand, Canada; the court has the power of final adjudication with respect to the law of Hong Kong as well as the power of final interpretation over local laws including the power to strike down local ordinances on the grounds of inconsistency with the Basic Law.
The power of final interpretation of national law including the Basic Law is vested in the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China by virtue of Article 158 of the Basic Law and by the Constitution of the PRC, however national laws which are not explicitly listed in Annex III of the Basic Law are not operative in Hong Kong. Article 158 delegates such power to the courts of Hong Kong for interpretation while handling court cases. Although this arrangement has attracted criticism of "undermining judicial independence", an interpretation by the NPCSC does not affect any court judgments rendered. Controversy regarding this power of interpretation arose in the right of abode issue in 1999. From its inception until September 2015, the court was located in the Former French Mission Building, in Central. In September 2015 the court relocated to the former Legislative Council Building, the colonial Supreme Court. Sir Denys Roberts Sir Alan Huggins Art McMullin Neil Macdougall Sir Derek Cons Philip Gerard Clough William James Silke Kutlu Tekin Fuad Sir Noel Power Gerald Nazareth John B. Mortimer Henry Litton Charles Ching Michael Hartmann /Lord Cooke of Thorndon Sir Edward Somers Sir Anthony Mason Sir Daryl Dawson Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead Sir Gerard Brennan Sir Thomas Eichelbaum Lord Woolf Lord Scott of Foscote Sir Ivor Richardson Michael McHugh Sir Thomas Gault Legal system of Hong Kong Supreme Court of Hong Kong Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal Hong Kong Judiciary website page on Court of Final Appeal Jurist Hong Kong
Fanling Lodge
Fanling Lodge is an official residence of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, which serves as a country house and hosts official functions. Built in 1934 as a summer residence for the Governor of Hong Kong, Fanling Lodge was granted a Grade I historic building status in 2014, amid concerns about its inclusion within a new town development plan. Fanling Lodge is located in the Kam Tsin area of the New Territories in Hong Kong, near Fanling and Kwu Tung, it is situated in a 2.3-hectare wooded lot within the grounds of Hong Kong Golf Club, off Castle Peak Road - Kwu Tung. In 1932, citing the high expense for repairs and maintenance on Mountain Lodge, the summer residence of the Governor of Hong Kong on Victoria Peak, Governor Sir William Peel proposed constructing a new summer residence in Fanling. Completed in 1934, Fanling Lodge served as a weekend and holiday retreat for the Governors of Hong Kong. Mountain Lodge was demolished in 1946. Fanling Lodge remained as an official government residence after the handover in 1997 and as of 2015 remains the alternate residence of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong.
A helicopter pad is located on the lawn of the home and allows the Chief Executive to travel to the lodge from Government House, the main Hong Kong residence. Tung Chee-hwa, the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong, was criticized by the Democratic Party at the end of 1997 for not using Fanling Lodge. Critics demanded. Since that time, the relevance of Fanling Lodge as an official residence has been questioned recurrently during Legislative Council debates. Opponents object that the provision of such a residence to the Chief Executive is an unnecessary perk, that another use should be found for the building. At the end of 1997, the combined upkeep cost of Fanling Lodge and Government House, both used, was HK$13 million a year. About 58 domestic staff were employed to maintain the two official residences, it was reported in 2005, at the beginning of the tenure of Donald Tsang as Chief Executive, that two permanent staff were employed at Fanling Lodge. The maintenance cost incurred by the Architectural Services Department for the upkeep of the Lodge amounted to HK$856,000 for the 2010–2015 period.
Fanling Lodge was designed in 1933 by government architect Stanley Feltham of the Public Works Department of Hong Kong. Its construction was completed in 1934 at a cost of HK$140,000, it was used as a summer residence of the Governor of Hong Kong until the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. Governor Sir William Peel, who had proposed the construction of the lodge, had a keen interest in golf and horse riding, he made the Fanling Lodge available to the garden parties of the Fanling Hunt and Race Club, managing the nearby Kwanti Racecourse. After the War, it was used as a provisional campus of the Rural Teachers' Training College between September 1946 and 1948. Being considered too close to the Chinese border in a Cold War context - the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, it was assigned to the British armed forces until 1960, it subsequently returned to its initial function as an alternate official residence. In the years preceding the 1997 handover, Fanling Lodge served as a venue for secret discussions between China and the United Kingdom, outside of the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group.
The Lodge has hosted visiting dignitaries: famous guests have included Prince Charles in 1994 and British Prime Minister John Major in 1996. Minor building renovations were made in 2005. Fanling Lodge is a two-storey house, it features four bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a wood-and-stone pergola, a swimming pool and a tennis court. Additional buildings include a Chinese-style pavilion, its architectural style is an eclectic mixture of styles: it includes Arts and Crafts, Spanish Mission Revival and "Hollywood Moderne" styles, together with classical elements such as Corinthian columns and Serlian arches. Similarities have been noted between the architectural style of the main building and that of "The Pantiles", a block of flats built in Hampstead Garden Suburb of London in 1934 and designed by the British architect James Bertie Francis Cowper; the garden of the Lodge was designed in the Crafts style. Tree species include Magnolia grandiflora, Melaleuca quinquenervia, Eucalyptus citriodora, Livistona chinensis and Bougainvillea spectabilis.
These species are common in Hong Kong. Concerns have been raised that Fanling Lodge and the nearby Hong Kong Golf Club Fanling Clubhouse, built in 1914, may be demolished for the development of a new town in the area. Secretary for Development Paul Chan Mo-po stated in July 2013 that the Lodge and the Golf Club might be replaced by a housing project. In this context, the Antiquities Advisory Board listed Fanling Lodge as a Grade I historic building and Fanling Clubhouse as a Grade II historic building in September 2014. Thus, the two historic buildings may be preserved and incorporated into future new town developments. Pictures of Fanling Lodge. Item N88 Legislative Council of Hong Kong: Official Record of Proceedings, 11 July 2013. Q&A with Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, including mentions of Fanling Lodge
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
