Taikoo sugar refinery and company town : progressive design by a pioneering commercial enterprise

Abstract

Abstract of thesis entitled

“Taikoo Sugar Refinery and Company Town: Progressive Design by a Pioneering Commercial Enterprise”

Submitted by

Jennifer Field Lang

For a degree of Doctor or Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in February 2018

From 1881-1884, Butterfield & Swire, the Far Eastern branch of the British trading firm John Swire and Sons, established the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. Opening for business in 1884, the sugar refinery featured a modern and technologically advanced industrial plant (machinery and buildings) including: deep water docks and piers for ships; cranes; warehouses; manufacturing and processing buildings; store buildings; coal bins; a rail system; and reservoir and water channel systems to collect and transport water from the mountains to the refinery, all of which enabled Taikoo to produce a wide range and high volume of sugar products. Additionally, there was an associated company town with housing for local workers and European managers and their families that included social and community facilities, schools, recreational facilities and fields, and a sanitarium located on the mountains behind the refinery that was accessible by way of an aerial ropeway. The Taikoo Sugar Refinery and company town, nineteenth-century workers’ housing in Hong Kong, and early industrial architecture and factory design in Hong Kong all remain inadequately studied areas. Because today there are few visible intact vestiges of the Taikoo Sugar Refinery and company town, it remains unclear what were the various architectural and design components of the site and their impact on colonial Hong Kong from a physical, economic and social perspective. The Taikoo Sugar Refinery and company town, significant in its substantial role in the early development of the sugar refining industry in Hong Kong and Asia in the late nineteenth century, represents a pioneering business enterprise in colonial Hong Kong and a rare and distinctive example of not only industrial architecture, but also of a combined company town and hill station form operating in Hong Kong. This dissertation: 1) documents the history, design, planning and development of the Taikoo Sugar Refinery, workers’ housing and company town site, revealing the influences that shaped its design, construction and operation; and 2) demonstrates the impact of this site on the history and development of colonial Hong Kong.