Penha Hill, Macau (was "Old Hong Kong")

Alison.
Mon, 09/22/2014 - 22:32
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Penha Hill, Macau (was "Old Hong Kong")

[Identified as Penha Hill in Macau in the comments below]

Can anyone identify where this is?  I have scanned the picture from some old slides my father took in the 1950's and can't place where this is.

Date picture taken
1950s
Gallery
1950s Hong Kong

Comments

Hi,

I started my search for this image back in June when I made a post to a Talk forum on wikipedia. Somebody replied to my post suggesting I post a similar request to gwulo.

Instead of posting I decided to poke around gwulo to look for clues. A first session some months ago got me nowhere. A few days ago I tried again.

Suddenly, after a long, long, search through your photos I found myself looking at virtually the same image I had been trying to identify.

By the time I got to the end of page 2 of this thread and visited the related uwants discussion, I realised I could finally discard my theory that the photo was taken from somewhere near Tai Po looking north-east along Tolo Channel, if it was taken anywhere in Hong Kong at all.

In the hopes that I can retribute something I am posting a table full of links which aims to tell the story of my search in as concise and useful a way as possible.

The main purpose of the table is to pull together the many pieces of information I have found on my search. Added to this are a series of wikimapia links to locations which (I believe) definitively define the locations of the viewpoint, the central house, and the island in the centre of the channel at the centre of the view.

My hope is that this table will provide a useful summary of all that has been found on this search, by all concerned.

the original image ibiblio: original image | original image source page ('Near Castle Peak'!)
seeking help wikipedia: original posting and first suggestion
chronological images many sources: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
the solution gwulo + uwants: gwulo: first clues - especially at the end of page 2 | uwants: final solution - pages 134 + 135
overviews various: early 20C | early 21C | Macau, Barra + Penha Hills | early 20C reverse
locations wikimapia: viewpoint | central house location - house no longer exists | central island (zoom in) ( terrain | satellite ) - island now surrounded by reclaimed land |
houses to left of sightline ( site of large square single-storey-on-plinth house - house replaced by residential buildings | smaller white house in valley - house still appears to exist )
maps wikicommons: Macau ( 1639 | 1889, very detailed, Portuguese - 19Mb, size can cause problems ) |
Macau+10kms ( 1912, Portuguese | 1555-2011, animated topographical, French ) |
Macau+150kms, Canton / Guangzhou / Pearl River estuary, Hong Kong ( 1753, detailed, Dutch | 1890, German | 1910 )
In less than a hundred years this Macau view...
...no longer exists:
the sea is gone, reclaimed as land;
the hill is gone, levelled for stone;
the 2 central houses are gone, replaced by newer or bigger or more;
the sailboats are gone, replaced by machines;
the visibility is gone, blurred by pollution.