LMS Bazaar Chapel [1844-????]

Submitted by annelisec on Mon, 08/01/2016 - 10:28
Current condition
Demolished / No longer exists
Date completed

Location approximate.  It was in the Lower Bazaar - Jervois Street.

Photos that show this Place

1866
1868
1868

Comments

Page 79 of the book James Legge, Missionary and Scholar says the first chapel was burnt down in the great fire of December 1851:

Incidents of Chinese Life and Work

The end of 1851 was marked by calamity. In an extensive fire, by which thousands of the Chinese population lost all their property, the Mission Church and the Hospital were reduced to ashes. Energetic measures, however, were taken for the reconstruction of the buildings, cordial help was granted by the London Missionary Society, and, best of all, public confidence remained unshaken.

"Hong Kong, Dec. 30, 1851.

"We had a very fine meeting in the Chinese Chapel last Sabbath night There were more than a hundred people there who were going to sail to-day for California, and very attentive they were. I came home cheered by such a close to the Sabbath services of the year. About ten o’clock a servant came and told me that a fire had broken out in the Chinese town; I looked and saw some houses blazing. Going to the spot I saw the flames were rapidly extending, and in a couple of hours five or six hundred houses were in one terrible conflagration. Our chapel and hospital were involved in the ruin. [...]"

(I originally thought the text above referred to the first Union Church, but Herostratus corrected me that it referred to this Place:

The LMS also had a chapel in the Chinese Bazaar and  it seems more likely that this was the one that was destroyed in 1851 as 'thousands' of Chinese lost their homes and five or six hundred homes were burnt. This are of Hollywood Road was a mainly European populated area at the time: the government in 1844 had shifted the original Chinese town from this area to Tai Ping Shan so it could be used for European settlement. 

)