New on Gwulo: 2025, week 46

Submitted by David on Sun, 11/16/2025 - 02:00

Welcome to the new readers who've joined us from my recent talks in Glasgow and Exeter. It was a pleasure to meet you, and thank you to everyone who brought along their family photos & stories to share.

On with what's new and updated on the Gwulo website:

General

1864: Gas lights turned on for the first time
Dairy Farm ice-making at Aberdeen
The arch & foundation stone of the old Tung Wah Smallpox Hospital have been removed from the garden at the Kennedy Town bus terminus, but hopefully will be reinstalled at a new location.
Extracts from early English-language newspapers related to Hong Kong, 1836-1844.
A 1939 home movie taken on Cheung Chau (thanks to Moddsey for the link.)
City boundary stone found near Wanchai Gap?
Notes about the first Central Market.
Answering a question from a previous newsletter, Mary Pritchard Moline was interned in Yangchow C Camp from March 1943 until August 1945.
Tip: if you want to take a closer look at any of the photos in the newsletter, click on the photo to visit its page on the Gwulo website, then click on the 'Zoom' tab where you can enlarge the image.
Readers ask for help with:
- Translating a Chinese inscription
- Where was the ship-breaking yard between Tai Lam and Kowloon around 1959-60?
- Margot is looking for any information about her grandmother, Edith Carlotta Johnson-Lee Gegg Ainslie. Edith lived in Hong Kong from before 1920 until she died in 1951. During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, she was interned in Stanley Camp.
- Where was this photo taken:
  
  Unidentified location, somewhere in Mid-Levels?, by helenwan
- This sailing boat, Eastlight, was built in Hong Kong for the Royal Navy in 1939. What happened to it between then and the 1950s?
  
  Eastlight sailing boat, by Pat@HLY
- Looking for information about other pioneers of early Hong Kong Plastic Industries
  
  Winsome Plastic 1953, by C Young
- Can you identify any of these people:
  
  Juvenile Care 1959, by C Young

Gwulo Website

If you've ever made a 'Place' page on Gwulo, please read this:
- If you've ever made a 'Place' page on Gwulo, please check this list to see if your name appears. If you see your name there, it means that one or more of the Places you created has its 'current condition' set to 'unknown'. Please click on your name to see a new page with a list of the Places affected.
- Look down the list of Places, and if you see any that you know are currently in use, ruined, or demolished, please edit their page and set the 'current condition' accordingly. Of course if you don't know the current condition of a Place, just leave the 'current condition' set to 'unknown'.
- This is valuable housekeeping that helps make Gwulo's maps work better.
Gwulo's books - 9,000 copies sold!
- At some point in November we sold the 9,000th copy of Gwulo's books. I was worried that once we left Hong Kong the sales of my books would dry up, so it's great to see them continue to sell. (This total is just for the English-language books. I'm looking forward to finding out how the Chinese translation is selling when I receive my first sales report from the publisher.)
- UK readers, I now have copies of the Chinese translation of my Volume 1 here in the UK. If you'd like to order them (£17 a copy, includes postage within the UK), please reply to this email and let me know.
- Here are the other shops and online stores where you can buy my books.
- US readers, unfortunately Amazon UK isn't currently shipping my books to the United States. I believe we'll have to wait for the tariff situation to settle down before they resume.
Future Gwulo talks
- Exeter: I'm already planning to give another talk there next year.
- Glasgow / Scotland: Although Glasgow has a population over four times the size of Exeter, less people attended the talk in Glasgow than in Exeter. We didn't sell enough tickets to cover the cost of renting the venue. If anyone has ideas for how to attract more people to attend a future talk in Scotland, please let me know.
- Other locations: If you've got a group of people that would enjoy seeing old Hong Kong photos and hearing their stories, please get in touch to discuss setting up a talk.
Do AI-generated images have a place on a history website like Gwulo?
- Several contributors have experimented with using AI to generate coloured, sharp images from old low-resolution black & white photos. I believe that these will cause us problems, so I've asked contributors to only upload original images in future, not AI-generated images. Read more about the thinking behind this decision.