To begin with in the 1840s, the almost exclusive use for coal in Hong Kong was to fuel the steam engines of ships.

William Tarrant, a very typical Hong Kong denizen then as now, or how a no-one can become a someone once the pond is small enough – claimed in 1848 that “the whole quantity consumed in Hongkong including the barracks during a year, does not probably exceed a thousand tons.” We know this was piffle, but it does indicate that from a landlubber’s point of view there seemed to be very little coal around. As we’ve noted, the demand for coal for shipping grew and grew.

It’s now time to note that after 1864, what William Tarrant had seen as demand for not much more than for stuff to warm barracks in winter, also grew and grew. We need to remember that in the late 19th century, pretty much anything that whirred and whizzed, thumped and banged, or rumbled and rolled did so thanks to steam. And for steam, one needed coal because coal was by far and away the most thermally efficient fuel for boiling water. In the early 1860s Governor Sir Hercules Robinson saw that better lit public streets in Hong Kong would help reduce crime. So, he backed the founding of the Hongkong & China Gas Company, which in 1864 opened its gasworks in Shek Tong Tsui at Whitty Street, which supplied 500 street lights.

To make gas one must have coal. It was the beginning of twenty-five years of increasing public and private demand for coal – to power pumps to pump out dockyards, drive machinery in ropeworks, sugar refineries, textile mills, cement works and, briefly in the 1870s, Hong Kong’s mint for stamping out coins. From the late 1860s to pump the public water supply from reservoirs. As of 1890 to generate electricity for homes, offices, telegraphic communication, and tramcars. For public and private transport – launches and ferries of course – but also the Peak Tram and, from 1910, the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Electricity turned out to be coal’s most important modernizing use in Hong Kong’s economy. In the 125 years Hong Kong has been generating electricity, power output has increased 105,000-fold. Even though today some 70% of that power is produced by burning gas, Hong Kong still uses 37,000 times more coal a year to generate electricity than it did from Hong Kong’s first power station over a century ago, although there are only seventeen times as many people! Put bluntly, we each of us use about two thousand times more electrical power in our daily lives than our forebears did 120 years ago.

Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s because as demand rose, so the amount of coal needed to be kept on hand increased accordingly: from around 3,000 tonnes in 1844 to more like 10,000 tons twenty years later and, forty years after that, 100,000 tons. That’s a lot of real estate.

Ad hoc solutions ruled the roost over the first twenty or so years – including that of the P&O Company that stored its coal afloat in a hulk (ship without masts or sailed), the ex-East Indiaman, the Fort William from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to have been the most usual solution. The Fort William is the only coal hulk ever mentioned. Most coal was stored on land, which provoked an expected NIMBY reaction. Efforts were always being made to get it out of sight…well, out of the gweilos’ sight.

The happy solution turned up in 1860 after the 2nd Opium War. The Kowloon Peninsula was empty of upmarket gweilos and out of their sight. Perfect. For the next eighty years it became the site of most of the largest coalyards both for commercial use and for the Royal Navy. Hong Kong Island didn’t escape entirely, but the coalyards got shoved out to the edge, first in Wan Chai and then in the North Point/Taikoo area. After WW2 demand for coal for fuel disappeared in favour of oil, so coalyards dwindled to two large government owned and operated yards at Lai Chi Kok and the Taikoo end of North Point. That’s until the 1970s oil shock, when suddenly Hong Kong’s electricity generating stations decided coal was cheaper. That’s how come in the last 50 years (c.1975-2025) Hong Kong has imported SEVEN TIMES more coal than it imported in its first century during the heyday of the steam ship. Happily for us all, the two power companies store what is at any one time about 250,000 tons of the stuff way out of sight on the west coast of Lamma Island and at Castle Peak beyond Tuen Mun.

Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880s – were chronically inefficient consumers of it to boot. Up until the 1860s, a typical 700hp engine would have needed up to 50 tonnes of coal a day.

Hong Kong’s Harbour Master’s statistics are pretty useless and there is no hard data on steamship numbers before 1873. In that year 1579 steamers entered the port. Data suggests ships loaded around 100 tons of coal on average when they called at Hong Kong, so we’re looking at an annual demand for bunker coal in 1873 of around 150,000 tons.

The average ship delivering coal from the 1840s until the 1870s was a sailing ship and only carried about 400 tons, so we’re looking at anything up to one ship a day having to arrive in Hong Kong to ensure there was enough coal to meet the demand. To begin with coal was mostly a cargo of opportunity. Because, for colonial Hong Kong’s first forty or so years, demand in China for British products was very weak, ships leaving from Britain carried coal as ballast so the voyage could earn some money. Later, they carried British goods to Australia, picked up a cargo of coal there for Hong Kong, and then loaded tea to take back to Britain.

Only certain organizations with predictable demand – like the P&O steamship company or the Royal Navy – had regular, dedicated deliveries. For the rest, it was down to the market to ensure that supply matched demand. Mind you, however it was shipped for whatever reason, coal was a tricky cargo. There are lots of stories of coal carrying ships catching fire (in certain conditions coal will spontaneously combust) and exploding or sinking. There are others of the cargo shifting in strong weather and ships capsizing – a few ships are reported setting out from Britain with coal for Hong Kong and never arriving, just disappearing somewhere en route.