Hong Kong has always had more land and water than it could use, because most of the land is a hilly waste and most of the water is salty.

From the first years of the colony until today, the persisting shortage of usable land and fresh water has confronted every governor with a problem that he could neither solve nor ignore. They have all wrestled with it, none more vigorously than the governors of the last fifteen years, and the problem has become more costly, complex and acute than ever.

In any community, land and water problems are related to each other; in the peculiar circumstances of Hong Kong’s climate, geography and population, they intersect at more points than LaocoÖn and the serpents.

Consider the governor’s alternatives: If he stores the entire run-off of the summer rainy season in the reservoirs it will barely meet the minimum needs of the urban millions on Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and it will cause the withering of the crops of farmers in the New Territories during the winter dry season. If he cuts the city supply, how can he meet the ever-increasing needs of the new industrial centers, like Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong, that the government is building on land reclaimed from the sea?

The if’s are endless: If he stops the reclamation program to reduce the demand for more water, real estate costs will climb so fast that local industries will price themselves out of the export market. If he builds all the reservoirs the colony needs, who will pay for them? If he doesn’t, how can the fast-growing population of the colony survive? If the reservoirs displace more farmers, who will raise the food?

The present disposition of the colony government is to provide as much additional land and water as it can, and let the if’s fall where they may. To that end, it has spent about $60 million on reclamation and $55 million to increase its water supply since World War II. Over the next decade, its further expenditures in these two areas may reach $300 million. Many projects have not yet been authorized, but much of the preliminary surveying has been done. With the need for them becoming more imperative as the colony’s population continues to increase, it is not so much a question of if as of when.

Allocation of several hundred million dollars to correct deficiencies of the topography is none too large for the job that must be done. When one has noted that Hong Kong has a sheltered deep-water harbor (probably the bed of an old river that flowed from west to east), that one-seventh of its land is arable, and that its mines and quarries yield a modest amount of iron ore, building stone, kaolin clay, graphite, lead, wolfram and a few other minerals, one has exhausted the list of its terrestrial assets. Its liabilities are unlimited.

Three broken lines of perpendicular hills cut across the colony from northeast to southwest, with irregular spurs branching off haphazardly; two dozen peaks poke up from 1,000 to 3,140 feet. Eighty percent of the surface is either too steep for roads or buildings, too barren to grow anything but wiry grass or scrub, too swampy to walk through or so hacked up by erosion that it is worthless and an eyesore. The rest, except for farmland, is either in forest or packed with people in numbers ranging from 1,800 to 2,800 an acre. Rivers tumble from the high hills in all directions, but they are short and unreliable, mostly summer torrents and winter trickles.

Hong Kong’s weather is impartially disrespectful toward annual averages, periodic tables and the population. Rainfall averages about 85 inches a year, with the rainy season extending from April through September. There have been long summer droughts and ruinous winter floods. On July 19, 1926, it rained nearly 4 inches in one hour and 21 inches in 24 hours.

Prevailing winds blow from the east in every month but June, and the colony’s fishing settlements have been located to protect them from it. The protection avails nothing against typhoons, which usually form in the Caroline Islands, curve northwards over the Philippines and hit Hong Kong from all angles, principally during the June to October season, though there is no month which has not had at least one of them. Four out of five bypass the colony, but the fifth may inflict devastation on ships, boats and shoreline villages. It never snows and freezing temperatures are extremely rare, yet the high, year-round humidity can put a raw edge on cool wintry days and make summer clothing stickily uncomfortable. Except for flat farmland in the northwestern New Territories, topsoil is thin, highly acid and leaches badly during the rainy season.

This chronicle of drawbacks only tends to revive the question every British administrator since 1841 must have asked himself: Why did we ever settle this hump-backed wasteland? They have answered the question by a dogged and unremitting effort to make it a habitable place.

The first English traders had scarcely settled along the north shore of Hong Kong Island when it became evident that there was a shortage of suitable land. The slopes of Mt. Gough and Victoria Peak rose steeply behind Queen’s Road, the only street along the shore. Holders of waterfront lots on the road extended them toward the harbor pretty much at random, giving them more level land but creating a jagged shoreline unprotected by any seawall. Several governors sought to build a straight and solid seawall, but the lot-holders balked at paying its cost.

Two poorly constructed seawalls, erected in piecemeal fashion, were wrecked by typhoons before the government was able to push through a unified seawall and reclamation scheme. By 1904, a massive seawall stretched along the island front for two miles, and Queen’s Road stood two blocks inland from the harbor. Most of the colony’s principal office buildings have been built on this reclaimed land.

Once the value of reclamation had been proved, the whole northern shore of the island was gradually faced with a seawall. Much of the Wanchai district rose from the sea in the 1920s and its new-found land was soon covered with tenements or bars and cabarets catering to the sailors’ trade. Swamps became solid ground and promontories were swallowed up by the seven-mile-long reclamation.

Starting in 1867, a succession of seawall and land-fill projects altered the size and shape of the Kowloon Peninsula.

By the time of the Japanese invasion, a total of 1,425 acres, or more than two square miles, had been reclaimed. The gain was twofold, for it not only added level land, it absorbed all the fill from sites where obstructing hills had been cut down to make existing ground usable.

The foundation of the colony’s tourist industry and air cargo business rests on land reclaimed from Kowloon Bay and converted into an international airport. Its name and its origin go back to 1918, when two real estate promoters, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Au Tak, organized the Kai Tak Land Development Co. to create building sites by filling in the northern end of Kowloon Bay. Homesites and an 800-foot-long airstrip were in use on the land by 1924, with Fowler’s Flying School the first aviation tenant. Government took it over in 1930, improving and enlarging it in preparation for the first international flight, an Imperial Airways’ weekly service to Penang started March 24, 1936, linking with the main route between England and Australia. Four other international airlines, including Pan American and Air France, joined the formation before the Japanese seized the field in 1941. The Japanese extended its area and built two concrete runways, but its buildings were bombed into rubble before the war ended.

Restored to full operations in 1947, Kai Tak handled the strangest one-way traffic boom in its history. In one month of 1949, 41,000 passengers were flown in from China to escape the advancing Communist armies. Mainland service ended a year later, and traffic declined to one-third of its former volume. The field itself, penned in by rocky peaks, had reached the limits of its development, and the largest four-engined ships were rapidly outgrowing it. For jets, it would be a cow pasture at the bottom of a canyon.

The Department of Civil Aviation, after concluding that nothing further could be done to expand the existing field, began casting around for alternate sites. Fourteen of them, including Stonecutters Island and Stanley Bay, were ruled out for excessive cost, inaccessibility, or risky topography before the experts decided to put the airport right next to the old one, on a strip of land that didn’t then exist.

The government put up the money and the job of building a promontory 7,800 feet long and 800 feet wide that would point directly into Kowloon Bay began in 1956. A few hills would have to be knocked down to clear the approaches, but disposal of the dirt would be simple, since 20 million cubic yards of fill were needed to build the promontory. The new airport runway was to have a length of 8,350 feet, extending the full length of the reclaimed strip and well beyond its landward end.

Three thousand laborers, most of them hauling dirt by hand, worked nearly three years to lay down the man-made peninsula. Although it was near the old airport, it overcame the earlier field’s approach limitations by being pointed straight at the 1,500-foot-wide harbor entrance of Lei Yue Mun, and at the opposite end, having the Kowloon hills truncated to permit another clear shot at the runway, depending on which direction best fitted weather conditions.

The new runway went into use in 1958, with the completion of the terminal coming several years later. Temporary terminal buildings bulged with incoming tourists, but they were moved through these buildings fairly well. Most colony residents are hardly aware of the arrival and departure of the huge jets, though they shake the earth with their thunder as they pass over Kowloon. Kai Tak has become a full 24-hour airport. Its 200-foot-wide runway is stressed to take a maximum plane weight of 400,000 pounds, well above the limit of the heaviest airliners. From the air it looks like a super-highway lost at sea.

Opening of the new Kai Tak Airport brought the colony an additional gain by freeing 70 acres of the old field for industrial development.

Less than half a mile from the seaward end of Kai Tak, the first new town in the government’s history is being built—Kwun Tong, an industrial, commercial and residential area along the northeastern shore of Kowloon Bay. A ten-year project of large extent, it required the removal of a whole range of hills. The spoil was then hauled to the bay and dumped behind a protecting seawall 2,477 feet long. The leveled hills and the land reclaimed from the sea will provide a 514-acre site, close to a square mile, for an industrial center whose population is expected to reach 300,000 within a few years.

Digging and filling began in 1955 and have proceeded with such speed that today, in order to get a panoramic view of the project, one has to go to a hill three quarters of a mile back from the seawall. Block after block of multi-storied factories stretch along the sea front, approximately eighty of them, several blocks deep in the industrial zone between the seawall and Kwun Tong Road, which cuts directly across the town. On the landward side of Kwun Tong Road, the commercial and recreational zones are beginning to take shape; behind them, the long files of resettlement estates housing 60,000 persons and various government-aided housing for another 15,000. Privately built houses are also being developed.

Kwun Tong has all the noisy, dusty confusion of any construction job in progress, but there are already 15,000 people working in its completed factories, making cotton yarn, furniture, garments, and other products. Most of the factories are humming and a few betray signs of hasty organization. One plant spent two years tinkering with stop-gap orders for simple novelties while its management tried to find some profitable use for a million dollars’ worth of fine machinery standing idle under its roof.

Kwun Tong will never be a beauty spot because its main function is industrial. Nearly half its total area will be reserved for homes and commercial use, however. Proceeds from land sales are expected to repay the government for its $17 million investment in Kwun Tong.

Tsuen Wan, a second industrial town about eight miles northwest of Kwun Tong in the New Territories, has reclaimed around 70 acres from the sea. Gin Drinkers’ Bay, an adjoining inlet used for ship-breaking, is being filled in to provide 400 more acres of industrial sites. No one knows the origin of its name but it no longer matters; this glass will soon be filled with earth. When completed, Tsuen Wan will be a town of about 175,000 people.

Specialized reclamation projects have been pushed ahead at many other spots. At North Point, on Hong Kong Island, 12,000 people live in tall apartments built on recently reclaimed land. The new City Hall opened in 1962 on reclaimed waterfront land in the Central District. Five blocks of the central waterfront, just west of the reclaimed land on which the Star Ferry’s Hong Kong Island terminal sits, are being extended several hundred feet into the harbor for more building sites.

The principal land-fill operations have been restricted to the island and Kowloon Bay, except for Tseun Wan. The limitation has been human, rather than geographic; most urban workers can’t afford to travel to outlying locations and they don’t want to anyway. They plainly prefer the excitement, gossip and sociability of the crowded cities.

Nevertheless, central reclamation possibilities are running out, unless the government proposes to pave its entire harbor. As a more likely alternative, it sent engineers out in 1957 to study reclamation sites in the bays and shallow inlets of the New Territories. Five have been tentatively chosen that could be developed to create 3,000 more acres of land. The cost would come to more than $83 million, so there’s no eagerness to tackle the project at once.

The never-ending task of providing more land for the colony’s growing population would be meaningless without the assurance of an adequate water supply. At this stage in the colony’s development, even when the work of increasing the water supply is proceeding on a scale no previous generation would have attempted, the builders and planners are not deluding themselves. They know that when they have completed the last unit of the reservoir system under construction, the needs of the colony will probably have outstripped its capacity. There were times in the past when some optimistic governor, presiding at the opening of a new dam or reservoir, fancied that the problem had been met. The next drought was sufficient to knock his hopeful predictions into a cocked hat.

Hong Kong has never been inclined to waste water. On the rare occasions when its people had a full supply, as in certain periods of 1958 and 1959, its maximum average consumption ran to about 88 million gallons a day for nearly 3,000,000 people. New York City, with just under 8,000,000 people, consumes about 1 billion 200 million gallons a day. Because of an unparalleled water-supply system, Americans are the world’s champion water-wasters. An American will use 100 gallons a day, compared with 27 gallons per person in Hong Kong, and about 50 gallons per person in Great Britain.

There are compelling reasons why Hong Kong residents will not waste water. The colony, unlike New York City, cannot draw from a watershed covering several states. Except for a relatively small amount piped in from Red China since 1960, it has had to rely on surface water collected entirely from its 398¼ square miles of land area, which is about one-fourth larger than New York City. And it has to get the water while the getting is good; during the annual five-month dry season, the surface run-off averages only 600,000 gallons a day.

The colony may have been mistaken from the start about its potential water resources; even before it was established, sailing ships stopped regularly at Hong Kong Island to draw clear, sparkling water from its hillside springs. After the island was settled the springs soon fell short of needs, and five wells were sunk to tap new sources of supply. Their levels, too, sank as rapidly as the population rose. Governor Hercules Robinson expressed his concern over the dwindling supplies by offering $5,000 in 1859 to anyone who could design a reservoir system adequate for 85,000 residents. S. B. Rawling, civilian clerk-of-works for the Army Royal Engineers, took the prize with a plan to build a 2-million-gallon reservoir at Pok Fu Lam, on the slopes of Victoria Peak, and carry the water through a ten-inch pipe to tanks above Victoria City.

Completed in four years, Pok Fu Lam proved to be short of the need even then, for the population had risen to 125,000. Striving to catch up, the colony installed a much larger reservoir above Pok Fu Lam, linked it to a pair of supplementary reservoirs, and discovered that the demand was still in advance of supply. Before the end of the century, new reservoirs had been added at Tai Tam and Wong Nai Chung, and the water finally reached the eastern sections of the city. Filtration through sand beds was also incorporated into the system.

None of these efforts satisfied the popular needs for long. Completion of Tai Tam Tuk Reservoir in 1917 near the southeastern end of the island raised the storage capacity to 1 billion, 419 gallons and everyone thought the problem was solved at last. A series of punishing droughts killed that bright hope, and the building of the Aberdeen Reservoirs rounded out all the parts of the island that could be drained for storage. Two reservoirs on the Kowloon Peninsula were tied to the island with underwater pipelines, but this was done only after a spring drought in 1929 had dried up five of the island’s six reservoirs, making it necessary to bring in water by ship from as far away as Shanghai.

The rain-gathering potential of the New Territories had been exploited by the 1930s with the construction of the Shek Li Pui and the Jubilee Reservoirs. When the Japanese arrived, they found 13 reservoirs with a storage capacity of 6 billion gallons. They let the mains deteriorate during their occupation of the colony, applying their own brand of water-rationing by cutting off all supply to entire sections of the colony whenever they chose to.

Following World War II, the government tried deep boring to reach underground water resources, but this turned out to be scarcely worth the effort. After years of surveying and study, engineers laid out the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir System, at the central western end of the New Territories. This called for construction of a two-section dam 2,300 feet long and 200 feet high. This gigantic main dam, built entirely of concrete, created a reservoir of 4 billion, 500 million gallons. Twenty-three miles of “catchwaters,” or concrete channels to trap run-off from the rains, funneled the surface water from 11,000 acres into the reservoir. It took eight years to construct, being completed in 1960 at a cost of almost $25 million.

None of these large dams served the needs of the hundreds of small villages in the New Territories, which still relied on wells and streams or threw up earth dams in hilly areas to form their own miniature reservoirs. After World War II the colony government and the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association, a private philanthropic body, furnished grants of cement to replace these crude and leaky installations with concrete dams and concrete-lined wells, plus pipes to carry the water into the villages.

Rice crops in the New Territories were dependent on their own irrigation systems, traditionally constructed of earth channels and dams. They were laid out with evident shrewdness to cover the greatest possible area, but the dams and channels had to be nursed along constantly to prevent leaking and to keep them from becoming choked with weeds. The government and the Kadoorie Association also furnished materials to replace these systems with concrete dams and channels. Nearly 600 dams and more than 220,000 feet of channels have been improved in this way since World War II.

When the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir was under construction, a very delicate balance of catchwaters and irrigation channels had to be worked out so that the reservoir collected all the excess summer rain not required for irrigation, but did not draw off the sparse winter rains which farmers had to have. The farmers’ initial assumption when they saw the huge catchwater channels passing the farms on their way to the reservoir was that they were being robbed of water; it took considerable diplomacy and convincing proof to allay their suspicions.

Farmers who learned that their villages were about to be inundated by the big reservoir were even less happy. They rejected the government’s proposal to move them to another rural area and insisted on moving, if move they must, to the developing industrial town of Tsuen Wan. They received the full market price for their farm property and were resettled in new houses at Tsuen Wan, with shop space they could rent to replace their farming income. A few holdouts threatened to stay in their old homes until the reservoir floated them to glory, but belatedly reversed themselves and walked out on dry land.

The Tai Lam Chung relocation was hardly concluded when the government found itself involved in an even knottier problem. Continuing demands for more water forced the construction of still another dam—Shek Pik, on Lantau Island. This was a remote part of the colony, much larger than Hong Kong Island, but completely without roads until 1957. A few government people visited the island regularly, but its isolated villages, with their square stone towers or “cannon houses,” were more likely to regard all visitors as pirates until proved otherwise. Armed and alert, they holed up in the towers to defend themselves against marauders who still stage occasional raids in sparsely settled areas.

Two villages in southwestern Lantau, Shek Pik and Fan Pui, would have to be removed to make way for the new dam. Their people, having no knowledge of modern technology and no need for a dam, viewed the project with fear and hostility. The dam was not, in fact, being built for them; its collected water was to be carried by pipeline to Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Peng Chau. Fan Pui, the smaller village, had to be treated with diplomacy and compensated before its 62 people consented to move to another rural area on the island. Inhabitants of Shek Pik elected to move to Tsuen Wan, settling in new five-story blocks. The oldest inhabitant, an eighty-six-year-old woman, made the transfer with full official ceremony, her sedan chair borne by four policemen. The ancestral tablets and household gods also made the trip on the shoulder-poles of respectful bearers. Anything less than this diplomatic ritual would have made the entire relocation impossible.

Preliminary work on the Shek Pik Dam became a trail-blazing venture into unexplored territory. A ten-mile paved road had to be built along the edge of the sea from the sheltered harbor at Silver Mine Bay to the future dam site. Test borings at the foot of Shek Pik Valley where the dam was to cross disclosed that the ground was a porous mixture of gravel, boulders, and rotten granite down to 137 feet below the surface. Since the ground stood only 15 feet above sea level, seawater would be able to seep into the reservoir and the fresh water in the reservoir would escape beneath the dam, undermining it.

If a regular concrete dam were to be built on such ground, its foundations would have to go down at least 137 feet, a frightfully expensive procedure. Engineers produced a reasonable alternative by using the recently developed technique called grouting. In this process, a mixture of water, cement, and clay is pumped into porous ground under high pressure, sealing off the foundation without requiring excavation to bed rock. A series of tests established that this process was feasible for Shek Pik, and preparations to build an earth dam were made in 1958.

The dam was to be 2,300 feet long, with a maximum height of 180 feet. It would back up 5 billion, 400 million gallons; a third of the colony’s total water storage. A ten-mile tunnel was to carry the water from the treatment works near the dam to Silver Mine Bay. From there it would be pumped under the sea in twin 30-inch-diameter pipelines to reach Hong Kong Island, eight miles east of Lantau. Fifteen miles of catchwaters were to drain about twelve square miles of land, aided by the fact that rainfall on Lantau Island is generally ten percent heavier than on Hong Kong Island and is more evenly distributed throughout the year.

One of the tunnels was delayed for a time by a peculiarly Chinese problem; its “fung shui” was regarded as injurious to a resident dragon. The fung shui, a very important consideration among local people, meant that any proposed change in the local landscape had to be undertaken with great care. It would never do to nip off the top of a hill that was shaped like a dragon, for that might blind the mythical beast and put a hex on the countryside. The thing to do was to hire a fung shui expert from a nearby village; for a suitable fee, he would propitiate the dragon and the work of dam-building could proceed.

In a more practical way, the engineers had to install concrete channels and pipelines to make certain that sufficient quantities of water were diverted to irrigate farms near the catchment area. Hillsides above the big catchwaters had to be faced with chunam, a mixture of straw, lime, clay and cement which keeps the hillside soil from washing into the catchwaters and clogging them.

By early 1962, the southwestern portion of Lantau was criss-crossed by deep catchwaters and the earth dam was rising at the foot of the valley, with its core of impermeable clay being made ready for a covering of ordinary clay and dirt. Up in the mountains at the head of the valley, Buddhist monks and nuns continued their quiet, contemplative existence in the Po Lin Monastery, almost untouched by the dam project. Even when a few more guests stayed overnight at the Po Lin hostel, the pattern of prayer and work did not change.

Construction of the dam, pipelines, tunnels, and catchwaters became an international venture, with French, English, American, and Hong Kong contractors sharing the work under supervision of government engineers. The entire $40 million job is to be completed late in 1963.

There were no claims that the completion of Shek Pik would give the colony all the water it required. The new dam on Lantau and the water pumped in from China would be helpful, but far short of indicated needs.

Two factors balanced each other in planning further exploitation of the colony’s water resources. More reservoirs of the type already in use would displace more farmland than Hong Kong could afford to lose. But the introduction of grouting, the foundation technique successfully employed at Shek Pik, made it possible to consider reservoir sites which would have seemed ridiculously unsuitable a few years earlier. And these sites, it appeared, could be developed without invading farm areas.

In the late 1950s, engineers of the Public Works Department and two consulting firms directed their search for more water toward the thinly settled scrub country of the eastern New Territories. This part of the colony consists of two peninsulas with the irregular outline of an ink-blot, separated by the broad, ten-mile-long Tolo Channel. Both peninsulas are chopped into by dozens of deep bays, coves and inlets bordered by high, rocky hills. Hundreds of inshore fishermen ply the surrounding waters, but most of the region is too barren and mountainous for farming.

Survey engineers made two recommendations which startled laymen: (1) Build a 6,600-foot-long dam across the entrance of Plover Cove, a four-square-mile inlet from Tolo Channel, and cut it off from the sea. (2) Build a similar but much shorter dam to seal off Hebe Haven, an inlet about one-fourth as large as Plover Cove. When the dams were finished all that would be necessary would be to pump the seawater out of the inlets and let the rains fill them with fresh water. The two reservoirs would be enough to double the storage capacity of the colony’s water-supply system.

These basic recommendations in further discussions evolved into an integrated scheme of tremendous size and complexity, covering the entire eastern half of the New Territories. It included a series of service reservoirs and pumping stations along a main pipeline extending from the Red China border to Kowloon. These would be linked to Plover Cove and Hebe Haven by another system of tunnels. Virtually all the surface rains in the eastern end of the New Territories would be fed through catchwaters into the two main reservoirs. Since Hebe Haven might collect more summer rain than it could hold, the excess water could be conveyed by tunnel to Plover Cove, with its much larger capacity. Even the water brought by pipeline from Red China would be fed into the integrated system. Three balancing reservoirs, to maintain a controlled and even flow of water, and two large new filtration plants, to purify the water before it made the last stage of its journey to urban consumers, were to become part of the system.

Many of the connecting pipelines were to be designed to convey water in either direction, making the utmost use of storage capacity. By these refinements of the original recommendations, the capacity of the integrated scheme would be raised to 100 million gallons a day when it came into full use.

The first stage of the gigantic new system had made remarkable progress by the early part of 1962. The Lion Rock Tunnel had already been begun by cutting through the side of a mountain to connect the filtration plant at Sha Tin with a pair of service reservoirs in Kowloon. The tunnel, 32 feet in diameter, will carry three pipelines, each four feet in diameter, and a two-lane, 24-foot-wide auto road three-fourths of a mile through Lion Rock Mountain. Excavation work on the Lion Rock Reservoirs, with a total capacity of 41 million gallons, had almost been completed. At the other end of the tunnel, at the Sha Tin filtration plant and pumping station, a hillside site as extensive as four football fields had been excavated and the spoil was being used to fill a shallow inlet. Construction of ten miles of tunnels and the 10-foot-high Lower Shing Mun Dam were well advanced.

Meanwhile, engineers were probing the soil structure at the entrance of Plover Cove. Working from barges in 35 feet of water, they bored down through 35 feet of soft clay, reaching to almost twice that depth before they found impermeable clay and rock to form the foundation for their earth-fill dam. When complete, the dam will extend 35 feet above the water and 70 feet below it, with grouting to provide a watertight foundation. The main section of the dam will cross the cove’s wide entrance. Two shorter sections will close off side entrances to the cove.

The first stage of this integrated scheme will be rounded out in 1964. Both Hebe Haven and Plover Cove should be ready by 1970, though any completion dates beyond 1964 are likely to be elastic. At each stage, improvements are introduced and existing goals altered.

In addition to these broad-scale developments, the colony has taken immediate measures to conserve the present supply of fresh water by making it possible to use salt water for such purposes as flushing and fire-fighting. Since 1958, salt-water mains have been installed in four densely populated sections of Kowloon and two on Hong Kong Island. Fluoridation of the entire water supply began in March, 1961.

The possibility of distillation of seawater for producing a fresh-water supply has been examined by engineers, but thus far the outlook is discouraging; the cost remains far too high. There is even a faint, faraway hope that some day atomic energy may be employed to distill an unlimited supply of fresh water from the ocean at low cost.

If every phase of Hong Kong’s integrated scheme is in operation by 1970, its water shortage may be over. Similarly, if all the reclamation projects now under consideration are brought to fulfillment in the next decade, there may be enough land to meet all ordinary requirements.

The determination of these requirements, however, will derive from the Department of Public Works only secondarily. The primary determinant will come from the Registry of Marriages.

Any recent visitor to the Central Marriage Registry would appreciate the difficulties in predicting the population of Hong Kong even five years hence; there the walls of two long corridors are so thickly papered with overlapping notices of marriage that not much more than the names and occupations of the prospective couples remain visible.

Neither land nor water is likely to become a surplus commodity in tomorrow’s Hong Kong.