How Kowloon-Canton Railway history sheds light on the need for Hong Kong’s express rail to the mainland
Hua Guo and Victor Zheng say the Kowloon-Canton Railway was once considered a ‘white elephant’ by the public too, but the officials of the day knew that it was a necessary investment for Hong Kong’s economic future
History may help to define the future if we study the past. The Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) was the first cross-border railway connecting Hong Kong with mainland China. The railway has a British section and a Chinese section. The former, which was officially opened on October 1, 1910, is the basis of today’s East Rail Line connecting Kowloon with Lo Wu. A year later, the latter was completed from Lo Wu to Canton (Guangzhou).
At the grand opening of the railway, Mr E.S. Lindsey, the chief resident engineer of the KCR, was reported by the Post to have said that “it would be possible to go from Canton to Hong Kong in four hours, allowing the passenger time enough to transact business and return home on the same day”.
No one today questions the benefits of the East Rail Line to Hong Kong, but few know that it would not have been constructed if Hong Kong had not faced a threat to its competitiveness. A major British trading house obtained a concession in 1898 from the Imperial Chinese government to build a railway connecting Hong Kong with Canton. The railway itself had not been constructed due to the higher cost of transporting goods by train than by river steamer until when the Americans financed construction of Canton-Hankow railway and proposed to build their own deep water port near Canton.
These plans posed a threat to Hong Kong’s role as the maritime hub connecting China with the rest of the British Empire. Thus, the Hong Kong colonial government rushed to start construction on the KCR, using public funds to pay for the excavation of the British section from Kowloon to Lo Wu in 1905.
