Thoughts from Hong Kong's Ice House Street

Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong - Looking at the Bank of China Building from Battery Path, October 2019

Finding my bearings…

This year when I spent time in Hong Kong, I walked nostalgically along Battery Path to Queen’s Road Central. Fifty years ago it was my walk to work. Queen’s Road runs like a ribbon along what was once the island’s harbour-front, a narrow strip in front of a mountain.  While reclamation has distanced the foreshore, the mountain footing remains immovable.

Marina House, where The Advertising and Publicity Bureau had its offices, is long gone; in company with the landmark Hong Kong Hilton, the iconic HK Cricket grounds and the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building. I felt just a little cheated that my concrete past had been obliterated as I stood in a shady spot watching the traffic, unsure even where Marina House had once been.

Then I found my compass; The Bank of China. Ironic that the once-spooky building slap bang in the middle of colonial Hong Kong, outlived all the rest.  Each October during the Cultural Revolution, the bank building became a giant red billboard of propaganda for mainland China.

And then I saw another familiar, the black and white sign for Ice House Street.  A strange name.  English yet oddball.  I was sure of my bearings.

Ice House Street

A name so solid and descriptive, the street is stranded now, it does not even reach the waterfront.

Two years after the British colonised Hong Kong in 1841, the Government awarded the Ice House Company a plot of land in Central in return for supplying free ice to the colony’s hospitals.  A thick-walled storage godown was built to store ice blocks. Perhaps the small lane that ran past the site had once another name but Ice House Street soon fitted better.

When I read that the first shipments to the Ice House came from northern China that made sense for on my trip to Beijing’s Forbidden City last year, I’d seen the ice storehouses built during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1736-1795). They could hold 5,000 blocks of ice. The stores had vaulted-ceilings and were sunk into the ground. Each year, half a month after the winter solstice, they were filled with thick blocks of clean ice cut by quarrymen from the city’s moat.

Yet Hong Kong’s shipments of ice from China were short-lived - a supplier from the USA took over - an entrepreneur by the name of Tudor who was harvesting ice from the frozen ponds of New England. He’d developed a way of packing the blocks in sawdust for sale across America and around the world. Tudor streamlined harvesting by adopting new ice-cutter technology  - a knife-saw drawn across the ice by horses with studded horseshoes. He floated or skated the blocks downstream and established a chain of storage depots. Tudor nearly went bankrupt but his hard work and innovation paid off in the end. For his Hong Kong customer, the ice took a long and arduous journey by merchant clipper. Hong Kong got its ice from Tudor’s company for almost thirty years until 1874 when the colony began to produce its own ice in a Causeway Bay factory.

Ice Harvesting continued well into the 20th Century

When I got back to Sydney, I dug out one of my favourite books; Nora Waln’s The House of Exile. I was sure I had read something about harvesting ice early on in the book.

Nora, from a Pennsylvanian Quaker family, was 25 when she left America for China to stay with the aristocratic Lin family in the winter of 1920. She travelled by steam ship and train, and for the last leg of her long journey, she boarded the Lin’s canal boat fitted out for winter with sledge runners to take her along the frozen Grand Canal to The House of Exile.  The cabin warmed by foot-braziers and furnished with back rests padded with camel’s wool was warm and comfortable. 

‘In a nest of soft furs and gay quilts I was cosy between Shun-ko and her neice, Mai-da. Each held one of my hands under the coverlets.’

With delight Nora watched spirited children propel little sledge-boats past their barge, pushing off against the ice with pointed sticks and escaping collisions by fractions.  Skaters flew along on urgent errands and cursed those more joyful souls skimming the ice, practising rotations and twirls.

I flicked the pages until I found what I was looking for. Nora had written:

‘With care not to endanger the double track sledge path, men cut ice for summer use. They stacked it in flat baskets woven of stout twigs, and hung each basket by its strong handle from the middle of a carrying pole. A man at each end of the pole carried the ice to the canal side earthmounds, where they buried it away for summer use, exactly as explained in the annals of Wei, written thirty centuries ago. … Women wheeled hamper barrows down to the opened water and exchanged banter with the ice-cutter, while they let their ducks and geese out to swim.’

Who could not be delight at Nora’s gift for snatching such detail as she swept along the canal?  In our mind’s eye we can each ‘see’ the ducks and geese paddling the dark water in a newly excavated icy pond as their minders chatter to the workmen, each breath condensing into misty puffs in the bitter cold. And imagine downy plumage flipped up by the chill winds, fluff and feathers spiralling to jest with snow flakes and rival ice crystals.

Thinking about all this, it made my pique of time change over fifty years look pretty ropey when the three-thousand year technology of harvesting, shipping and storing ice, was snuffed out overnight as factories took over the job of making ice. And in no time, technology turned again and we all had refrigerators and could make our own.

Time and technology wait for no one.

Footnotes

Although refrigerators for home use were being introduced into modern homes in America as Nora grew up, she would have been familiar with the harvesting of ice - Prelinger Archives has a 1919 amateur video of ice harvesting using horses in Pennsylvania.

China’s Grand Canal is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the oldest and longest artificial waterway in the world.

Postscript

I started to talk to my aunt in Sydney about this post and she recalled that as a child there was an ice chest in her house. A man would deliver a block of ice which he put into a drawer at the bottom of the chest and goods that needed to be kept cool were stacked in the space above. I found that a fascinating link to the past!