The History of Hong Kong (Part 7)

This is the story of the one, as a shipping manager he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time, and Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRanger. Click Granger.com or just stop by, Granger for the ones who get it done. Hey everyone, Lozlemont Gumbery here with another China History Podcast. Today we're covering part 7 of our Hong Kong history overview. We're going to pick up in the years leading up to the Japanese invasion in the Battle of Hong Kong, then we'll look at the three years and eight months of the Japanese occupation. I'm going to skip over Sir Andrew Kultekat, 19th governor of Hong Kong and the one serving the shortest time in office, December 1935 to October 1937. He was succeeded by Sir Jeffrey Northcoat who by the time of his tenure as governor was already enjoying terrible health. He was hardly in the physical and mental state to deal with the historic events that were breaking out all around. So not much that can be said about Hong Kong's 20th governor. It was during Northcoat's time that the Marco Polo bridge incident went down July 7th, 1937. This was the incident that sparked the whole Japanese invasion of China. They had already made themselves at home in Manchuria since the Mupten incident or Joe Yiba, as it's known in China. But now with his latest incident at the Marco Polo bridge in Beijing, Japan is going to execute their very well laid plans concerning an invasion of China and getting access to all those natural resources. This made things very uneasy in Hong Kong. The closer the fighting got to Canton, to Guangzhou, the more tense it became in Hong Kong. Once word got out that something like 30,000 Japanese troops had landed in Daiya Bay, things got more intense than ever. Daiya Bay is about 40 miles away from Hong Kong and it's today home to the nuclear power plant that provides electricity to Hong Kong. After a couple of weeks of intense fighting, Canton was taken. Japan had been on a roll since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The coming out party was the Sino-Japanese War ending in 1895. Then there was the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, then Japan annexed Korea in 1910. In Yenshe-Kai and the 21 demands, 1919 and Duan Chi-Rai's Nishihara loans that same year, then as I mentioned, the Mupten incident, 918, 1931. In now July 7, 1937, the Marco Polo bridge incident. We've heard all this stuff before in previous podcasts. Those years of aggression by Japan have done immense damage to the relations between China and Japan. 2000 years of good and friendly relations undone by these seemingly unforgettable 55 years of violence. The Japanese, in their relentless pursuit of achieving their greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, were never able to penetrate deeply into the heart of China. Their area of control and influence was always close to the coast and coalesced around a few of the major cities of the interior. This is why in October of 1938, Jiang Kai-shak will take the capital at Nanjing and move it all the way out west to Chongqing, where it was not easy for the Japanese to get to without spreading themselves out to thin. 1937 is going to be a bloody year filled with some of the worst horrors that the 20th century had to dish up. Once the Battle of Shanghai is fought between August and December 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War is often running with a bang, a quarter million casualties resulted from the bombing and fighting that went on during those few months. The rape of Nanjing soon after follows the fall of Shanghai, not since the bloodletting that went on during the Typing Rebellion had China seen such horrors. By October the following year, in 1938, the Japanese began to encircle Canton. The British did their best to maintain some semblance of calm in this storm, shaking the fire east. They declared Hong Kong neutral in September 1938 and took measures to make everything appear normal. Weapons were controlled and measures were taken to show the Japanese that Britain was tough with the locals and prohibited them from arming themselves or taking any anti-Japanese actions that might provoke an incident. This included openly sending relief supplies to China via Hong Kong. This is still a year before Hitler would invade Poland so the British were continuing to be very careful to avoid any confrontations in the Orient. A two front war was the last thing on their mind. Although the British allowed the arms to be shipped and smuggled, they tried to make it look to the Japanese, at least, that they were cracking down on these weapons shipments to China via Hong Kong. By this time, refugees started flowing into Hong Kong by the rate of as many as 5,000 a day, all attempts to process so many immigrants in an orderly fashion were fruitless. The population of Hong Kong around this time was about a million. Hong Kong will see as much as a 50% increase in population with as many as half a million refugees stream into the colony from across the border seeking safety from the moroting Japanese. This time, along with refugees with nothing except a shirt on their back, came industrialists and entrepreneurs who gave up on China and brought their world to Hong Kong. Some brought equipment and whole factories to Hong Kong where it was considered safer and still more conducive to carrying out business. Although these manufacturers and entrepreneurs faced similar hardships in Hong Kong under the Japanese yoke, once the war ended in Hong Kong saw a boom in the economy and a speedy recovery, it was partially thanks to many of these entrepreneurial refugees who escaped China and tried their luck in Hong Kong. They would help prime the pump for the postwar boom to the Hong Kong manufacturing base. The Japanese military tried to close down all the ports in China and they were very successful in carrying this out. But Hong Kong, being an international port and British in all, was not affected. The Japanese didn't want to do that just yet. The time wasn't right. Hitler hadn't invaded Poland yet. No war had been declared between anyone yet. So Hong Kong was spared while China's other ports were locked down and controlled by the Japanese and navy. So Hong Kong became very important suddenly as the one single door or window from which China could receive arms and weapons as well as other material, critical to China's defense against Japan. 60,000 tons per month of weapons made their way from the port of Hong Kong to the Chinese army. The good old KCR, Kaolun Canton Railway, served as the transport link for this arms trade between Hong Kong and China. With Japan's effectiveness at shutting China down, 1937-1938 almost half of China's foreign trade shifted down to Hong Kong in the colony. Once again, as it would later on after the war, played one of the chief roles in its history as China's trade and commercial window to the outside world. Everything's got out of hand in China and the economy needed a safe haven to carry out trade and commerce. There was always Hong Kong. Time and again, Hong Kong would play this role. Even the Bank of China and the Communications Bank of China moved their headquarters temporarily to Hong Kong during the war. In effect, Hong Kong became for a short while, China's central banker. Everyone was starting to take sides. The US, French, and Portuguese for all their own reasons didn't resist Japan's blockade and bella coast warnings. The British were standing firm but were extremely wary to start a war on two fronts, as by this time War with Nazi Germany was a foregone conclusion. September 1939 Hitler invades Poland, June 1940, France is done in. Japan is really starting to make a lot of noise about Hong Kong being used as the main conduit for arms and material coming through from the outside world. So just when Japan was turning their sights on Hong Kong to put an end to the flow of arms into China, the 717-mile-long Burma Road was just finishing up and that became the replacement arms conduit to China after Hong Kong fell. And although its pan running the show had meant an end to regular arms shipments, a very brisk smuggling business began to be carried out thanks to Hong Kong. Hong Kong's unique watery geography, all kinds of necessities begin to make their way to China via the Pearl River Estuary. October 1938, Canton, or Guangzhou, fell to Japanese forces. This is when the tide of refugees flooding into Hong Kong hit a crescendo. You can't imagine what it was like those times, late 1930s. Could Captain Charles Elliott or his nemesis, Lord Palmerston, ever have envisioned the scenes of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese fleeing southern Guangdong for their lives to the safety of this one-time barren rock with hardly a house upon it. Britain was in no position to swagger in front of the Japanese. 1938, 39, 40, everyone was at their mercy. In March 1939, Japan had bombed Shenzhen, and some bombs had fallen on the Hong Kong side of the river that served as the border between China and Hong Kong. A bridge and a railway station in the new territories was hit. Churchill had said, quote, "If Japan goes to war with us, there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it. It is most unwise to increase the loss we shall suffer there. Instead of increasing the garrison, it ought to be reduced to a symbolic scale. Any trouble arising there must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions. I wish we had fewer troops there, but to move any would be noticeable and dangerous." September 1941, a new governor arrives in Hong Kong, and this one gets to enjoy the dubious honor of being the colony's wartime governor. He is Hong Kong's 21st governor, Sir Mark Etcherson Young. He came on board just in time to join the discussions on how to defend the colony and manage the whole swollen Chinese population in Hong Kong at such a time as this. As the second half of 1941 rolled around, the head off his back in London had their hands full. How to save Hong Kong was not the topmost priority, and of the two British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong? Singapore was considered the more strategically important to hold on to. So the thinking was Hong Kong drew the short straw and contained inside all the words of encouragement was an admission that it was a foregone conclusion that Hong Kong was going to be lost to Japan. The strategy was for the remaining vestiges of a military in Hong Kong to do as much with as little as possible. They were to do whatever they could to resist the Japanese when the invasion came. And it was coming, they all knew this. They were to hold them back for as long as humanly possible so that all attempts to fortify Singapore could be made. Hong Kong was basically on its own now. No cavalry was coming, no naval flotilla was arriving imminently to save the day or provide reinforcements. It was a relatively unprotected Hong Kong against what was at the time one of the strongest, most violent and efficient war machines on earth. They were coming straight at Hong Kong. But it wasn't like Hong Kong was totally unprotected. Hong Kong's quiet, long-time friend and our neighbor to the north, the nation of Canada. Yes, the nation that brought us Mark Rosewell, Mr. Da Shan himself and of course Dr. Norman Bethune, they sent some help. Two regiments in fact, and they arrived just in time in November 1941. The Winnipeg grenadiers and the royal rifles of Canada. The man in charge of defending Hong Kong against the Japanese army was General Christopher M. Moltby. He had been given this command in August 1941. His nemesis for what was shaping up to be the Battle of Hong Kong was Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai who hailed from the lovely town of Hiroshima, Japan. Okay, we all know the story well. Ray Harris is going to be covering this in detail much later on when the magnificent history of World War II podcast begins covering the war in the Pacific. For now, let's just say Japan goes and bombs Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1941, a day which FDR said would live in infamy. While Japanese bombers were laying waste too much of the US Navy, it was on the afternoon of the next day in Hong Kong. And all those left to defend Hong Kong against the onslaught were already well into the fight, which would rage on for almost 18 days. The Japanese army just plowed through across the border. They marched right into Kaolun and made it all the way to the harbor on December 18th. They boarded boats across Hong Kong harbor and landed on the other side on the North Shore of Hong Kong Island. They landed somewhere around where Taikusheng is today. There were about 30, 40,000 of them facing off against this onslaught of superbly trained, well-armed and brave Japanese soldiers were a grand total of perhaps 14,000 British-led troops, which included not only the Canadian volunteers, but Indian troops as well. The Royal Hong Kong regiment, known as the volunteers, also joined in the defense. This homegrown militia group went all the way back to 1854. They were set up right after Governor John Bauering arrived in office. The forces in Hong Kong at that time had been thinned out quite a bit due to the Crimean war going on. Too many troops had been sent to the front, leaving Hong Kong a little exposed. So this force was set up to sort of fill the gap and now they were facing their finest hour. They had 2,200 of these volunteers and seven infantry companies, five artillery batteries and five machine gun companies. They gave it their all. Everyone left dealing with this mission impossible. Fought a great fight. The two and a half weeks of fighting were filled with valiant acts of unrequited bravery from these warriors from Canada, India and of course from the British side. General CM Maltby did all he could, but he was a mouse fighting an elephant that he held them off for 17 and a half days as an amazing feat in itself. But in the end, the fight was simply way too one-sided. Even with those in defense of Hong Kong having the home field advantage. In the end, having just arrived on the scene in August, all Maltby had to work with were troops not adequately trained, no real plan and a shortage of arms and equipment. On paper, this was going to be a turkey shoot. There were two main battles fought. One was at Wang Nai Chong gap and the other in Stanley. Wang Nai Chong gap is a space on Hong Kong island where you could get from the north end to the south end of the island in vice versa. This was of course back then. Now you have the Aberdeen tunnel and a multitude of ways and various distances to get from central to Stanley. But back then, Wang Nai Chong gap was pretty much the only easy way to go from north to south on Hong Kong island. The Japanese, although pinned down for a while in Wang Nai Chong gap by the Canadian troops, were able to fan out across Mount Parker and to Gerdeen's lookout. Then the battle spread out to the south of the island from Repulse Bay to Stanley. Churchill had said days after the attack began, "We are all watching day by day and hour by hour, your stubborn defense of the port and fortress of Hong Kong. You guard a link between the far east and Europe, long famous in world civilization. We are sure that the defense of Hong Kong against barbarous and unprovoked attack will add a glorious page to British annals." Although they fought the good fight, the defenders of Hong Kong led by General Maltby in the end had to wave the white flag. The surrender happened 71 years ago, almost to this very day, and what became known is black Christmas, December 25th, 1941. And the period that followed the occupation is known to Hong Kongers is the San Nian Ling Ba Goyer, the three years and eight months. Around 7,000 British soldiers, civilians and government officials ended up getting sent to internment camps in Shamsue Poe, Stanley, and elsewhere. Things got off on the wrong foot at once, just as preparations were underway for the British surrender on December 25th, 1941. A bunch of allegedly drunken Japanese soldiers forced their way into St. Stephen's College over in Stanley. It was being used as a field hospital, and many of the soldiers wounded in the fighting that had transpired the past couple weeks were recovering there. The Japanese forced their way in and just butchered everyone, something like a hundred people. Anyone wounded or disabled who couldn't run and scatter fast enough were cut down. The nurses who were caught were all savagely gang raped. This event was known as the St. Stephen's College incident, or the St. Stephen's massacre. This was the first high-profile example in Hong Kong of the Japanese military's calling card. Their brutality and inhumanity to their fellow man, and women too. No statistics that I could find, but thousands of women faced sexual harassment and rape on a grand scale during these days in 1941-1942. And Lieutenant General Sakai, showing what a man of good taste he was, held the formal surrender at the peninsula hotel on the third floor, right on Boxing Day. No less to December 26th. I recommend the peninsula for anyone with the budget to stay there. The Japanese sure liked it. They used this five-star grand hotel as their headquarters. The man in charge, for Japan, arrived on the scene in February 1942. This was General Ren Suke Isogai. The man who came to the fore at this time for the British in Hong Kong was Franklin Charles Gibson. He ultimately became the face of the former colonial government during the occupation. Governor Young had been sent elsewhere, and Gibson was left in charge at things. Gibson was sent to the Stanley internment camp, which is where he ended up spending the war, and it was Gibson who would play a lead role. Right after the Japanese surrendered on August 15th, 1945, he held down the fort until Harcourt arrived from Sydney, but I'm getting way ahead of myself. And then the Japanese just moved in and took over. They took control of everything that could be controlled. The police, most of all, they seized factories and any useful manufacturing assets. Propaganda posters started getting pasted up everywhere. Slogans were shouted out in the newspapers and radios. The basic line was, "Japan was great. Be like us." You know, there was a lot of this. The press was heavily censored. The mouthpiece for the Japanese was the Hong Kong news, and the reporters were all, you know, stringers and several reporters from the South China Morning Post. If any publication wasn't pro-Japanese and their slant, it was shut down. The Hong Kong dollar was outlawed and replaced by a Japanese military yen. The exchange rate was pegged at two Hong Kong dollars to the military yen. This was an old trick that modern conquerors would do to grab control of the local economy. If you control the currency, you controlled everything. By October of 1942, the exchange rate had inflated to four to one, so it didn't take long at all for the Hong Kong people to get shafted with this new military currency. Everyone had been forced to turn in their legal tender Hong Kong dollars for this funny money issued by the military. Then the Japanese authorities took these Hong Kong dollars and used them to purchase, you know, whatever it was they required for the war effort. In short, Japan totally mismanaged the Hong Kong economy and all these attempts to mess with the currency and replace Hong Kong's banks with Japanese branches and their banks just turned the whole economy and financial system on its head. The dreaded Kempe Tai or Xianping Duy were all over the place. These guys were modeled after the French gendarmerie and served as the military police of the Japanese war machine. What does there to say except that the Japanese lived up to their reputation as brutal occupiers, all kinds of measures unsuccessful most were taken to play down Chinese culture and education and to promote Japanese culture instead. The name of the game was Japanisation. There were a lot of signature examples of this. Streets were renamed Queens Road became Meiji Dori. The peninsula hotel was changed to the Matsumoto. The venerable British retailer Lane Crawford was renamed Matsuzakaya. After it was forcibly taken over by order of the Japanese military government, Matsuzakaya is a big Japanese retailer who's been around since 1611 and Lane Crawford was founded in 1850. Now in our time, they both operate in compete side by side in Hong Kong. The local residents had a rough back then. Society was filled with all kinds of new rules that could get you killed or severely inconvenienced if you didn't show full and enthusiastic compliance. Dongwa Hospital and the Bolian Cook continued their work, aiding those in need during this 44-month period. Over 1,300 days. Food was always scarce. People starved. The Japanese for all their famous efficiency never got the food distribution thing going smoothly. There was always a shortage and all the most important staples had to be rationed. Rice was rationed at 8.5 ounces per day per person. To alleviate the food shortages, the Japanese attempted to empty Hong Kong out a little. Almost a million people, many of them, the same refugees who had fled to Hong Kong, were all sent back to the other side of the border. Everything was done in the name of the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere. The Japanese assured the Chinese repeatedly that they were an integral and important part of this whole new thing. No one had to sell China on the idea of building some kind of totally self-sufficient fire-eastern economic trading block with military alliances and all the necessary trappings. If China was part of such an organization, for sure, they could stand up for themselves and send all these Western imperialists and colonialists packing and allow all the people of the fire-easter to take control of their own destiny. The only problem was Japan insisted on being at the top of the pyramid and there was the rub. How could China say, "Yeah, no problem," to something like that? In Japan, lording it over the Chinese at a time when they were weak, divided, broken, there was simply no way that after all that had happened in recent memory, going back to the 21 demands that the Chinese were going to look the other way and willingly accept a dominant Japan. Try as Japan might to aggressively seize the hearts and minds of the locals and push this whole Japanization program. People lip-synced as much as they could get away with and the whole thing never really caught fire. You know how it is anywhere in the world. No one gives up their culture by force and willingly adopts another without a fight. There was no small amount of organized resistance against the Japanese. The Kempai Thai were as ruthless and efficient as their Dishtapo-Kindred Spirits and stamping out the opposition. But as we know in our age of terrorism today that this is a never-ending battle and while you can stop most of the resistance, you can never fully extinguish it. There were several organized resistance groups. The East River Column were a group of guerrilla fighters based in Guangdong who provided endless harassment of the Japanese army there. Same with the Hong Kong Column Brigade, a band of 400 or so brothers and arms who were mostly based out near Saikong in the new territories. But I guess the most fabled band of them all was the British Army A group, the Yingjun Fu Tuan. Their specialty was to operate behind enemy lines, gathering intel and providing covert assistance to British and allied prisoners of war in Hong Kong and in southern China. There's a great story how it was founded. The man who founded it, he was head of the Physiology Department of Hong Kong University, Sir Lindsey Tasman Ride, a great Australian in that country's proud history. He was absorbed into the British defenses of Hong Kong and served valiantly, but like so many others, he ended up captured and interred in a prisoner of war camp. He was sent to the one in Shamshui Po, but he escaped with three others who referred to him as Doc Ride and went on to form the core of this team of Chinese and British secret agents. And for the rest of the war, they carried out all kinds of amazing feats and were effective at intelligence gathering. Through their three-year and eight-month period of occupation, the Japanese met with great success in convincing the locals that the British is arrogant, snobby, prejudiced, and obnoxious as the locals saw them were far more civilized and preferable to the Japanese. One thing the local people learned fast was of the massive corruption of the Japanese occupiers. From the top down, the Japanese occupiers were greedy and on the take. In short, they made the British look great. You know, everyone liked the part where the Japanese put the Westerners in their place and showed them they weren't so superior to the Asian man after all. Many were quite pleased finally to see the British and other Westerners humiliated and made to eat humble pie. But other than this one thing, there was little else to think highly about the Japanese. Their occupation of Hong Kong did nothing except ruin the economy, ruin people's lives, and offer up a multitude of hardships, and inconveniencies that many of the older Hong Kong residents can still remember today. Other than commencing the fine tradition of holding horse races on Sunday, there's very little good that came out of the three-year-eight-month Japanese occupation. We all know how things turn out in the end. As bad as it was, it finally began to wind down. And by 1944, when things really started to build a copeless for Japan, the big question regarding Hong Kong's future was being discussed at the highest levels of power. It was merely a matter of time before Japan was slowly squeezed to death. So what would become of Hong Kong? There were two contending ideas floating around. One concerned the notion of returning Hong Kong to China. Zhang Kai-shak was the main one championing this idea. Would Hong Kong go to Jiang to China or back to the British? In the end, it came down to General Douglas MacArthur to decide unilaterally what the course of action should be. It was decided that Hong Kong would go back to Britain and things would pick up where they left off before Japan invaded Hong Kong. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was alive, had felt it was appropriate for Hong Kong to be returned to Chinese sovereignty. And had even promised Madame Jiang Kai-shak, Song Mei-ling, that he supported this view. Jiang Kai-shak had received so many positive signals from the American side, indicating that Hong Kong would revert to China. This was a pretty big deal going on behind the scenes. There was plenty of momentum to handing Hong Kong back to China along with a general settlement that included Singapore as well. But towards the end of the war, Jiang Kai-shak's regime had been sufficiently discredited enough mostly through his own doing so that the Americans in British weren't so sure he was going to come out on top when all was said and done. And so with this in mind, and Harry Truman now in charge of the White House, all of a sudden given Hong Kong back to the Republic of China and the KMT seemed like such a good idea. More and more it was looking like the KMT wasn't going to be the guys in control. The idea to return to the pre-December 1941 status quo ultimately won out. Harry Truman, I'm sure many of you shine a hand out there know, he was the guy who used to call Jiang Kai-shak, "cash my check." He was not what you'd call a big time Jiang supporter, with FDR gone and Truman now in the Oval Office, Hong Kong's fate was sealed. It would remain as a colony of Great Britain. And when it came time for the Japanese to surrender, Admiral Cecil Harcourt, he of Harcourt rode in Harcourt Garden fame, rushed back to Hong Kong from Sydney, Australia so that he could be the one on behalf of the British to accept the surrender of the Japanese. As I mentioned, Franklin Charles Gibson was doing a fine job filling in for the Chief Executive until someone arrived on the scene. Well, on August 30, 1945, Harcourt arrived on the scene, sailing into Hong Kong harbor on the HMS Swiftshire. By this time, the population of Hong Kong had dropped to some 600,000. So many hundreds of thousands had been sent back across the border to China, so the place had been emptied out quite a bit, but it isn't going to stay that way for long. Governor Mark Young returned to work on May 1, 1946. He had experienced no small amount of suffering during the occupation. At first, the Japanese hold him up at the peninsula, but he, along with General Malphie, ultimately got sent to Stanley Prison, which had been converted into a massive internment camp. The Japanese were known to shuffle these VIP prisoners of war, like Governor Young, to different camps in China and also in Japan. When the war ended, Governor Young was housed in a POW camp in Shenyang, also known as Muttent, where in September 1931, these 14 years of horror and hardship began between Japan and China. Governor Young wasn't killed, but he did suffer terribly at the hands of his Japanese captors, who quite enjoyed putting such a high-ranking Western person in his place and making them suffer all manners of humiliation and degradation. When the nightmare ended in August 1945, Young was sent back to Britain to recuperate, and as I said by May the following year, he was back in the Governor's Mansion. One of the first things Young tried to champion after he got back to work was the matter of directly electing members to the Legislative Council. That didn't go too well. In 1946-47, a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists had resumed, and the feeling at the time was directly electing members to let go would run the risk that one day the Communists would be able to manipulate the voting in Hong Kong. So this never gained any traction and remains even today in post-1997 Hong Kong, a heated issue. And this also might be a reason why Sir Mark didn't get any of the particular honors usually accorded to a Hong Kong governor. Most everyone got a street, a garden, a statue, a pier, or a public meeting place named after them, except for the second governor Robinson, the last governor and current chairman of the BBC Trust, the Lord Patton of Barnes, a.k.a. Chris Patton, and this governor, Sir Mark Acheson Young. Well, you all know the story. Japanese Germans, Italians, lost the war, there were trials, executions, and justice meted out here and there. We'll leave all those details for Ray Harris to narrate and explain. As far as Hong Kong goes, Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai, who prevailed as the victor of the Battle of Hong Kong and who later served as the Hong Kong governor during the occupation, the guy who accepted the British surrender on the third floor of the peninsula, he was executed by a firing squad on September 30, 1946. In Sukye, Isogai, the same war tribunal that meted out justice to Takashi Sakai, sentenced to General Ren Sukye, Isogai, to life in prison. He served six years of his sentence and was then sent back to Japan, and he died in 1967. With everything that had just happened in Hong Kong, from the destruction of the financial system to the basic nuts and bolts of everyday buying and selling, the entrepreneurs, businessmen, skilled workers, day laborers, and investors from all over saw opportunity with everything that needed fixing. Like everything, it was slow at first, but once the colony got off its knees, there was no stopping the place. The post-war recovery was very quick. This was due to the industriousness of the Hong Kong people and the policies of the government that guided Hong Kong through these boom years. We'll see as Hong Kong sees this explosive growth, when disasters hit China like the Great League forward and the later famine, once again the desperate will seek greener pastures in Hong Kong. And it's the post-war years where we will pick up next time in part eight of this Hong Kong history series that so far has no end. I'm going to take this all the way until 1997, before we call it quits, and I have an idea for a next series, but I will not divulge it at this time. This is Lausanne Montgomery coming to you from the town of Claremont, California, on the very edge of Los Angeles County. Take care everyone. This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies, to PPE, to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. Call 1-800-GRanger. Click Granger.com or just out by Granger for the ones who get it done.