Story and audio segment contributed by David Wong at www.BlogTheTalk.com....

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:41:07 GMT

Story and audio segment contributed by David Wong at www.BlogTheTalk.com.
Photographs contributed by the Hong Kong Fringe Club.

I’m standing on the corner of Wyndham Street and Ice House Street, next to what is today the Fringe Club. The lively arts society moved into the premises in 1983, when it was a very run-down old warehouse that had previously belonged to Dairy Farm. It had once been the Cold Storage Depot for Dairy Farm – much of their milk and other produce used to be brought from the dairy in Pok Fu Lam over here to the city for distribution.

One cannot take the existence of milk-producing cows in Hong Kong for granted. How did Jardine Matheson’s Dairy Farm Company come into being, in a city where so much of the population is lactose intolerant? Milk was highly prized as a beverage, and even a tonic, by the early colonials. Only the rich could afford them though, and the wealthiest foreign households in Hong Kong kept their own dairy cow for personal consumption.

A Mr. J. Kennedy, though, aimed to change all of that. Garden Road in the 1870s was largely unkempt wilderness past St. John’s Cathedral, bordered on both sides by green fields. So Mr. Kennedy leased the land, and brought over special dairy cows from Britain, and even rosy-cheeked English milkmaids! Unfortunately, the venture soon failed.

But in 1886, a Doctor Patrick Manson, who was later to be knighted for his work on tropical medicine and the plague, believed very much in the curative powers of milk for the Western diet. He formed a venture called the Dairy Farm Company with veteran Armenian businessman Paul Chater, who was also responsible for spearheading the Central land reclamation. Let me read you his views in the company prospectus:

“The price of good milk in Hong Kong at present ranges from twenty to twenty-five cents per bottle of twenty-four ounces. These prices, unless in the case of the rich, are simply prohibitive. A principal object of the proposed Dairy Company will be to reduce the price so as to bring milk within the reach of the poor, say to ten cents or less per large bottle. A second object will be to secure its purity and remove it from the category of typhoid fever and other disease causes; and a third object to place the concern on a sound financial basis and make it a source of profit to the shareholders.”

Mustn’t forget that last bit in Hong Kong! Anyway, Manson and Chater raised the HK$30,000 they needed, and made an excellent bit of business out of the Dairy Farm. The fate of the milkmaids, sadly, remains unknown, but the cows purchased from the venture, and new ones, were moved to Pok Fu Lam. The Dairy Farm finished the building that now hosts both the Fringe Club and the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in 1892.

Dairy Farm has long since outgrown these premises – no wonder too, since the firm, under the stewardship of Jardine Matheson, has grown into a regional powerhouse that owns, among other things, the franchise to Wellcome, Ikea and 7-11. But the Fringe Club is still a fantastic place to have a drink or catch a show, perhaps the best adaptive re-use of a heritage building in all Hong Kong.

To listen to the original audio format of this contribution, go to: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~svw/fringe/

You have to download the file to your computer in order to listen, by choosing the save option. This may take around 5 minutes, thank you for your patience.

Photo by hkfringe club

Photos tagged 'chater'

Story and audio segment contributed by David Wong at www.BlogTheTalk.com....