Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s because as demand rose, so the amount of coal needed to be kept on hand increased accordingly: from around 3,000 tonnes in 1844 to more like 10,000 tons twenty years later and, forty years after that, 100,000 tons. That’s a lot of real estate.

Ad hoc solutions ruled the roost over the first twenty or so years – including that of the P&O Company that stored its coal afloat in a hulk (ship without masts or sailed), the ex-East Indiaman, the Fort William from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to have been the most usual solution. The Fort William is the only coal hulk ever mentioned. Most coal was stored on land, which provoked an expected NIMBY reaction. Efforts were always being made to get it out of sight…well, out of the gweilos’ sight.

The happy solution turned up in 1860 after the 2nd Opium War. The Kowloon Peninsula was empty of upmarket gweilos and out of their sight. Perfect. For the next eighty years it became the site of most of the largest coalyards both for commercial use and for the Royal Navy. Hong Kong Island didn’t escape entirely, but the coalyards got shoved out to the edge, first in Wan Chai and then in the North Point/Taikoo area. After WW2 demand for coal for fuel disappeared in favour of oil, so coalyards dwindled to two large government owned and operated yards at Lai Chi Kok and the Taikoo end of North Point. That’s until the 1970s oil shock, when suddenly Hong Kong’s electricity generating stations decided coal was cheaper. That’s how come in the last 50 years (c.1975-2025) Hong Kong has imported SEVEN TIMES more coal than it imported in its first century during the heyday of the steam ship. Happily for us all, the two power companies store what is at any one time about 250,000 tons of the stuff way out of sight on the west coast of Lamma Island and at Castle Peak beyond Tuen Mun.

Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880s – were chronically inefficient consumers of it to boot. Up until the 1860s, a typical 700hp engine would have needed up to 50 tonnes of coal a day.

Hong Kong’s Harbour Master’s statistics are pretty useless and there is no hard data on steamship numbers before 1873. In that year 1579 steamers entered the port. Data suggests ships loaded around 100 tons of coal on average when they called at Hong Kong, so we’re looking at an annual demand for bunker coal in 1873 of around 150,000 tons.

The average ship delivering coal from the 1840s until the 1870s was a sailing ship and only carried about 400 tons, so we’re looking at anything up to one ship a day having to arrive in Hong Kong to ensure there was enough coal to meet the demand. To begin with coal was mostly a cargo of opportunity. Because, for colonial Hong Kong’s first forty or so years, demand in China for British products was very weak, ships leaving from Britain carried coal as ballast so the voyage could earn some money. Later, they carried British goods to Australia, picked up a cargo of coal there for Hong Kong, and then loaded tea to take back to Britain.

Only certain organizations with predictable demand – like the P&O steamship company or the Royal Navy – had regular, dedicated deliveries. For the rest, it was down to the market to ensure that supply matched demand. Mind you, however it was shipped for whatever reason, coal was a tricky cargo. There are lots of stories of coal carrying ships catching fire (in certain conditions coal will spontaneously combust) and exploding or sinking. There are others of the cargo shifting in strong weather and ships capsizing – a few ships are reported setting out from Britain with coal for Hong Kong and never arriving, just disappearing somewhere en route.

Britain’s huge advantage economically was its early development both of a coal industry and of a seaborne coal trade. Hong Kong’s big disadvantage is that had few natural mineral resources and no coal. As Britain aggressively expanded its empire in the mid-19th century, it could do so using steam ships supplied with coal from Britain.

We can see that at work in a wonderful infographic created by the father of such things, the French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard, who illustrated Britain’s global coal export trade in 1850, 1860 and 1864, by which time 64,000 tons of the stuff were coming to HK. That expansion along with the number of steam ships, meant the problem of getting the coal the 14,000 miles from Britain around the Cape of Good Hope to places like Hong Kong got worse.

The obvious answer was to find coal nearer to the places that needed it and we can see efforts to that end almost as soon as the dust had settled from the 1st Opium War. There’s evidence of some of the earliest coal being mined in Australia being imported by the early 1850s. So did coal from the on-again, off-again mines from the deposits in Labuan, first discovered in 1847. Coal from Keelung in Taiwan was arriving in Hong Kong by the end of the 2nd Opium War. In the early 1860s there’s even coal recorded for sale from the Lackawanna mines in Pennsylvania, USA, as well as from Canada and New Zealand. The first coal from Australia arrived in Hong Kong in the 1840s, but was a sporadic arrival until more regular shipments in the 1870s through 1880s. From that last decade onwards more and more of Hong Kong’s coal came from Japan to the point that by the mid-1890s it was Hong Kong’s main supplier. Coal from North China only began to make a serious contribution by the 1920s.

That was until WW2, when everything changed. Post-war, that as from the 1970s has seen HK’s most recent coal high, ten times the amount of coal used in Hong Kong’s first century have fuelled Hong Kong’s growth engine, the main sources of the coal being South Africa and Indonesia. All up, in modern Hong Kong’s 180 plus years of existence, not far off half a billion tonnes of coal have arrived to fuel its growth from all over the world.