Surveying & Built Environment Vol. 22 Issue 1 (December 2012)

SBE
8
A Note on British Blockhouses in
Hong Kong
Rob Weir*
ABSTRACT
Hitherto unreported in the literature, a line of blockhouses 1 , which is best
remembered as the “Anderson Line” after its brain child Major General Charles
Anderson, were built along Kowloon Range in the early part of the last century,
which might well be the predecessor of the Gin Drinker’s Line (Kwong 2012, this
issue), now surveyed (Lai, Tan, Davies, and et al 2009, Lai, Tan, Ching and Davies
2011, last issue).
This technical note, as part of a large project 2 , provides in this context some
background information on construction in colonial Hong Kong of the first, c.1911
line of 30 blockhouses, their design details, the weaponry they were defended by
and their actual positions.
* Retired Cathay Pacific flight engineer. Email: pillbox@bigpond.com
1 Blockhouses were defined in Section 17, Blockhouses, Field Defences, Pt 1, Manual of Military
Engineering, page 107, in the Manual of Military Engineering of 1894 seen by the author at the Royal
Engineers Museum, Chatham, as being:
“Blockhouses are defensible guard-houses or barracks, having framed or stockaded walls and
roofs formed of timber, or iron rails, with earth on top. Being easily destroyed by artillery, they
are chiefly suited to mountain warfare in wooded country, where it is not always easy to bring
artillery to bear upon them; and where the artillery itself is of inferior power.” (School of Military
Engineering 1894, p. 107)
2 Editors’ note: The author is an Australian who lived and worked in Hong Kong for 15 years. Now
retired and living in Melbourne he has been researching the locations of batteries, shelters, pillboxes,
and blockhouses in Hong Kong for more than 20 years and in communication with Tim Ko and Y K Tan
on matters relating to these matters. He visits Hong Kong on a regular basis for site visits and archival
research. He became interested in HK military history as a result of finding many unexplained ruins
during hill walks, and discovering there were few sources of information easily available.