Mount Parish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mount Parish | |||||||||||
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| Chinese | 巴里士山[1] | ||||||||||
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Mount Parish is a hill in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, to the south of Queen's Road East, between Kennedy Road and Stubbs Road.
In 1873 the Royal Navy bought the Seaman's Hospital in Wan Chai, which was running at a loss, using the money obtained by selling the hospital ship, HMS Melville. The Seaman's Hospital was renamed the Royal Naval Hospital, and the hill where the hospital stood was named Mount Shadwell, after Vice-Admiral Charles Shadwell, the Commander-in-Chief on the China Station. By 1931 the Infectious Diseases Hospital has been built on the neighbouring hill, which was renamed Mount Parish, after Commodore John E. Parish, the Naval Officer commanding in Hong Kong between 1873 and 1876.[2] A granite pillar at the foot of the hill, beside Queen's Road East, acted as a boundary stone of Royal Navy lands. The pillar is inscribed with a '7', an anchor, and the year '1905'.[3][4]
With the start of the Second World War, the Hong Kong Government built a network of air raid protection tunnels in order to prepare for a possible war with the Japanese Army. During the Battle of Hong Kong, the defenders of Hong Kong fought the Japanese in order to prevent the latter from advancing into Central. The buildings were damaged during the war.
After the war, the Ruttonjee Sanatorium took over the site of the Naval Hospital on Mount Shadwell. In the early 1950s the Infectious Diseases Hospital was demolished in order to make way for a new campus of Wah Yan College, Hong Kong, opened in 1955. By 1990 the name of Mount Parish has been dropped off from the map.[3]
Wahyanite campus
The campus of Wah Yan College, Hong Kong still stands at the top of the mount and covers an area of 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft). It was completed and officially opened on 27 September 1955 by the then Governor Sir Alexander Grantham, replacing the old campus at Robinson Road. It was designed by Professor Gordon Brown of the University of Hong Kong, containing classrooms, laboratories, a hall and a chapel.
An extension to the campus was completed in 1987 and named Gordon Wu Hall, after Sir Gordon Wu, a businessman who was an alumnus of the school. In 1992 a landslide at Mount Parish caused the death of a driver, who was buried alive in his car at Kennedy Road. The landslide prompted the rebuilding of six classrooms, to be reopened in 1998. In 2003 the music room was rebuilt into a six-storey complex. A plan to rebuild the hall was proposed in 2011. Construction work is undergoing. The old hall will be replaced with a six-storey complex, doubling its original size in terms of land mass.[5][6]
