Hong Kong Collectors: Shun Chi-ming and the Local Weather

Walking up the driveway off Nathan Road, next to St. Andrew’s Church in Tsim Sha Tsui, the trees are still wet from the rainfall that has just passed. The air feels more oxygenated amidst the lush greenery. Up a path is a brick building where the first radio transmissions were broadcast in Hong Kong: a weather report. 

These are the thickly forested grounds of the Hong Kong Observatory, which has tracked Hong Kong’s weather with minute detail since 1883. Next to the newer Centenary Building, which opened to mark the observatory’s centenary, is a much older two-storey building made of bricks painted white, its elegantly arched windows and wooden floors reflecting its status as a declared historic monument. 

There is a history exhibition on the ground floor. Among the objects on display  is a portrait of the Observator’s first director, who arrived in Hong Kong from Denmark in 1883. There are weather charts and instruments and old photos – some of them lovingly collected, paid for and donated by former observatory director Shun Chi-ming. 

Shun prefers not to think about how much he has spent on collecting such old ephemera, an obsession that started when he became director in 2011 and only accelerated ahead of the institution’s 130th anniversary in 2013, when he realised that the oldest photograph in the observatory’s archives had been taken in 1908, with nothing from its first 25 years of operation. Thus began his quest to research the observatory’s history and find more artefacts for the establishment that was his home for his whole career and continues to be his passion in retirement. 

A fascination for the weather

Even as a young student at St. Paul’s College, Shun was already interested in meteorology, stars and physics. “I liked to know whether there was a typhoon coming, whether we needed to go to school tomorrow,” he says as he lays out photo albums for later viewing. “So I plotted the latitude and longitude of the typhoon, and on the grid, I would measure them and then try to do a forecast.”

Shun was born in 1963 as the only child to a waiter and a housewife. He remembers his father being encouraging of his meteorological interests. “He didn’t have too much time to spend with me, but sometimes he would read his newspaper about the stars, the planets, and he would say ‘Oh, maybe it’s a good idea to go to MIT in the future because it’s a very good university.’”

Shun had the opportunity to go just that: after studying physics and maths at the University of Hong Kong, he received an offer to study at MIT — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — but Shun opted to join the observatory as a scientific officer instead. That was in 1986. In the years that followed, his achievements included the creation of the world’s first LIDAR or Light Detection and Ranging windshear alerting system, which warns pilots and air traffic controllers about dangerous windshear conditions on runways. This groundbreaking technology has since become a global standard.

Knowing more about typhoons

What drives Shun’s collecting is his interest in typhoons. Hongkongers are all too familiar with the tropical storms that blow into the city from spring to autumn, and they’ve shaped the history of the Hong Kong Observatory. 

Its first director, Danish professor William Doberck, was in charge for 24 years, and it was under his supervision that the harbourfront time ball was introduced so that passing ships could adjust their clocks. He also brought in an early typhoon warning system. But Doberck was blamed for his handling of the devastating 1906 typhoon, a particularly small but powerful storm whose intensity had been underestimated by forecasters. He retired the following year. 

As part of the observatory’s 140th anniversary celebrations two years ago, Shun was keen to contact former directors and their descendants. A relative of Doberck’s in Copenhagen had custody of the former director’s materials, including the portrait that now hangs in the observatory, which he donated for Shun.

Shun also collected other items that reveal the terrible force of typhoons on the fragile infrastructure of early colonial Hong Kong. He opens a photo album to reveal a group of 13 photos depicting typhoon damage, taken by a Western family that had been living in Hong Kong. “This is from the 1906 typhoon, which had the highest casualty rate on record in Hong Kong, with at least 10,000 deaths,” he explains. “Most of the piers in Hong Kong were damaged or completely destroyed. And you can see the houses at the time were also very fragile.”

The typhoon was severe, but it came as a surprise. Some years ago, Shun got together with maritime historian Stephen Davies to work out what happened. “We analysed the typhoon and found that the typhoon actually was a very, very small sized typhoon,” he says. “Nowadays, we have a name for it: a so-called midget typhoon. The diameter of the typhoon, in terms of the strong and gale-force winds, was only 10 to 20 kilometres in terms of radius. Normally, typhoons have a radius of hundreds of kilometres.”

Shun takes a French newspaper page from 1906 out of its plastic cover. “This is Le Petit Journal,” he says; it was a Paris newspaper that ran from 1863 to 1944. He gestures to an illustration on the page. “This is an artist’s impression of the situation, where the main characters are fishermen being swallowed by the sea.” The typhoon was so remarkable, it made the news halfway around the world.

Through online auction houses and approaches from other collectors, Shun has successfully managed to find far earlier photos for the observatory than were previously in its collection. Lai Afong, probably the preeminent Hong Kong photographer of the 19th century, took a series of shots of the infamous 1874 typhoon. (Typhoons were not formally named until after World War II.) Most of the collection was purchased by collector Siu Him-fung, who has also produced a book of the photographer’s work, but Shun bought one image of a building with part of its roof missing near High Street in Sai Ying Pun.  

“The 1874 typhoon triggered more discussion about the need for an observatory,” says Shun, “but the major reason was for a time service.” At the time, Hong Kong’s surveyor general, John MacNeile Price, wrote a proposal to create a weather observator, but he butted heads with then-governor John Pope Hennessy. “They had differing views so it dragged on for a while,” says Shun. “Then Hennessy left and Price revised the proposal and it finally got approved.”

Competing observatories

Meanwhile, French Jesuits in Shanghai were a number of years ahead, having set up their own observatory in 1872, following in the footsteps of their brothers in Manila, who had established an observatory in 1865. When Doberck became director of the newly established Hong Kong Observatory, he wanted a leading role in the region. Rather than share information, the three regional observatories tended to compete.

Shun pulls out an A4-sized book in French and Chinese about the original Shanghai observatory, the Observatoire de Zi-Ka-Wei, published in the 1930s. Folded into the back is a weather chart from 1935 with high and low pressure areas, and next to it a list where each coastal station reports the weather every day. “They actually printed the weather map together with the observations and distributed it to the shipping companies and those related,” says Shun. Each of the charts was filled in by hand and then posted at the Harbourmaster’s Office.” Amazingly, charts were still hand-drawn when Shun joined the observatory in the mid-1980s. 

He pulls out another interesting artefact: a barometer chart, this one from a 1908 typhoon. “You wrap this piece of paper onto a drum with a pen with ink, and then it’s connected to a barometer, so as the typhoon comes, the pressure will drop, and then you will have this shape,” he says, pointing to a dip on the chart. 

More research to be done

Alongside Shun’s photographs and the occasional postcard is a small 1938 hiking book called Rambles in Hong Kong, a friendly paperback documenting the author’s expeditions in the New Territories. It was written by Graham Heywood, who became observatory director after the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945. 

On December 8, 1941, Heywood and his colleague Leonard Starbuck had gone out in the New Territories with a plan to pick up all the weather equipment to avoid it falling into enemy hands, but the Japanese soldiers came quickly across from southern China and both Heywood and Starbuck were caught – Hong Kong’s first prisoners of war.

“We finally found the original location of the magnetic station,” says Shun. He has also researched what was happening with the observatory during wartime. “As soon as [the Japanese] occupied Hong Kong, they took the observatory,” he says. “They continued the observations because weather was so important to the military.”

Some 142 years on, things between the observatories in Shanghai and Hong Kong are a bit more amicable. When Japanese occupation ended in 1945, the observatory’s telescope had disappeared. But up in the museum in Shanghai they still have their transit instrument for seeing stars. Now Shun is off for a trip to go and see the telescope; he’s also hoping to meet a former Shanghai observatory director, who is in her 90s. More research, more stories and doubtless more ephemera for his observatory collection.