The forgotten museum of Hong Kong: a place of unfulfilled ambitions (1869–1933)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to shed light on the little-known history of the Hong Kong City Hall Museum. Housed in the old City Hall between 1869 and 1933, the museum was intended as a place of entertainment and education for the residents of the British colony, including Chinese people. Dedicated to research and seeking the dissemination of knowledge through scientific displays of natural history specimens and artefacts, it was to be an emblem of Hong Kong's modernity and embody a certain degree of ‘civilization’. However, the City Hall Museum never lived up to the expectations it initially had raised, and its collections remained disappointing and inconsistent. This failure was perceived as a stigma for the colony. This paper intends to offer an understanding of why this institution, during its more than sixty years of existence, failed to gather sufficient organisation and resources to support itself and ended up disappearing from memory.