Constructing an Atmosphere: The Hong Kong Observatory and Meteorological Networks within the British Imperial Sphere, 1879 – 1911

Abstract

In 1879, the Meteorological Society (U.K.) advised Hong Kong’s colonial government to establish a weather observatory for scientific observation. Although other observatories existed within the region, little was known about weather in Asia, particularly along China’s coast, and society leaders hoped accurate meteorological measurements from Hong Kong might deepen imperial knowledge concerning the region and the natural forces affecting economic and political affairs there. Hong Kong-based officials concurred, and by 1884, the Observatory had begun to take shape atop Mount Elgin, with an accompanying magnetic hut erected to the building’s west and a time ball positioned adjacent to Victoria Harbor. This paper examines the Observatory’s materialization, which remains a notable but underappreciated moment in the colony’s architectural history. A closer look at the site’s design and construction, particularly in relation to the machines housed within the main structure and the practices involved in its various purposes, offers insight into the design of spaces and systems that proved critical to the colony’s economic and political security over time. It also reveals the project’s instrumentality in documenting the colony’s well-being and, more generally, its intertwining of science within the overarching imperial objectives at work in the port. As the only facility responsible for housing Hong Kong’s barometric, thermometric, and astronomical devices, the Observatory was both a supporting structure of knowledge and an architectural performance of knowledge that proved essential to colonial governance. Its presence ensured for Hong Kong a consequential position within the tangle of inter-imperial networks and systems present in East and Southeast Asia over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.