1980s Hong Kong Island Skyline Victoria Harbour Junks S.C. Moy 248A Postcard

Title
1980s Hong Kong Island Skyline Victoria Harbour Junks S.C. Moy 248A Postcard

Front
A colour photographic view across Victoria Harbour towards the northern shore of Hong Kong Island, taken from the Kowloon side. The foreground is filled with choppy green-grey harbour water. Three working craft move from left to right across the centre of the image: nearest the viewer is a motorised harbour launch or lighter with a white and dark hull, heavy rubber tyre fenders slung along its side, a wheelhouse with a pale green canopy roof, and a small aerial mast; alongside and slightly behind it is a wooden junk-hulled cargo vessel with a red-brown painted hull, a bare mast, a canvas awning and a deck stacked with red, blue and multicoloured crates and bundles, flying a small red pennant from its masthead; further to the right a small open sampan speeds away leaving a white wake. Behind the vessels the Central and Wan Chai waterfront rises in a dense band of high-rise towers. Visible in the skyline are dark glass-clad slab blocks at the left, a tall pale tan-brown rectangular tower standing prominently forward of the others, several white and cream residential and office towers of varying heights, and, at the right, a large white curved-cornered tower rising above the surrounding blocks. Lower podium buildings, piers and a seawall run along the waterline, with small red flags or banners strung along one section of the praya. Behind the built-up shoreline the wooded slopes of the island climb steeply, dotted with white apartment blocks and villas on the mid-levels and upper terraces, culminating in the rounded green summit of Victoria Peak at the right with slender aerial masts on the ridge line. The upper third of the card is filled with a bright blue sky broken by heavy white and grey cumulus cloud.

Back
Printed in light blue at upper left: “248A. The Hong Kong Island” and beneath it the Chinese characters 香港 (Hēung Góng / Xiānggǎng — “Hong Kong”). Centre top, alongside a small circular publisher’s device: “POST CARD” with “FROM HONG KONG” beneath. Upper right, within a printed square frame: “PLACE STAMP HERE”. Running vertically down the centre divider in light blue: “PHOTO BY S. C. MOY — PUBLISHED BY PAUL PHOTOGRAPHIC & CHONG MING PRINTING CO. HONG KONG — TEL: 3-654761 3-808841 3-7416443”. At the lower centre, printed large in light blue: “248A”. The reverse is otherwise undivided by rule lines and carries no stamp or postmark; the card was written but not posted through the mail.

Handwritten in blue ink across the whole reverse, in a flowing cursive hand:

“Thursday 8/12.

My Dear Rene. Tomorrow we will be in H. Kong, we are happy to hear it will be warmer, has been cold & the usual flu on board, (remember last time) & on our table have it. one couple from S. Aust. we met on trip we met you, so we are lucky we have nice people again, also 2 ladies from Sydney who are beaut. too. Do hope you are O.K. Rene, & the family too. Saw the “cherry blossom” & the “plum blossom” in Japan, really beautiful. Korea is terrific, but the poor Chinese girl — get them out of my mind, no shopping left in them at all, +

Love K & Nan x”

Estimated Era
Approximately 1980–1986. The publisher line names S. C. Moy as photographer with Paul Photographic and Chong Ming Printing Co., a Hong Kong partnership whose numbered “Post Card from Hong Kong” series ran through the late 1970s and 1980s. The strongest dating evidence is philatelic-adjacent rather than postal: the three telephone numbers printed on the reverse are seven-digit numbers with the “3-” Kowloon prefix, a format introduced in Hong Kong during the late 1970s and retained until the territory-wide renumbering of the mid-to-late 1980s, which places printing firmly in that window. The skyline supports this. The tall tan-brown tower standing forward of the Wan Chai frontage is consistent with Hopewell Centre, completed in 1980, and the white curved-cornered tower at the right of the frame with the Connaught Centre (Jardine House, 1973) group on the Central reclamation. The absence of the distinctive stepped profile of the Bank of China Tower (1990) and of the exposed structural masts of the HSBC Main Building (1985) from the Central cluster indicates a view taken before the mid-1980s reconstruction of the Central skyline. The wooden-hulled motorised cargo junks still working the harbour alongside tyre-fendered lighters were commonplace into the early 1980s before container handling displaced them. The handwritten date “Thursday 8/12” indicates 8 December falling on a Thursday, consistent with 1983, written by a passenger on a cruise itinerary running Japan–Korea–Hong Kong.

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