Photo of the day No. 23 - St. Johns Cathedral in Hong Kong
The roof is cross shaped when viewed from above!
Me Jamie, your host, I am English and I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years - I know the place.
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Photo of the day No. 23 - St. Johns Cathedral in Hong Kong
The roof is cross shaped when viewed from above!
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“ St John’s Cathedral is the parish church with the longest history in the Province of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui. With a history of 175 years in Hong Kong, we are rooted in the liturgy of the Anglican Church and developed into having nine services on Saturdays and Sundays. All of you are most welcomed to join us either physically in our Cathedral or virtually on the internet. I am much looking forward to meeting you up here in our Cathedral Church on Garden Road. May God bless you and keep you.”
A quote from The Very Revd Kwok-keung Chan Dean of St John's Cathedral
Technically speaking I suppose this is my Church although to be perfectly honest I am not a particularly religious person, my wife is Catholic and our 3 adult sons are all Catholics.
I have been popping into St. Johns Cathedral since January 1972 (it has not changed much) - unlike many major cities in Europe, Hong Kong is not blessed with many magnificent churches and cathedrals, in Hong Kong people are free to practice whatever religion they want.
St. Johns Cathedral which has been around since 1849 has an anomaly that few people are aware of.
This is an excerpt from Beat Magazine in Hong Kong with regards to this anomaly
“he 1997 handover of Hong Kong saw the city's property market change hands to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – all land owned previously by individuals became the property of the PRC. The local Hong Kong government, according to Article 7 of the Basic Law, thus became responsible for management, usage, sales, and development of land.
The law of land rights in Hong Kong is simple: land cannot be sold, but rather rented to the highest bidder for the right to occupy it for a period of time – usually 75 or 99 years, with a select few 999-year leaseholds signed upon land ownership.
There are only 536 | 999-year-old leasehold-enlisted properties that exist in Hong Kong. Most of the properties were purchased by the British government from 1849 to 1898 – today they are apartment buildings, factories, office blocks, and malls.
With only one exception, virtually every piece of land in Hong Kong is a leasehold, rented out by the government to private developers to build on, but never own in its entirety.
The only current land plot that exists as a freehold lease and is owned exclusively by a non-government entity is the St. John’s Cathedral, an English-Gothic style Anglican Cathedral in the centre of Hong Kong’s Christian and business world.”
I should point out that many organisations (including the Hong Kong Tourism Board) have mentioned in articles that St. Johns Cathedral is cross shaped but that never sunk in with me, it is just not that apparent from ground level.
So there you go as they say, the American Consulate for context is a 5 minute walk away and has a 999 year lease.
That is quite something but I was much more intrigued by an image I took a few years ago, it is hard to get above ground images of buildings in Hong Kong as virtually all buildings are closed off to casual visitors and do not have a viewing floor, Building Management does not want the general public wandering around, I guess for security reasons.
Over the road (Garden Road) from St. Johns Cathedral is a famous building called The Murray Building which was revitalised and reopened as the superb and 5 star Murray Hotel and a few year years ago myself and some of my great Private Tour Guide friends where given a guided tour of the Murray Hotel and I naturally took some images of the surroundings.
It was only later that I realised that the roof of St. Johns Cathedral is in the shape of a cross, I had no idea because it certainly is not apparent when you are stood outside the Church.
It should be noted that you have to walk though the grounds of St. Johns Cathedral or walk by it on Garden Road to get to the iconic Peak Tram Terminus so it is well worth 10 minutes of your time to pay a visit and yes, if you are coming back down from Victoria Peak, at the Peak Tram Terminus you can wave at the American Consulate and take a shortcut through the grounds of St. Johns Cathedral or choose to keep waking down Garden Road and get a fabulous image for social media of the instantly iconic building called “The Henderson” you will know it when you see it.
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