The Steps of St John’s – a Little Hong Kong Mystery Solved

Many thanks to Colin Day, my former publisher at Hong Kong University Press, who picked up a copy of Midnight in Peking while flying through Hong Kong at Christmas. His eagle HK Heritage eye went straight to one of the photos – the one below in fact, of ETC Werner and his wife Gladys Nina Ravenshaw on their wedding day in 1914 at St John’s Cathedral. The photo was simply labelled as the date of the wedding and St John’s at the location. At the time I did wander up around St John’s, a lovely church in Central, but didn’t find the stairs. I assumed that they were adjacent to the Cathedral at some point but had been lost in the major development at the rear of the building that created, via a cut through, what is now the multi-lane Garden Road running up to the Peak Tram terminal. However, Colin begged to differ – there were never any stairs similar to the ones the rather stiffly new married couple are photographed on…and so a little hunt began… First the 1911 picture and then the rest of the story.

St John’s is one of the former colonial structures that cluster on what is known as Government Hill bounded by the Upper Albert Road, Queen’s Road Central, Garden Road and Glenealy. This area has been the centre of Hong Kong’s government since effectively the foundation of the colony. Government House and the former Central Government Offices dominate the hill while lower down are St John’s, the Court of Final Appeal (housed inside the former French Mission Building) and the Battery Path ambling between all these structures. The current Central Government building, behind locked gates, is rather uninteresting having been completed in the late 1950s. This replaced a building that was there since the 1930s. The stairs remain and are just a short walk (even in a wedding dress) from the Cathedral.

Now, as the photo below shows, the steps lead up to a locked gate and the 1950s structure. In the background of the picture above you can see the veranda of the original, or “old”, Central Government building, known as the Secretariat Building and dating back to the mid-1800s I believe. If anyone knows different or has a picture of the Secretariat Building I’d love to see and/or hear anything about it.

So there we are – ETC Werner and Gladys Nina stood one September day in 1911 upon the stone steps that led up to the Secretariat Building close to St. John’s Cathedral. The steps remain, perhaps slightly adjusted and repointed over the years but there all the same…

the steps leading up to the Central Government complex and a locked gate…the drain in the foreground by the way is English made and dated 1935. There’s additional foliage to one side of the stairs and, of course (this is now modern China), insurmountable gates and fences all around. But the stairs remain.

The view down the stairs towards the old French Mission Building (now the Supreme Court)