Founded in 1880 and located on the exterior of former
Tai Kok Tsui peninsula in
Kowloon, the dockyard belonged to then-British owned
Hutchison Whampoa. The dockyard was created from land reclamation in the 1870s. Amid the
Sino-French War in 1884 over the control of
Vietnam, Chinese workers in the dockyard refused to serve on
La Galissonnière, a French warship responsible for the bombardment of
Keelung and
Fuzhou. The crew eventually repaired the ship on their own. In 1937, a hundred Norwegian, Danish and Swedish refugees who had fled the
Japanese invasion of Shanghai were housed at the dock while they waited to be resettled. In the same year, the shipwrecked
steamer named the An Lee was towed to the dock. The facilities closed in 1972, the dockyard was transformed from 1974 to 1976 into the housing complex known as
Cosmopolitan Estate (14 13 floor towers) by Hutchison Whampoa (under the direction of
Douglas Clague) in 1974. With the West Kowloon Reclamation Project the dockyard area is now landlocked and no evidence exists to link it to its past use. On 16 January 1945, during the
Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in
World War II, the dockyard was bombed by
aircraft of the
United States. ==See also==