Content area
Full text
Introduction
As a contribution to heritage conservation planning and management, this paper provides an initial determination of the date of construction, locations and design of the pill-boxes of the Gin Drinker's Line, which witnessed fighting during the Japanese invasion in December 1941, based on post-war Royal Air Force and R.C. Huntings' aerial photos obtained from the Lands Department of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR Government), China. There is no map record of this Line in the UK Public Records Office[1] or the Hong Kong Government Services and hence our findings should be highly valuable for conservationists and military historians as source materials. Our endeavours should, accordingly, provide the essential elements of any statement of significance, the importance of which has been well recognised in the management of heritage ([7] Carter and Grimwade, 1997; [4] Baker, 2002).
Theoretical and technical context
The emerging literature on post-colonial conservation of colonial heritage in Hong Kong, as elsewhere in Asia, has concentrated on the values and preferences of decision-makers based on recent policy documents and initiatives ([12], [13], [14] Henderson, 2001a, b, 2002; [38] Teather and Chow, 2003; [41] Yung, 2007), or on a narrative of the typology of individualised items of surviving "colonial" heritage items, together with those items of so-called "indigenous" heritage ([2] Antiquities and Monuments Office, 2007), ignoring the hybridised nature of cross-cultural heritage ([30] Long, 2000). Essential as starting points as they are, both approaches are a-synchronic. The former creates a portrait of a new conservation culture as a forward-looking referent for interpreting new policy initiatives at the expense of ignoring a dowry of heritage conservation research and efforts made during the colonial era. The latter tends to miss out inconspicuous heritage items that are worthy of rehabilitation but seem to have "vanished" due to an inability to connect very visible and iconic monuments under consideration for conservation with apparently minor but no less insignificant artefacts. Like boundary stones and old map and chart data, pill-boxes belong to this category.
As far as the technique of heritage conservation planning and management is concerned, the use of aerial photos has declined as a result of the advancement in and proliferation of satellite imageries ([1] Al-Bakri et al. , 2001; [8]...