文化與媒體：由《憲報》到收費電視

1. Print: from the official Gazette to Chinese-owned newspapers

Hong Kong’s media history does not begin with a newspaper but with a government publication. The Hong Kong Government Gazette first appeared in 1841, carrying mainly directives, notices and reports issued by the British authorities, the Hong Kong government and senior officials. The earliest regular publication therefore served as a notice board rather than a news sheet. A year later, on 17 March 1842, the first English-language newspaper was founded; on the 24th of the same month it merged with another paper and the merged name was formed from the two titles. That detail matters: within the first two years there was more than one English paper, so even a tiny market already had competition.

Chinese readers had to wait until 1 August 1853, when the missionary Walter Henry Medhurst founded the Chinese Serial, the colony’s first Chinese-language periodical, which ran until it ceased publication in May 1856. It was missionary-led: religious in part, but also carrying news and general knowledge, and not a paper run by Chinese themselves. The first Chinese-owned newspaper, with both funding and editorial work in Chinese hands, came on 4 February 1874 — the Tsun Wan Yat Po, founded in Hong Kong by Wang Tao. The sequence runs from official notices to missionary periodicals to Chinese-owned papers, with a decade or two between each step: far slower than the English press.

2. Cinema: from travelling screenings to local production

Cinema arrived first as exhibition rather than production. On 22 November 1900 the first mobile venue dedicated to film screenings, Hee Lai Yuen, opened on Hollywood Road in Sheung Wan under the name “Marvellous Magic Lantern Show”, screening foreign scenic films. Such venues travelled, which means there was not yet a settled cinema system; audiences paid to look at foreign landscapes rather than local stories.

Thirteen years later local production appeared. In 1913 Lai Man-wai produced Zhuangzi Tests His Wife, the first Hong Kong film. Between “showing foreign films” and “making our own” lay a single precondition: local money, equipment and people who knew how to shoot. That precondition later grew into studios, cinemas and distribution networks, but this dossier’s timeline stops at the first production. Cinema seating, wartime screening censorship and postwar Cantonese output are listed as gaps rather than filled with guessed figures.

3. Radio: public before commercial

The order was reversed in broadcasting: public first, commercial later. On 20 June 1928 Radio Hong Kong, then under the Hong Kong government, began signal tests under the call sign G.O.W., becoming the first public broadcasting institution in the territory; the formal launch ceremony was held only on 8 October the following year. In its first year, broadcasting was a public facility still under test, and what listeners received was closer to a public service than to entertainment.

Commercial radio arrived on 22 March 1949, when Rediffusion began broadcasting — founded by the Hong Kong Cable Broadcasting Company and organised by the British Cable Broadcasting Company — becoming the first commercial station locally. From 1928 to 1949 Hong Kong broadcasting had a single public voice; only after the war, with a rapidly growing population and a changed audience, was there room for a commercial station. The two institutions then coexisted for decades, settling a division of labour between public service and entertainment funded by advertising.

4. Television: from one station to two, from black-and-white to colour

Television also began with a commercial operator. On 29 May 1957 Rediffusion Television, founded by Rediffusion, began broadcasting as Hong Kong’s first television station. Note the order: radio came in 1949, television in 1957, eight years later, and the same company moved from sound to pictures — accumulated equipment, staff and client relationships became the starting point for television.

A decade later, on 19 November 1967, TVB launched Jade and Pearl on the same day, making it the first station in Hong Kong to produce and broadcast colour programmes. Free television brought two structural changes: audiences moved from “subscribers” to “anyone with a set”, and revenue moved from subscription fees to advertising. Programme choices, news slots and ratings research all became business questions at once.

Television also gave social issues a shared picture. On 29 October 1972 Radio Television Hong Kong first broadcast the drama series Below the Lion Rock, set among residents of the Wang Tau Hom resettlement area on the southern slopes of Lion Rock; in 1979 Roman Tam sang the theme song, which became a classic of popular music. From news reporting to drama, media began putting housing, poverty and neighbourly relations on the same screen, turning “Lion Rock” from a place name into a cultural symbol.

5. Pay television and digital broadcasting: technology led, market lagged

In the 1990s television split again. On 31 May 1993 Wharf Cable Television was granted a pay television licence for a term of twelve years, and the station began broadcasting on 31 October that year. The licence did more than add a station: it turned television from a spectrum resource into a business of networks plus subscribers, where programmes could be narrowcast rather than aimed at every viewer in the territory.

A decade later the boundary blurred again. On 26 September 2003 Now TV, the pay television service operated by a wholly-owned subsidiary of PCCW, was officially launched — a telecoms operator delivering television over its own network instead of relying on conventional broadcast channels. Broadcasting and telecommunications, two regulatory domains, became two services on one broadband line.

Digital sound broadcasting offers the counter-example. On 15 October 2016 the Chief Executive in Council approved the termination of the sound broadcasting licence of Hong Kong Digital Broadcasting Limited: technically feasible and policy-approved, yet still withdrawn by the market. The lesson for this dossier is that media history is not a straight line in which newer technology always wins; audience habits, receiver penetration and advertising revenue often decide survival more than the standard itself.

6. How to read the sources

The most direct entry is the Hong Kong Chronicles chronology: p.126 for the Gazette and the 1841 apostolic prefecture, p.127 for the first English newspaper, p.141 for the Chinese Serial, p.160 for the Tsun Wan Yat Po, and p.187 and p.202 for the first film screening and the first locally produced film. Radio and television milestones cluster at p.220 (G.O.W. tests), p.271 (Rediffusion radio), p.309 (Rediffusion Television), p.356 (Jade and Pearl) and p.382 (Below the Lion Rock).

For the 1990s onward, move to p.509 (pay television licence), p.610 (Now TV launch) and p.708 (termination of the digital sound broadcasting licence). Hong Kong Chronicles, Nature: Territory, Geography and Population, p.640, records the founding of newspapers and periodicals in 1842 and is used to cross-check the dating of English papers; the RTHK “About us” page is used only to check the remit of public broadcasting, not to verify dates. For primary documents, the next step is the Government Information Services publication record, Communications Authority licensing notices and newspaper microfilm held by university libraries — not second-hand web pages.

7. Gaps

This dossier covers institutional milestones, not market outcomes. Newspaper circulation, readership and advertising revenue, and radio and television ratings, subscriber numbers and losses, are not registered year by year; any such figure in the prose would need an official series and a reference date, not an estimate.

Three threads are deliberately left blank: the wartime reorganisation of broadcasting and film censorship, the successive amendments to television licensing, and the causes behind the closure of the third station. All three are documented officially, but this site has not verified them page by page, so they appear as gaps rather than as a plausible-sounding narrative.