Shek Kip Mei fire
1953 disaster in Hong Kong
The Shek Kip Mei fire (Chinese: 石硤尾大火; Jyutping: sek6 gip3 mei5 daai6 fo2) took place in Hong Kong on 25 December 1953. It destroyed the Shek Kip Mei shanty town of immigrants from mainland China who had fled to Hong Kong, leaving over 53,000 people homeless.
The area that was destroyed by the fire is bounded by Boundary St. and Tai Po Rd.
After the fire, the governor Alexander Grantham launched a public housing programme to introduce the idea of "multi-storey building" for the immigrant population living there. The standardised new structures offered fire- and flood-resistant construction to previously vulnerable hut dwellers. The programme involved demolishing the rest of the makeshift houses left untouched by the fire, and the construction of the Shek Kip Mei Low-cost Housing Estate in their stead. Alongside a huge volunteer effort, the council spent nearly HK$16 million in relief work.
See also
Interim Housing
References
External links
Shek Kip Mei fire, Stories of Hong Kong from Hong Kong Public Libraries, Retrieved 2018-05-25
Smart, Alan (1 June 2006). The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (PDF).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Shek Kip Mei fire” as 1953 disaster in Hong Kong. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4101564. Authority coordinates are 22.334, 114.169. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953, 2018, 2006 and 1950.
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