Ordinary Gweilo

One of the facts I know about Hong Kong is that St John’s Cathedral is the only freehold property in Hong Kong.  It must be true – if you search in Google for St. John’s Cathedral freehold Hong Kong you will find several references to this, starting with Wikipedia (as usual according to The Guardian), and if get any further down you may also note that I have used it a few times here.

Except that it’s not true. It seems that St Johns Cathedral actually has a perpetual lease, having converted from freehold about a year after the Handover:

In other words, the Basic Law drafting committee negotiators actually forgot about HKU and St. John’s in 1988. They buggered it up, because HKU and St. John’s were so politically outre so far as the committee was concerned that no one thought about them. The buggeration factor actually occurred in 1986 in that pretty-pretty villa beside the old Kennedy School site along from the Union Church on Kennedy Road when smoothies from both sides negotiated land rights protection. The Chinese side thought that the Brits would just trouser government reserves and sell land rights and keep the proceeds, because that is exactly what the Chinese would have done had they been in charge. That was why they invented the Commission: to hang onto the moolah. St. John’s was mentioned but only in that context: ripping off the reserves and since it would never be sold and wasn’t owned by the government the negotiators went on to more interesting topics: tons of money in the reserves and land right sales proceeds.

Post-1997 Synod saw their chance on the freehold: vot a pisness, vot a pisness, you sell it, you still got it, vot a pisness. Or at least Synod was most fortunate to have one of HK best legal minds available to it, pro bono. So millions and millions of $ later, the Lands Department having avoided LegCo, granted a perpetual lease and The Trustees of the Church of England in the Diocese of Victoria in Hong Kong, acting in pursuance of the Church of England Trust Ordinance of 18th January 1930, Chapter 1014, Laws of Hong Kong, surrendered the freehold. The whole job was done in about two weeks mid-1998.

Many thanks to gunlaw for explaining this!