Thursday’s SCMP had a strange story about the possibility of replacing Easter Monday with a new public holiday for Confucius's birthday. Hard to see that happening – we already have too many of these one day holidays on random days of the week, and Easter is the only Hong Kong holiday that is guaranteed to produce a long weekend (Friday to Monday).
You might think that any story on this subject would be accompanied by some background information about the changes that have been made to Hong Kong public holidays in recent years (of which there have been several). However, all we got was this table:
New general holidays since 1997:
General holidays deleted since 1998:
SAR establishment day: July 1
National Day: October 1
Labour Day: May 1
Buddha's Birthday: the eighth day of the fourth lunar month
Queen's Birthday: a Saturday in June, plus the following Monday
Liberation Day: the last Monday in August and the Saturday preceding it
Sino-Japanese War Victory Day: August 18
The day following National Day: October 2
Not very helpful, I feel.
The Queen’s Birthday and Liberation Day holiday were cancelled when Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony, and to replace them we got SAR establishment day, National Day (originally October 1st and 2nd), Labour Day, and that curious “Sino-Japanese War Victory Day” holiday (well, if you can’t celebrate the end of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong at least you can remember another war against the same enemy).
Then they had a quick re-think and dropped two of these new holidays, replacing them in 1999 with Buddha’s birthday and (I think) Tuen Ng Festival.
Ordinary Gweilo 
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