A photograph taken around 1900 of British soldiers boarding the Peak Tram at the Garden Road terminus.

Every Hong Kong resident has a horror story or two to tell about what life is like on a sweltering hot day when the air-conditioner goes wrong. In our modern and efficient city, the problem can generally be solved fairly quickly. However, there was a time when the heat was not so easy to escape.

Electricity and electric fans did not arrive in Hong Kong until the 1890s. Before that there was the punkah. This was a large, fixed, swinging fan made of cloth stretched on a rectangular frame suspended from the ceiling and operated by a punkah wallah pulling a rope. Punkahs could be found in almost every tropical British colony.

After the Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, had "had a path cut" to the top of Victoria Peak, he built a bungalow there named Mountain Lodge as his summer residence. He had noted that the temperature was 14°F less than Central District in the summer.

The Old Peak Road – as it was later called – provided access to the Peak, and many residents built mansions there. They included Phineas Ryrie who was the first chairman of the Jockey Club. Apart from racing, his favourite sport was shooting. In order to have a supply of animals to slaughter he introduced rabbits to Stonecutters Island. When these rabbits failed to breed like rabbits he abandoned the scheme.

He had named his summer residence on the Peak "Craig Ryrie" after himself. In 1885, with his partner Alexander Finlay Smith, who had previously worked for Scotland's Highland Railway, he formed the High Level Tramway Company and began building the Peak Tram that ran from Garden Road to Victoria Gap.

The tram cars were originally steam driven and hauled by cable to an altitude of 428 metres above sea level. The steepest part of the track had a gradient of one in two. It was opened in 1888 by the governor, Sir William Des Voeux, who had a special seat permanently reserved for him.

The Peak Hotel was built next to the Victoria Gap Terminus. The partners' original concept of creating a hill station was soon achieved and surpassed, because many of the occupants of the European residential section of Central District migrated to the Peak. It became an expensive enclave where posh people lived all year round.

The area soon became self-sufficient. It had a church, a hospital, a club, a school and a police station. It even had its own barracks on Mount Austin Road. A dozen new narrow winding streets were built as well as the Peak Road. In the 1920s, electrical winding gear replaced steam on the tram.

When I moved there in the early 1970s, the old terminus was still operating. I often used to take the tram to work in the morning. It was a delightful seven-minute ride. Because of the inevitable long queues of tourists, I generally had to return home by taxi. In 1972, the original Peak Tower was built. It has since been replaced by a spectacular new building. Its architects inform us that "like the Eiffel Tower and Sydney Opera House, its form is distinctive…"

Perhaps the saddest anecdote of the Peak Tram concerns Ryrie's neighbour, Emmanuel Rafael Belilios, a legislative councillor and opium dealer who used a camel to commute between the Peak and Central. With the opening of the Peak Tramway the beast was made redundant, and in a fit of melancholia committed suicide by jumping off a cliff.