After the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, the French Mission was forced to retreat from China and its “business” in Hong Kong dwindled accordingly.  In 1953, The University of Hong Kong bought up Nazareth, and the establishment was again turned into a student dormitory — the famous University Hall.

If you have a crush for Douglas Castle, don’t miss the golden opportunity to get your hands on it in 1894 and 1953!

In 1861, Douglas, very wealthy by then, picked out the southern district of Hong Kong Island as his place of residence.  It was a location that, with the blue sea and the verdant and towering mountain, resembled his native home in Scotland and allowed him to oversee the docking and shipping on Aberdeen and the surrounding waters.  So he built on the hill a Tudor-style, two-storey castle, as well as other splendid structures, where he and his Chinese darling enjoyed a kind of aristocratic life.

Douglas died in 1869, after which his family business was obstructed by several wars, most fatally the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, and fell into decline as a result.  In 1894, during the Sino-Japanese War, Douglas Castle was sold to the Paris Foreign Missions Society (aka French Mission), which was based in Hong Kong and targeting China.  The castle was then renamed Nazareth, being turned into a monastery and enlarged with a printing house.  As a remark, in 1875 the French Mission had already established on the opposite mound a sanatorium, called Béthanie, for elderlies and sick missionaries, and with a Gothic church abutted.