by Jan Morris
What finally brought Hong Kong into its own was the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. The revolution itself sent an influx of refugee industrialists into Hong Kong, and when in the following year the revolutionary Government went to war against the United Nations in Korea, the consequent interruption of all western trade with China transformed the colony’s functions. Until then the territory had seen itself, as its founders had always seen it, primarily as an entrepôt, through which commerce with China could conveniently and efficiently pass. The free port of Hong Kong was one of the world’s busiest, but the place produced very little itself, and though governed as a Crown Colony, and proudly listed in the imperial rosters (‘Our Easternmost Possession’), was essentially an economic appendage of China proper. In 1950 however the western boycott of all things Chinese temporarily put an end to the old purpose, and obliged Hong Kong to find other ways of earning a living.
It did so spectacularly, and turned itself over the next decades into the immense manufacturing and financial centre whose towers, ships and lights so astonished us when we arrived from Guangzhou a few pages back. An endless flow of refugees out of the Chinese mainland provided cheap and willing labour, and European, Chinese and American enterprise combined to create a new kind of Hong Kong: a staggeringly productive City-State, only just a British Colony at all, into whose banks and investment houses funds flowed from every corner of the capitalist world, and from whose harbour was dispatched an amazing flow of products manufactured within its own small, crowded and improbable confines. The colony’s population, estimated at 2.4 million in 1955, was 5.6 million by 1988 – 98 per cent of it Chinese, the rest a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of races and languages. It was a phenomenon unique in history. In the twelfth century a magician-poet called Bai Yue-shan had mystically foreseen a Hong Kong ablaze ‘with a host of stars in the deep night, and ten thousand ships passing to and fro within the harbour’; and as every morning voyager on the Xinghu knows, by the end of the 1980s it had all come true.
In 1898, the year Hong Kong signed away its future, the British Empire was at its apogee. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the year before, had been celebrated as a colossal celebration of her inter-continental sovereignty; another year was to pass before the calamities of the Anglo-Boer War cracked the imperial certainty. In 1898 the British ruled nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, governed a quarter of its population and commanded all its seas. It was the widest dominion the world had ever known, and its confidence was overweening.
No doubt, at such a time of insolent assurance, the British regarded the lease of the New Territories as tantamount to a cession. 1997 was so far away, the Chinese were so generally addled, and the British Empire was not in the habit, as Victoria trenchantly observed when Heligoland was ceded to the Germans, of ‘giving up what one has’. What the Empire had created in Hong Kong seemed impervious to Chinese intentions: it was not a Briton, but the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen who presently wondered aloud at how much Englishmen could achieve in seventy-five years upon a bare ocean rock, when Chinese could not do so much in millennia!
Nor did the notion of self-government, soon to transform the nature of the Empire, ever attach itself to Hong Kong, which remained into our own times a colony of the most archaic kind, with no democratic institutions whatever. Nevertheless as the years passed, as China sporadically revivified itself with revolution and reform, and brooded over the injustices of foreign intervention, as the power of the British themselves weakened, so the approach of 1997 was to give an extra paradox and uncertainty to a place already uncertain and paradoxical enough. By the 1980s the British Empire was, in a generic sense, dead and gone. Hong Kong was a last posthumous prodigy, its population being some thirty-five times greater than the population of all the other remaining overseas possessions put together, and the run-down to its denouement came to assume a symbolic fascination. It was like a race against time – as though in some ill-defined way Hong Kong might prove something, accomplish some definitive act, before it passed out of the hands of the capitalist west into those of the always unpredictable Chinese. It might prove something about capitalism itself, or it might offer a valedictory testament to the meaning of the lost Empire.
Today, as I write, the moment has almost come. We have entered Hong Kong’s last year as a British possession, and we are already watching its metamorphosis, in identity as in spelling, into Xianggang. In 1984 a new agreement was reached between Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China, decreeing the return of the whole of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in the fateful year 1997:
1. The Government of the People’s Republic of China declares that to recover the Hong Kong area (including Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, hereinafter referred to as Hong Kong), is the common aspiration of the entire Chinese people, and that it has decided to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong with effect from 1 July 1997.
2. The Government of the United Kingdom declares that it will restore Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China with effect from 1 July 1997.
The British agreed to withdraw not merely from the New Territories, about which they had no choice, but from Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, which had theoretically been ceded them for ever. The Chinese agreed to give Xianggang a semi-autonomous status as a Special Administrative Region, allowing it to continue in its capitalist ways for another half-century after its return to the Chinese motherland – ‘One Country, Two Systems’, as they said with their fondness for symbolic numericals. In the meantime they would evolve a new constitution, the Basic Law, to come into force in 1997, and the two Powers would work together in regular consultation towards an amicable handover. It was an accord specifically between London and Beijing. The people of Hong Kong took no part in the negotiations, as they had taken no part in any of the previous compacts between the Empires that ruled their destinies.
So the end draws near, and Hong Kong awaits it nervously, not knowing what to expect. Everything it does now is subject to the overwhelming fact of 1997, and to the dominant scrutiny of the People’s Republic. Start to finish, the British colony of Hong Kong will have existed for 156 years. It was said of it long ago that by its acquisition the Victorians had cut a notch in the body of China, as a woodman cuts a notch in a great oak he is presently going to fell. But the oak has never fallen, and actually Hong Kong no longer feels an alien mark upon the coast of China: it has been notched there too long, it is too Chinese itself, its affairs have been too inextricably linked with those of China, and its return to the great presence, however ominous or bewildering the circumstances, seems only natural.
I have been writing about Hong Kong on and off for thirty years, and I come back to it now primarily as a student of British imperialism. Hong Kong is an astounding epilogue of Empire, and it is piquant to note that its return to China will occur almost exactly a century after that climactically imperial Jubilee celebration of 22 June 1897. In this book I set out to portray the last of the great British colonies as it approaches its end, and by alternating chapters of theme or analysis with chapters of historical description, I also try to make a whole of the imperial connection, to evoke something of Hong Kong’s past as well as its present, and to explore how such an imperial anomaly came to survive so long.
The symbolism of the place and the moment, however, goes beyond Pax Britannica – Hong Kong seldom was a very characteristic British possession. In its affairs we see reflected not only the decline of a historical genre – it is the last great European colony, too – but the shifting aspirations of communism and capitalism, the resurgence of the new Asia, the rising power of technology. As it prepares to withdraw at last from the British imperium, it is like a mirror to the world, or perhaps a geomancer’s compass.
For whatever happens to Hong Kong, in its present incarnation it is about to come to an end, and like the departure of ancestors its passing poses some last, lingering, ambiguous questions. Is there more?
Is anything proved? How was the wind and water? Is the image of those ships and stars all that British Hong Kong leaves to history, or are there other messages?
1 Or in the case of its first incumbent, Lord William Napier of Maristoun, by a convenient ideographic transcription of his name which meant ‘Laboriously Vile’.
1 Previously commander of a hospital ship and Protector of Slaves in British Guiana.
1 Although he later became Governor successively of Bermuda, Trinidad and St Helena, and died (in 1875) an admiral, he is uncommemorated still in the colony that he founded, and his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of Hong Kong.
CHRONOLOGY
IMPACTS AND IMAGES
I
HONG KONG IS IN CHINA, IF NOT ENTIRELY OF IT, AND after nearly 150 years of British rule the background to all its wonders remains its Chineseness – 98 per cent if you reckon it by population, hardly less if you are thinking metaphysically.
It may not look like it from the deck of an arriving ship, or swooping into town on a jet, but geographically most of the territory is rural China still. The empty hills that form the mass of the New Territories, the precipitous islets and rocks, even some of the bare slopes of Hong Kong Island itself, rising directly above the tumultuous harbour, are much as they were in the days of the Manchus, the Ming or the neolithic Yao. The last of the leopards has indeed been shot (1931), the last of the tigers spotted (1967, it is claimed), but that recondite newt flourishes still as trituroides hongkongensis, there are still civets, pythons, barking deer and porcupines about and the marshlands abound with sea-birds. The predominant country colours are Chinese colours, browns, greys, tawny colours. The generally opaque light is just the light one expects of China, and gives the whole territory the required suggestion of blur, surprise and uncertainty. The very smells are Chinese smells – oily, laced with duck-mess and gasoline.
Thousands of Hong Kong people still live on board junks, cooking their meals in the hiss and flicker of pressure lamps among the riggings and the nets. Thousands more inhabit shanty towns, made of sticks, canvas and corrugated iron but bustling with the native vivacity. People are still growing fruit, breeding fish, running duck-farms, tending oyster-beds; a few still grow rice and a very few still plough their fields with water-buffaloes. Village life remains resiliently ancestral. The Tangs and the Pangs are influential. The geomancers are busy still. Half-moon graves speckle the high ground wherever feng shui decrees, sometimes attended still by the tall brown urns that contain family ashes. Temples to Tin Hau, the Queen of Heaven, or Hung Shing, God of the Southern Seas, still stand incense-swirled upon foreshores.
But the vast majority of Hong Kong’s Chinese citizens live in towns, jam-packed on the flatter ground. They are mostly squeezed in gigantic tower-blocks, and they have surrounded themselves with all the standard manifestations of modern non-Communist Chinoiserie: the garish merry signs, the clamorous shop-fronts, the thickets of TV aerials, the banners, the rows of shiny hanging ducks, the washing on its poles, the wavering bicycles, the potted plants massed on balconies, the canvas-canopied stalls selling herbs, or kitchenware, or antiques, or fruit, the bubbling cauldrons of crab-claw soup boiling at eating-stalls, the fantastic crimson-and-gold façades of restaurants, the flickering television screens in shop windows, the trays of sticky cakes in confectionery stores, the profusion of masts, poles and placards protruding from the fronts of buildings, the dragons carved or gilded, the huge elaborate posters, the tea-shops with their gleaming pots, the smells of cooking, spice, incense, oil, the racket of radio music and amplified voices, the half-shouted conversation that is peculiar to Chinese meeting one another in the street, the ceaseless clatter of spoons, coins, mah-jong counters, abaci, hammers and electric drills.
It can appear exotic to visitors, but it is fundamentally a plain and practical style. Just as the Chinese consider a satisfactory year to be a year in which nothing much happens, so their genius seems to me fundamentally of a workaday kind, providing a stout and reliable foundation, mat and bamboo so to speak, on which to build the structures of astonishment.
2
What the West has provided, originally through the medium of the British Empire, later by the agency of international finance, is a City-State in its own image, overlaying that resilient and homely Chinese style with an aesthetic far more aggressive. The capitalists of Hong Kong have been terrific builders, and have made of the great port, its hills and its harbours, one of the most thrilling of all metropolitan prospects – for my own tastes, the finest sight in Asia. More than 6 million people, nearly twice the population of New Zealand, live here in less than 400 square miles of land, at least half of which is rough mountain country. They are necessarily packed tight, in urban forms as startling in the luminous light of Hong Kong as the upperworks of the clippers must have been, when they first appeared along its waterways.
The Tangs and the Lius may still be in their villages, but they are invested on all sides by massive New Towns, started from scratch in starkly modernist manner. All over the mainland New Territories, wherever the hills allow, busy roads sweep here and there, clumps of tower-blocks punctuate the skyline, suburban estates develop and blue-tiled brick wilts before the advance of concrete. Even on the outlying islands, as Hong Kong calls the rest of the archipelago, apartment buildings and power stations rise above the moors. Flat land in most parts of Hong Kong being so hard to find, this dynamic urbanism has been created largely in linear patterns, weaving along shorelines, clambering up gullies or through narrow passes, and frequently compressed into almost inconceivable congestion. Some 80 per cent of the people live in 8 per cent of the land, and parts of Kowloon, with more than a quarter of a million people per square mile, are probably the most crowded places in all human history. An amazing tangle of streets complicates the topography; the architect I. M. Pei, commissioned to design a new Hong Kong office block in the 1980s, said it took nine months just to figure out access to the site.
There is not much shape to all this, except the shape of the place itself. Twin cities of the harbour are the vortex of all Hong Kong, and all that many strangers ever see of it. On the north, the mainland shore, the dense complex of districts called Kowloon presses away into the hills, projecting its force clean through them indeed by tunnel into the New Territories beyond. The southern shore, on the island of Hong Kong proper, is the site of the original British settlement, officially called Victoria but now usually known simply as Central; it is in effect the capital of Hong Kong, and contains most of its chief institutions, but it straggles inchoately all along the island’s northern edge, following the track worn by the junk crews when, before the British came at all, adverse winds obliged them to drag their vessels through this strait. Around the two conglomerates the territory’s being revolves: one talks of Kowloon-side or Hong Kong-side, and on an average day in 1996 about half a million vehicles passed through the underwater tunnels from one to the other.
Once the colony had a formal urban centre. Sit with me now in the Botanical Gardens, those inescapable amenities of the British Empire which have defied progress even here, and still provide shady boulevards, flower-beds and a no more than usually nasty little zoo almost in the heart of Central. From this belvedere, fifty years ago, we could have looked down upon a ceremonial plaza of some dignity, Statue Square. It opened directly upon the harbour, rather like the Piazza Unita in Trieste, and to the west ran a waterfront esplanade, called the Praya after its Macao original. The steep green island hills rose directly behind the square, and it was surrounded by structures of consequence – Government House where the Governor lived, Head Quarter House where the General lived, a nobly classical City Hall, the Anglican cathedral, the Supreme Court, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The effect was sealed by the spectacle of the ships passing to and fro at the north end of the square, and by the presence of four emblematically imperial prerequisites: a dockyard of the Royal Navy, a cricket field, the Hong Kong Club and a st
atue of Queen Victoria.
It has all been thrown away. Today Statue Square is blocked altogether out of our sight by office buildings, and anyway only the spectre of a plaza remains down there, loomed over, fragmented by commercialism. Even the waterfront has been pushed back by land reclamation. The surviving promenade is all bits and pieces of piers, and a three-storey car-park obstructs the harbour view. The cricket ground has been prettified into a municipal garden, with turtles in a pond. Government House and the Cathedral are hardly visible through the skyscrapers, the Hong Kong Club occupies four floors of a twenty-four-floor office block, Queen Victoria has gone.
This is the way of urban Hong Kong. It is cramped by the force of nature, but it is irresistibly restless by instinct. Except for the harbour, it possesses no real centre now. As we shall later see, the territory as a whole has lately become a stupendous exercise in social design, but no master-plan for the harbour cities has ever succeeded – Sir Patrick Abercrombie offered one in the heyday of British town planning after the Second World War, but like so many of his schemes it never came to anything. Proposals to extend that promenade were repeatedly frustrated down the years, notably by the military who would not get their barracks and dockyards out of the way; all that is left of the idea is the howling expressway that runs on stilts along the foreshore.