Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  Like Hong Kong itself, Happy Valley on race day is a bitter, brilliant, grasping place, not in the least blasé or world-weary. The tension which grips any racecourse towards the end of a race seems to affect Happy Valley with an extra frisson, sweeping through the stands like a gale out of the hills. The Chinese proletariat below may take it stoically, and the rich Chinese above them, too, preserve for the most part their smooth self-control, but the Europeans are different: eminent financiers and women in silks leap to their feet with the thrill of a finish, the men shouting meaningless exhortations like ‘Come on, Champion Joker’, the women sometimes jumping up and down like participants in an American TV quiz.

  It is a curious spectacle, in a city that spends all its working days so assiduously in the pursuit of profit – who would think a casual bet could mean so much? – and it leaves in more dilettante minds a disturbingly fanatic impression. If you are of this temperament, better not look through your binoculars at the faces of the winning owners or the successful trainer, when the victorious horse is led into the ring below, and the big gold cup is presented – occasionally one can get a nasty shock, from the malevolent satisfaction their expressions seem to convey, as they look triumphantly round them at their rivals.6

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  We are talking of impacts, and undeniably an impression of the unscrupulous, paling into mere shadiness, has always struck observers to Hong Kong. Few outsiders have ever thought this a nice place. The mid-Victorian Colonial Secretary Bulwer-Lytton said that his dispatches from Hong Kong revealed ‘hatred, malice and uncharitableness in every possible variety’, while in 1859 The Times observed that the very name of the colony ‘may be not inaptly used as a euphonious synonym for a place not mentionable to ears polite’. The place was fostered, after all, by the narcotics trade, and problems of law and order, mayhem and immorality have plagued its rulers always.

  Piracy was the first basis of Hong Kong crime, together with smuggling, and was for years a local way of life. Pitched battles between the Royal Navy and pirate fleets were not uncommon, and while pirate commanders could be unbelievably bloodthirsty, sometimes they saw themselves in a romantic light – ‘Chief of the Sea Squadron’, proclaimed the banner flying from the masthead of one such nineteenth-century bravo, ‘who takes from the rich and not from the poor’. As late as the 1930s the steamers for Guangzhou and other China ports went to sea with their superstructures fortified with barbed wire, machine-guns mounted on their bridges and passengers locked in their cabins. The last pirates were driven from these waters only when the Communists took over the mainland harbours, and by then the tradition had diversified: it was in the skies between Hong Kong and Macao, in 1948, that a Hong Kong-owned Catalina flying-boat became the first aircraft to be hijacked – four armed pirates took it over, but in a struggle the pilot was shot, the aircraft crashed, and twenty-six people were killed.

  Some of the territory’s best-known crime stories have been wonderfully piratical. There was the occasion in 1878 when a gang of toughs sealed off a whole city block, fought off armed police, ransacked a store and escaped across the harbour in a steam launch. There was the mass escape, in 1864, of 100 convicts from the prison hulk Royal Saxon – nearly half its inmates, some of whom were never caught. There was the discovery in 1921 of eight and a half tons of Persian opium, guarded by an armed sampan in a cliff cave on the uninhabited island of Kau Yi Tsai. There were the robbers who, in 1865, spent several weeks tunnelling into the vaults of the Central Bank of Western India, getting away with a fortune in gold bullion. There was the attempted shooting in 1912 of the new Governor, Sir Henry May, when having at that moment disembarked from his ship from Fiji to take up his office, His Excellency was attacked at point-blank range while riding along the quay in his sedan-chair, carried by eight bearers in white gaiters and feathered hats and escorted by Sikh policemen through ranks of saluting soldiers. Best of all, there was the celebrated Poisoned Bread Case of 1857.

  This was a dramatic realization of that favourite Victorian chiller, the Yellow Peril. A Chinese patriot named Cheong Ah Lum, responding to the wave of xenophobia then sweeping China, decided to exterminate the principal British residents of Hong Kong. Since he was the most respected baker of the island, he was in a strong position to achieve this, and by slipping arsenic into his loaves he did indeed give some 400 Britons very severe indigestion (though by putting in too much, and thus making them vomit, he did not succeed in murdering them). Panic understandably seized the colony, the British Empire having only just been plunged into the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, but the plot was discovered and Cheong Ah Lum, though acquitted of murder for lack of evidence (by a judge and jury all of whom had swallowed some of his arsenic) was deported to China. With a shudder British society returned to normal, the Governor, Sir John Bowring, himself composing a hymn of thanksgiving to be sung in the Cathedral. For years afterwards visitors were shown Cheong Ah Lum’s bakery as a Chamber of Horrors, and a chunk of the poisoned bread, well-preserved by its arsenic, was kept in a cabinet in the Chief Justice’s office until the 1930s.

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  Pick up any local newspaper, and you will see that Hong Kong crime today, though generally less spectacular, can be just as surprising. The tang of it is always in the air, like the sting of profit; often the two merge, confirming I suppose the belief of idealistic Marxists that capitalism is a misdemeanour in itself.

  Though by international standards the rate of serious crime is remarkably low, the streets are generally safe and vandalism is rare, there is all the general chicanery one expects of a great city, especially a port-city so volatile as this: protection rackets, pornography, prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, violence of one sort or another. Every few months the Tactical Unit of the Hong Kong police force mounts an intensive anti-crime sweep, setting up road blocks, stopping and questioning thousands of citizens, raiding night-clubs, dance-halls and mah-jong schools, but though a few dozen arrests are always made the great body of organized crime is scarcely affected.

  The drug trade in particular is always on the boil. Until the 1930s the Hong Kong Government still leased out an opium farm, or agency, and the smoking of opium was legal here until 1940 – extraordinary survivals of old imperial mores. The subsequent banning of all narcotics has led to an inexpungable black market in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. In 1995 73 people were prosecuted for murder and manslaughter, 1,102 for rape and indecent assault, but 5,669 were charged with drug offences, whether with trafficking or with simple possession. At the other end of the crime market, ever and again the predictable cases of crooked dealing emerge from the affairs of big business.

  Much of the crime is organized by the Triads, secret societies which began as subversive political organizations in Manchu China, but developed into huge ramifications of skulduggery. Triads have been at work in Hong Kong almost since the start of the colony, and as 1997 impends are apparently intensifying their activities while the going is good. There are said to be at least fifty separate gangs in the city now, with at least 100,000 members, binding themselves together with secret oaths and rituals, and engaged like the Mafia in many kinds of criminal enterprise. They are supposed to number in their ranks many a well-educated and professionally respectable citizen, but they can be primitively brutal: a businessman stabbed to death by Triad hit-men in 1987 had been sent in warning, a few days earlier, the severed head of a dog.

  The largest Triads are far too prominent to be entirely clandestine, and play a more or less open part in Chinese community affairs, rather like the IRA in some parts of Northern Ireland. They are said to have infiltrated many schools, and young men join them as a demonstration of their manhood, or are trapped into complicity by their own dependence on drugs. The largest society of all, the Sun Yee On or 14K Triad, which moved to the colony from China after the Communist Revolution, is believed to have at least 25,000 members. Some Hong Kong Triads have become internationally powerful too, especially in the heroin business, with branch
es in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the United States, and agents in every overseas Chinese community: one of the most active along the drug routes is said to be the Tai Huen Chai Triad, the ‘Big Circle People’, which was set up in Hong Kong by former Chinese Army soldiers disgraced during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

  The Triads are seldom entertaining, but the small-time misbehaviour of Hong Kong can be wonderfully picaresque. The Hong Kong newspapers devote whole pages to the local court news, in the manner of English or American provincial newspapers half a century ago, and by monitoring them just for a few days I culled the following cases more or less at random:

  A house agent, pretending to be the owner of two premises, rents them out to twelve separate clients, taking deposits from each.

  A brothel manager is caught by the police hiding on an external second-storey ledge of his premises with an entirely naked employee.

  A woman police inspector, charged with stealing five cosmetic items and a birthday card from a store, says she was thinking about an important case she was involved in, and forgot to pay.

  A sixty-nine-year-old caretaker, charged with indecently molesting small girls, says that fondling children brings him good luck in gambling.

  Two men are fined for smuggling giant-panda furs on a sampan out of China.

  Undercover policemen posing as construction workers are caught gambling on the building site by other undercover policemen.

  A man advertising his Mercedes for sale is invited to bring it to a Kowloon hotel, where he is obliged to sign the papers of sale and is left bound and gagged while the villains sell the car to someone else.

  Most notoriously, Hong Kong has specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery, variously euphemized as ‘cumshaw’, ‘squeeze’, tea money, steak fees, kickback or entertainment expenses, has always been a fact of life, whether it is a street-vendor bribing the local constable to let him stay on his pitch, or a building contractor slipping a few thousand dollars to an appropriate Government department. Ever since the days of the compradors, the Chinese intermediaries who interpreted and negotiated for the early British merchants, Hong Kong has been run very largely by brokers, agents and go-betweens, and it is a small enough step from commission to graft. Besides, it is a dazzling, tempting city in itself – just the place to seduce those who are, as Conrad once wrote of corrupt officials in the East, ‘not dull enough to nurse a success’.

  If you find all this difficult to imagine, as you stroll home through a balmy summer evening from some agreeable function, where Mr X, the well-known investment broker, has been so very charming, Mr Y, the property millionaire, has inquired so kindly if he can be of any help to you in your work, and that perfectly delightful trainer from Happy Valley has invited you out on his junk next Sunday, lift your eyes beyond Statue Square to the top floor of the Garden Road multi-storey car-park. There is sure to be a light burning up there, however protracted your dinner has been, because it is the headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a body established in 1974, rather in desperation, to fight squeeze, cumshaw and tea money in the colony.

  Its powers are immense – it can act without higher authority to inspect any institution, public or private, it can hold suspects without trial indefinitely, and it receives an inexhaustible flow of intelligence about the private lives of everyone, from the Governor down. In 1988 its agents arrested the chairman of the Stock Exchange itself, on suspicion of corruption. Its interrogations are said to be severe, and quite likely some poor devil is being questioned up there at this moment. Brokers and property developers are likely suspects of course, but you would be surprised how many Jockey Club trainers have been invited to the ICAC car-park too.

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  Many foreigners, especially perhaps Japanese and Americans of a certain age, think of Hong Kong primarily as a place of sexual licence, where a business trip is easily lubricated by adventures on the town, and painted girls in topless bars are always ready to ease the tension after dark.

  Indeed it is a louche and lascivious city. Sexual gossip abounds. A judge is observed in a red-light district, a well-known Chinese lady is seen in Macao with an influential administrator. Illicit relationships true or imaginary are staples of conversation, and several thousand people, including Heaven-knows-who, are said to be on a secret police list of homosexuals. It was always so. From the beginning Hong Kong seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements, partly because of the climate perhaps, partly because European males have always been attracted by nubile Chinese females, partly because the early settlers were often men of vigorous appetite and flexible morals, and partly because the air of Hong Kong somehow seems to suggest that in sex, as in most other things, anything goes.

  Even in High Victorian times, it appears, English gentlemen might acceptably flirt with Chinese women, as they certainly might not with Africans or Indians. The London Graphic reported with amusement, in 1872, the response of an Englishman disembarking in Hong Kong when a pretty Chinese girl asked if she could wash his clothes for him: ‘Yes! and me too, if you like, my duck of diamonds!’ Many nineteenth-century Europeans took Chinese mistresses. From their liaisons sprang a Eurasian community which still survives, though nowadays its members tend to think of themselves simply as Chinese, and which has produced some distinguished citizens – notably Sir Robert Ho Tung, said to be Hong Kong’s first millionaire.

  Very early in the colony’s history we read of brothels flourishing in the area off Hollywood Road, west of Central, staffed sometimes by Chinese, but often by Europeans and Americans. ‘Clouds and rain’ was the Chinese slang for sexual intercourse, but the English equivalent was ‘honey’. The Beehive Inn, a well-known bordello of the mid nineteenth century, hung out a sign saying:

  Within this hive, we’re all alive,

  And pleasant is our honey;

  If you are dry, step in and try,

  We sells for ready money.

  And when in 1851 an Australian ‘actress’ opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace she advertised it thus in the Press: ‘At Mrs Randall’s – a small quantity of good HONEY in small jars.’ Church-going colonists, leading merchants, senior Government officials, were not ashamed to visit these houses, and visitors were often shown them. Kipling, when he visited Hong Kong in 1888, spent a night inspecting the stews, and wrote about it freely in From Sea To Sea. He declared it ‘Life with a Capital Hell’, being especially perturbed by his discovery of Englishwomen among the whores.7 Even in the 1930s the best-known of the contemporary madams, the Russian-born Ethel Morrison, was a familiar figure of Hong Kong society, and when she died there was a memorial service for her at the Anglican Cathedral.

  The grander brothels presently moved to the Happy Valley area, the rougher ones further west, so that the area called Kennedy Town entered the naval vocabulary for a generation or two (though Her Majesty’s ships were also served by a peripatetic corps called The Midnight Fairies, who used to climb their hulls at dead of night). Later the red lights shifted again, and for a time made the name of Wanchai, a hitherto seedy district surrounding Lockhart Road, a soldiers’ and sailors’ synonym for roister:

  Way down in Wanchai there is a place of fame

  There stands a street, and Lockhart is its name.

  Slant-eyed Chinese maidens all around I see,

  Calling out ‘Artillery man, abide with me’.8

  During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, when Hong Kong became a centre for Rest and Recreation (‘R and R’) for the United States forces, Wanchai was like a wildly liberated Las Vegas. All along Lockhart Road and down the dimmer side-alleys, girls offered their wares at the doors of bars, music pulsed across the sidewalks, soldiers and sailors staggered drunkenly along the pavements, whistled the wolf-whistle which was the contemporary signal of machismo, and were skilfully fleeced by bartenders, restaurateurs, madams and whores
alike. To this day there are many Americans to whom the name of Hong Kong suggests first of all The World of Suzie Wong, Richard Mason’s novel about a golden-hearted Wanchai prostitute in a waterfront hotel: it was made into a famous film,9 and can still bring a nostalgic look into the eyes of veterans far away.

  Today Hong Kong’s night-life is concentrated over the water in Kowloon, and a relative peace has fallen upon Wanchai – even Suzie Wong’s hotel, the Luk Kwok, has been reborn as a popular family hostelry. It is the area of Nathan Road that now more often summons the end-of-day businessmen, mostly Japanese nowadays, and the visiting seamen (though there is still no shortage of Midnight Fairies among the sampan people). There the topless bars are the most topless, and the honey is most overtly for sale.

  A vast panoply of neon advertisements casts the whole area into a gaudy glow, like a nightmare disco, their huge signs in Chinese and English marching one behind the other far up Nathan Road towards the mountains. Like all advertising displays in Hong Kong they are obliged by law to be motionless, to avoid confusing the navigators of ships and aircraft, and this unwinking stillness of them, their reds and golds and purples staring so gigantically sterile down the street, seems to emphasize the calculated nature of the pleasures to be found below.

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  Yet heartless and loveless though it may sometimes seem, Hong Kong by and large is a remarkably festive place, and a general sense of having a good time is shared by all races, at all levels of wealth and poverty.