by Jan Morris
It is true that even in the water-colours the miscellaneous crowd of Chinese idlers, together with stray dogs and grazing donkeys, rather spoils the elegance of the Sunday afternoon promenade, on the parade-grounds beside the new Cathedral; but still a military band plays, and through the crowd one sees a sprinkling of decorous English families, gentlemanly-looking strollers with canes and boutonnières, pantalooned children with their Chinese nursemaids, and benevolently watching from his porch above, one likes to fancy, the newly appointed Right Reverend Bishop of Victoria, whose diocese also embraces Japan and the whole of China.
The flag flies over Head Quarter House. Turbaned Sikhs salute passing officers. Down in the harbour there is a flash of oars, perhaps, as the Commodore is conveyed in spendour from his flagship, the magnificent seventy-two-gun battleship Blenheim, to pay a call upon His Excellency the Governor. When the light was kind, when you looked the right way, Hong Kong was already recognizably Imperial; even Mr Robert Fortune was stirred by the knowlege that here ‘lives and property were safe under the British flag, which has … braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze’.
But off-shore at the eastern end of Victoria there lay another kind of headquarters ship, looking distinctly less ceremonial than the Blenheim, and smelling in an odd way of rotting vegetables. It was the smell of opium, very familiar in these parts, and the vessel was the massive old Indian trader Hormanjee Bormanjee, in whose holds, during the first years of Hong Kong, Messrs Jardine and Matheson stored not only their bullion, but the drugs which their swift armed clippers would distribute up and down the China coast.
In a way the Hormanjee Bormanjee was more truly a colonial flagship than the Commodore’s battleship, for Hong Kong frankly depended then upon the profits of the narcotic trade. ‘In common with every Philanthropist,’ piously proclaimed the Friend of China in its very first issue, 1842, ‘we must deeply deplore the addiction of the Chinese to this fascinating vice,’ but hardly anybody really believed it – even the Great Seal of the colony, designed in 1844 by the Queen’s own medallist-in-chief, depicted beneath the royal crest a waterfront piled profitably with what might have been tea-boxes, but were generally assumed to be opium chests. In 1844 the Governor himself declared that almost anyone with any capital in the colony was either in the Government service, or else in the drug trade.
For every British warship in the roads, there were likely to be two or three opium clippers, as spendidly equipped, as confidently dressed as any frigate. The flag above the general’s residence was no more assertive than the flag above the Jardine, Matheson headquarters at East Point, half a mile along the shore. Hong Kong’s Government might be clothing itself in consequence; in cash it was far outshone by the merchant community, which brought to the colony all the insolent panache it had developed at Guangzhou. ‘You will like to know’, Robert Jardine wrote home in 1849, ‘who have got the nicest houses here. As you are aware the Governor and the General have generally the finest, here it is not so, “Who then?” – Jardine’s …’
Within a few years of the colony’s settlement dozens of merchant companies had come to Hong Kong, together with European shopkeepers, physicians, publicans and miscellanous commercial men. Most of the companies were British or Indian, but they included American, German, Italian, Dutch and French concerns, and they were dominated by three old familiars from Guangzhou: Jardine, Matheson, the most famous or notorious of them all, with five partners and twenty European assistants; Dent and Company, their chief rivals, with five partners and eight assistants; and the American Russell and Company, with six partners and eight assistants.
Life in Hong Kong really revolved not around the Governor, but around these formidable hongs and their bosses the taipans. Not only were they the shipowners, the warehouse men, the accountants, the agents and the chandlers of the colony, but they also played the parts of insurers and bankers. It was they who had induced the British Government to acquire this island, and they considered themselves its true possessors. The historian G. R. Sayer1 likened Hong Kong in these early years to the headquarters of a commercial expeditionary force, whose outposts were at the Treaty Ports along the China coast; if the Governor was its chief of staff, unquestionably its field commanders were the taipans.
For they were frontier merchants of the most shrewd and energetic kind. Their rivalry was fierce, their methods were no-holds-barred, and they all lived for the moment, in the happy knowledge that twenty years in this place would make most of them rich. Few intended to stay longer, and the taipans frequently came and went, often handing over dynastically to family successors. William Jardine himself, who never came to Hong Kong, had spent only twelve years on the China coast; his partner James Matheson presently went home after nineteen years; but other Jardines, other Mathesons and lateral descendants of both clans were to remain in Hong Kong for generations.
They lived in some style, influenced still by memories of the East India Company at Guangzhou. The independent merchants had loathed that immense and venerable establishment, but had caught some of its attitudes all the same. Thus those waterfront offices of Hong Kong were clearly descended from the EIC’s old factories, and the manner of life among the merchants was distinctly John Company. Like the Anglo-Indians, they had their native surrogates, the go-betweens between rulers and ruled; the compradors were the interpreters, the middlemen of the hongs and often important men in their own right. Like the Anglo-Indians again, the merchants worked extremely hard, scorning the effete Latin notion of the siesta, as it was practised at Macao, and dressing for the office as they would dress for it in England, in high collars, thick suits and boots.
Like the Anglo-Indians, they sustained themselves amply in their exile. The assistants (nicknamed here, as in India, ‘griffins’) lived for the most part in messes, but the more senior men, who sometimes had wives and families with them, occupied sizeable houses; one advertised for sale in 1845 had two thirty-foot sitting rooms, five bedrooms with bathrooms en suite, two 100-foot verandahs closed by Venetian blinds, and ‘commodious out-buildings for servants’. Dent’s maintained a fine garden villa on the waterfront, prominent in those ship-deck pictures. Jardine’s No. 1 House, the one Robert Jardine bragged about, was a mansion in the Grecian mode, where the partners of the day were attended by many servants and well-protected against the island fevers – David Jardine’s London tailors, sending him a bill for a suit, expressed surprise at the increase in his measurements, and were ‘pleased to infer that the climate of Hong Kong agrees with your constitution’.
It was not however the climate. Jardine’s had imported a chef from London, just as Dent’s had brought one from France, and the taipans and all their assistants were very well fed. Victuals as varied as Dublin stout, English hams, tripes and tinned oatmeal were regularly shipped from Britain, alcohol seems to have been unlimited – they drank claret with their breakfasts, beer with their midday tiffin, and in the evenings great quantities of claret, champagne and port. As for local provisions, the Friend of China tells us that as early as 1842 beef was cheap and there was plenty of milk and butter. One could get pheasant, partridge, venison and all kinds of fish familiar and unknown. Ice soon became available from a publicly subscribed ice-house, and there was a Sheep Club whose members clubbed together to graze Indian and Australian sheep for mutton (though a London Times reporter, George Wingrove Cooke, writing about the Hong Kong cuisine in the following decade, complained that because in summer the sheep had to be killed on the day of eating, their meat was ‘as hard as death stiffened them’).
The merchants were nearly all young men, even the taipans being seldom older than thirty, and whether they lived in houses or in company messes, pursued their lives with a boyish brio, larking about a lot, playing a great deal of billiards, smoking heavily and living it up at the Happy Valley races, which were like country race-meetings in Ireland, and were dominated by the hongs’ own racing ponies. ‘I never saw one of the young clerks with a book in his hands,’
wrote the genial Albert Smith;2 they had, he said ‘a mind-mouldering time of it’. For the most part their jobs were office jobs, tedious enough labours of accountancy and stock-taking, but all around them was the excitement of get-rich-quick. Everything was urgent, everything was fast, not everything was above-board. The opium ships that sailed in and out of the harbour were ships made for speed and getaway, raked schooners built to the latest American pattern. The tea clippers that stopped by were the most powerful sailers of their day, engaged in perpetual thrilling races with each other on the long run to England. Hard, reckless, well-paid captains came and went, telling tales of hit-and-run battles with Chinese cruisers, or planning yet more sensational voyages home.
In the early years of the decade many businessmen regretted their move to Hong Kong, and thought of returning to Macao or Guangzhou. Later confidence fitfully grew. Hong Kong had certainly not yet become the immense mart of trade that Pottinger forecast, partly because the China commerce was now funnelled also through the Treaty Ports, but it was not languishing. Its free-port status brought much traffic, there being at that time no customs dues at all. Apart from opium, still illicit in China but still immensely profitable, there was trade in cotton, sugar candy, rattans, salt and tea – much of it smuggled through the Chinese customs. Dent’s, it was true, were getting into financial difficulties by the middle of the decade, their scheme to make Hong Kong the principal tea centre of the China coast having failed, but Jardine’s compound at East Point, around and below No. 1 House, was thriving. Built upon a small promontory, looking across to the Hormanjee Bormanjee, its three-storey warehouse was surrounded by granite and brick workshops, stables and lesser houses, and it sponsored its own Chinese quarter, Jardine’s Bazaar, on the higher ground behind. From its shipyard was launched the first foreign ship built in Hong Kong, the schooner Celestial.
Another mid-century observer, the civil servant Alfred Weatherhead, declared that the chief reason why people remained in Hong Kong was ‘the powerful, all-absorbing love of gain’. So it was, and not least among the well-mannered but extremely hard-headed Scots who set the tone of Jardine, Matheson. When in 1850 a partner’s daughter, a Miss MacLean, had her wedding breakfast at the East Point compound, with fifty guests and a merry dance, the company accountant wrote characteristically to a friend recently returned home, when the festivities were over: ‘It was a capital chance for your Plate, which I began to despair of selling, and I got old MacLean to take it at your price of $200 …’
Inevitably these two societies, the official and the merchant, clashed. They mingled at weddings of course, they shared the Club and the racecourse, but their differences were fundamental. The best of the officials – only the best – were concerned with the imperial interest, the general extension of trade, Christianity and all else that went with the glory of England. The best of the merchants – even the best – were concerned with self-enrichment. Government sought to raise sufficient revenue to pay for the administration of the place. Merchants resisted all efforts to raise taxes, and they were perfectly ready to evade British authority altogether, if necessary, by becoming honorary consuls of foreign powers, or by sailing their ships under Danish or American flags. The two sides thus worked to different rules, all too often honoured different standards, and the life of the colony was punctuated by rows between them – the London Times once remarked in despair that Hong Kong seemed always to be racked by ‘some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war or some discreditable internal squabble’.
In particular the merchants were antagonized by Governors of liberal tendencies, Governors who were thought to be too sympathetic to the Chinese, or Governors who showed insufficient respect for Free Trade in all commodities, especially opium. Pottinger the first Governor, a militant man, seemed at first to be just their kind, and when he posted an order (later rescinded anyway) that opium ships would not be allowed in the harbour, James Matheson commented knowingly: ‘Sir Henry never means to act on it, and no doubt privately considers it a good joke.’ Even he, though, upset nearly everybody in the end, and his successor Sir John Davis, who headed the administration for most of the 1840s, had nothing but trouble.
For Davis was not only a Protectionist, but also a Sinologue, having lived and worked on the China coast on and off for thirty years, mostly with the East India Company which the independent merchants had so detested. He was a man of fastidious if intrusive culture, had translated some of the Chinese classics into English, and was always saying ‘That’s not how the Company used to do it.’ He was hardly the man to please the traders, and in return he frankly despised most of them. In no time at all he had infuriated them by reducing the terms of their land leases (they claimed they had been promised perpetual tenure), imposing a property tax, setting up Government opium and salt monopolies to be let at auction, and trying to make everyone, English or Chinese, register with the Government.
The merchants disliked everything about Davis. They were affronted when they discovered he had emblazoned his own armorial bearings, displaying three stars and a bloody hand, on the tower of the new Cathedral, whose foundation stone he had laid. They were irritated by his choice of street names for the growing town: he named Shelley Street after the later bankrupted Colonial Auditor, and he named Hollywood Road after his own family home at Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol, but ‘not even a lane’, wrote Alexander Matheson crossly, ‘for a merchant’. They were so furious about the registration plan that Davis was forced to withdraw the proposal, and impose the register only upon the Chinese.
Not only did the merchants stir their lobbyists in London into action against Davis, but they treated him with boorish incivility. A memorial of protest they once sent to him was so rudely worded that he refused to accept it, and when the unfortunate Governor was due to present the Plenipotentiary Cup at Happy Valley in 1848, not a single horse was entered for the race. ‘It is a much easier task’, wrote Davis querulously to Lord Stanley, ‘to govern the 20,000 Chinese inhabitants of this colony, than a few hundreds of English.’
The temper of Hong Kong being what it was (‘the land of libel and the haunt of fever’), Davis was also led into controversy with some of his own officials. He was at odds with his Colonial Treasurer, Robert Montgomery Martin, the man who thought the very possession of Hong Kong a mistake, and who once likened the island to a decayed Stilton cheese. Despite the street name he described his Colonial Auditor as dissipated and negligent. He was daggers drawn with his Chief Justice, John Walter Hume, whom he rashly accused, in a letter to Lord Palmerston himself, now the Prime Minister, of being a habitual drunkard.
When London unexpectedly responded by ordering an official inquiry into this charge, Davis lost his nerve and offered his resignation. It was, says E. J. Eitel, Hong Kong’s first historian, ‘unhesitatingly accepted’,3 and the delighted merchant community boycotted all the farewell ceremonials, when Davis sailed away from the quayside to ‘the faint cheer of a few devoted friends’. The Friend of China cocked a last snook with the sarcastic valedictory: ‘Never, surely, in the Heavens above, or in the earth beneath, did there ever exist, embodied or disembodied, such a pleasant little gentleman as Sir John Davis.’
His successor, Sir George Bonham, was much more to the merchants’ taste. Since he concentrated on reducing official expenditure rather than raising more revenue, and since he spoke no word of any Chinese language, and indeed declared the mere study of Chinese ‘warping to the mind’, they thought him a capital fellow.
These unlovely conflicts at the heart of things, at the beginning of things, did not help to raise the moral standards of Hong Kong as a whole, and already an insistent strain of villainy ran through its affairs, orchestrated by rumour, gossip, backbite, slander and intrigue.
At the top was the presiding dubiousness of the opium trade. At the bottom, every kind of vice flourished among the Chinese proletariat and the crowds of sailors, soldiers and miscellaneous beachcombers of the waterfront. In the middle was a floating pop
ulation of European adventurers and confidence tricksters – ‘Why did he leave home?’ was the first question asked about any unannounced newcomer. Almost everything was tainted in one way or another. Official dispatches were often carried on opium schooners, and the equivocal cleric Karl Gutzlaff, Chinese Secretary, had previously acted as an interpreter on Jardine’s drug-smuggling ships, distributing Christ’s message to the heathen at the same time.
For all those burgeoning symptoms of the imperial order, this was a tough town. It was a seaport of the east, a garrison town, a smuggling centre, a haunt of pirates and racketeers, a drug market and already, with its admixture of Portuguese, Parsees, Americans and many other nationalities, among the most cosmopolitan of all Her Majesty’s possessions. Triads from Guangzhou had very soon infiltrated the Hong Kong underworld, bringing to the colony every kind of hustler. Opium divans and gambling schools abounded, brothels flourished: the Chinese population of Victoria, it was estimated in 1842, supported 439 prostitutes in twenty-three houses, 131 opium sellers in twenty-four shops.
It was a great place for pubs, too, many of them kept by former seamen and pretty tough themselves: we read of the British Queen, the Britain’s Boast, the Britannia, the Golden Tavern, the Caledonian, the Eagle, the Waterloo, the Commercial, and we hear frequently of drunken brawls outside them – the Friend of China reported one day in 1842 that two sailors from the Blenheim, drunk, stripped to the waist and streaming with blood, fought a boxing match outside Labtat’s Tavern watched by a crowd that included half-a-dozen policemen.
Sharp dealing in currency was rampant: coins from Britain, China, India, Spain, Mexico and all South American states circulated legally and were ripe for manipulation. As for the profiteers who flocked to every nineteenth-century frontier town, every new settlement upon a foreign shore, they were in their element here: H. C. Sirr, newly arrived as Attorney-General in 1844, claimed that his boarding-house, through whose windows the rain dismally poured, was as expensive as a first-class London hotel (he was explaining, in the magistrate’s court, why he had felt it necessary to assault its proprietor).