by Jan Morris
In a thousand ways old tastes, habits and techniques resist all challenge. Here in the heartland of the solar-powered calculator, where virtually every household has a television set, and every schoolboy can write a computer program, the abacus is still a common commercial instrument. Skyscrapers go up in frameworks of bamboo scaffolding. Chinese harmonics easily withstand the assaults of rock and European classical music. The clatter of mah-jong, which the Chinese have been playing in one form or another since the Song dynasty, is still far more common a sound than the ping of electronic games. Side by side with the western calendar the lunar calendar is observed, and everyone in Hong Kong knows what Chinese year it is (1997 is the Year of the Ox).
After 140 years place-names often resist westernization. To Chinese people Stanley is still Chek Chu, as it was before the British came, Aberdeen is still Hong Kong Tsai, Little Hong Kong, and Mount Davis Road is Moh Sing Ling To, the Hill From Which We Can Touch The Stars. Into our own times the Chinese have called the Governor of Hong Kong Ping Tao, ‘Military Chief’, and the Botanical Gardens, across the road from his palace, are still known as Ping Tao Fa Yuen, Military Chiefs Flower Garden. As for Chinese personal names, they defy all western practice still, since in the course of a lifetime a Hong Kong Chinese may have five or six different aliases – milk name in babyhood, proper name in childhood, school name, class name, business name, marriage name …
The Chinese of Hong Kong have a powerful aptitude for belief. They believe in gods and ghosts, signs and auguries, and supernatural faiths of one kind or another permeate every facet of the territory, ranging from sophisticated theological dogma to everyday superstition – the small mirrors so often to be seen hanging outside shops and houses are not there for decoration, but to ward off evil spirits. Half a million Hong Kong Chinese are Christians or Muslims, but many, many more are Daoists, Buddhists or animists, and many pursue an eclectically layered combination of religions – what Peter Fleming once called ‘the marzipan effect’.13 The gods of their pantheon, not so much worshipped as supplicated for favours, are innumerable – monkey gods, sea gods, earth gods, kitchen gods, martial gods, water gods, gods of affluence, of mercy, of happiness, of justice, of long life, of wisdom, of literary aptitude and conversely of wealth. When in 1980 the New Territories village of Fanling held a festival, seventy-eight different divinities were honoured; houses and apartments have private shrines to their own hearth gods, and almost anywhere you may come across the gypsy-like little sanctuary of stones, ribbons, red paper and candle stumps which marks a holy site of animism, with a couple of elderly ladies perhaps fiddling around with joss-sticks, or pulling cabalistic papers out of carrier bags.
Nor are these mere rural archaisms. The most thoroughly urbanized parts of Hong Kong are among the most powerfully religious. Many small Buddhist hermitages, sometimes housing a single holy man, are actually on upper floors of high-rise blocks, and the best-known of the myriad urban temples are as thronged as supermarkets – look in at any time of day, and there will be the caretakers at their dusty desks, surrounded by holy texts and pictures, and before the gaudy altars women will be shaking the chim, the box of bamboo fortune-sticks, while incense smokes, bells tinkle and the blackened god-images peer down from their altars. The vivacious temple of Wong Tai Sin, rebuilt in the grand manner in 1973, serves the new residential quarters of eastern Kowloon, and is surrounded by tower-blocks. Used mainly as an oracle for the foretelling of the future, it is a positive powerhouse of the transcendental: bright with colour, attended by arcades of soothsayers and charm-sellers, with occasional flute-players too, haunted by beggars with tin cups and conveniently served by an adjacent station of the underground railway. The fortune-sticks that fall from your chim are interpreted for you by the soothsayers, and if they recommend a prescription for some ailment, you can get it made up at the temple’s own clinic.
Not so long ago one of the hazards of driving in Hong Kong was the belief among elderly Chinese that if they stood close enough to a passing car any evil spirits at their heels would be run over. In 1960, when the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club suffered a series of calamities, including the death of a jockey, a Buddhist service of exorcism was held for four days and three nights upon the Happy Valley racecourse, led by sixty-eight monks and forty-eight nuns and attended it was reported by 40,000 citizens. The Ratings and Valuations Department, then housed in a former barracks, was also exorcised of ghosts left there since the Japanese occupation; the Press was given a preview of the ceremony. Three times a month childless women make their way to the phallic boulder called Yan Yuen Sek, up a track above Bowen Road in mid-Levels, where against a backdrop of plush apartment blocks, with the harbour beyond and the distant roar of traffic muffled through the trees, they light their joss-sticks, say their prayers and consult their fortunes in the lee of the monolith, which has probably been since neolithic times a symbol of fertility. The airy substances which waver and float above the scene are sometimes fragments of burnt offering, and sometimes dragon-flies.
Hong Kong’s mountains and outlying islands are positively impregnated with holy thought and practice. If you fly over the New Territories in a helicopter you will discover that throughout the rough hill country are strewn the omega-shaped enclosures of ancestral graves, all alone in propitious sites, giving the whole massif a suggestion of sacred dedication. The island of Ap Chau is colloquially known as the Jesus island, since it is inhabited entirely by Chinese adherents of the True Jesus Church; hardly less holy is Lantau, convulsed though it is, as I write, by the building of Hong Kong’s enormous new airport on its ancillary islet of Chep Lak Kok.
That all too well-known temple of Po Lin is only one of a dozen retreats strewn across this large, bare and beautiful island, from red-roofed Buddhist monasteries in the flanks of mountain valleys to a rest camp for Christian missionaries high in the hills (the village of Tai O, on the western shore, was reported by the London Missionary Society in 1917 to be ‘a stronghold of idolatry’). Proud above the sea at the northern end of the island is the church of the Trappist Monastery, whose community came here from Communist China. Its thirty silent Chinese monks (together, in 1987, with one Englishman) run their estate as a dairy farm, and for years provided the Hilton Hotel with all its milk. A most homely smell of hay and cow-dung greets the visitor to their ugly buildings, together with the text PAX INTRANTIBUS, SALUS EXUENTIBUS – ‘Peace to those who enter, health to those who leave’.
And on a plateau in the south, reached only by footpaths, high and exquisitely lonely stands the Buddhist monastery of Tsz Hing. The clanging of its bells, the chanting of its monks at their devotions, float magically on the wind above the empty grassland all around.
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Often the old Chinese traditions are formally institutionalized within the structure of this British colony. There are many Buddhist schools, there is a flourishing Confucianist academy, and the Chinese Temple Society administers most of the temples. The charitable body called Tung Wah, founded in the nineteenth century specifically to run a Chinese hospital, became almost a tribune of the people, and is now a complex agency of Chineseness. The Triads themselves are extremely traditional: in the Sun Yee On Triad, for instance, senior officers have ritual names, like Dragon Heads or White Paper Fan, and a functionary called the Incense Master, straight from Manchu China, supervises the whole hocus-pocus of ritual, codes and cryptic signs.
In the New Territories especially ancient conventions are still formally honoured. Ancestral halls may be crumbling and rubbish-strewn, old architecture disappearing, but the heritage is far from abandoned. The native people of the New Territories are officially called indigenes, to distinguish them from immigrants to Hong Kong, and they have long memories. Some 6,000 clan organizations, officially recognized, own and administer ancestral or communal properties. At Tai O the village ferry is still run by the Kai Fong, the traditional residents’ association which used to provide the village watchmen too. On Cheung Chau tenants still
pay rents to 400 members of the family which owned the island before the British came. The descendants of Lin Tao-yi, a thirteenth-century citizen of Kowloon, are paid a share of the moneys collected at the temple he built on Joss House Bay.
The walled village of Kat Hing Wai may have been degraded into self-display, but near Shatin another example, the Hakka village of Tsang Tai Uk, though run-down and hemmed in by urban development, is recognizably what it always was. Its name means Mansion of the Tsang Family, and it is more like a medieval castle than a village. Within its high square towered walls is a cheek-by-jowl, jam-packed assembly of four parallel brick alleys, very private of feeling, with a temple in the middle. It is strewn with the bicycles, potted plants, dogs, children and outdoor washing machines of domestic life, and seems to form one extended household to this day.
Further north, at the village of Wang Toi Shan, though a main road passes nearby and all the modern domestic conveniences are available, the Tangs still cling to their ancestral rights. They own 60 per cent of the village still, and each male has the legal right to build himself a new house there, perpetuating the clan’s hold over its fortunes. Its members live very traditionally, I learned from a Chinese-language television programme in 1986. They are buried as they always were, in ancestrally approved locations. They scorn to educate their daughters, who are expected to marry outside the village to avoid in-breeding, and so are regarded as merely temporary residents. They gamble incessantly, and the men share all the profits of the clan-owned lands. As a young Tang of Wang Toi Shan told the television interviewer, ‘We don’t have to work here, we just have pleasure. Or we work for three years, rest for five.’
Chinese medicine, pithily summed up by a nineteenth-century British Medical Officer as ‘empiricism and quackery’, is practised assiduously still in Hong Kong. Many Chinese people distrust western cures and treatment, having far more faith in the efficacy of bear’s gall, weasel’s liver, and other old stalwarts of the Chinese pharmacopoeia. The herbalist’s shop is a common sight of Chinese Hong Kong. Its remedies are meticulously stacked in files and boxes, and the most precious of its specifics, like deer horn or Bezoar, which comes from the stomachs of ruminants, are laid out reverently in the window, sometimes in big glass caskets, sometimes on cushions of cotton wool.
Chinese mortuary practices survive, too. It is customary still to exhume the bones of the dead from their original graves and transfer them to urns; though now that bones decompose more slowly than they used to, I am told, under the influence of antibiotics, they are generally left in their graves for eight years, instead of the traditionally lucky six.
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Then there is feng shui, wind and water, the geometry of place and balance. You can hardly not come across feng shui in Hong Kong. Its grasp upon the Chinese mind is tenacious, and the annals are full of its influences. James Hayes the historian has given us14 a letter, written in 1961 to a District Officer, which he describes as a classic statement of feng shui fixation. Here it is:
Sir,
The hillside behind my hut is known, in feng shui terminology, as the Dragon’s Vein, and is therefore of great importance to our villagers.
This fact notwithstanding, an outsider has had the audacity to hire some workmen to dig up the earth there in an attempt to build a house on the site. In so doing he has neither obtained the consent of the village elders nor applied to your Office first for a survey. Thus no sooner had the work started than the villagers’ livestock, such as cattle, pigs and dogs, were afflicted with disease and ceased to drink or eat.
Their condition has shown some slight improvement only after I had the holes filled up and after a charm was employed to invoke the gods to drive away the evil spirit.
However, this man has no respect for our native traditions and is planning to tamper with the earth again. As this lawless character is not likely to show the least concern for our safety, would you please send an officer over as soon as possible to prevent him from carrying out these activities.
Dr Hayes comments that ‘the geomantic quality of the land in question, the adverse effect of the interference with it, the remedy applied, the lawlessness of the offender, are all essential ingredients to a feng shui scenario’. Certainly in the past feng shui, with its undertones of magic and animism, has proved itself in the colonial context variously constructive and obstructive, comforting and terrifying, grand and petty. On the one hand whole villages were sometimes abandoned because the local feng shui had been disturbed, upsetting the cosmic balance, and European miners had to be imported to build the first railway tunnels because Chinese would not risk disturbing the earth-spirits; on the other hand feng shui gave to the countryside, in particular, a grace and proportion not entirely obliterated even now. Often it also had rapscallion perspectives. When a ship went ashore at Lantau in 1980 some of the islanders demanded compensation from the Marine Department on the grounds that its violation of the local feng shui had caused the otherwise inexplicable deaths of many chickens.
Even today no Hong Kong employer, from the richest bank to the simplest corner store, can afford to ignore the precepts of Wind and Water. Just as the wrong siting of an ancestral grave could affect the fortunes of descendants for ever after, so faulty design in factory or office can antagonize the earth-forces or the spirit world and bring bad luck upon all its workers. The doors of the Mandarin Hotel in Central were placed at an angle to the street to discourage the entry of inimical influences. The fifth chimney of the power station of Aberdeen is said to be there purely for safety’s sake – four chimneys would be unlucky because the Chinese word for four sounds like the word for death. A weeping willow was planted in the gardens of Government House to ward off the ‘secret arrows’ of the Bank of China towering nearby. Feng shui is inescapable in this British trading colony and financial centre: even the two-day tourist is likely to see, mysterious in the windows of antique shops, the dizzily complicated disks and rulers with which the geomancer practises his craft (guarding for instance against any conjunction of the measurement 43 with the measurement 5 ⅜, or making sure that the Five Elements, the Ten Stems and the Twelve Branches are auspiciously aligned).
I called once upon an eminent geomancer at his headquarters at Tsuen Wan in the New Territories. He also runs an electronic manufacturing company, and his office was air-conditioned, and contained an aquarium full of extremely valuable carp. Wearing a brilliantly white shirt and striped tie, with a gold pen in his breast pocket, a gold watch and gold-rimmed spectacles, he made his points by tapping his cigarette lighter on his desk, and suggested to me a rather mature computer buff. In fact he was above all a devotee of feng shui. It was the first thing of his life, he told me, which he had learnt from an older master as all practitioners must.
True feng shui had nothing to do with magic, he said, although in the old China it used to be given an esoteric mystery by magicians in yellow robes. It was a matter of harmony between man and nature, and was concerned with location, with colour, with proportion. As he scribbled some illustrative diagrams in my notebook, and considered the question of whether feng shui was an art or a science (a philosophy, he rather thought), he told me that he was never short of geomantic business. Indeed his press cuttings showed him in an honoured place at the opening ceremonies of Hong Kong’s most spectacular new building, the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, to the design of which he had contributed his expertise.
Actually that building, he said in a technical tone of voice, occupied one of the twenty best feng shui sites in the whole territory – with its back to mountains, beside flowing ridges, at the very bottom of one spur in a group of seven, on a gentle sloping site, facing the sea. Even so, he had felt obliged to make certain recommendations to improve the good fortune of the place, in particular adjusting the angles of the escalators.
The sophisticated assurance of such men, the unquestioning acceptance of their skills by highly educated Chinese, half-convinces many Europeans, too, that f
eng shui makes sense. As long ago as 1926 Sir Cecil Clementi, the Governor of the day, suggested that it might be regarded in some contexts as ‘at least an embryonic form of the town-planning idea’, and undeniably the feng shui woodlands planted by the ancients are ecologically valuable today. It is hard to know whether the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank people, when they agreed to shift the escalators, really believed it would be beneficial, or whether they simply wanted to keep their employees happy; but some expatriates certainly employ a geomancer to approve the siting, the architecture or even the furnishing of their new houses, ‘just in case’ – for they have caught from the Chinese the cheerful if fatalistic attitude that it is worth appeasing all gods, in case one of them exists.
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If there was ever a time when the Chinese of Hong Kong were truly subject to the foreigner, it has long gone. Numerically so overwhelming, psychologically they have grown only stronger down the years. More than half of them, and that the younger and more virile half, have been born in Hong Kong, and as the British prepare to leave the place already one can sense them dismissing the whole business of colonialism from their minds. They are Chinese first, after all, to whom the existence of this Crown possession has been no more than a fortunate convenience. I dare say even the most virulently anti-Communist of them, the most sympathetic towards the west, feels a certain satisfaction at the thought of Hong Kong returning to its roots.
We have glimpsed them rich and poor, but their great strength now lies in their young, educated, clever, modern and progressive middle class. This has been brought into existence by the British, during half a century of liberal education, and is unlike anything in China proper. You see its members everywhere. Consider for example this cluster of university students on the upper deck of an out-island ferry – a Saturday-morning ferry, say, taking them for a day’s hiking and picnicking somewhere. They are extremely lively, extremely neat, extremely polite and engaging young people. Talking loudly, laughing a lot, with their bright blue rucksacks, their sneakers and their Walkman radios they look thoroughly modern, and if you engage them in conversation you will find that they are liberated in their emotions too. They may seem to think more practically, calculate more exactly than their counterparts in the west. They are still, as a rule, far more devoted to their families. But they are certainly not interested only, as the old Hong Kong canard has it, in money, and they are noticeably not respectful to the old Confucianist ideas of a rigid social order. They are just as idealistic, no more, no less, than young Europeans or Americans, just as concerned with a proper balance of life, between the necessary making of money and enjoyable ways of using it. Some are power-hungry, some drop-outs, some honest plodders, some dreamers. All in all, they are as likeable and normal a generation as you will find anywhere in the world, freed at last from the burdens and inhibitions of the Chinese condition.