by Jan Morris
It stood on a plateau beside Upper Albert Road, on what used to be called Government Hill, opposite the Botanical Gardens, not far from military headquarters and the Anglican Cathedral, and looking down to the harbour in a posture of unmistakable authority. Every view-picture showed it. It was neo-classical in style, pillared all around, with a flight of ceremonial steps leading steeply down to the garden. It had a stately porte-cochère and a handsome pair of guardhouses, and it was lit throughout by gas, a convenience not appreciated by all its residents, who found it exceedingly expensive and not very efficient (‘smoke and heat with very little light’, thought Sir Richard MacDonnell, complaining to the Colonial Office in 1866 about his annual lighting bill of £500).
Its roof was flat, offering its occupants a quiet retreat in the sunshine and a lovely view over the harbour, and there were five tennis-courts, three grass, two asphalt. Its domestic staff were dressed in long blue gowns and white gaiters, and wore pigtails so long that they reached almost to the ground. When the Governor formally received guests he did so in a pillared hall the height of the house, Hong Kong’s equivalent of a Durbar Hall, with a band playing in the garden outside. When he left the building on an official visit he was conveyed out of the grounds, wearing his gorgeously embroidered jacket, white breeches and cocked hat, in a sedan-chair carried at a jog-trot by eight Chinese bearers in red. When he went to sea he travelled, like a Doge, in a twelve-oared official barge.
A constant procession of grandees now passed through Hong Kong, and nearly all experienced the hospitality of Government House. Some of course were grander than others. The sociologist H. J. Lethbridge tells us4 that even visiting authors could expect to be invited for a chat with His Excellency, while HM the King of the Sedangs, who turned up wearing a uniform of his own design in 1888, was actually an engaging French adventurer named David de Magrena. But there were real swells too. There were the admirals of the world’s fleets, nearly all of whom sent their vessels to Hong Kong at one time or another. There were the royal princes Albert (‘Eddy’) and George, and foreign potentates more genuine than the King of the Sedangs, and inspecting politicians from Westminster, and eminent financiers, and Ulysses S. Grant, and George Curzon the future Viceroy of India, who arrived in time for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, during which three men were killed by celebratory salutes and two by firework displays – ‘No Englishman can land in Hong Kong,’ wrote Curzon none the less, ‘without feeling a thrill of pride for his nationality. Here is the furthermost link in that chain of fortresses which from Spain to China girdles half the globe …’
Beneath this lordly aegis Hong Kong was far more structured than it had been in its pioneering days. The colonial statutes book had grown apace, and hardly a week went by without some new regulation in the Government Gazette. There was the Preservation of Wild Birds and Game Ordinance, the Child Adoption and Domestic Servitude Ordinance, the Married Women’s Disposition of Property Ordinance, and there were decrees about the siting of Chinese cemeteries, and orders about the treatment in prison of First Class Misdemeanants (they were to be allowed their own food, plus half a pint of wine and a pint of malt liquor every twenty-four hours). Rickshaws were regulated, hawkers were regulated, even brothels were officially licensed now.
Calmness, aloofness of authority was the Empire’s criterion, and as if to give physical expression to the ideal, Hong Kong was now equipped with its own exclusive hill station. A hill station was essential to your compleat colony. In India the archetypes had been built on high ridges of the Himalayas, or in the rolling Nilgiri hills, but less majestic possessions also had their examples. In Malaya there were the Cameron Highlands, in Ceylon there was Nuwara Eliya, and most pertinently another small island colony of the east, Penang off the coast of Malaya, possessed a hill station on the very doorstep of its town, with a bungalow for the Governor on top.
Victoria, Hong Kong, also had a mountain at its back door, and successive Governors had toyed with the idea of creating a hill station on the Peak. Despite the thick mists and the pervasive damp, it would provide healthy relief from the humidity down below, in summer the temperatures up there being five or six degrees lower than the temperatures at sea-level. It would also offer Europeans a retreat from the pushing Chinese community with its queer tastes and unhygienic habits – the hill station always was an epitome of imperial separateness.
The Government had made a start in 1867 by acquiring a former Army sanitarium, 1,700 feet up, and renaming it Mountain Lodge as a summer resort for the Governor himself. Though not all incumbents made much use of the place, and some of them intensely disliked it (‘a damp and gloomy prison’, Sir William Des Voeux called it) nevertheless it had become the nucleus of a settlement. Paths had been cut up the mountainside, the white speckles of villas appeared more frequently in the water-colours of each successive year, and in 1887 one of those ordinances reserved the whole of the Peak district for European residence (Chinese were not excluded in so many words, but were effectively kept out by a combination of building regulations and innuendo).
Until then one went up the Peak on foot or on pony, by camel perhaps if you were Mr Belilios, or most probably by sedan-chair, carried up the winding narrow tracks by teams of two or four Chinese chairmen – every Peak house had its chair-shed, the Hong Kong equivalent of a coach-house. The arrival of so many prosperous new householders, though, and the promulgation of the Peak Residence Ordinance, led to the opening in 1888 of the steam-powered High Level Tramway, the first cable railway in all Asia and one of the steepest in the world.
This became one of the sights of Hong Kong. A tram left every quarter of an hour, the ride took eight minutes, and at its steepest point the gradient was one in two. It was a spectacular demonstration of British technique, for everything was made in England, put together by Scottish engineers, and run by British employees – drivers, brakesmen, conductors and all. In those days the Peak tram ran from its lower terminal near St John’s Cathedral almost entirely through undeveloped hillside, and from far below in the harbour people could see its unwavering line precipitous up the mountain, and the shapes of its trams crawling so daringly up and down – an image of imperial accomplishment in the benighted East.
Beside the upper terminal stood the Peak Hotel, which soon became one of the colony’s chief social centres. Unassuming enough at first, and intended chiefly as a way-station on the way to the summit, it had been amply extended, and people went there now for tea and dinner in the cool evening. Valetudinarians retired there, and there were summer balls and dances. So, with the Governor in his lodge, the rich Europeans in their villas (Cloudlands, The Eyrie, Tor Crest, Strawberry Hill), an Anglican chapel-at-ease for Sunday service, the Peak Club for bridge and gossip, a police station for security, the trams bravely trundling up and down, cucumber sandwiches at the hotel and the natives well out of sight, up there among the China mists of Victoria Peak the colonial aesthetic was fulfilled.
Far below, very early every morning, eleven filthy junks tied up at the Praya, and were filled to the gunwales with human excreta, tipped out of tubs by smeared coolies. Brown and stinking these nightmare craft lurched away through the harbour shipping and made their way to Guangzhou, where the colonial night-soil was sold as manure. They were instruments of private enterprise in the classic Hong Kong kind, for the public lavatories of the colony were run by private contractors, who first charged for shitting, and then sold the shit; but they were also a reminder of the squalor that still, despite first appearances, defied all colonial improvement.
Hong Kong’s Chinatown, said the British traveller Henry Norman,5 was ‘probably about as insanitary as any place in the globe under civilized rule’. Those public lavatories, for example, were uniformly nauseating, while most Chinese households drained their effluence into open cesspools – if it was drained at all, for much of it, too, was bought for re-sale by freelance scavengers. Living conditions in the poor quarters were fearful. An officially commiss
ioned report in 1882 – in effect the first Hong Kong social survey – showed that Chinese houses were generally divided by partitions into many cabins, each a dwelling about ten feet square. In one row of eight such houses 428 people were living. Hardly any houses had running water (and water from public fountains was available only in the small hours of the morning). Many had no chimneys, the smoke from their fires issuing from the windows, and in many pigs lived among the humans upstairs as well as down.
The smells were terrible, the dangers all too obvious. The author of the report, an engineer named Osbert Chadwick, warned that one day it would all erupt into frightful epidemic, and he was right – in the next decade bubonic plague fell upon Hong Kong, killing more than 2,500 people, nearly all of them Chinese but including the Governor’s wife, and forcing scores of thousands to flee the colony. But even without the plague, in 1882 the mean life expectancy was eighteen years and four months; if you survived to the age of twenty, you could expect only another twenty-three years of life.
Directly, of course, most of these horrors affected only the Chinese community, which now numbered at least 150,000, and contributed virtually the whole of the colony’s proletariat. Even in the most bigoted eyes, this was no longer a community entirely of riff-raff. Though it included all those slum-dwellers, and some 29,000 boat-people, it included too many wealthy businessmen, shipowners, agents and compradors. It was said that 90 per cent of the colony’s revenue was contributed by Chinese; in 1885 eighty-three British property-owners were rich enough to pay property tax, 647 Chinese, and seventeen Chinese were among the eighteen richest of all (the eighteenth was Jardine, Matheson). There were many scoundrels still, but many Chinese professional men and craftsmen worked in the colony now. Lamqua the Handsome Face Painter had been succeeded by six professional portraitists, four daily newspapers were printed in Chinese, and the Tung Wah hospital was already active. In 1884 there were seven Chinese Justices of the Peace, and a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn named Ng Choy had been appointed the first Chinese member of the Legislative Council.
Nevertheless European prejudice against all things Chinese remained incorrigible, in matters legal as in social attitudes. Racial segregation was as absolute as the Europeans could make it. Chinese were not only barred from the Peak, they were also kept out of most central residential districts, and they were freely insulted by the cruder of the European colonists. ‘You cannot be two minutes in a Hong Kong street’, wrote Isabella Bird, ‘without seeing Europeans striking coolies with their canes or umbrellas.’ There was no chance, of course, of even the most distinguished Chinese joining the Hong Kong Club; Major-General Edward Donovan, commanding the garrison in 1880, said that Chinese people gave ‘ocular, auricular and nasal demonstration how unfitted they were for the neighbourhood of Europeans’.
The Chinese were often arrogant too, and could certainly be annoying. Their concern for hygiene was vestigial, and to European ears the noise they made was indescribably awful – it was estimated that if every Chinese street-hawker uttered his street cry only once a minute, that would amount to a million raucous cries a day. Chinese could also be frightening. Violent crime was common still among them, and the local Triads were now said to have enrolled 15,000 members. If you took a sampan to dine aboard a ship in harbour, the pier-side constable took a note of its number, the sampan people having a habit of cutting their passengers’ throats, robbing them and throwing them overboard. Nor had the British forgotten the affair of the poisoned loaves. Xenophobia periodically flared up into violence in China itself, and the possibility of a rising was never entirely absent from European minds in Hong Kong. Kowloon City, just across the border, was notoriously full of toughs, and Henry Norman made his readers’ flesh crawl with the reminder that in a few hours 20,000 more could easily come down from Guangzhou.
Thus though the merchant community depended upon Chinese compradors, clerks and agents, and frequently liked them as individuals, distrust of the Chinese as a race seemed ineradicable; an element of fear and resentment, compounded by racial bigotry and reinforced by horrible social contrast, lay behind the grand imperial appearances of Hong Kong.
It was the ethnic injustices that chiefly offended the most remarkable Governor of the period, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, who came to the colony from the Windward Islands in 1877, and left in 1882, pursued by furious controversy, to be Governor of Mauritius. We may catch something of his personality from a picture taken in 1881, on the occasion of a visit to Hong Kong by King Kalakaua of Hawaii.6 Having snatched this recondite monarch from the care of Jardine, Matheson, who represented his kingdom on the island, Pope-Hennessy entertained him handsomely, and sat with him in a garden somewhere for an informal celebratory photograph.
Framing the picture are the European worthies of Hong Kong, British and foreign, official and unofficial, stiff and self-conscious in their whiskers, bowler hats, topees and cravats. In the front row, centre, sits the King, bewhiskered himself, wearing a straw boater and thickly suited. And beside him sits His Excellency the Governor, looking something like an Irish bookie, and something like Isambard Brunel the engineer, and a little like the Mad Hatter. He is very small, perky-looking, beardless with a beaky Roman nose, and he sits in an attitude of almost comical concentration, one hand holding a cane, legs elegantly crossed. On his head he wears a very tall pale-coloured top hat, tilted eccentrically over his eyes like the hat of a tipsy man-about-town, or an entertainer about to begin a soft-shoe shuffle; and all in all he projects a persona so sharp, so ludicrous, but yet so fascinating that the eye slides immediately over all those notables, over the King of the Sandwich Islands himself, to alight upon his peculiar presence.
He was an Irishman, and despite his profession a born rebel. Wherever he went in the colonial service he antagonized British settlers with his liberal views, especially on race, and infuriated the Colonial Office with his high-handed and often preposterous attitudes. His reputation had preceded him to Hong Kong, and a song in the colony’s Christmas pantomime, just before he arrived, hoped the coming year would be
Free from disasters, typhoons and tornados,
Or ‘rows’ like they had in Barbados …
In the event from start to finish of his Hong Kong governorate Pope-Hennessy was never without some flaming squabble on his hands. He upset his own subordinates as readily as he infuriated the business community, and could seldom resist a gibe. Even his honoured guests might feel the sting of him: even in his speech of farewell to King Kalakaua he made an unfortunate joke about the ‘trifling incidents’ which had in the past damaged relations between Hawaii and Great Britain, ‘such as the killing of Captain Cook by His Majesty’s predecessors …’
This strange but compelling administrator had come to Hong Kong with a beautiful young wife and a baby, and had instantly upset the business community by his partiality towards the Chinese. He was forgiving to Chinese criminals, advocated better education for Chinese children, and even tolerated the Chinese practice of mui tsai, the sale of young girls into domestic servitude. He outraged loyalists by proposing to call the new astronomical observatory not after Queen Victoria, but after the Qing Emperor Kang Xi, who had built one in Beijing. He arranged full British nationality for eminent Chinese residents, he resisted racial segregation in the central town districts, he insisted that Chinese should have an equal right with Europeans to use the City Hall museum and library. It was he who appointed Ng Choy to the Legislative Council.
But it needed tact and understanding to lead the British community into more enlightened attitudes, and nobody could be less fitted for such a task than pesky Sir John. He had a genius for rubbing people up the wrong way, and unfortunately his idealism was hardly matched by his ability. He would accept no advice. He lost papers. He failed to answer letters. He quarrelled with the Colonial Secretary, because he insisted on handling everything himself, with the headmaster of the Central School, because he insisted on interfering with the educational processes, with the Registra
r-General, whom he accused of immoral practices, with the Harbour-Master, whom he charged with dereliction of duty, with General Donovan, whose rival dinner-party in celebration of the Queen’s Birthday he forbade (there being only one band available), with the taipan of Jardine, Matheson about almost everything, and more or less as a matter of principle with virtually the entire British commercial community, who all hated him, and whom he thoroughly detested in return. To cap everything, in 1881 Sir John Pope-Hennessy attacked with an umbrella, in a public place, the leader of the Hong Kong bar, whom he claimed to have caught in flagrante delicto showing a book of indecent engravings to Lady Pope-Hennessy.
So he achieved little in the end, and failed to make Europeans and Chinese much better friends: even the promising Ng Choy presently left Hong Kong for China, changing his name to Wu Ting Fang and becoming Chinese Ambassador to the United States. At the same time Pope-Hennessy compounded the old enmity between officials and unofficials. When the irrepressible Governor left Hong Kong in 1882, on his way to create havoc in the Indian Ocean, he was given many presents by the Chinese community, assured that he ‘embodied the mind of heaven and earth’, and awarded (at least by his own account) the sobriquet Number One Good Friend; but few Europeans came down to the wharf to see him off.
Out at sea the ships perpetually lay. This was a sea-Empire, those were the years of Rule Britannia, and Hong Kong’s imperial status was best exemplified by the spectacle of its harbour.
The China trade had not proved quite so lucrative as the merchants hoped, but Hong Kong had become an entrepôt serving a wider region, and it was primarily as a place of shipping that it was famous – after London and Liverpool, the Empire’s third port. Opium (its export to China now legal), sugar, flour, salt, earthenware, oil, amber, cotton goods, sandalwood, ivory, betels, vegetables and grains passed endlessly through the colony’s go-downs, and the papers were full of ship arrivals and passenger lists – the Revd Osborne Chestnutt, MA from Liverpool, Misses Whiteworth and Button from Shanghai … At any one time there were likely to be at least 1,000 seamen ashore in Hong Kong; it had become one of the most familiar of all sailor-towns, abounding with seamen’s boarding-houses and brothels, where merchant seamen (merchant Johns) got into fine old brawls with Royal Navy men (Johnny-haul-tauts), and well-loved grog-shops beckoned: