by Jan Morris
It was only appropriate that visually Hong Kong seemed to have a completed air. Though it was still the third port of the British Empire, it was not in the condition of excitement, whether commercial or imperial, that we have noticed on earlier visits. It had calmed down. The Hong Kong dollar, worth 6s. 2d. in 1919, throughout the 1920s never rose higher than 3s., and this was no time for adventurous construction. The twin cities of the harbour remained the only substantial towns. The modernist styles about to fall upon Europe and America would not reach Hong Kong for another two decades, and people were still building much as they had been forty years before.
There had been great changes, of course, since 1880. Victoria had been transformed by Paul Chater’s Praya Reclamation Scheme. The waterfront of the 1880s was now a block away from the sea, and on the extra land had appeared new premises for the Hong Kong Club, a new Supreme Court and sundry commercial blocks, all fronted by a new esplanade called Connaught Road. Statue Square, then called Royal Square, had doubled its size. It now contained a Cenotaph in memory of the war dead, and effigies of Queen Victoria, largely under a canopy in the middle, Edward VII, George V, Queen Alexandra and the eponymous Duke of Connaught on the esplanade. (The future Edward VIII had vetoed a statue of himself, suggesting that the money be put to better causes.) The Pedder Street clock-tower had gone, having been declared a hazard to traffic, and Jardine’s had largely abandoned their East Point headquarters: the tea-chests in their go-downs there were full of archives, and in 1921 a last farewell had been said to No. 1 House with a sentimental candle-lit dinner. Across the water the Kowloon waterfront was now dominated by the towered terminal of the Kowloon to Guangzhou railway, and the four-square hulk of the Peninsula Hotel.
But all the new buildings remained sedately within colonial conventions – fan-cooled, teak-banistered, the Hong Kong Club with Moghul turrets over colonnades, the Supreme Court with a classical dome over arcades, the railway station in a sort of Indo-Byzantine style, the Peninsula perceptibly Chinoise, and most of the office blocks in varieties of tropical-Gothic. A quaint old Receiving Ship still dominated the harbour view – the former troopship Tamar, but looking much like the old Victor Emmanuel – and the fact that the Praya now extended further to the west, running in a wide sweep along the foreshore towards Possession Point where it all began, only seemed to confirm the sensation that this was the definitive Hong Kong, as it always would be. The French observer, Albert Demangeon, writing in 1925, summed it up, once and for all it seemed, as ‘the proudest monument of England’s commercial genius’.1
Over the hills behind Victoria the scatter of cool white villas now extended to the island’s southern shore. The Repulse Bay had entered its delightful career of tea-dances and sundowners, and at Shek O, away on the island’s western tip, a group of expatriate country-lovers were building themselves nice tiled bungalows, attended by gravel drives and ornamental flower-beds, almost as they might somewhere in the Green Belt of London. Even Kowloon, though it had grown explosively since the turn of the century, had developed in a seemly way, and the railway station tower was a proper substitute for the lost Pedder Street clock, guiding the ferry-boats, when the fog lay low, just as faithfully into their piers.
Colonial Hong Kong was set in its ways, too. It had been in existence as a British possession for close on eighty years, and the expatriate community had evolved its own values, rituals and conventions, soon picked up by newcomers and passed on to successors. It had its long-familiar pecking orders of race, function and residence. It had its naval balls and cricket tournaments. Going to see one’s friends off on the P. & O., with all the well-loved festivity of gramophone music, streamers and popping champagne bottles, was part of life; so was the King’s Birthday Party up at Government House, whatever you happened to think of the Governor.
Everyone in this society had his place – Lane Crawford’s floorwalkers in their company mess, the corporal’s wife in her married quarter at Murray Barracks, Lady Southorn the Colonial Secretary’s wife in her stately drawing room on the Peak, Captain Wotherham, veteran of thirty years in the eastern seas, in his new retirement house overlooking the ships at Kowloon, Mr Kadoorie the vastly successful financier in his enormous house on Nathan Road, the harbour-master in the harbour-master’s house, the general still in Head Quarter House, the Astronomer in his house beside the Royal Observatory, Ethel Morrison in Lyndhurst Terrace, Jardine’s taipan well-fed as ever at The Mount, the Governor in his palace, electrically illuminated now, opposite the botanical gardens on Upper Albert Road.
By now the great business companies, once so agile and predatory, had acquired a portlier air – the air of Establishment. They had been on the China coast for several generations, and despite the uncertain times were at the apogee of their commercial supremacy, just as Hong Kong had reached its peak as an entrepôt of the China trade. The hongs held an economic stranglehold on South China, Guangzhou nationalists complained, and they were active everywhere else in China too. The Germans having been eliminated from the Far East – ‘the impact of World War I on Jardine’s’, drily wrote one of the firm’s directors in retrospect, ‘was not disastrous’2 – among their foreign rivals only the Japanese really counted, and their participation in China’s affairs seemed by now no longer a great adventure, but simply business practice.
Their ships dominated the China coast, and provided the chief means of transport into the interior. Their money was behind railways, breweries, fur traders, hotels, textile mills, newspapers. Jardine’s had offices in all the main Chinese cities, and also in Japan, Manchuria and Taiwan. The Hongkong Bank built itself, in 1923, a Shanghai office even bigger and grander than its headquarters at 1 Queen’s Road Central – and it was only one of half a dozen great buildings on the Bund designed by the Hong Kong architects Palmer and Turner.
But middle-age had set in, abetted by tradition. Asked to account for a certain malaise at Swire’s, one of its managers said that it was becoming dominated by ‘a lot of old crocks 50 to 55 years and upwards’, and J. K. Swire himself said there were ‘too many deadheads at the top out East’. The young John Keswick, arriving for his first job at Jardine’s Shanghai office, was handed the same pen that his father had used, when he joined the firm, and was reminded that his grandfather, his great-uncle, his father and his elder brother had all been in their day Chairmen of the Shanghai Municipal Council. The representatives of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank were bigwigs too, great men in the East. The blind Sinologue Guy Hillier, the bank’s manager in Beijing for thirty-nine years, was certainly one of the most influential people in the capital, and when in 1925 his successor Mr Allen concluded an interview with the then-dominant war-lord Duan Qi-rui, ‘the Marshal [saw] me to the door of the apartment himself, which my interpreter told me was an unusual compliment for him to pay’.3
All this was apparent in Hong Kong, the source of so much power and profit, but less in flamboyance than in accomplished routine. The trading post had got used to itself. Taipans no longer hissed at Governors, scandals were subdued, libel actions out of fashion. Some of the flash had left the place, as it had left the Empire as a whole. When a steamer of Swire’s China Navigation Company sailed for Xiamen or Fuzhou now, it sailed with immensely practised ease, drawn from long experience; its brasses polished as ever, its black hull fresh-painted, its house flag proudly flying, its awnings crisp and white, its dinner menu offering roast beef and Yorkshire pudding as well as shark-fin and pigeon-egg soup; but it lacked perhaps the old panache, either of High Imperialism or of illegitimacy.
Almost as if in response to the flagging of public exuberance the colonists of Hong Kong lived their private lives intensely. People were living intensely all over the western world, in the days of the Charleston and the cocktail, but it showed more in this minute enclave of western ways, set among its archipelago in the mighty flank of China.
The European and American community was still dominated by its Britons, but not quite so absolutely. The German
colony had been dispersed by the war, its memory besmirched by propaganda – as a home-grown victory song had it,
The Hun has got it in the neck,
He’s crawling in the mud,
He’s a nasty dirty thing,
Though at fighting not a dud.4
On the other hand there were more Americans about – some 500 in the later 1920s – more Frenchmen, more Dutch and far more Japanese, while the Jewish, Indian and Portuguese communities had all produced rich and eminent citizens to challenge the supremacy of the British.
But the British did not care, for the kind of Britons who lived in Hong Kong still felt themselves to be at the apogee of their national achievement. It took time for metropolitan attitudes to filter through to this remote possession. Like Jardine’s, Hong Kong had not suffered much from the Great War, and for the most part people felt as privileged by destiny as they had forty years before. ‘She had never’, wrote Somerset Maugham about one of his Hong Kong characters,5 ‘paid anything but passing and somewhat contemptuous attention to the China in which fate had thrown her,’ and she doubtless felt almost as superior to Dutchmen or Japanese (two half-Japanese girls, indeed, particularly admired by officers of the Royal Navy, were thought unsuitable guests by the loftier chatelaines of the day).
At the start of the 1920s much about the colony seemed to visitors quaintly old-fashioned. The up-to-the-minute Hong Kong of the 1890s had long been left behind. If you were invited to dinner at the Peak from Kowloon, for instance, you took a rickshaw to the ferry-station, a Star Ferry to Central, another rickshaw to the lower Peak tram station, a tram to the upper station and a third rickshaw to your host’s front door – anachronism indeed to a traveller from post-war London. The chief noises of the city streets were still the old noises, the cries of Chinese hawkers, the clanging of tram bells, plus the hooters and chugging engines of the ships at sea.
In the course of the decade things changed. For one thing motor cars arrived in force – ‘coughing, spluttering, honking demons’, as a Chinese protest to the Governor called them. The Governor himself had ridden around in a car, rather than a sedan-chair, ever since the attempted assassination of Sir Henry May in 1912, and by 1929 there were 1,400 private cars in the colony, mostly American-built but including two Rolls-Royces, together with 247 taxis, 150 buses, 446 trucks and 460 motor cycles. The roads were beginning to be congested, and as early as 1925 Howard T. Werschul, an American flour merchant, got two months’ hard labour for ‘wanton and furious driving’.
European social life grew more sophisticated, as the years passed, but even so it sounds a sadly provincial society. It saw last year’s films at the cinema (evening dress only in the Dress Circle), it played the gramophone records of the day before yesterday (One Stolen Kiss, or Deep in My Heart, Dear), it eagerly read the social news from London (‘News and Gossip from the Metropolis’). It went to dinner-dances a lot, and to beach parties at Repulse Bay, where a row of 120 mat-sheds provided shelter for hamper lunches, and steam launches waited off-shore to take the revellers home. It smoked a great deal, drank without much finesse – gin before dinner, whisky during the meal, brandy afterwards: Governor Sir Henry May, opening a drinking-water reservoir in 1918, had pointedly observed that because of the general preference for stronger liquids only one in two of the lower-rank European civil servants ever lived to draw their pensions. Sometimes the Tramway Company arranged evening excursions to the beaches at North Point, and parties got together to swim hilariously in the moonlight to the music of a band.
The community prided itself on its English idiosyncrasies, sometimes rather silly ones: the Governor Sir Reginald Stubbs, who attended Council meetings every Thursday morning and afternoon, said he might as well have tripe for his Thursday lunch too, and so instituted a luncheon club called the Victoria Tripe Hounds, with Master and Whips, which ate tripe and onions among comic flummery at Government House. At the same time, like most societies in the English-speaking world, Anglo Hong Kong was becoming slightly Americanized. The stars of Hollywood were the stars of its cinemas, the songs of New York were the songs on Radio Station ZBW (except on Sundays, when air-time was reserved exclusively for higher things). ‘Cascade?’ asked an advertisement for beer, and the answer was pure America: ‘You Betcka!’
In 1922 the Prince of Wales arrived for a three-day visit, with Lord Louis Mountbatten as his equerry: it was somehow characteristic of the place that when they walked for the first time into the apparently empty gardens of Government House there was a sudden blast of a whistle, and out of the shrubberies sprang a horde of boy scouts and girl guides, ‘all yelling’, we are told, ‘shrilly’.
At the summit of expatriate activities stood the Peak, by now a snootier hill station than any of its Indian progenitors. It was officially defined by height – the Peak District constituted anything on Hong Kong Island above the 788-foot contour – and its allegorical situation up there among the clouds meant that altitude had become a kind of obsession. Peakites, as they were known, looked down not just topographically but socially too upon those with houses on lower contour lines.
Before she arose to the Peak
(wrote a contemporary lyricist)
Matilda was timid and meek,
But now she offends
Her Bowen Road friends
With a smile that is cutting and bleak.
Bowen Road? Where was Bowen Road? Why, down in mid-Levels, at least 200 feet too low.
By now the Peak was a very beautiful residential area, its winding lanes half-hidden by trees, lined with ferns and shrubberies. No motor road ran up there yet, and the Peak tram, electrified in 1926, was busier than ever, and very obliging; if by any chance you missed the last tram up, which left Victoria at 11.45 p.m., you could order a private tram at any time up to three in the morning. The more traditional of the Peak’s grandees, nevertheless, were still carried up and down in sedan-chairs; some went up by chair, down by bicycle, and Mr R. C. Hurley, whose house stood rather lower than the upper tram terminal, liked to complete his journey home on his ‘motor-less motorcar’, a four-wheeled carriage which enabled him to free-wheel all the way to his front door.
There were officers’ messes on the Peak now, and a number of messes housing the young assistants of the great companies, so that the social life was lively. Dropping one’s card at the Peak residences was an essential introduction to Hong Kong society, and every self-respecting household maintained a card-box by the gate; as Lady Southorn was to write,6 the card-box was the very symbol of western civilization – ‘the West has a box and the East doesn’t’. Bridge sessions were popular. Crumpets at the Peak Hotel were excellent still. Dinner-parties were lengthy, six or seven courses being eaten, black ties worn, music sometimes provided by Filipino bands, additional young men courtesy of the Royal Navy.
A formidable Residents’ Association kept up the tone of this Elysium, vetting even European governesses before they were allowed to accept employment (though it was up to the Governor himself, under the Peak Preservation Order of 1918, to decide who might be householders). The Chinese coolies who brought supplies up the Peak were forbidden to use the tram, and were obliged to labour with their heavy loads of coal, ice, food and building materials up the steep and often rain-washed tracks. In 1921 a compassionate clergyman discovered that one small labourer, aged six, spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, carrying fifty-eight-pound loads of coal from the waterfront to a house of lofty eminence.
A rung or two down the social ladder, many Europeans lived in the mid-Levels swathe of residential streets, between the Peak and the commercial waterfront, but by the mid-1920s there was a shift of social emphasis off the island altogether, across the harbour to Kowloon. Until the acquisition of the New Territories, twenty years before, such a movement had seemed inconceivable. Nobody then lived in Kowloon, it used to be said, except soldiers and Portuguese, and almost nobody respectable went there except to have a seaside picnic. There was nothing much to do there anyw
ay, except for men of raffish tastes. In those days Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare, had degenerated after half a mile or so into a rutted country lane, and ended altogether at Boundary Street, marked by a bamboo frontier fence. Beyond were the mysteries of China, where superstition reigned, where bandits and tigers lurked, where ne’er-do-wells went to gamble with the natives, and unspeakable things went on in opium dens.
By the 1920s the New Territories had become the countryside of Hong Kong. People went hiking and picnicking there, looked at walled villages or collected wild flowers. Sportsmen shot duck in the Mai Po marshes, and the Governor had a country house at Fanling (much nicer, most incumbents thought, than Mountain Lodge). As the gateway to all these pleasures, Kowloon was no longer a disreputable enclave on a foreign shore, but was fast becoming a twin city to Victoria, and much of the colony’s vigour had migrated there.
Old-fashioned ladies still asked of men ‘Are you married or do you live in Kowloon?’, but in fact besides many well-heeled Chinese, Indians and Portuguese, who often found it more congenial than the stuffier Hong Kong-side, a perfectly respectable British society was now settled in spacious and shady colonial houses on the edge of the town. Engineers, middle-rank officials, merchant-navy officers had settled there, and had formed a Kowloon Ratepayers’ Association, like the more stately association of the Peak, to try and keep the Chinese masses out of their district too. And in 1927 the social balance was still further shifted by the opening of the Peninsula Hotel, much the grandest in Hong Kong, along the road from the railway station on the waterfront of Tsim Sha Tsui.
This was a world away from the now shabby corridors and old-fashioned saloons of the Hong Kong Hotel, long left high and dry away from the sea by the march of reclamation. Six storeys high and designed to international standards of luxury, the Peninsula was really a transport hotel, built to serve passengers disembarking from ocean liners, or arriving on the train from Guangzhou, Beijing, Moscow, Paris or London. But it became the smartest place of all to have a dance or give a party, the focus of young European social life, and for three decades the best-known building in Hong Kong.