Atlas

by Kai-cheung Dung

  There are somewhat unpleasant stories about Blake Garden’s past. It is said that the Chinese neighborhood of Tai Ping Shan lacked proper planning and supervision for several decades after the founding of Victoria, and its inadequate sanitary conditions resulted in an outbreak of plague in 1894. In just a few months, from May to September, there were over twenty-five hundred plague deaths. Since Tai Ping Shan had been the center of the epidemic, the government expropriated the area in 1895, pulled down all the buildings, and rebuilt the district with better sanitary facilities. Blake Garden was subsequently laid out on land between Tai Ping Shan Street and Po Hing Fong and was named after the governor in whose term of office it was completed. In order to prevent an epidemic from attacking European residential areas, the authorities passed the Peak Reservation Ordinance in 1904 prohibiting Chinese people from settling in the Peak district above 788 feet above sea level.

  The sad history of Tai Ping Shan was then buried under the flowers and birdsong of Blake Garden. Giant banyan trees locked in the souls of the dead, their benign roots driving out putrid vapors so that everything implied by the name “Peace Mountain” came true. From then on peace spread as widely as once the plague had done. It eroded the memories of Victoria’s inhabitants, while also bequeathing the symptoms of forgetfulness to later generations, so that people eventually began to doubt that Tai Ping Shan had been the home of their forefathers, just as they also failed to realize that many directors of the earliest charitable institution in the entire city, Tung Wah Hospital, had been opium merchants. A small number still obstinately believed in the story of Tai Ping Shan but were no longer able to find any clues to its existence on maps.

  An English couple who were fond of keeping parrots are said to have lived in the Mid-Levels district next to Tai Ping Shan when the area was ravaged by the plague. As they had the misfortune to die from infectious disease, their house was seen as unlucky and pulled down, and about a dozen parrots were made homeless. They took shelter in the banyan trees that had been transplanted from elsewhere into the new Blake Garden, where they thrived and multiplied. More than a century later, scholars researching the history of Tai Ping Shan suddenly hit upon the bright idea that generations of Blake Garden parrots might have passed down authentic vocalizations from the past. They went to Blake Garden with audio equipment to interview the birds’ descendants, as if recording oral history. It seems that they could just discern monotonously repeated shrieks in the parrots’ clamor but were unable to tell whether they were curses or blessings: “Tai Ping! Tai Ping!”

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  WAR GAME

  A still-extant map of Victoria designed by the British but printed in color with a Japanese text has frequently been cited as evidence of Japan’s unbridled ambitions in East Asia during World War II. The title of the map is “An Outline Map of the Military Installations of Hong Kong,” and it was drawn around 1939 or 1940. The map carefully sets out how the garrison was deployed in Victoria and its surrounding area, precisely indicating the locations of army camps, batteries, naval bases, ammunition depots, power plants, oil-storage tanks, and other installations of strategic importance, and also providing an analysis of the effect of the topography and the harbor on military movements.

  By the twenty-first century, British scholars referred to this map at international conferences on East Asian history to show that the Japanese army had incontrovertibly attacked Hong Kong in the past. They also supported their arguments by quoting the memoirs of the chief of staff of the 38th Division of the Japanese 23rd Army, which had been given the task of occupying Hong Kong. This officer valued the map highly for its extreme accuracy and “expressed his deep respect” for “the general staff’s always thorough reconnaissance.” However, another conference participant, the Japanese historian Fujimoto Hiroo, presented counterevidence asserting that the map actually belonged to a Japanese war game called Attack that was popular in the middle of the twentieth century. The game required a minimum of two players: one designed a strategy for garrisoning and defending a place (usually a city) on the map, while another had to work out the best strategy of attack. The game ended with a judgment by an experienced and strategically knowledgeable third party who determined which scheme was the superior and who was the winner. The game was said to have been tremendously popular among young people and had been strongly promoted by the Ministry of Education as beneficial to intellectual growth and skills among students. Fujimoto traced the origin of this game to the old Chinese expression “paper strategist” and also saw a connection with the computer games that emerged toward the end of the twentieth century, thus verifying that humans have a common and natural psychological desire for imaginary warfare in virtual space. His conclusion was that the occupation of Hong Kong was a reality only in the two-dimensional space of “An Outline Map of the Military Installations of Hong Kong.” Fujimoto’s arguments met some support among Chinese scholars or else deliberate disregard.

  The modern Japanese fiction writer Hiroshi Inoue reminisced about his childhood experiences in an interview:

  My seemingly never-ending early childhood was in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Life in our country was extremely difficult at that time, with everything in short supply, but being free from restrictions imposed by older males, I had carefree days and was even bored to the point of feeling gloomy. The quiet lanes often echoed with the hollow broadcast sound of victory bulletins, but my only pastime was drawing maps of nonexisting places on the blank sides of scrap paper. I do not actually understand why maps of all things made such a deep impression on my immature and ignorant mind; in any case, what I first thought of when taking up a pen was not writing words or making pictures but to draw a map. The places I made up may have been carelessly scrawled on paper, but to me they were real and I could see a pattern gradually emerging. In my imagination an island would always appear first, then a peninsula to the north, with a harbor in between. With its eastern and western approaches rather narrow, the harbor was an excellent and well-sheltered anchorage. To the north of the peninsula I placed a range of tall hills that formed a natural barrier and separated the port city on the southern tip of the peninsula and the northern shore of the island from the mainland to the north. I imagined the city to have strong defenses and set up fortifications at every strategic point to guard the entrances to the harbor. I also constructed a defensive line that stretched through the high ground to resist an enemy attack from the north. At every stronghold on my maps I made detailed notations suggesting all kinds of plans for occupying the city. I could often spend the better part of a day amusing myself in this fashion, and it was probably at that time that I first began to develop my creative powers. It was only in the 1960s that I learned that there was such a place as Victoria, and to my surprise the map of that city happened to coincide with the one that the lonely and introspective child had inadvertently made up in his utter boredom. From then on I knew that a fiction writer’s greatest nightmare is to discover that nonsense from his own imagination is actually true reality.

  PART THREE

  Streets

  30

  SPRING GARDEN LANE

  Spring Garden Lane was one of the oldest streets in Hong Kong. It had already become a settlement for British people on the island when Hong Kong was first opened as a treaty port, and it is said that the first governor’s official residence was located on this site. According to research by Ye Lingfeng, the word “spring” in Spring Garden does not refer to the season (as in the Chinese version of the name) but to a water source. Ye quotes a passage in John Luff’s The Hong Kong Story describing the scene as it looked in the summer of 1841, on the stretch of road going west from Wong Nai Chung on Hong Kong Island:

  On the way, where they are marking out the road, you pass through a most pleasant spot, where a cool spring gushes from the ground. This pleasant spot is quite a contrast with the rest of the waterfront, its richer foliage giving it an almost English appearance. One or two people have it in mind,
for the shady trees will form a most welcome garden spot. The spring, gushing cool and sweet from the ground suggests the name its first occupants will bestow upon it: Spring Gardens.

  Ye Lingfeng also describes a lithograph by Murdoch Bruce from 1846 called Spring Gardens:

  The houses are two-story buildings in the tropical colonial style with spacious arcades. A European woman holding a parasol is walking her pet Pekinese down the street. A broad path down the middle has been made for horse riding or light carriages. It shows how prosperous the street was at this time.

  This ideal residential environment was originally located at the Praya at the starting point of Queen’s Road East, which later became Wan Chai. After more than a century of land reclamation, the later Spring Garden Lane became quite far from the waterfront. There are at least two different versions chronicling the rise and decline of Spring Garden.

  Norman Elton’s Legends from the Four Wans and Nine Yeuks relates the life story of a British merchant, Jonathon Parker. Parker was one of the first to move into Spring Garden in the early years, and it has been said that he gave the place its name. He and his wife, Camille, enjoyed an idyllic existence in Spring Garden, where they gave birth to a son. Parker and his wife lost their lives when they were attacked by local bandits while on a walking trip in the hills near Wong Nai Chung in the summer of 1848. Their relatives took their son back to Britain, and Parker’s property in Spring Garden gradually fell into disrepair. Fifty years later, their son, Charles, who had become a successful businessman, returned to Spring Garden, where he put considerable effort into rebuilding the property, restoring Spring Garden to its former glory. Charles married the daughter of a wealthy Chinese merchant, and they resided in Spring Garden for the rest of their lives. Thereafter Spring Garden once again passed from prosperity to decay, and this time its decline was not reversed.

  The local historian Lau Tou, however, gave an entirely different account in his Stories of Hong Kong Streets:

  As the British residents in Hong Kong moved into the cooler areas on the Peak, the area around Spring Garden lost its former gentility. It eventually degenerated into a quarter for low-class prostitutes, known locally as dai lum-ba (literally, “big numbers”). These prostitutes, whose clientele was exclusively foreign sailors and seamen, were frequently treated with brutality. A British sailor named Charles, whose nickname was the Avenger, raped and then strangled a Chinese prostitute. After the Hong Kong police authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, his drowned corpse was eventually discovered in the harbor.

  In the 1996 street map, Spring Garden Lane is only one of many narrow lanes in the old part of Wan Chai, indistinguishable from nearby Stone Nullah Lane. Spring Garden withered and dried up between these tales of restoration and revenge.

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  ICE HOUSE STREET

  Ice House Street was a hillside road located in Central. Its upper end was connected to Lower Albert Road, and it intersected with Queen’s Road at the bottom. Originally there had been an ice warehouse on this street, established in 1845, which imported natural ice blocks from America for consumption by foreigners living in Hong Kong during the summer and to provide cold storage for foodstuffs. It also supplied ice free of charge to local hospitals. Since Queen’s Road ran alongside the harbor in those days, it was convenient for ships transporting the ice to unload their cargo for storage at the harborside. The Ice House’s business was threatened when a merchant set up a factory for manufacturing ice in Spring Garden in Wan Chai in 1866, and it eventually stopped importing natural ice from overseas in 1880. The Ice House and its competitor, the Hong Kong Ice Company, were both taken over by Dairy Farm in 1918.

  As it happens, the Chinese name of the street does not correspond exactly with its English name: pronounced suet-chong in Cantonese, it literally means “snow factory.” The Chinese word for “ice” is bing, but Hong Kong people were in the habit of referring to “ice” as “snow” (suet). Another thing is that the “snow factory” was not actually a factory (chong) but a godown (fu). In short, the correct translation for the English name would have been bing-fu.

  There is an argument to the contrary, however, according to which the term “snow factory” is an accurate description of the company, or, at least, that manufacturing snow was one of the Ice House’s sidelines. According to this claim, the “snow factory” in its early days was investigating how to manufacture snow as well as supplying ice to local residents. This suggests that snow might actually have been manufactured, that is, creating the effect of a mock snowstorm in imitation of the weather conditions in the expatriates’ home country. The idea was both to ease the discomfort caused by the summer heat (to which the foreigners found it hard to adjust) and to dispel their homesickness at the lack of a true winter. In this sense, “snow factory” is not a mistranslation but a wholly appropriate term for the enterprise’s other function and purpose.

  The advantage of “snow factory” as a term, compared with “ice house,” is that it actually comes closer to revealing the true nature of colonial society. We have no way of knowing now whether the plan to manufacture snow eventually succeeded, but it was at one time a very agreeable (although secret) custom to go to the Ice House to experience the joys of a chilly European winter. There was supposed to have been a fully furnished Victorian-style living room in the cellar where ladies and gentlemen could sit at their leisure and enjoy the warmth and comfort of afternoon tea around an open fireplace.

  In the colony’s early days there was a story that circulated widely among the local Chinese that the first act of each new arrival from Britain was to head straight for the Ice House in Central to put their memories and dreams into cold storage in the cellar, lest they rot in the cruel subtropical climate.

  Hong Kong people called ice cream snow cake (suet-gou). Dairy Farm, the company that took over the Ice House, afterward became a major manufacturer of ice cream. Its depot used to be in Ice House Street, next to the Ice House, and the building afterward became the premises of the Fringe Club, a place where artists could perform their dreams whether sweet and creamy or icy cold.

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  SUGAR STREET

  Sugar Street was a short street located between Yee Wo Street (named after Jardine, Matheson & Co., known in Cantonese as the Yee Wo Company) and Gloucester Road in Causeway Bay (although it is so short it seems hardly worth mentioning on a map). There used to be a sugar refinery in the street, hence the name. However, the street also had an unofficial name, Silver Dollar Street, because the refinery’s forerunner on the site was a mint. In fact, the interchangeability of coinage and sugar casts an intriguing light on local historical developments.

  In 1866, the government invested $400,000 in the construction of the Hong Kong Mint in Causeway Bay to mint its own silver coinage (of the kind in common use in Britain), also reminting on commission new silver dollars in place of the clients’ old coins. But the mint did poor business, failing to make a profit, and financial difficulties brought operations to an end in 1868. The plant was sold to Japan for $60,000, and the site was bought by Jardine, Matheson for $60,000 for development as a sugar refinery.

  However, there is another version of the mint’s closure. According to rumor, a strange event took place when the mint first went into operation. After the workers had poured the molten silver into the casting molds, what emerged at the other end was heaps of sparkling white sugar. The same thing happened continually over the next two years. Reluctant to let it be known and obliged to compensate its clients from its own silver reserves, the government suffered severe financial losses.

  This massively extravagant by-product of the mint was initially allocated for internal consumption only, supplied to high officials and departments for use in sweetening their afternoon tea. Later, some of it was also secretly sold on the market or shipped to other British colonies in Southeast Asia, even to Britain itself. There was a somewhat exaggerated claim that Queen Victoria and members of the royal family were particu
larly fond of sugar produced by the Hong Kong Mint because it represented such high value. Although the side effects of the mint’s malfunction were within acceptable boundaries, nevertheless the Hong Kong government in the end closed the mint down, partly because the costs were far too high and also for fear that the truth would leak out.

  Commentators believed that selling the mint to Jardine, Matheson was a government cover-up to conceal the scandal; some even believed that Jardine, Matheson had been a partner in constructing the mint in the first place. Once it had bought the mint and ordered the purchase of new machinery, the sugar produced by Jardine, Matheson was sold locally and in China. People have speculated that its sugar trade was enormously prosperous, becoming perhaps its most important source of profits apart from opium. Lo Tung, in his Record of Strange Happenings in Hong Kong, quotes a worker at the refinery as saying that every day they would pour the raw materials for refining white sugar into the machines, while what emerged at the other end was a steady stream of sparkling, sweet silver coins.

  The refinery was subsequently destroyed in the typhoon of 1874, when the whole plant and warehouse stock were swept out to sea by huge waves. Seamen and fishermen have testified that following the disaster the brackish waters of Victoria Harbor began to taste sweet, and there was also a tendency for fish caught in the harbor to be oversweet and fatty. The refinery was not rebuilt, for reasons that are not clear, and only the name lingered on as witness to its former existence. Lo Tung summed up his narrative with the following enigmatic line in colloquial Cantonese: “That’s how it goes: feed them sugar and you feed them shit.” It remains unclear whether this is a comment on the ruling strategy of the colonial government in exercising its political and economic powers or on the operation of divine justice.