Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  To secure this kind of commercial access, however, the British merchants starting to operate out of Hong Kong wanted a commitment to retain the Fragrant Harbour and not return it in any future peace deal with the Chinese – which the Treaty of Nanking duly provided. Leading the pack was Jardine, Matheson & Co. ‘Once thoroughly protected roads [anchorage] made and settlers encouraged it could hardly fail to become a considerable emporium,’ James Matheson wrote to William Jardine. And so he was happy to sink the company’s funds into new headquarters on the island’s East Point. ‘Our outlays in building an extensive godown [warehouse] etc. at HongKong will by and bye amount to perhaps 20,000 dollars – so that I am not disinterested in advocating its retention. Many prefer Cowloon Peninsula, but we ought to have both.’36 By May 1842 Hong Kong was ‘progressing with wonderful rapidity’, agreed Alexander Matheson (who had assumed leadership of the firm from his uncle). ‘Several large store godowns and dwelling houses are already finished, and many more in progress, and there is an immense Chinese Bazaar of brick houses exceeding in extent that of Macao; and with its fine anchorage, excellent roads [sheltered waters], and picturesque scenery, it has already thrown Macao into the shade.’37 There was a growing conviction that Palmerston’s ‘barren little island’ might just have something going for it. ‘It struck me at that time, and circumstances have since borne me out, that we should never again relinquish this little spot,’ wrote Captain Arthur Cunynghame in An Aide-de-Camp’s Recollections of Service in China (1844). ‘It seemed perfectly requisite for us to possess some portion of land, neighbouring the continent, where our own laws should be enforced, free from the chicanery and grasping insolence of the mandarins.’ It would all help, he reflected, in compelling ‘the Chinese authorities to respect the laws of civilized nations’.38 By which, of course, he meant the laws of Britain.

  GLEN AND GOLDTOWN

  It was the very drama of the location – the rain and sun, the valleys and forests, the deep greens and shearing rocks – which so entranced the first European visitors. ‘Both on the mainland and in the island itself, there are bold, rugged mountain outlines, often shrouded in a mist that reminds one of Scotland and Ireland; huge boulders of rock from which beautiful ferns of every variety grow in profusion,’ wrote the British attaché at Peking, Lord Redesdale. The hills surrounding the bay offer a vista of ‘a blue glen such as Sir Walter Scott might have described’.39 The missionary and future Oxford Professor of Chinese, Reverend James Legge, would never forget the journey from Macao to Hong Kong and ‘the sensations of delight with which … I contemplated the ranges of hills on the north and the south, embosoming, between them the tranquil waters of the bay. I seemed to feel that I had found at last the home for which I had left Scotland.’40 It was Wong-nai-chong, or Happy Valley – where once ‘there were to be seen only fields of rice and sweet potatoes’ (and now is home to one of the most obviously urban racecourses in the world, with its floodlit track nestled in a modern valley of towering residential apartment blocks) – which seduced the incoming colonists.41 Hong Kong vice consul Henry Sirr thought the valley’s gushing streams made it ‘the most picturesque portion of the Island’, as the ‘lover of nature’ made his way up towards the peak, passing ‘broken rocks relieved by stunted trees, clad in dark green, with occasionally a noble mangoe or lei-chee tree, the branches drooping under the weight of the delicious fruit’ lining the route.42 The travel writer Albert Smith, visiting in the 1850s, was equally delighted by ‘the belts of mango and lychee trees’ and the water cascading over the ‘blocks of granite, with a charming Chamouni sound about it’.43 It was a curious mix of the exotic and the familiar: a meteorology and geology like that of the Highlands or the Alps, but set above the South China Sea.

  Along the foreshore, much of this sublime beauty would soon be obliterated by the speed of development. In Hong Kong’s halcyon days at the start of the twentieth century, its Renaissance Revival cityscape of City Hall, Praya esplanade, Royal Square and Regatta Club would earn the colony the title of Pearl of the Orient. It was a sophisticated, elegant, if somewhat raffish destination on the rim of the exotic East. At the beginning, though, the colony had more the feel of midwest America in the midst of a gold rush. ‘If you leave Hong Kong for a month, where you left a rock you find a drawing room in the height of Indian luxury – and a road where there was twenty feet of water,’ reported Lieutenant Bernard Collinson of the Sappers in 1845, who also had the thankless task of producing Hong Kong’s first map.44 Queen’s Road, originally a rough track straggling along the coastline, quickly emerged as the colony’s main thoroughfare. ‘Go where you would your ears were met with the clink of hammer and chisels, and your eyes were in danger of sparks of stone at every corner,’ recalled the American traveller Osmond Tiffany. ‘The buildings were run up and finished with magic ease; one day the cellar would be dug, and the next the roof was being finished.’45 In between the construction sites were the tents and huts of the 55th Regiment, builders’ yards, and then a Chinatown hinterland of squatters’ huts, opium dens, temples, gambling-halls and duck-pens.46 Out of the chaos came Hong Kong. ‘Within one year from the completion of the first house, not only were regular streets and bazaars for the Chinese erected, but numerous large substantial warehouses were built, mostly of stone, some already finished, and others in progress.’47

  Then as now, it was these commercial premises – the warehouses, banks, wharfs, jetties and factories – which provided the colony’s defining architectural edifices. Pottinger’s ambition to turn Hong Kong into ‘a vast emporium of commerce and wealth’ led him towards a policy of land auctions and peppercorn rents designed to attract the major East Asian merchants on to the island. It proved a remarkable success as the premises of Gibb, Livingston & Co. of Jamieson, How & Co., of Dent & Co., of the American firm Russell & Co. and of Lindsay & Co. overtook the waterfront. To store the huge quantities of stock – the woollens, silks, cottons, coal, earthenware, alcohol, timber, rice, nut oil, tea and opium – entering from Europe, India and China, merchant houses demanded extensive lots, and the ‘Princely Hong’ obviously required the largest. Just outside the centre, East Point might not have been the finest location on offer, but Jardine, Matheson & Co. managed to erect there a godown ‘so extensive, as to form almost a town of themselves’.48 Another witness thought the Jardine Matheson headquarters so grandiose that it resembled ‘somewhat an independent though allied sovereignty of Hong Kong’.49 These bastions of an informal empire were then joined by those more formal symbols of Empire such as the Royal Navy Dockyard, army barracks and hospital, government offices, St John’s Cathedral and Flagstaff House, residence of the commander of British forces in Hong Kong – and all bearing witness, reflected Henry Sirr, ‘to English perseverance, industry and energy’.50

  In those pioneering days, not everyone shared Sirr’s belief in the future of the Fragrant Harbour as a viable British colony. For all that broiling sun, sea mist and lashing rain fostered not a clean Highland air, but a deadly ‘Hong Kong fever’ which managed to wipe out scores of early colonists. Soldiers had the worst of it as poor housing, bad diet, exhaustion, venereal disease and drink took their toll. Smallpox, malaria and cholera did the rest. The mid-1840s saw a mortality rate approaching 20 per cent with 100 soldiers from the 55th Regiment dying between June and August 1843, and over 260 men, 4 women and 17 children from the 95th Regiment lost between 1847 and 1850; in the July and August of 1848 they were burying them at a rate of fifty a month.51 ‘The mortality was mainly owing to the want of accommodation for the multitudes who kept pressing into the new colony, and to the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up,’ thought James Legge. ‘Then the drains were for the time all open, and an atmosphere of disease, which only the strongest constitutions and prudent living were able to resist, might be said to envelope the island day and night.’52 Until the advent of a proper system of burial grounds (beginning around Happy Valley), effective sanitary reform and safe dr
inking water in the 1860s, the casualty rate was terrible, and few thought England had such human capital to spare. One Hong Kong resident concluded that the death rate meant ‘the settlement on the Eastern coast of China must become a national burden, with no counterbalancing advantage’.53 Even Victoria had heard tell of the island’s insanitary mess. ‘The Queen understands there is a notion of exchanging Hong Kong for a more healthy colony,’ reads a January 1844 note to the foreign secretary. ‘The Queen, taking a deep interest in all these matters, and feeling it her duty to do so, begs Lord Aberdeen to keep her always well informed of what is on the tapis in his Department.’54

  Across Whitehall, there was growing scepticism about the wisdom of colonizing Hong Kong. As the five Treaty Ports on the Chinese coast opened up by the Treaty of Nanking allowed European merchants direct access to the mainland markets and took up most of the increased trade, and as the Qing authorities worked to block wealthy traders from moving to the island, the great Hongs started to take a hit on their investments. After a few years at his East Point godown, even Alexander Matheson no longer thought the colony ‘absolutely indispensable for the extension of British trade in China’. Instead, he told a House of Commons Select Committee into ‘The State of Our Commercial Relations with China’ that if it were not for the amount of money sunk into real estate, most merchant houses would be looking to pull out of Victoria Harbour. ‘From Hong Kong we cannot be said to have derived directly much commercial advantage, nor indeed does it seem to be likely, by its position, to become the seat of an extended commerce,’ concluded the MPs in their July 1847 report.55 Colonial Treasurer Robert Montgomery Martin was adamant about Hong Kong’s death at birth. Following his brief and unhappy tenure in what some boosters had called ‘the Carthage of the Eastern Hemisphere’, he concluded in 1844 that ‘there is scarcely a firm in the island but would, I understand, be glad to get back half the money they have expended in the Colony, and retire from the place’. Even after three years’ residence, he still could not understand why the British Empire had sunk so much of the Nanking indemnity money into ‘this wretched, barren, unhealthy, and useless rock, which the whole wealth, talent and energy of England would never render habitable, or creditable, as a colony, to the British name’. To talk of Hong Kong becoming a durable commercial emporium or emulating Raffles’s achievements at Singapore was a delusion: ‘There does not appear to be the slightest probability that, under any circumstances, Hong Kong will ever become a place of trade.’56 Even the fervently free-trade Economist magazine was soon lamenting how the island was in danger of becoming, ‘nothing now but a depot for a few opium smugglers, soldiers, officers, and men-of-war’s men’.57 This was certainly not the great citadel of laissez-faire economics they had hoped for.

  THE GREAT BABYLON

  Even if over-optimistic aspirations for Hong Kong as an eastern Carthage were not immediately realized, the colony did nonetheless grow as a busy trading hub. Initially this was down to foreign merchants involved in the China trade in opium, silk and tea, a growing ship-building and -refitting industry and financial and legal services in banking and insurance. Despite the naysayers, Hong Kong offered a secure, accessible and competitive staging post, tax-free and under British rule of law, on the India–China trade route. For all their shroud-waving and demands for government support, once Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co. decided to station their headquarters on the island, its importance as a hub of Asian trade and finance expanded exponentially. Soon enough, French, Dutch, German, Parsi and Sephardic Jewish businesses (led by the entrepreneurial Sassoon family) were stationing themselves in the colony in a mutually reinforcing process of commercial growth. Together with Calcutta, Bombay and Canton, Hong Kong was where global trading information came to be exchanged, capital raised, prices fixed and international trading networks forged. For all Montgomery Martin’s prophecies of collapse, commerce picked up as traders deposited their goods in ‘insurable’ godowns, waiting for the right moment to bring their wares to market. Between 1844 and 1861, the number of ship arrivals rose almost fivefold from 538 to 2,545, and total tonnage climbed almost sevenfold from 189,257 to 1,310,388 tons.58 In 1847, for example, the chief countries from which they came were Great Britain, with 53 ships carrying 21,173 tons; India, with 114 ships, of 66,259 tons; Australia, with 33 ships, of 10,364 tons; and North America, with 16, of 8,175 tons.59 The Fragrant Harbour became one of the busiest shipping stations in the world as Chinese ocean-going junks bobbed up against heavy Indian merchantmen, American whalers, tea clippers, gigs, paddle-steamers and gunboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, when over 11,000 ships entered and cleared every year, carrying over 13 million tons of cargo, Hong Kong would proudly claim the title of the Empire’s third port after London and Liverpool.60

  In the early years, it was above all else the opium business which kept Hong Kong going. ‘The principal mercantile firms are engaged in the opium trade, who have removed hither from Macao as a safer position for an opium depot and which they frankly admit is the only trade Hong Kong will ever possess,’ was Montgomery Martin’s acid verdict in 1844.61 He was wrong, but not yet. In the 1840s, the colony became known as ‘the central warehouse’ for ‘British Indian produce’ as it handled some 75 per cent of the entire Indian opium crop. ‘Between 1845–9 some three-fourths of the opium crops were deposited in and reshipped from this harbour, which thus protected an immense amount of British property,’ boasted one British diplomatic memo. In 1844, the second British governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, thought that ‘any scruples on our part’ about Hong Kong becoming a transshipment centre for drug running were ‘more than superfluous’ given that the opium trade was ‘now fairly established by general connivance along the whole coast of China’.62 Opium dealing subsidized the rest of the expanding Hong Kong economy: Chinese traders came to the colony to trade in the drug; opium cakes became standard currency; and drug disputes dominated judicial proceedings. ‘Then came on a troublesome case about selling a ball of opium,’ recounted Albert Smith of a typical workload at the Magistrates Court. ‘A swore that he ordered the ball of B, and paid for it, but that it was never sent home. B swore it was; and called C & D – his shopmen – to prove this. The books were also produced. B was a known respectable shopkeeper, so A was fined five dollars for telling lies and taking up the Queen’s time.’63 It was expected that Sino-British trade would move on from its dependence on opium into a broader commerce of goods and services between the kingdoms; in fact, the decision to continue drug trafficking, despite repeated demands by the Chinese authorities for the trade to end, dreadfully retarded any productive commercial relationship between Hong Kong and Peking.64 Yet the British Empire had a characteristic answer to that problem: another bout of gunboat diplomacy.

  For Karl Marx, the irony was delicious. It would be Sir John Bowring – ‘the pet disciple of Jeremy Bentham’, as Marx called him, ‘the greatest-benefit-of-the-greatest-number man’ and the leading member of the Peace Society – who would, as Hong Kong vice admiral, be the British official to instigate the Second Opium War. Bowring was indeed a true disciple of laissez-faire. Accredited with the early Victorian aphorism ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ’, he passionately believed in the pacific, improving, enlightening virtues of commerce. Bentham had died in his arms; he was there at the founding of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838; and he represented Bolton as a free-trade candidate in parliament for seven years. Few symbolized liberal commerce as Bowring did, and, as one of his earliest despatches revealed, he was an ardent advocate of the Hong Kong model of tax-free enterprise. ‘Believing that the satisfactory development of our prosperity is mainly due to the emancipation of all shipping and trade from fiscal vexations and exactions, I trust no custom-house machinery will ever be introduced,’ he intoned in language reminiscent of Huskisson’s assaults on the Navigation Acts. ‘Hong Kong presents another example of the elasticity and potency of unrestricted commerce which has more than c
ounter-balanced the barrenness of the soil … the disadvantages of its climate, and every impediment which would clog its progress.’65

  Yet impediments still existed on the mainland. Despite the hopes invested by British merchants in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Qing officials still proved far too reluctant to open China up to trade. In Peking, the celestial emperor thought the Treaty had conceded too much, and his agents showed no inclination to honour its terms. As a result, the mid-1850s witnessed growing tension between British merchants and Chinese authorities over access to ports and trading rights. And when, in October 1856, Chinese soldiers boarded the Arrow, a British schooner registered in Hong Kong, roughed up the captain and pulled down the Union flag, it was Sir John Bowring of the multinational Peace Society who, in Karl Marx’s description, ‘preached red-hot shells’ with a retributive bombardment of Canton.