Cities of Empire
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The so-called Second Opium War (1856–60) saw an Anglo-French invasion of Canton, the occupation of Peking, the burning of the Summer Palace (preserved now as a crumbling monument to Western barbarism) and the flight of Chinese Emperor Xianfeng into exile. It was humiliation on a grand scale and, in London, the British press and parliament were full of chauvinistic self-congratulation. ‘We hear nothing of the illicit opium trade, which yearly feeds the British treasury at the expense of human life and morality,’ complained Karl Marx in his New York Daily Tribune column of the jingoism sweeping the capital. ‘We hear nothing of the constant bribery of sub-officials … We hear nothing of the bullying spirit … or of the vice introduced by foreigners at the ports open to their trade.’66 None of that mattered. Instead, the British pressed home their military advantage with the Treaty of Tientsin and then the Convention of Peking in 1860, which liberated ten more Chinese ports to foreign trade, allowed access to China’s hinterland for British missionaries and merchants and by imposing a tariff on the importation of opium effectively normalized the trade. Crucial to the future sustainability of Hong Kong, the Convention also ceded to the British in perpetuity the southern part of the Kowloon peninsula and the Stonecutters Island, a small island to the west of Hong Kong. British territory in China increased to over ninety square kilometres, and another episode of gunboat diplomacy had paid off.
The religious imagery which enveloped the ‘Gospel of Free Trade’ and ‘saving’ of China was entirely purposeful. Across the British imperial landscape during the nineteenth century there was an increasing intimacy between commerce and Christianity, between the virtues of capitalism and the spread of Protestantism. The more cosmopolitan East India Company had always sought to keep the Church out of its colonial affairs, but as its monopoly ended and the evangelical movement gained greater sway in Westminster the spread of British civilization across the globe invited a more interventionist religious component. In southern Africa, the missionaries were said to come with ‘the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other’; in South-east Asia, they arrived with a free-trade agreement and a cruiser at anchor. And just as British merchants went weak at the knees at the prospect of opening up the Chinese market to European trade, so Western missionaries delighted at the prospect of so many heathen, Chinese souls ripe for conversion. ‘The high governor of all the nations has employed England to chastise and humble China,’ proclaimed the American missionary Elijah C. Bridgeman. ‘He may soon employ her to introduce the blessings of Christian civilization and free intercourse among her millions.’67 ‘Do we now wait for China? No! China waits for us!’ responded the British missionary R. G. Milne. ‘Providence, by commerce, has given us access to no fewer than five ports of that magnificent nation, and by conquest has facilitated our entrance among its inhabitants, as bearers of celestial light, as apostles of good tidings.’68
Of course, there was the bothersome business of illegal drug trafficking and war-mongering as the vehicle for divine opportunity. Some evangelicals did express concern at the method of entry into China (the leading evangelical Lord Shaftesbury condemned the First Opium War as ‘one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of History’), but most missionaries were willing to overlook the chests of opium for the sake of advancing God’s greater calling.69 Hong Kong had been delivered into British hands for a purpose and, with the colony barely a few months old, the London Missionary Society, the American Episcopal Church and the Baptist Church sailed into Victoria Harbour. Special China Funds were raised in London to support a missionary programme of Christianization to be run out of Hong Kong. As with sales, so with souls: Hong Kong was the bridgehead into China. ‘While contemplating this rapidly-formed colony … and its probable influence on the future destinies of a race amounting to one-third of the estimated population of our planet, many novel considerations obtrude themselves on the mind of a British Christian,’ mulled Reverend George Smith of the Church Missionary Society after his visit to Hong Kong in 1846.
Believing that his country has been honoured by God as the chosen instrument for diffusing the pure light of Protestant Christianity through the world, and that the permanency of her laws, institutions, and empire, is closely connected with the diffusion of evangelical truth, a British Missionary feels jealous for the faithfulness of his country to her high vocation, and ‘rejoices with trembling’ at the extension of her colonial empire.70
The most celebrated of the new missionaries was the Reverend James Legge of the London Missionary Society, who arrived on the island in 1843 and set up the Union Chapel as a starting point for conversion. ‘I am very happy in my work. I opened a new chapel in the heart of the Chinese population in January which is attended in a very encouraging way. A-fat, the first Chinese Protestant convert, is labouring with me,’ he wrote in February 1844. ‘By and by, I hope to see a flourishing school and a Theological Seminary, with an Institute for native girls, all flourishing here. My hands will be full.’71 An ‘Anglo-Chinese College’ (later, a theological college) did indeed spring up, as did the Morrison Education Society School and the Medical Missionary Hospital, all dedicated to the practical dissemination of the Gospel. They were followed by the high-Anglican edifice of St John’s Cathedral, opened for divine service in March 1849. ‘Ultimately, the island will become a hive,’ predicted Legge, ‘and I hope that many a Christian swarm will be thrown from it to settle on the adjoining continent.’72
In the event, Legge proved more of a scholar than charismatic missionary, and conversion in the colony was slow. Native Hong Kongers might have been amenable to education and healthcare provision from missionary societies, but the purer benefits of Protestantism were generally lost on them. Legge started to concentrate on translation work and theology, while missionary leaders openly questioned the resources allocated to Hong Kong when all of China remained unconverted. Yet the most formidable obstacle to building a Christian ministry was the unfortunate state of the Chinese population. ‘While in the northern cities on the mainland of China daily intercourse may be held without restraint with the more respectable classes of native society,’ continued Smith, ‘at Hong Kong, on the other hand, missionaries may labour for years without being brought into personal communication with any Chinese, except such as are, generally speaking, of the lowest character, and unlikely to exert a moral influence on their fellow-country-men.’ The Chinese population of the colony was made up, for the most part, of those ‘of the lowest dregs’ – coolies, stone-cutters, boatmen, junk crews, iron workers, handicraftsmen, pirates, brothel keepers, Triads and thieves. Very few of them provided receptive Christian material.73
Smith’s characterization of the population was not unusual, and a hint of illegality suffused the entire island. Rubbing up against the incoming missionaries were the usual range of chancers attracted to a bustling, commercial melting pot on the contested edges of imperial authority. ‘It was a seaport of the east, a garrison town, a smuggling centre, a haunt of pirates and racketeers, a drug market and among the most cosmopolitan of Her Majesty’s possessions,’ explains Jan Morris.74 Those who were displaced by the Opium War made their way into the colony as well as a growing population of boatpeople drawn to the distribution and construction work on offer. It was a migrant, shifting, shady community whose loyalties were limited: few felt confident enough to predict the future control of Hong Kong, and public order, beyond the barracks, was difficult to maintain. ‘In the early days there was next to no police guardianship; and the consequences were frequent disorders on the streets during the day, and many burglaries on a great scale at night,’ recalled Legge.75 Warehouses, public buildings (including Government House), shops, and domestic properties such as James Legge’s were all broken into.
The rampant criminality only augmented the racism of the British colonial elite. From the very foundation of the colony, the abuse and occasional violence meted out towards indigenous and migrant Chinese by the Europeans was noticeable. ‘The Europea
ns hate the Chinese, and the latter return the compliment with interest,’ was Lord Redesdale’s opinion.76 In stark contrast to the early orientalists of Calcutta, there was little attempt on the part of imperial administrators in Hong Kong to read Chinese literature or understand Qing culture. ‘At the present moment, the separation of the native population from the Europeans is nearly absolute,’ noted Sir John Bowring in the 1850s. ‘Social intercourse between the races is wholly unknown … I do not believe there is a single merchant or tradesman in Hong Kong who speaks or understands the native dialect, who has seen a Chinaman at his table, or admitted him to the slightest confidential intimacy.’77 The Reverend George Smith thought it worse than that. ‘The Chinese are treated as a degraded race of people,’ he noted. The British authorities responded to the volume of crime in May 1843 by prohibiting all Chinese boats from moving about the harbour after 9 p.m. and requiring all Chinese on shore to carry lanterns after dark and not be on the street after 10 p.m. These controls were escalated in 1844 with an ordinance to control the Chinese population through systematic registration and thereby block the influx of the ‘scum’ of the Chinese into the colony.78 The result of this heavy-handed array of registrations and restrictions was the elimination of any hope of mutual trust in the colony. ‘By these means, a race of people, the most alive to the influences of kind treatment, instead of being converted into friends of British connexion, become alienated, and return to their native soil with prejudices and heart-burnings increased to a ten-fold degree, to spread disaffection to Hong Kong, and hatred of the Western Barbarians.’79
At moments of heightened Sino-British tension, that prejudice and disaffection spilled over into communal acts of resistance and sometimes violence. When the 1844 registration requirements were announced, the Chinese community called a General Strike and forced the abolition of the scheme for all but the lowest classes. And then there were the poisonings. In July 1848 there was an attempted poisoning of twenty-five men of the Royal Artillery. But ‘the diabolical attempt to poison a large number of the inhabitants of the Colony’ came in the shadow of the Arrow incident and the run-up to the Second Opium War, when bread from the E-sing bakery was laced with arsenic. On 15 January 1857 James Legge was one of the 300 or so Europeans
who partook of the poison. I did so twice; – early in the morning, and again at breakfast time; soon getting rid, however, of all the noxious matter through violent paroxysms of sickness. Never was such a day of excitement in the Colony; and had A-lum [the baker] been caught at once, he would have been lynched beyond doubt; but he had gone off with all his family by the early steamer to Macao.80
Although a jury could come to no firm conclusion as to criminal intent behind the poisoning, in its aftermath, new controls were placed over the Chinese community, with more extensive registration schemes, licensing, corporal punishment, searches, deportations and curfews.
The bigotry was all the more self-defeating because, in the words of Governor Hercules Robinson in 1863, ‘it is the Chinese who have made Hong Kong what it is and not its connection with the foreign trade’.*81 It was Chinese labour, trade connections and entrepreneurialism which rescued Hong Kong’s finances from their opium dependency and began to chart a more sustainable urban economy. The outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion across southern China in the early 1850s led a growing number of wealthy Cantonese families to make a base in the colony. Between 1853 and 1859, the Chinese population of Hong Kong rose from around 40,000 to around 85,000, and with them came new links to markets on the mainland, with lower overheads thanks to the absence of middlemen, as well as international networks. The growth of overseas Chinese communities in the American West (on the back of the California goldrush), South-east Asia and Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century helped to turn Hong Kong into a transnational trading and labour hub. Attracted by the British system of private property rights, Chinese immigrants started sinking large funds into the Hong Kong economy, spurring a new wave of commercial development. Such was the growth of confidence that in 1864 the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was founded in the colony and, in 1872, Jardine, Matheson & Co. even felt sure enough of future profits to drop the opium trade. But it was Chinese industriousness which was the main source of the wealth creation, and the Chinese were the ones reaping the profits. In 1876 twelve of the twenty highest ratepayers were European firms; in 1881 only three European companies were among the top twenty. The rest were Chinese individuals or firms.
In the process, great fortunes were accumulated. The so-called hanjian or ‘Chinese traitors’, those smugglers, merchants and gang-masters who had thrown in their lot with the English early in the history of Hong Kong, did particularly well. The comprador Kwok-acheong was a pilot and then provisioner for the Royal Navy who later managed to gain a monopoly over cattle imports into the island and ended up with a personal fortune worth over half a million dollars. His business associate, Tam Achoy, followed the British fleet from the naval dockyard in Singapore to Hong Kong during the First Opium War. His fortune came from construction contracts, chartering emigration ships and then an extensive property portfolio along Victoria Harbour. There were numerous other Chinese ‘hongs’ grown rich from the cotton and silk trade, construction, real estate investment and the emigration business.82
Barred from the traditional avenues of social preferment and political power, Hong Kong’s wealthy Chinese used philanthropy and voluntary association to develop an active civil society. These Chinese were not the passive victims of colonialism, but active partners in the development of the colony’s social ecology. Charity on a grand scale was the vehicle of choice for ambitious Chinese former compradors, as they assumed the traditional civic function of public men in a commercial city. The creation of a District Watch Committee in 1866, followed by the Nam Pak Hong guild (a mutual assistance association ‘to promote members’ welfare and market prosperity’), the Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk (literally, ‘protect virtue association’, formed to stop kidnapping and prostitution) showed an increasingly self-confident mercantile Chinese elite in the second half of the nineteenth century. ‘Since the founding of the Tung Wah Hospital, the members of its board of directors have begun to hold an annual gathering to celebrate the lunar new year,’ reported Wang Tao, the Christian publisher and friend of James Legge. ‘For the occasion they don all sorts of fine headgear and gowns, as if they were illustrious officials having an audience with the emperor! Sartorial splendour has supplanted the plainer styles of the past. At fashionable social gatherings, some spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single dinner.’83
For all the philanthropic venture and ostentatious display, the places on the Watch Committee, the Sanitary Board and the hospital, the real levers of power in Hong Kong – the Executive Council and Legislative Council (which supported the governor) – were closed to the Chinese. Demands for political representation were always resisted by both Crown authorities and the British business community. The Chinese could do the hard work, but the lion’s paw remained on top. For E. J. Eitel it was the key to the colony’s success: ‘the rapid conversion of a barren rock into one of the wonders and commercial emporiums of the world has demonstrated what Chinese labour, industry and commerce can achieve under British rule’.84 Despite the prosperity of many of the Chinese population, the colony’s early racial absolutism also produced, as with so many of Britain’s imperial cities, a chronically divided urban topography. ‘In this island of contrasts none is greater than that between the European and Chinese quarters of the town,’ thought Lord Redesdale. ‘In the former the houses are large and well built of gray slate-coloured bricks and fine granite … In the latter, on the contrary, the houses are low and mean’ and peopled ‘by ugly old women and queer little yellow children’.85 Despite the presence of an indigenous Hong Kong population, the British conviction of themselves as ‘bona fide first possessors’ spurred them to give an air of permanence to their Chinese colony. They would live and build in a Brit
ish manner, cementing their ownership of the island through the design of its colonial institutions: the Gothic of St John’s Cathedral (1849), recalling the Early English architecture of the thirteenth century; the neo-classical Government House (1855); the colonnades and cupolas of the Renaissance-styled City Hall (1869); the arches and verandas of the Royal Observatory Building (1883) – as well as all the vast godowns lining the harbour. This stood in sharp contrast to the supposed impermanence of the migrant Chinese population, housed in their shoddy shanty towns without classical or Gothic legitimacy. They were passing; the British were the possessors.
As in Calcutta and Bridgetown, separate living spurred racial consolidation as the British colonial elite hugged themselves together in a class hierarchy directly imitative of nineteenth-century England. Then as now, the pinnacle of domestic Hong Kong living was Victoria Peak, with its cool air, lush forest, stunning views and cloistered exclusivity. Today native Hong Kongers complain about the ‘wall of money’ coming over from China and buying up the best properties, but in colonial days it was China-free. In 1867 a summer lodge was erected for the British governor, and, during the second half of the nineteenth century, non-Europeans were progressively excluded from accessing the Peak. Finally, in 1904, after a deadly outbreak of bubonic plague on the island, they were banned from it altogether as Hong Kong consolidated its racial exclusivity and British expatriate life retreated to its rarefied air.