Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Even in the mixed areas of the island, there was not much mixing. For all the charity and philanthropy of the Chinese merchants, the British remained steadfast in their social segregation. Hong Kong’s exclusive panoply of clubs, associations, sports, recreation, entertaining and civic functioning were the means by which the British maintained a colonial sense of purpose and, by excluding the Chinese, racial superiority. There was the Amateur Dramatics Club, the Victoria Club, the Peak Club, the Victoria Recreation Club and the Hong Kong Smoking Concert Club – all with complicated and fraught membership structures for upwardly mobile expats. Then there was the sporting life: the Victoria Regatta Club, the Hong Kong Boat Club, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, the Hong Kong Rifle Association, the Hong Kong Athletics Club, the Hong Kong Cricket Club and, of course, the Hong Kong Jockey Club at Happy Valley (where the Jardines proved particularly successful trainers). However, since its foundation in 1846, the social summit of colony life was located at what was called, very simply, the Hong Kong Club. ‘The Club will form a point of attraction which cannot fail to be most welcome,’ declared its co-founder Donald Matheson. ‘It will afford every variety of entertainment to give a stimulus to the enjoyment of literary and scientific society.’86 Few would claim it has ever done that. Instead, with an aggressively discriminatory membership code – firmly excluding the island’s petit-bourgeoisie, along with Indians, Chinese and women – it became the fulcrum of British colonial self-belief. To belong to the Hong Kong Club secured an elite status on the island and daily access to the governmental and business circle in charge of the colony’s destiny. For all his wealth, and despite his place on the Hong Kong Legislative Council, the Jewish trading dynast Frederick Sassoon never risked applying to join the club for fear of the dreaded black-ball. Today, the club still has an air of exclusivity, albeit now entirely corporate rather than racial. Rehoused in a rather drab, modernist three-storey block opposite the Legislative Council, the club comingles the super-rich of South-east Asia with some old China hands of pre-handover days. Humorous cartoons of various club chairmen playing rugby or drinking whisky, and the impressive fine-art collection of Landseer-lite depictions of Highland scenes, speak to a nostalgic colonial identity, but the club is clearly run with mainland China money. Hierarchy and prestige remain tangible, but the way in is now international finance.

  In nineteenth-century Hong Kong, the club, the racing at Happy Valley and the cricket woe what made the climate, illnesses, absence of females and demands of work just about bearable. To Albert Smith, it was a life of relentless tedium and pettiness. ‘The young men in the different large houses have a sad mind-mouldering time of it,’ he thought. Tea-tasting demanded no great intellect, and so the colony’s young clerks ‘loaf about the balconies of the houses, or lie in long bamboo chairs, smoke a great deal, [and] play billiards at the Club, where the click of the ball never ceased from the earliest morning’.87 Then there were the feuds, snubs and social climbing to contend with, the smallness of the island only adding to the pressure-cooker etiquette tussles. ‘The little community, far from being a band of brothers, is split into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their own immediate circle,’ wrote the clerk Alfred Weatherhead of mid-1850s Hong Kong.88 This was the bitter-sweet nature of Hong Kong life: a place of remarkable beauty, global reach and offering the promise of great riches, but more often than not the setting for a claustrophobic, enervating colonial life. Rudyard Kipling thought it all too reminiscent of ‘an India up-country station’, where the inhabitants, surrounded by the open sea and high mountains, ‘complain of being cooped in and shut up’. ‘They have amateur theatricals and they quarrel and all the men and women take sides, and the station is cleaved asunder from the top to the bottom.’89

  The warring merchants, officials, soldiers and spouses of the island were all, however, united by the absolute conviction that the transformation of Hong Kong was the product of what Jules Verne called ‘the colonizing genius of the English’ allied with the elixir of free trade. For Phileas Fogg, Verne’s hero of Around the World in Eighty Days, Hong Kong’s ‘docks, hospitals, wharves, Gothic cathedral, government house, macadamized streets’ gave to the colony ‘the appearance of a town in Kent or Surrey, transferred by some strange magic to the antipodes’. For British national identity in the Victorian era, increasingly configured around free trade and an imperial psyche deeply antagonistic towards China, Hong Kong managed to assume a monumentality rarely reached by other possessions. Part of that was always connected to the drama and emotion of the location – and, with it, the legend of those pioneering, commercial adventurers, led by Jardine and Matheson, crafting out a city-state from a barren rock in the face of the mighty Middle Kingdom. To James Legge, looking back on thirty years of Hong Kong missionary activity, such a transformation could only signal a grander hand at work.

  When I contrast the single street, imperfectly lined with hastily raised houses, and a few sporadic buildings on the barren hill-side, with the city into which they have grown, with its praya, its imposing terraces, and many magnificent residences, I think one must travel far to find another spot where human energy and skill have triumphed to such an extent over difficulties of natural position.

  He concluded his 1872 talk to the City Hall audience in Hong Kong by imagining ‘Britannia standing on the Peak, and looking down with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built’. Rudyard Kipling concurred. While he was always proud to see the busy shipping lanes of Singapore, the poet of Empire wrote of swelling with patriotism ‘as I watch the fleets of Hong-Kong from the balcony of the Victoria Hotel’. ‘No Englishman can land in Hong Kong without feeling a thrill of pride for his nationality,’ confirmed Lord Curzon. ‘Here is the furthermost link in that chain of fortresses which from Spain to China girdles half the globe.’90

  Any Englishman or -woman landing at Hong Kong now would be hard-pressed to find much physical remnant of Britannia on her peak. Of course, Wellington Street, Connaught Street, Stanley Street and Queen’s Road still exist. But with a brutal, rhythmic regularity, the old is ripped down for the new. In stark contrast to the imperial riches of Calcutta, Dublin or Cape Town, the British colonial footprint in Hong Kong is now limited to the tea museum at Flagstaff House (nestled in the midst of Hong Kong Park), the busy, whitewashed Gothic Revival St John’s Cathedral, the Old Dairy Farm Building, Government House and the LEGCO Building on Statue Square (previously Royal Square), built in 1898 for the Supreme Court before becoming home to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.* The heart of activity of the island is in the Central skyscrapers, the Mid-Levels apartments and then in the haggling bustle of the Chinese markets heading west into Sheung Wan. The colonial sunsets of Somerset Maugham, veranda drinks and social faux pas on Victoria Peak are long gone.

  What does remain is the mental architecture of Empire: the rule of law and private property rights; a free press, remnants of a parliamentary system and horse racing. Yet Hong Kong never achieved its defining purpose. For even after the addition of the New Territories in 1898 on a 99-year lease, the colony failed in its imperial mission to ‘open up’ China to the virtues of free trade. In fact, much of Hong Kong’s prosperity in the twentieth century would be thanks to China ‘closing down’ to world trade under Communist rule – the advent of Maoism in 1949 and the imposition of US sanctions secured Hong Kong’s position as a vital entrepôt for trading in the far East; the protection of private property and the rule of law made it a good place to do business; its free port and low taxes kept it globally competitive; and the pegging of its currency to the US dollar gave it sound money.

  Another part of the success, however, was a planning policy predicated on the creative destructive power of capitalism. There has never been much room for architectural sentiment in Hong Kong, as progressive advances in engineering have made the capacity for urban densification and elevation ever easier. Today the modernist Jardine House
, with its distinctive circular windows, is now overlooked by the glimmering skyscrapers of Standard Chartered Bank, Sir Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation Building (complete with Scottish Saltire styling), International Finance Centre, Tower 2 and, most important of all, since 1990 the Bank of China Building.

  What the skyscrapers conceal, however, is how since the 1840s Hong Kong’s unabashed capitalism has also been the product of generous state support. Indeed, the landmass of modern Hong Kong is a creature of extensive government subsidy as the waterfront has receded in the face of sustained public reclamation projects taken deep into Victoria Harbour. In 1841, the sea lapped the shore at where Queen’s Road stands – now a good half a kilometre from the Star Ferry Terminal over to Kowloon. In the most inhospitable of geological terrains, successive administrations have sought to provide, not least at Kowloon Docks, the perfect circumstances for commercial success. And this triumph of infrastructure is what is so striking about Hong Kong under Chinese rule: the super-efficient Chek Lap Kok Airport (now overlooked by the vast Tian Tan Buddha), the six-lane highways, and then the graceful suspension bridges linking Lantau Island and the New Territories, and then the smooth roadways into Hong Kong itself. In its statist efficiency, modern Hong Kong is a self-confident testament to capitalism with Chinese characteristics. For when China did finally open up to the merits of free markets in the early 1990s, it was time for Hong Kong to be handed back.

  As just another global financial metropolis of the twenty-first century – alongside Doha, Singapore and Shanghai – Hong Kong’s special purpose in the vanguard of free trade is no longer so obvious. Yet despite all its concrete and commuter villages, underpasses and train-tracks, global brand advertising and Americana shopping malls, the Pearl of the Orient’s unique urban élan somehow still manages to impress. The lush greenery of Victoria Peak, the criss-crossing ferries between Hong Kong island and Kowloon, and then the silver canopy of skyscrapers combine to produce an unrivalled city sensation. It was just as beguiling a vision in 1997 as 1898 – and few British politicians wanted willingly to take leave of it.

  But if British Hong Kong was born of the age of sail, by the latter half of the nineteenth century the steamer was taking over. A second industrial revolution of rail and steam was rolling across the Empire, and Curzon’s chain of fortresses was coming to include the citadels of the manufacturer as well as the merchant. Jardine Matheson’s ideology of free trade would remain, but the age of industry and mass production would change the function of imperial cities. And it would be William Jardine’s business partner Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, and his dirty, smoggy city of Bombay, which would come to take the colonial mantle from the Fragrant Harbour of Hong Kong.

  7

  Bombay

  ‘City of the present and the future’

  Struggling against the ‘abominable filthiness’ of Mango Senoy Street in the Fort district of Bombay, the deputy inspector general of hospitals was led by one enraged tenant to ‘a range of latrines, where he indignantly showed to him what he and others were subjected by the landlord’. ‘Both men and women, to avoid wading through the pool of ordure, had to use as stepping-stones some pieces of masonry that still projected a little above its surface,’ reported the inspector, Andrew Leith. Alongside decomposing animal and vegetable refuse rotting in the streets, ‘there is scarcely a part of the Fort or Native Town in which the ground along every dead wall is not wet or in pools from its being resorted to as an urinary’. Indeed, ‘many instances occur where the walls of the adjoining houses are constantly wet with fœtid fluid which frequently affects the atmosphere of the rooms so as to render it impossible to keep food for one single night without its being tainted’.

  Sewage was another problem for the city, as painstakingly recorded in the Report on the Sanitary State and Sanitary Requirements of Bombay (1852). ‘The open drains, or rather uncovered receptacles of filth … do not deserve the name of drains: there is seldom any perceptible motion in the liquid contents of the majority of them.’ One Bombay resident, the Parsi lawyer and politician Sir Dinshaw Wacha, well remembered how this refuse was dealt with. ‘The black foul semi liquid stuff was first thrown out on both sides of a street or road in a heap and after a day or two carted away.’ In the meantime, the ‘decomposed gases emitted from the perforated covers saturated the atmosphere with foul exhalations’. It was all deeply unpleasant. ‘Picture to yourself the life of a Hindu gentleman in the heart of the city,’ pleaded one public official. ‘Disturbed in the early morning, long before sunrise, by the sweepers at work, he gets up and goes to the verandah in front of his house to breathe the cool and refreshing air of the morning; but even that comfort – and how dear it is to all India! – is denied him, for he is driven from the verandah by the sweepers passing to and fro in front of his dwelling, and the horrid odours that taint the morning breeze.’

  Then there were Bombay’s public water tanks, which one sanitary reformer described as ‘nothing more than huge cess-pools, in which persons and clothes, wash and are washed, in a water that is never changed’. Just as disconcerting was the dangerous proximity of sewers to drinking water – ‘in some cases the distance between the privy and the well is as little as six or seven feet … there can be no doubt that into all these wells there is a large percolation of impure matter’. ‘All was darkness in Bombay,’ thought Sir Dinshaw of his native city in the 1850s, ‘and one generation after another lived in a happy-go-lucky style oblivious of the heavy bill of annual mortality.’ And it was quite a tab: cholera, smallpox, measles and a range of other diseases ‘annually claimed a large holocaust’ numbering in the tens of thousands. In 1865, over 65 per cent of the total mortality within the city of Bombay was attributed to ‘fever’.1

  ‘But by the side of this native town there is the modern European city, which in its regularity, magnificence, and beauty rivals any in the West,’ countered James Furneaux, subeditor of The Times of India. If a visiting European tourist avoided the insanitary rookeries, he might not even think his steamship had landed him east of Suez. In fact, ‘the stately pile of the Yacht Club, the imposing arcade of the Apollo Restaurant, and the electric lights around him, remind him of his own land’. This healthy, stately Bombay had for its motto ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’ and deserved it. ‘By the largeness of its population, greatness of its extent, the excellence of its situation, the volume of its trade, the wealth of its inhabitants, by everything that contributes to material greatness, it stands out pre-eminently among all the cities of India, nay of the whole East.’2 Far from the slums and open sewers, an array of grandiloquent, ‘Bombay Gothic’ edifices lined the city’s Esplanade, lapped by the Arabian Sea, and highlighting the achievements of Empire. Bombay’s University Library and Convocation Hall, the High Court, the Government Secretariat and the Central Telegraph Office offered a well-crafted essay in colonial self-congratulation. ‘The long and magnificent series of public buildings … was one of the finest sights of its kind in the world,’ thought the governor of Bombay in the 1870s, Sir Richard Temple. ‘The buildings are in themselves grand, but other cities may have structures as grand, though probably separate. Bombay, however, has all her structures in one line of array, as if on parade before the spectator.’3 It was always the case that a visiting Briton ‘feels himself a greater man for his first sight of Bombay’.4

  No building symbolized the meaning of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century more purposefully than Bombay’s Victoria Terminus station. Officially opened in 1887 for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, Empress of India,* it served both as the lead terminal of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and as an icon of colonial achievement. ‘The Jewel of Bombay is the Victoria Railway Station,’ thought the British writer G. W. Stevens, ‘a vast domed mass of stone fretted with point and column and statuary and shrubbery, purple-belled creepers, scarlet-starred shrubs.’5 From under its gaudy Indo-Saracenic domes – an overwhelming architectural mélange of London’s
Natural History Museum, Balmoral Castle and St Mark’s, Venice – spread forth the infrastructure of British India, connecting this commercial metropolis with the lineaments of Empire round the world. Small wonder Jan Morris was moved to describe the station as ‘the truly central building of the entire British Empire – the building which expresses most properly the meaning of the imperial climax’.6

  It was equally understandable when British director Danny Boyle chose to make VT – by then renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus – the defining backdrop to his 2008 Bombay blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire (a cinematic adaptation of the novel Q & A, by Vikas Swarup). It was beneath the station’s canopy of monkey-gargoyles, sculpted dripstones and corrugated iron-roofing, and among the overhead bridges, information boards and ticket offices, that the drama’s final chase takes place. This was the film that acquainted mass Western audiences with contemporary Mumbai: a rambling, quasi-Dickensian rendering (complete with the deliberate blinding of child beggars) of a slum megalopolis approaching 20 million inhabitants. In one sense, the screenplay was an easily consumable depiction of the ‘familiar’ India – of the Bandra, Dharavi and Annawadi slumdogs, of child poverty, immiseration and sanitary systems which would not have been unfamiliar to Andrew Leith in the 1860s. But this fable of doomed young lovers was also an introduction to the New India – of call centres, Bollywood, property development, fashion and multinational corporations. Mumbai was the obvious place to set it. For behind Sir Richard Temple’s ‘magnificent series of public buildings’ that once dominated the Esplanade there now towers Bombay House, the global headquarters of India’s industrial behemoth Tata Group, its satellite dishes and radio masts clashing with the Gothic of the University Library Clock Tower. Mumbai is now a commercial and cultural epicentre of twenty-first-century global capitalism; together with Shanghai, it serves as an urban shorthand for the assertive dynamism of the BRIC economies. When the ‘Licence Raj’ of postwar socialist development fell away in the early 1990s, Mumbai rose up as Asia’s ‘Maximum City’ of wealth creation.7 It was a city where the fabulously wealthy Ambani dynasty could build a twenty-seven-storey tower-block in the exclusive Malabar Hill as their own personal compound, while inequality and poverty still of Victorian levels flourished in coagulating ‘Slumbai’. ‘The inequalities that defined Bombay as a colonial port town have continued,’ notes journalist Kalpana Sharma. ‘Investment is always available to beautify the already well-endowed parts of the city. But there is no money to provide even basic services to the poorer areas.’8