Outposts

by Simon Winchester

Most visitors from the West come in by air, as I did first in the mid-1970s, from New Delhi. The approach to Kai Tak airfield is unforgettable—though not at first: the plane usually contrives to come in from the western side of the colony, and the last few miles of the journey are over the brown and undistinguished hills of Kwangtung province of Southern China, and the muddy estuary of the Pearl River. (The British have been this way, evidently: even the airline maps show the southernmost point of China, just off to the starboard side, was once called Cape Bastion, and there is a Macclesfield Bank and a Money Island out in the South China Sea, barely visible from five miles up.)

  But then the sea begins to swarm with shipping. Big freighters can be seen lumbering northwards, contained in channels between a clutch of tiny, tree-covered islets. Red and white hydrofoils scurry to and fro leaving trails of white foam, and stately ferry boats plough across the straits. As the plane gets lower still we can see the country boats—skiffs and punts and a few elegant sailing junks, each a superb piece of Eastern imagery with its three lugsails stiffened with long battens, and a lone crewman fishing from the stern.

  We sink lower still, and flash over a small island where there seems to be a barrack block, and a clutch of radio towers. And then, in a bewildering rush of concrete and steel and neon, Kowloon is below, and blocks of flats stream past at 200 knots. They say the locals hang their washing out for a warming blast from the passing jets; we clear the roofs by no more than a hundred feet, and then make a sharp right turn and, twenty seconds later, touch down at Kai Tak, on the runway which is built out into the bay, and from which all Hong Kong can be seen, draped like a great wall of whiteness against the lush green foliage of the Peak.

  It is a mesmeric, intoxicating sight, a view to make one gasp. A hundred years ago there was almost nothing: just a thin line of warehouses, a few church towers, the mansions of the taipans up on the slopes, and Government House on Upper Albert Road with the Union flag waving lazily in the steamy air. Today a vast white winding cloth of concrete, steel and glass has been bolted on to the hillsides, obscuring the contours, turning a world once dominated by the horizontal and the gentle diagonal into a pageant of the vertical. On the waterfront—on land reclaimed from the harbour—are the glittering towers of the ‘mighty Hongs’—Jardines, Swires, Wheelock Marden, the Honkers and Shankers, Hutchinson Whampoa, Hong Kong Land, and all the other guardians of capital might.

  ‘I began to wonder,’ Sun Yat Sen once wrote, ‘how it was that Englishmen could do such things as they have done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within seventy or eighty years, while in 4,000 years China had achieved nothing like it…’ His wonderment was spurred, no doubt, by the prevailing contemptuous Chinese view of Western inadequacies. XuJiYu, a scholar of the nineteenth-century mandarinate, described Britain as merely ‘three islands, a handful of stones in the western ocean…her area is estimated to be about the same as Taiwan and Hainan.’ To both mandarin and revolutionary the name ‘China’ meant the same thing—‘the area beneath heaven’. No other upstart nation—and certainly no mere handful of stones in the western ocean—could contemplate changing the aspect of the Chinese island of Hong Kong, even a little.

  And how it has changed! Huge tower blocks, with flats costing three thousand pounds a month to rent; six-lane motorways, streaming with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes (more Rolls per head than anywhere else on earth); palaces of gleaming black reflecting glass, each connected to the other by aerial walkways; massive housing projects with population densities of up to a third of a million people per square mile; tunnels, railway lines, yacht harbours, container ports, ice rinks, roller-coasters, spy stations, cable terminals, a planetarium, two race courses and all the paraphernalia of urban life, jammed on to a tiny chunk of granite once described as ‘a plutonic island of uninviting sterility, apparently capable only of supporting the lowest forms of organisms’ but which now (the commentator was writing in 1893) ‘stands forth before the world…as a noble monument to British pluck and enterprise.’

  The first view of Hong Kong from the air is impressive enough. But to arrive in Hong Kong from her motherland, from the mainland China from which she draws her people and her inner strengths, and to which, it is internationally agreed, she will return three years before the end of this century, is to see all the drama of an Imperial extravaganza, and to be allowed to make comparisons between the two systems under which modern China has been run.

  I had flown into Peking with the Royal Air Force, aboard a VC-10 that was taking Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, to the Chinese for another in what then seemed an interminable series of negotiations over the colony’s future. The journey seemed interminable, too, only enlivened for me by our brief stop in Delhi, where the British High Commissioner’s Rolls-Royce was waiting, driven by the Imperial chauffeur, who had the splendidly down-to-earth name of Mr Omo, and whose charge was, naturally, pure white.

  We landed in Peking in the mid-afternoon, and everything was strangely silent: no band, no guard of honour, no cheering and no applause. The plane’s engines ceased their whining, and the great quiet murmur of China took over, wrapping us all in its strange soft blanket. It was cold, too, and dusty, and the skies were heavy with the fine yellow sand from the Gobi desert. The streets, thronged with cyclists, were quiet and dusty too, and the whole city looked shabby and tired, as though its citizenry and its buildings were emerging from a long sleep, and were blinking their rheumy eyes towards the light.

  I took the Canton train a few days later, and experienced one of those intense bitter-sweet moments that becomes ineradicably etched on to the memory. It is not strictly relevant to the saga of Empire, perhaps, but it lies at the centre of my great affection for China, and had something to do with my mixed feelings about Hong Kong.

  I had been on the platform at Peking central railway station a few weeks before as a great express, the 3.54 p.m. to Chongqing, pulled out. A young woman, dressed in dark blue Mao overalls, was saying her tearful farewells to a baby, probably her own, that someone was holding at a carriage window. A guard blew on her whistle, the woman began to weep softly but uncontrollably, and the train, with painful slowness, started to move out of the station. But as it did so the loudspeakers on the platform began to sound a melody of wonderful sweetness, a tune so sad and grand and gentle that I knew it had been written especially for a departure platform, and particularly for that young woman and her child.

  Some days later I was in Hong Kong, whiling away one late evening in a bar, talking to an old British actor I had met in the lift. He was a forlorn figure, a man for whom his bottle now seemed more comforting than his lines, and who was reduced to playing the Hong Kong hotels in place of the West End theatres he had once known. The Empire takes such people, and makes them briefly feel wanted again.

  We were the only ones left in the bar, and ordered a final whisky while the old Cantonese waiters began stacking the chairs, and the girl at the turntable pulled out a last record, sighing deeply as she cued down the needle. The music flooded out into the bar, and my companion’s endless conversation faded into a mere hum. It was, of course, the same sweet tune, cascading over this sad old night as though it had been designed for moments like this, too. The girl told me what it was called: ‘Fishing Junks at Sunset’. Classical piece, from up there—and she jabbed her thumb towards the harbour, and Kowloon, towards the New Territories, and the fence, and China beyond.

  And then I was back in Peking, and down at the station and waiting in the corridor of the 10.43 p.m. from Peking to Canton, while a group of friends stood with a bottle of champagne to wish me God-speed as I set off for the south, and the Imperial foothold. The guard waved her flag and blew her whistle; the train moved slowly away, everyone was waving and then, above the screech of flange against rail, I heard a shout. ‘They’re…playing…your…tune!’ And I listened over the din, and heard its sweetness once again: ‘Fishing Junks at Sunset’, the perfect music for a melancholy China night, and a piece tha
t has haunted me ever since.

  The journey lasted for two nights and three days. My travelling companions were, variously, a Japanese businessman who either bought or sold pig bristles for use in shaving brushes; a welder from Minneapolis who had come to see his son at university in Shanghai; and Professor Yang, who was in charge of the Tungsten, Tin and Bismuth Group of the Chinese Geological Society and, to judge from the number of ballpoint pens in the top pocket of his Mao jacket and the fact that he was travelling Soft Class, was a very senior cadre of the Party.

  In Canton station I found a taxi driver who was prepared to take me to the frontier, a hundred miles away across the delta of the Pearl River. We bumped along rutted roads, crossed wide rivers on rickety ferry-boats, and managed to get a speeding ticket from a policeman who jumped from behind a bush and waved a red flag at us, angrily, but then offered us a cup of chrysanthemum tea by way of consolation. He said he was sorry that a gweilo—a foreign devil—had been so inconvenienced.

  Ten miles away from the frontier, still deep inside a China of timeless rural peace—workers knee-deep in the paddy fields, ducks straggling along the roadside, the occasional bullock-cart lumbering down a muddy lane—we passed two unexpected signs of the new, post-Mao order: a petrol station, run by Texaco (though no cars were taking advantage of it), and a tall, electrified fence, with watchtowers and a massive and well-guarded border control post, such as you might find when taking the autobahn from Vienna to Budapest.

  This was not the frontier with Hong Kong, however. It was a new ‘internal’ frontier that divided the special economic zone of Shen Zhen from Marxist orthodoxies of the rest of China—the zone being a sort of halfway house, an airlock, between the rigidities of the Communist world and the laissez-faire capitalism of the Crown colony. It is a frantically busy place, with factories and tower blocks and hotels (most of them paid for by wealthy Hong Kong investors) rising out of the paddy fields, and restaurants jammed solid with a new Chinese élite who are making money on a scale of which Mao would never have dreamed.

  And then, dark on a distant hill, the first sign of a familiar Empire: the square and battlemented outline of a fort. I had seen such things on the brown ridges above the Khyber Pass, and in the Malakand Hills near Swat. Both there, and here, they looked as if they belonged on a film set for Beau Geste: they are called Mackenzie Forts, after the Bengal Governor who designed them. Elsewhere in the world they are mere relics of a British Raj; they belong now to independent governments, who use them for training, or turn them into museums, or just allow them to fall into ruin.

  But on this frontier they are still British Imperial forts, guarding an old British Imperial fortress. A huge Union flag waved from the one I could see from Shen Zhen, and once in a while there was a faint glint as binoculars swept the town, and the border river and the fence. There were British soldiers up there, in their last few years of Empire-watch.

  The taxi dropped me at the Lo Wu railway station, where the Friendship Bridge crossed the muddy little border stream. There was a steel gate across the single railway line, and a dozen khaki-uniformed soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army stood in front of it, chatting to each other and smoking. They smiled and waved as I walked past them on to the footbridge and into British territory. One of them asked, in sign language, if I had enjoyed the time I had spent in his country, and offered me a cigarette. They seemed genuinely pleased when I told them I had, and they were clapping and laughing when I looked back at them, at the point where the corridor turns and all view of the People’s Republic is deliberately blocked. A few days later I thought back to their little group: theirs had been the last gesture of true human friendship from a Chinese stranger that I was to experience for my remaining few days in the East—from now on, in the superheated mercantilism of Hong Kong, civilities and kindnesses were at a premium.

  I had breakfast with the British soldiers who hold the line—nearly all of them Gurkhas, members of one of the world’s last remaining mercenary armies performing one of Empire’s last remaining tasks. They built the fence: it is fourteen feet high, twenty-six miles long, alive with sensors and arclights, but with 150 gates (only three of which are guarded) through which the local Chinese farmers are permitted to wander more or less at will. There is a standard briefing given to visitors: small men from the hills of western Nepal demonstrate high-technology systems, acronyms like CLASSIC (the Covert Local Area Sensor System) and VINDICATOR, maps are drawn showing how many illegal immigrants—or ‘eye-eyes’, as the troops call them—are seized each month in each of the border’s four sectors, slides of helicopters and dogs and tracker-teams are shown with a mixture of pride, puzzlement and embarrassment. The troops have a threefold official role—protecting the ‘integrity’ of the Sino-British border, collecting low-level intelligence (which means gazing endlessly through those binoculars at the fields and the tower blocks below), and capturing illegal would-be settlers in the colony. But the Gurkhas know that they, as Nepalis, have no business in the matter; the British officers have no real heart for it, now that they know the border will vanish for all time on 1st July 1997, when the lease runs out; and the only pleasure anyone takes in the task is that it is done well, efficiently and, so far as the immigrants are concerned, with despatch and compassion. (The captives—about eleven a day—are given a cup of tea and handed over to the Chinese border guards at a small ceremony each afternoon at three, and are fully expected to have another try at scaling the fence the very next day. Some, indeed, are regulars, and the soldiers hope that before too long the most persistent will evade the detectors and the tracker dogs, and get into one of the crowded slums of Hong Kong and begin to enjoy what is said, by comparison, to be the good life.)

  The train from Lo Wu was very different from the slow and rickety antique that had brought me to Canton. No chipped paint and cracked leather upholstery, no lace antimacassars and bed-time tea, no fronded lamps and grime-crusted window; here, instead, was a gleaming steel arrow, silent, cushioned, smooth and very fast. At the first station, in the New Territories village of Sheung Shui, a pretty Chinese girl got on board: she was dressed in white silk, had a Hermès scarf, carried a costly handbag and wore a gold wristwatch as thin as a wafer. She was a picture of perfection—a signal contrast to the last girl I had seen in China, now just a few thousand yards away to the north. She was working at the Lo Wu station, shuffled around in slippers, wore a baggy uniform of rough blue drill, and a flat cap adorned with the red star of the Party. The girl in silk, however, was haughtily disdainful, and shouted at a porter for some unfathomable misdemeanour; the girl in blue drill had smiled happily, and her resignation to her role in the proletariat seemed not to depress her. Whose life, I wondered, was the more fulfilling? Who had the more reason to hope?

  And then I was at Kowloon station—the most distant railway station to which it was possible to journey, without interruption, from London. All the chaos and urgency of the colony was here—shouting porters, magazine sellers, hustlers, hawkers, policemen, old ladies with chickens, bewildered American tourists, businessmen being ushered into long black cars, the girl in silk being kissed by an immensely fat Frenchman who whisked her away in a Mercedes to his model agency, or his apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, or to lunch at the Kowloon Club. And there, across the harbour, was the great crystal wall of Hong Kong herself, with the Peak, swathed in a warm and swirling mist, looming faintly above. It was a month since my Easter visit, and the black framework of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building had grown by another hundred feet, and blocked out yet another view, and another bit of the greenery I had been able to see the last time I had stood here, gazing south from Kowloon at the richest colonial possession on the planet.

  Hong Kong is—setting aside Anguilla, and the mid-ocean peak of Rockall—the youngest of Britain’s remaining colonies. The Convention of Chuen Pee was announced on 21st January 1841, ceding Hong Kong Island to Britain, and to the Honourable Chieftainess Victoria, in perpetuity; the settle
ment reached between the British Conservative and Chinese Communist Governments in 1984 established that the Victorian interpretation of perpetuity no longer obtained, and it was agreed that sovereignty would revert to China on 1st July 1997. Hong Kong thus knows precisely the duration of British Imperial dominion: 156 years, five months and eleven days—a great deal less than her three and three-quarter centuries in Bermuda, rather longer than the ninety years during which the Crown administered India.

  Of all Britain’s innumerable Imperial conquests, occupations and annexations, that which won Hong Kong for England was the least honourable. The ‘unequal treaty’, to which the Chinese understandably objected almost from the moment they were compelled by circumstance to sign it, had its origins in the mucky trade between British India and China, in the dried cakes of ooze from the seed pods of the pretty red flower Papaver somniferum—opium. Hong Kong, however glittering a prize it has become today, is a colony first established for the convenience of the British narcotics business—a fact the Chinese, despite the diplomatic niceties that attended the signing ceremonies of 1984, are loath to forget.

  The Javanese Dutch are said to have shown the Chinese the delights of inhaling the pleasurable fumes of opium. By the 1830s between four and twelve million Chinese were addicted. The side streets of Shanghai and Peking were thick with furtively run divans, inside which, in an atmosphere of warm, sweet-scented gloom, Chinese men were able to slip contentedly into the untroubled sleep and dreamy fantasies that the opium induced.

  But China grew few poppies, and those that were harvested were not for lancing with the opium-knife. The Imperial court had forbidden the practice, and officially discouraged its import. They condemned what they called the ‘foreign mud’—and yet, unofficially, connived at the trade. Americans brought in opium from Turkey, and Parsee traders would bring it in from Persia and Afghanistan. But the best opium, guaranteed unadulterated and most competitively priced, came from Bengal and Bihar—and from the British East India Company’s headquarters in Calcutta.