Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  The Indian association with Hong Kong was based upon alliances between the British taipans and their Bombay or Calcutta trading partners – alliances that predated the colony. Parsee merchants in particular were important in Hong Kong affairs from the beginning, several having bought land in Elliot’s original auctions, and Indians, fragmenting into Sikhs or Bengalis or Pathans, branching out into Pakistanis, have always been familiar in Hong Kong. They used to be familiar as soldiers, policemen and ships’ guards, they are familiar still as hotel doormen and security guards. The aristocratic-looking gentlemen often to be seen standing in the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel, as if waiting to join their fellow-directors for luncheon in the grill, are I am told strong-arm men from the north-west frontier; the police who guard the ammunition stores on Stonecutters Island, in the harbour, are always Sikhs, because their religion forbids them to smoke.

  In the past at least they suffered from dual racial prejudices – unless they were rich or grand they were liable to be slighted by British and Chinese alike – but they have often prospered mightily all the same. It was an Indian who first operated a cross-harbour ferry service, in the 1840s, and another began the Star ferries, and for many years Indians were prominent in the hotel business. Two of the original Indian firms in Hong Kong, founded in 1842, flourish to this day. As manufacturers and agents, Indians and Pakistanis play a role in the Hong Kong economy wildly out of proportion to their numbers; they form less than 1/400 of the population, but they generate a tenth of the colony’s export trade.

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  Look at the buses of the Japanese School, lined up head to tail on the road above Chung Hom Kok! Listen to the animated chattering noise of the pupils on the beach below! Bear in mind that just across the bay, on Stanley Beach in 1943, thirty-three British, Indian and Chinese citizens were beheaded for alleged High Treason against the Japanese occupying Power! The Japanese association with Hong Kong has been ambiguous indeed. On the one hand their armies were the only armies ever to invade the colony, on the other for many years their foreign trade was largely financed by the colony’s banks. On the one shore the children merrily bathing, on the other the bloodied heads falling on the sand.

  It was from Hong Kong that Jardine, Matheson moved into Japan in the nineteenth century, and except for the war years they have maintained thriving branches there since.8 The Japanese in return established a large commercial and financial colony in Hong Kong, besides providing, for example, one of the best-known Hong Kong barbers of the 1930, the surgeons who, during a terrible epidemic in 1894, first isolated the plague bacillus, and that once ubiquitous Hong Kong vehicle, the rickshaw, whose name was really jin-riku-sha, ‘man’s strength cart’. Until the Second World War there was a thriving Japanese Residents’ Association, with its own temple, and when the future Edward VIII came to the colony in 1922 its members greeted him with a volley of rockets, which upon exploding released a multitude of Union Jacks on parachutes.

  The years of the Second World War cast a pall of horror over the relationship, mingled (on the British side anyway) with a profound puzzlement and a trace of reluctant respect, but soon the Japanese were back in full force and confidence. Today they have their own banks, investment firms, insurance companies, hotels, restaurants and at least ten perpetually jam-packed department stores. The rickshaws have almost vanished, but the Toyotas and the Nissans, the Sonys and the Panasonics are everywhere. The Hong Kong finance market might be in trouble without its Japanese funds, the topless bars and massage parlours of the territory would languish were it not for the insatiable lusts of Japanese businessmen, and the 21,000-odd Japanese residents are likely soon to develop, I would guess, into the biggest foreign community of all.

  In Victorian times there was also a prosperous German colony – rather too prosperous, British competitors thought. It had its Germania Club, complete with theatre, and the Berlin Ladies’ Association ran a foundling hospital. Germans were personally popular in the colony, and an elaborate welcome was offered, by Germans and British alike, when in 1898 Prince Heinrich of Prussia arrived in the cruiser Deutschland on his way to the new German protectorate of Qingdao up the coast.9 Two world wars dispersed the community, but anti-German feeling was never fierce in Hong Kong. During the First World War the exploits of the German raider Emden, sinking British ships all over the Indian Ocean, were much admired by the colonists, who had happy memories of the cruiser from pre-war visits, and during the Second World War Nazi Germany was remote from the anxieties of Hong Kong. The Club, closed in 1914, has never been revived, and the German presence remains unobtrusive – 2,900 souls in 1996: but as you might guess from the prevalence of Mercedes and BMWs, West Germany is a more important trading partner to Hong Kong than is Great Britain itself.

  Russia, whether Soviet or Tsarist, has always been suspect in the colony, but Russians of one sort or another have repeatedly turned up. The future Tsar Nicholas II turned up in 1891, with a royal yacht and an escort of four warships, and was given a fairly frosty reception; nobody cheered him, and after a brief visit to Government House he sailed away again. Less eminent Russians turned up after the Soviet Revolution, and others again retreated to Hong Kong after successive alarms in Shanghai, a racier international settlement which in general they much preferred. Throughout the 1930s there were always White Russians knocking about, earning their livings as ships’ guards, as prostitutes, as dance teachers, as photographers, as racehorse trainers (the last Russian trainer at Happy Valley retired in 1986). There were enough to form a Russian platoon of the Hong Kong Volunteers, and when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1941 there were enough to form a thirty-member Cossack choir in their prisoner-of-war camp.

  The French, now represented by some 5000 people and at least 500 firms, are old habitués of the territory. In 1852 a French architect built Hong Kong’s first City Hall, in 1865 a Frenchman was appointed first general manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, in the 1950s French engineers built the new Kai Tak airport runway, protruding dramatically into the harbour. The chief Canadian connection with Hong Kong is a tragic one, being (as we shall later learn) the needless obliteration of two Canadian battalions in the Japanese invasion; today however there is a sizeable Canadian community, and Canada is best-known in the colony as the most popular destination for Hong Kong Chinese seeking a haven before 1997.

  The Australian link is full of verve, beginning with the importation of New South Wales ponies to race at Happy Valley, culminating in the bold investment of Australian entrepreneurs in the nervous Hong Kong market of the early 1980s. Australians are everywhere in the history of Hong Kong, from Mrs Randall with her Honey to Mr Murdoch with his newspaper. They are everywhere on the ground too, developing properties, managing shops, editing papers, and their accents permeate High Court and stock exchange alike, besides ringing convivially (stridently sometimes) across yacht club marinas on Sunday mornings.

  The Gypsies have never come to Hong Kong, but their wandering comrades the Jews have often fulfilled themselves by these remote and alien waters. Many have been refugees, often refugees twice or three times over – from Nazi Germany, from Soviet Russia, from Japanese occupation or Communist China. Others have come in the course of business, and some have established themselves in the classic line of the British imperial Jew.

  They have never been a large community (some 3,000 in 1996), and for generations they were, for example, excluded from membership of the Hong Kong Club. On the other hand some gained acceptance by being very rich, owning successful racehorses and giving splendid parties, and some were notably interesting: E. R. Belilios, for instance, who came to Hong Kong in 1862, defied convention by keeping a camel to carry his provisions up the Peak, while Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, who arrived in the 1940s and had once been Sun Yat-sen’s bodyguard, was one of the most colourful condottieri of the Chinese civil wars. The first great Jewish merchants followed the flag from Bombay, but some of them had originally come from Baghdad, and their families include s
ome of the best-known in Hong Kong history.

  Their white twin-towered synagogue was built in 1902 in a vaguely Dutch style, and is now hemmed in by gigantic tower blocks. It exhibits near its porch a list of subscribers, and there you will see some unexpected names, like Gezundhaji and Mackenzie. You will also find Jewish names, though, that were famous throughout the British Empire. The synagogue is named Ohel Leah, Leah’s Tent, having been built in honour of his mother Leah (‘Peace Be To Her’) by Jacob Sassoon, whose family came by way of Iraq and India to provide the empire with generations of poets, country gentlemen and millionaires. And prominent still in the affairs of the synagogue are the Kadoories, whom we see in pictures of a century ago dressed in turbans and baggy pantaloons, but who in 1981 produced Hong Kong’s first peer of the British realm – Lawrence, Baron Kadoorie, of Kowloon in Hong Kong and of the City of Westminster.

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  But of all the foreigners who have taken advantage of Britain’s presence in Hong Kong, pre-eminent from the first have been the Americans, whose Republic was rather more than sixty years old when the Crown Colony was established, and who have maintained a Consulate here since 1845. ‘Many people out in carriages,’ noted a visitor in 1858, ‘and some Yankees in light iron four-wheeled trotting gigs.’ We can see them now, with their tilted hats and their cheroots, and this is not surprising, for they have never gone away.

  American ships had first come to the China seas in 1784, when because of the Revolutionary War most foreign ports were denied them, and an American factory was established at Guangzhou in 1803. American entrepreneurs, nearly all British by origin in those days, regularly bought opium in India and in the Middle East, distributing it along the China coast in their own fast vessels. An American figures in the very first printed British reference to Hong Kong – he was an interpreter, picked up at a rendezvous off the west coast of the island by Lord Amherst’s mission to Beijing in 1816 – and among the original hongs of the colony was Samuel Russell and Company; founded in Boston in 1811, with partners from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, it remained for thirty years one of the presiding institutions of Hong Kong.

  Americans built the first Christian church in Hong Kong (the Baptist Chapel, 1842), and brought the first ice (1847), and financed the first 1,000-room hotel (1962 – originally to be called the America Hotel, it later became the Hong Kong Hilton). An American owned the first motor car (not surprisingly he was a dentist, J. W. Noble). An American was present at the very first Government House Christmas dinner (he was George Henry Preble, one of Commodore Perry’s officers on the expedition to Japan). An American naval band led the Masons along Queen’s Road to the opening of their new lodge in 1853. Americans ran the first steamer to Guangzhou (the Midas, 1845), and made the first Hong Kong parachute jumps (the Baldwin brothers, 1891). The rental sampans known as Walla-Wallas are supposed to be named after a small town deep in the interior of Washington State, because that is where their original operator came from.

  Ex-President Grant dined at Government House in 1879 (‘the most illustrious guest that ever sat at this table’). Admiral Dewey used Mirs Bay, debatably within Hong Kong’s territorial waters, as a base during the Spanish-American war. Emily Hahn the writer was an outstanding personality of pre-war Hong Kong, boldly defying pretensions grandiose and petty, living in a cheerfully unmarried state with the chief intelligence officer of the British garrison, and announcing the birth of her child, in the South China Morning Post, with a defiant: ‘To Major Boxer and Miss Hahn, a daughter.’ Kipling, on his visit to the colony in 1889, thought the whole town ‘dressed by America, from the hair-cutters’ saloons to the liquor bars’, while the girls of the bordellos talked in an American argot (‘I stood appalled at the depth and richness of the American language’): he went on one of the American river-steamers, too, and thought it not at all like the British boats of the Irriwaddy flotilla, being composed ‘almost entirely of white paint, sheet-lead, a cow-horn and a walking-beam’, with a stand of loaded Sniders to repel pirates.

  Whenever there has been a tragedy, a scandal, a financial coup or an adventure, there are likely to have been Americans somewhere about. Americans have kept pubs in Hong Kong, staffed brothels, married into Government House, fought pirates and for that matter been pirates. One of the most famous pirates of all was Eli Boggs, a renegade American matelot, who preyed upon the Pearl River traffic with a fleet of thirty armed junks. A reward offered for his capture by the Hong Kong Government was won in 1857 by another American, Captain ‘Bully’ Hayes, who took part in a Royal Navy raid on the pirate fleet and personally arrested its commander. The subsequent trial was a sensation of the time – Boggs, though almost tenderly good-looking, was alleged to have led his Chinese ruffians in the seizure of countless ships, murdering their crews or forcing them overboard. No witness could be found who had seen him actually kill a man, but he was found guilty of piracy and sentenced to transportation for life. (However although ‘Bully’ Hayes got his $1,000 all right, Boggs never went to the penal colonies, for after three years in a Hong Kong gaol he was released because of ill-health, and disappeared, it seems, simultaneously from Hong Kong and from history.)

  During the Americans’ Asian wars, in Korea in the 1950s, in Vietnam later, their servicemen fell upon Hong Kong in their thousands as they had fallen upon Tokyo in the 1940s – it is no coincidence that the modern soubriquet for a Hong Kong madam is mama-san, as in Japan. A generation of American males was conditioned then to think of Hong Kong as a paradise of hedonism, just as their successors today, the tourists who arrive for their own R and R on package tours and cruises, stereotype the place as the greatest of all shopping centres. Except for those of protectionist views (people in the textile industry, for instance), most American visitors and residents eagerly embrace the mores of Hong Kong, seeing in the territory no doubt some esoteric mirror-image of their own ideology, and buying in their hundreds of thousands a succession of popular novels about the place.

  As for the Chinese of Hong Kong, so readily do they adapt to American tastes in return that the busiest of all McDonald’s hamburger joints are those in this territory, and recently almost 4,000 people ate pizzas in a single day at a Pizza Hut in Kowloon.

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  Today there are almost as many American nationals living in Hong Kong, official statistics say, as there are Britons: but probably half of them are Chinese-Americans, many from Hong Kong in the first place, and are thus invisible.

  This is very proper, for the Americans’ stance in Hong Kong has not always been what it seems. On the face of it their residency has been straightforward enough. They have their Chamber of Commerce and their International School. They have a gloriously luxurious American Club on the forty-seventh floor of a waterfront skyscraper in Central, one of the best places in the world to enjoy a vodka martini to Cole Porter in the piano bar, together with a sumptuous country club. They have their State of Illinois Asian Office, their State of Michigan Agricultural Department Office, their Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. There are American presenters on Hong Kong television, and American enterprise is active in everything from the generation of electrical power in gigantic power stations to the construction of model ships in upstairs Kowloon workshops. There is a very large Consulate-General in a prominent position half-way between Government House and Statue Square, and in 1987, to cap it all, an American briefly became managing director of Jardine, Matheson itself.

  But their presence in Hong Kong is more subtle than that. Some of the Consulate-General windows are eerily mirror-glassed, to prevent spying visual or electronic, and official American attitudes in the Crown Colony have often been similarly opaque. As recently as 1986 a senior American consular official was heard to tell a visiting bigwig from New York that there, right there in that Consulate-General, was where Hong Kong was really run. If the American financial interest in the territory is enormous, and growing fast, the Americans have also had powerful historical, political and id
eological stakes in the place.

  Early in this century they began to regard China as particularly their sphere of influence. Commercially their commitment was no more important than Britain’s, but emotionally, largely because of the proliferation of American evangelical missions in the Chinese interior, they felt themselves to have a superior lien upon the country. This conviction came to a head during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose maternal grandfather Warren Delano had been a partner in Russell’s, and who was interested in China all his life.

  It was during his presidency that we first sense a growing American determination that the British ought not to be in Hong Kong at all. Roosevelt was against all Empires, as any self-respecting President had to be in the 1930s and 1940s, and just as he thought the British should leave India, so he thought they should hand back Hong Kong to the Chinese. Like Chiang Kai-shek, the Christian convert who ruled China from 1928 to 1949, he considered the Treaty of Nanking, under which the colony had become British, an ‘unequal treaty’, one of many forced upon the Chinese in the previous century by the overwhelming power of Europe. Most of those treaties were revoked by agreement in 1943, but the original Hong Kong cession, and the later lease of the New Territories, were both upheld by the British, and were regarded by Chiang and by Roosevelt as iniquitous.

  The later stages of the Second World War, when Hong Kong had been lost to the Japanese, and Chiang’s Kuomintang China was formally admitted into the ranks of the Big Five Powers, seemed the opportunity to set things right. Correspondence between Chiang and Roosevelt frequently proposes the return of Hong Kong to China after the war. To Stalin, at Yalta, Roosevelt suggested the internationalization of Hong Kong. To Eden, in Washington, he said Britain should give up the colony ‘as a gesture of goodwill’. Another suggestion was that the British should sell Hong Kong to China, the price being lent by the US Treasury, or that the Chinese themselves should be enabled by the Americans to liberate Hong Kong from the Japanese. Whatever the means, Roosevelt was confident that the matter would be arranged. ‘We are going to be able to bring pressure on the British to fall in line with our way of thinking,’ he told his son Elliott. ‘We’re going to be able to make this the twentieth century after all, you watch and see!’