by Jan Morris
But the American attitude changed when, in 1949, the Communists acceded to power in China, and Chiang Kai-shek moved with his refugee Government to another off-shore island, Taiwan. Now the British were no longer urged to hand the colony back to Beijing. On the contrary, when in 1950 the Americans found themselves fighting the Chinese Communists over the issue of Korea, Hong Kong became an outpost of their own power. The Consulate-General was enormously enlarged, becoming for a time the biggest of all American overseas missions, and was supplemented by every kind of skuldug outfit operating under the umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency. An embargo was placed upon trade with Communist China, and in Hong Kong American officials pedantically enforced it as if the territory were their own, drawing preposterous distinctions between timber grown in China and timber grown in Hong Kong, or banning the export of processed prawns on the grounds that they might have been caught in Chinese territorial waters.
Now the ships of the United States Seventh Fleet vastly outgunned the few remaining warships of the Royal Navy, and the antennae of American radar aerials and electronic watchposts sprouted from the ridges of Hong Kong. For the next twenty years, through all the traumas of Chinese hostility and gradual reconciliation, through the agonies of the Vietnam war fought a few hundred miles to the south, Hong Kong was America’s lookout into China, swarming with American servicemen, political and economic analysts, journalists, academics and plain spies. And when diplomatic relations were re-opened directly with Mao Zedong’s China, and the United States recognized Beijing rather than Taipei to be the legitimate Chinese capital, the colony may have lost some of its strategic value to Washington, but became a favourite place of American investment – the fifty US companies in Hong Kong in 1954 had become 1,000 by 1996.
Today the Americans officially welcome the impending return of Hong Kong to its motherland, while wondering like everyone else what will become of their money. Their concern nowadays is discreet, and in public at least they have taken no part in the approach to 1997: but their trading links with China could be a powerful lever towards democratic change in Beijing, and thus towards confidence and stability in Hong Kong. Their warships still often lie in the harbour, too, and to those of determinedly romantic tastes, like me, there is still a faint nostalgic stir to be gained from the sight of the Stars and Stripes flying there, as it was flown so long ago by the elegant opium clippers, by Russell and Co.’s chugging paddle-steamers, and even when the moment was propitious by Eli Boggs the pirate.
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And so to the 98 per cent: first and last of the Hong Kong peoples, the Chinese.
I was walking one day along a track on the island of Lamma, which lies two or three miles to the west of Hong Kong Island, thinking as it happened of the seafood lunch I was planning to enjoy beside the waterfront, and thinking too how much the island reminded me of a semi-tropic Scotland, with its bare heathy hills and salt wind – I was progressing in an amiable distraction when rounding a grove of shrubbery beside the path I came across ten or twenty people dressed all in white hooded cloaks, heads bowed, chanting incantations over an open pit. Aromatic smoke came from the ashes of a fire, and beside it a man in a long black gown and wide hat stood silently, as in trance, holding a wand. It was like a macabre dream, on that sunny morning, and it was partly because I did not wish to intrude, but partly because I was slightly shaken, that I hurried shamefaced by towards my fried garupa with egg plant (the Lamma fish restaurants are among the best in Hong Kong).
Shamefaced because I knew very well that it was no more than a Chinese funeral I had seen, conducted according to the old Daoist rites, and thus almost as natural a part of the local life as the wind off the sea itself. It is a disagreeable anomaly of Hong Kong that, thanks to the peculiar history of the place, the westerner thinks of the Chinese culture there as esoteric, something to be stared and wondered at, or hastened past, when it is of course the foundation of all else in the territory. The incidence of Europeans in Hong Kong is about one in every hundred persons, and what seems extraordinary to them, is of course overwhelmingly the norm.
It is however, in fairness to the ingenuous foreigner, even by Chinese standards a varied norm. Only rather more than half the population was born in Hong Kong, and even without counting its foreigners the colony is an ethnic hodgepodge. Its original Cantonese, Hakkas, Hoklos and Tankas are still here, the Hakka women still in their wide black-fringed straw hats, the Hoklas and Tankas still living by the sea, if not in their junks and sampans, at least very often in semi-amphibious huts or permanently grounded vessels. But there are also sizeable colonies of people from Shanghai – they used to call Hong Kong’s North Point Little Shanghai, so crowded was it with Shanghai-occupied apartment blocks, factories, restaurants, shops and offices – besides scatterings of immigrants from many other parts of China. Unless they happen to speak Putonghua or Mandarin, the central and official Chinese language, none of these peoples share a tongue, though they all share a written script. Some of them have traditionally been enemies; until very recently no self-respecting Cantonese would marry a Hakka, while Hakkas and Hoklas, it was said in the 1930s, ‘have little in common save mutual dislike’.
Nor is it anything like a settled populace. Like all else in Hong Kong, it is in a perpetual state of restlessness, and one of the most characteristic of all Hong Kong sights is that of a Chinese family on the move, deep with bags and baskets, with poles over its shoulders and multifarious tied parcels, with bewildered children and sharp-eyed crones, standing patiently in line for train or hovercraft, aircraft or ferry. Every day thousands of Hong Kong residents cross the border into China, by train, by boat or on foot over the border, and every day thousands more return, while there is a perpetual flow of emigrants to places far away – to join relatives in San Francisco, to start restaurants in Manchester.
Even within itself the Chinese community is never static. Nothing stays the same! Not long ago rice was the chief product of the New Territories, now there is hardly a paddy-field left, and as the face of the land constantly changes, so the people too are on the move, changing their jobs, changing their names, changing the way they live. Tankas and Hoklas forsake crafts of the sea to become factory workers, Hakkas fight their way out of the construction sites, farmers become businessmen and people of all ranks and races move out of squatters’ huts into tenements, out of tenements into apartment blocks, out of apartments into villas in the hills. I would guess there is no community in the world in such a state of ceaseless ferment.
But there is nothing remarkable to it. It is the norm.
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The Chinese population of Hong Kong is young, a quarter of it less than twenty-four years old, and it exudes a curious mixture of fun and earnestness. In the New Town of Yuen Long I once came across a bubble-tent, with windows in it and a guard outside. An odd kind of whistling noise emanated from it, half-way between a hoot and a protracted squeak. I looked through the windows and found it to contain a trampoline, upon which a large number of very small Chinese children were bouncing up and down. They did it not casually, nor wildly either, but with a fierce concentration, as though they were undertaking some important family duty, but at the same time they were doing it with such extreme enjoyment that the peculiar noise I had heard outside turned out to be a kind of constant solidification of their laughter.
I spend a few minutes with my notebook at a Chinese café – not one of the well-known tea-houses, which are sometimes frowsty or aloof, but a common-or-garden, ad hoc kind of general café, not very new, not very old, and almost anywhere in Hong Kong outside the expensive centre. I sit in a corner below the television set, thus obliging other customers to show their faces as they peer at the picture above my head, and order a cup of tea as an excuse for observation. Nobody minds. On the contrary, almost everyone greets me with smiles, the men behind the counter with grave smiles, the young women at their bean-curd with comradely smiles, the small girls with smiles that entail a deliberate, styliz
ed narrowing of the eyes, the boys in their school uniforms with very polite, diffident and prefectorial smiles (are they members of their class Triad group?).
Sickly is the music, chirpy the Cantonese dialogue that emerges from above me. Sometimes the whole café breaks into laughter, and nods cheerfully in my direction as though to say that I really am missing something hilarious. Only the man at the corner table, who wears a jerkin inscribed ROUTE SAISONAL GIRL CORRESPONDENCE, and is reading the Jockey Daily News in Chinese, takes no notice. The counter is piled high with packets of tissues, a tin of Ovaltine, and a cardboard box marked SHOWA SPAGHETTI which is waiting to be turned into Chinese noodles. A couple of rather sinister youths push through the door, have a dour word with the owner, and go out again. An old, old man, the very image of a sage, creeps in and finds himself a warm place; he has a long crinkled Confucianist beard, very beady eyes, carries a walking stick with an ivory handle and wears a baseball cap.
As time passes the noise increases. The schoolboys break into argument. The small girls play merry games with chopsticks. The women talk very loudly with their mouths full. Outside the door an electric drill starts up, and the café owner reaches over my head to turn up the volume of the TV. It does not matter in the least. Noise is endemic to the Chinese, is part of the texture of their lives, and the now-deafening variety of affairs in the café is a true microcosm of the Chinese city outside. The frank untidiness of the establishment, its free-and-easy way, the feeling that it has not been there very long anyway, and may well have moved somewhere else next time I pass this way, is Chinese Hong Kong all over.
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Yet there are Chinese families that can claim twenty-seven generations of residence upon the soil of Hong Kong. If the western presence here has been radical in most ways, it has been conservative in others. Elsewhere in China, including even Taiwan, the ancient Daoist, Buddhist, Confucianist and animist ideas have been challenged by three revolutions. The revolution of 1911, which overthrew the monarchy, laid emphasis upon western logic and efficiency, discouraged many an old tradition, and deliberately cut ties of custom that linked the people with the imperial dynasties. The Communist revolution of 1949 suppressed Daoism and most of its manifestations, discredited Confucianism and Buddhism and disintegrated the entire social structure. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s did its mad best to extinguish everything old and interesting altogether.
The one corner of China which has completely escaped these convulsions is paradoxically Hong Kong. The British promised from the start to honour Chinese custom, and by and large they did. Long after the abolition of the traditional marriage laws in China, for example, the Manchu laws prevailed in Hong Kong, so that into the 1930s married women could not sue for divorce and had no property rights whatever. Until quite recently the colony even allowed Chinese defendants the right to have their cases heard under Chinese customary law, a baffling prospect for young British magistrates who knew nothing whatever about it (though the writer Austin Coates, who was one of them, was quite happy when the Chinese system was invoked, knowing, he said, nothing whatever about English law either).10 It is true that the predominant official language of Hong Kong has always been English, but this has only left affairs more firmly in the hands of local elders determined to preserve the status quo: even now the New Territories, for all their fantastically burgeoning townships, offer rich fields of research for anthropologists and social historians.
On the surface, and in the tourist brochures, all this means that Chineseness in its most fantastic forms is honoured in the everyday life of this British colony. Hardly a month goes by without the celebration of some effervescent festival. Wild dragon-boat races are rowed, the full moon is honoured with picnics in high places, the spirits of the dead are placated with five-course meals in cemeteries, flotillas of toy ships with candles on them are launched into the sea, immense dragon-trains wind their way through shopping streets, and at the Chinese New Year the entire city gives itself up to eating, drinking, parading, lighting lanterns, exploding illegal firecrackers and saying to one another in Chinese in the best Hong Kong convention, ‘Respectfully hope you get rich!’
Some of the shrines and memorials of tradition have long since become tourist attractions. Everyone climbs the 500 steps to the Buddhist Temple of Man Fat, above the New Town of Shatin in the New Territories, to see the gilded corpse of the holy monk Yuet Kai; he died in 1965, and now sits bolt upright for ever in a tall glass case, covered in gold leaf and looking alert but blotched with what I assume to be preservative. Then high among the hills of Lantau is the immensely rich and gaudy Buddhist monastery of Po Lin, which is besieged all day by tourist buses. Its large enclosure contains computerized offices and a popular vegetarian restaurant, and beside its gates they have erected the largest of all images of the Buddha; this was made in China by the satellite and rocket manufacturers China Astronomical Industry Scientific and Consultative Corporation, and looms copper-sheathed over the island as a new wonder of the world.11
Since Victorian times every visitor has been taken to the Man Mo temple (‘the Civil and Martial temple’), which is about as old as the colony itself, and is a dim-lit, smoky, gilded, cluttered and cheerful distillation of everything one supposes a Chinese temple to be. And for so long have sightseers frequented the Tang clan’s walled village of Kat Hing Wai, at Kam Tin in the New Territories, that it has become hardly more than a permanent exhibition. Its inhabitants are descended from Tang Fu-hip, who settled in the district in the eleventh century, but shoddy souvenirs now fill the shops within its narrow geometric streets, children demand payment for having their photographs taken, and outside its gates dreadful old women in traditional costume, smoking traditional pipes, pose beneath umbrellas for profitable effect.
Among all these spectacular public manifestations, let us choose one to suggest the flavour of them all: the festival of Ta Chiu on the island of Cheung Chau, which is not only among the most popular of Chinese celebrations, but a red-letter event on the tourist calendar too, when half the launches, ferries, sampans and private junks in Hong Kong are pressed into service to take the gweilos to see the show. It is dedicated to the Pacification of Departed Spirits, including those of animals, and in former times during its celebration the people of Cheung Chau forbore from eating any kind of flesh.12 The festival happens every year some time during the fourth moon, but the exact date is variable and apparently unpredictable, making it an unsatisfactory occasion for the organizers of package tours.
Cheung Chau is about two and a half miles long from end to end, and used to be called Dumbell Island because of its shape. There are no cars on it, and it consists largely of a single cramped and crowded fishing-town, extending from one shore to the other. For the three days of Ta Chiu it is entirely given over to the festival, as Rio de Janeiro gives itself up to Mardi Gras. Chinese operas are performed in the town square, dragon-dancers display themselves, and on the afternoon of the third day a marvellous procession weaves its way through the sinuous streets. There are banner-men, lion-dancers, stick-dancers, percussion bands, all strangely dominated by elaborately dressed and heavily made-up small children, apparently balanced magically on the tops of poles or the handles of axes; stalking stately above the crowds, they are really held up there with wires and struts, but look so permanently immobile, so artificial and so rigid, that they are rather like the monk Yuet Kai in his container.
The grand climax occurs later that evening, in the compound of a foreshore temple. This is dedicated to the Daoist divinity Pak Tai, Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven, and is the island’s chief institution. Before the Second World War, according to the District Officer of the time, its finances were ‘inextricably mixed with those of the market, the ferry, and the electric light station’, and it is still the focus of various social, charitable and community associations, and contains wonderful things like swordfish beaks, and ancient swords, and armour, and signed photographs of English royalty.
There
at the sea’s edge the procession is welcomed by some strange constructions – four fat pillars, half-illuminated in the twilight, sixty feet high and each made entirely of some 5,000 half-pound buns. No wonder Europeans call this the Bun Festival. The towers stand there enigmatic against the night sky, offering sustenance it is supposed to the spirits beyond; but when midnight comes, and a priest has inspected the pillars through a jade monocle to make sure the ghosts have done, young men climb up there and take all the buns down, one by one, like corn coming off the cob, for distribution to the villagers. People keep them in airtight jars, and bits of them soaked in tea or water are said to be remedies for several ailments.
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Such are the more publicized signs of Chinese tradition in Hong Kong, but in fact no announcements are necessary. It must be obvious to the least sensitive foreign visitor that in this territory we are experiencing the presence of a culture all-pervasive, all-enduring; despite the symbiotic overlap we earlier observed, fundamentally it seems oblivious to history.
