by Jan Morris
They used to adopt Chinese sobriquets, generally with the help of scholars and soothsayers, and these are still remembered, if only by the writers of company histories; for the most part though they have lost the grand corporate images they inherited from the days of the East India Company and the Guangzhou concessions. Their premises are mostly subsumed in anonymous skyscraper blocks, their interests are so diffuse, and spread through so many subsidiary companies, that their power has lost some of its old public impact. Countless newer houses, most of them Chinese, many of them American or Japanese, have joined and often superseded the senior firms. By the late 1980s Japanese and American investments had both exceeded British, Hong Kong’s chief trading partners were, after China, Japan and the United States, and only one in twenty-five of the ocean-going ships that used the port flew the Red Ensign. Nevertheless much real power in Hong Kong, during these last days of its colonial status, remains in the hands of a few old British or Anglo-Chinese companies. In 1987 Hutchison-Whampoa published an advertisement demonstrating how widespread was its influence in Hong Kong throughout a working day: whatever you did, you were almost bound somehow or other to be contributing to its coffers, whether you were shopping at one of its 200 supermarkets, using one of the myriad products its agencies handled, buying an apartment, drinking a bottle of pop, having a drink at the Bull and Bear pub, switching on the electric light, using a cellular telephone or driving on an asphalt road.
Hutchison-Whampoa, though British by origin, is now Chinese-controlled. Other old companies remain in British hands, and under British management. They began often enough as furiously competitive shippers and port agents, but are often linked now behind the scenes, or rather in the pages of the Directory of Directors, in almost incestuous intimacy. Three institutions in particular form part of the fabric of the place.
The youngest has the Chinese name of Taikoo, Great and Ancient. In 1869 there visited Hong Kong a Yorkshire businessman of all the Yorkshire orthodoxies – John Samuel Swire, shrewd, steady, sarcastic, dictatorial, who frequently said ‘I told you so’ and was given to Yorkshire dicta like ‘I write as I speak, to the point’, or ‘I aim to be strong enough to be respected, if not beloved’. He was the perfect businessman – ‘a person’, wrote an American contemporary in admiration, ‘who lives by and for business alone’ (besides being backed by ‘practically unlimited supply of British pride and capital’). His partners called him ‘The Senior’.
Together with a Lancashire mill-owner, Richard Butterfield, Swire and his brother William had founded a shipping and trading firm in Shanghai in 1866, and from there he extended his activities to Hong Kong. Butterfield was soon disposed of,9 and the firm grew rich, in the classic Hong Kong way, as shipowners, ship repairers, agents, importers and exporters of many commodities. Its headquarters were always in England, it was active in Japan and China too, and John Swire did not himself stay long in Hong Kong; but by the time he died in 1898 the firm of Butterfield and Swire was one of the most powerful in the colony, with all the arrangements of the older companies, an office on the Praya, messes for the young gentlemen assistants and a house on the Peak for the taipan.
This hong was not always loved in the colony, partly because of its relatively liberal racial views. ‘An undignified style of action,’ commented an observer from Russell’s (‘The Flag Prospers’), when Butterfield and Swire invited Chinese freight brokers to a dinner, ‘the Swire lot blustering away among the Chinamen … [hobnobbing] with every unwashed devil in the place.’ Swire’s helped to destroy Russell’s in the end, as they had helped to drive the old and respected firm of Dent’s (‘Precious and Compliant’) into bankruptcy, and were also considered rather too ruthless in their methods. They were, said a writer in the Hong Kong Telegraph in 1891, ‘the everlasting Bugbears of Eastern commerce, the nigger-drivers, the sweaters, the Jews – worse than Jews, for no Jew was ever so full of hatred and persecution and intolerance of all others …’ During the First World War the Governor himself, Sir Henry May, accused Swire’s of reluctance to help the war effort – they were ‘the most remiss in furnishing volunteers for the defence of the Colony’.
Certainly the firm seems to have lacked the easy-going style of the older British hongs. ‘You are ruining your chance as regards advancement in our firm,’ wrote Swire’s taipan to one of his employees in the 1900s – ‘ “American Women and Nips”. We will not tolerate these vices, they lead the man into trouble, destroy his efficiency, & he sets a bad example to others.’10 ‘The Firm do not approve,’ it was announced in 1900, ‘of their Employees being interested in Race Ponies … to so interest themselves, in future, will certainly prejudice their chance of promotion.’ ‘I hope you will make that young nephew of mine work,’ wrote Warren Swire when John Kidston Swire joined the Hong Kong office in 1914, ‘he is not in China for his own amusement …’ Nevertheless they have prospered ever since. The name of Butterfield was eventually expunged, but the firm remains ubiquitous in Hong Kong, controlling immense properties, running innumerable concerns. It flies its house flag (quartered in white and red, with a blue vertical stripe) on many vessels, and has a controlling interest in the colony’s chief international airline, Cathay Pacific, one of the most important in the east. Listed as one of the most profitable companies in the territory, Swire’s is really a world-wide conglomerate, with interests in tea plantations in Kenya, container terminals in Japan, oil in the Gulf, property in Florida, cold storage in Canada, hotels in Mauritius and bottling in Salt Lake City. Descendants of ‘The Senior’ are still prominent in its affairs.
Its great rivals were, and are, Jardine, Matheson, the first of them all, who have always been as inescapable in Hong Kong as they are in the pages of this book. They adopted their Chinese name, ‘Ewo’, State of Happy Harmony, in 1842, and officially resumed it in 1958 because the Chinese characters for ‘Jardine’ meant in English ‘dumping ground’. Like Swire’s, Jardine’s had begun as general agents, buying and selling in China for clients in Europe, and had gradually diversified into shipowning, sugar-refining, banking, insuring, mining, railway-building and every imaginable kind of entrepreneurial activity in the east. Unlike Swire’s, for 150 years their headquarters was in Hong Kong, and unlike Swire’s again they depended very largely upon the personalities of their partners, who were almost invariably Scots.
Jardine succeeded Jardine in Ewo, Matheson followed Matheson, and in 1853 William Keswick, great-nephew of the original William Jardine, founded another related dynasty within the firm. By the 1980s the descendants of Andrew Jardine of Broadholm, Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, had included fifty-one men, spread over seven generations, who were associated with the business. Among them were some remarkable people. William Jardine himself was called by the Chinese ‘Iron-headed Old Rat’ because of the insouciance with which, attacked one day in Guangzhou, he totally disregarded a blow on the head with a club. Then there was David Matheson who resigned to become chairman of the executive committee of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, and James Johnstone Keswick, a man of such unrebuffable tact that he was nicknamed ‘James the Bloody Polite’, and Alexander Dallas who went on to be Governor of Manitoba. James Matheson, who once called the Duke of Wellington ‘a strenuous advocate for submissiveness and senility’, bought the entire island of Lewis, considerably larger than Hong Kong, and built Stornoway Castle on it. Henry Keswick, at the end of the First World War, bought an uncompleted Royal Navy destroyer and had it finished as his personal steam yacht.
Ewo always sounds more fun than Taikoo. On St Andrew’s Day Jardine’s used to take over Happy Valley for a celebration which culminated with the running of the Ewo Handicap, a mile race for ponies ridden by members of the staff. Men of all ages and all riding abilities entered the race. The winner got a cup, the last man in got a wooden spoon so large that it became a Jardine’s custom to pass it around the company filled with whisky – ‘Testing the Capacity of the Wooden Spoon’. I have a photograph of the jockeys who ra
n the Ewo Handicap in 1930, and a formidable crew they look: eight extremely healthy-looking Europeans, mostly Scots, ranging from the youthful to the grandfatherly, and eyeing the camera with expressions of unsmiling resolution, as if they were summing up the photographer’s suitability for employment.
For Jardine’s was stylish, but seldom reckless. Its partners set about things with a Scottish calculation. They owned the fastest sailing ships, with the best-paid crews and the most ambitious captains. They brought the first steamships to the China coast. They financed the first China railway. They set up a subsidiary in Japan as soon as the Japanese allowed it (Ei-ichiban-Kan = British Number One House). They moved swiftly into cotton, when the American Civil War cut off American supplies from Europe. They were agents for Armstrong the gunmakers; when China was rearming in the 1880s. They were local pioneers in insurance, in the use of the telegraph, in textile-weaving, in sugar-refining. They shared in the beginnings of the Star Ferry and the Peak tram. They acted as consuls for many foreign Powers, and their Chinese compradors often became great men in their own right – the rise to power of the Ho dynasty, long one of the most influential in Hong Kong, was founded upon the wealth of a Jardine’s comprador.
By these means they became more than just a company, but an international power factor, with holdings and interests in many countries. When they first put their shares on public sale, in 1961, they described themselves elegantly as a company ‘which participates widely in the commerce and industry of the Far East, in the merchanting11 of imports and exports, the distribution and servicing of engineering products, the shipping industry, air transport business, insurance, investment management, agency business and general merchant adventure’.
Though Jardine’s is no longer the most profitable public company in Hong Kong, its tentacles extend into many others, and it remains the most famous of them all. It is also still the most emblematic. For some years in the early twentieth century the company headquarters were moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai, where prospects seemed more exciting. They returned to Hong Kong in 1912, and when in 1984 it was announced that they were going to move once more, this time to Bermuda, a shock ran through the east. The future of Hong Kong was undecided then, confidence was shaky at best, and the news that the Princely Hong thought it wiser to shift its headquarters out of the colony had a devastating effect. Share prices slumped, and a hundred lesser concerns wondered whether it might not be wise to do the same.
The crisis of confidence passed, and within a few months Hong Kong had returned to economic boom, but in any case Jardine’s move seems more legal than logistical. Much of the company’s wealth is still tied up in its multifarious Hong Kong operations, and its Hong Kong office remains the biggest of all its branches. The noonday salute is still fired, by a Hotchkiss 3-pounder gun made in 1901, on the quayside near Jardine’s old East Point premises, opposite the Excelsior Hotel, which Jardine’s own. Eight bells is rung, too, on a ship’s bell, and this is the ceremony which Noel Coward immortalized in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’:
In Hong Kong
They strike a gong
And fire off a midday gun
To reprimand each inmate
Who’s in late …
Eminent visitors are sometimes invited to perform the ceremony, and once the Master fastidiously fired the gun himself (‘I rather like loud noises’).
The third historic old money-maker is ‘Wayfoong’, Abundance of Remittances, known to Hong Kong people simply as The Bank, and listed as the second most profitable public company in the territory. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was founded in 1864 by an association of local firms, and became a powerhouse of commerce and industry not just in Hong Kong, but all over the Far East – much of Japan’s original foreign trade was financed by the Bank, and much of China’s railway development. Its presence is towering in Hong Kong, and it is a particularly masterful Chief Manager of the Bank, the Victorian Sir Thomas Jackson, who is portrayed frock-coated in the single surviving effigy of Statue Square.
The Bank has known its hard times – convulsions in China which paralysed its operations there, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, when its head office temporarily migrated to London, the batterings of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts and finally the traumatic agreement that Hong Kong was to revert to Chinese sovereignty. But like most such Hong Kong institutions, it has long since hedged its bets and stashed much of its assets far away. Besides its own branches around the world, generally in ports, it has acquired subsidiaries as prominent as the Marine Midland Bank of New York, the British Midland Bank and the British Bank of the Middle East, as discreet as merchant banks in the Bahamas or Papua New Guinea. It owns investment management companies in New York, London and Sydney, it has its own satellite network, and whether you are taking out a policy with the Al Sakr Insurance Company of Saudi Arabia, buying stocks on the island of Jersey, or making a deposit with the Cyprus Popular Bank, you are dealing indirectly with HongKongBank (as its publicists vainly try to rename it). Its knowledge of China is profound – it started operations there in 1865 – and this gives it a unique and highly profitable status: in 1987 it was reckoned to be the sixteenth richest among the banks of the world, but its Scottish chairman announced that he wanted to make it the strongest of them all.
If Jardine’s has been immortalized by Coward, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was immortalized by Auden – it was the Bank’s new headquarters that the poet had in mind when he sneered at ‘a worthy temple for the comic muse’. The history of The Bank is remembered, in fact, chiefly by its buildings. After renting property for its first decade, its directors built three successive offices of their own, all on the same site at No. 1 Queen’s Road Central, and they have been pre-eminent in Hong Kong ever since, appearing on many of its banknotes, and in themselves forming an architectural index to the financial progress of the territory.
The first (1886) was a remarkable hybrid by the local architects Palmer and Turner, who had opened their office in Hong Kong in 1868 and are still there now. It was tropical Mediterranean on one side, monumentally domed the other; its main south door opened into Queen’s Road, its north door faced the grand new Praya along the waterfront. The second building (1935), was the one Auden commemorated, and was specifically commissioned, from the same architectural firm, to be ‘The Best Bank in the World’. It was a skyscraper by the standards of the day, the tallest building between Cairo and San Francisco, with a pad for autogiros on its roof, air-conditioning of a kind and a squash-court in the tower. It was faced entirely in Hong Kong granite, the Bank buying its own quarry for the purpose, and its main banking hall was embellished with a magnificent mosaic ceiling, designed by a Russian artist from Shanghai, V. S. Podgoursky, and executed in a disused church in Venice. The building was thick with symbolisms, from Podgoursky’s didactic murals, all about the blessings of trade and industry, to the Men of Vision, looking vaguely Assyrian, who gazed towards the waterfront from the façade. Outside the north doors reclined two heroic lions, one snarling, one merely looking cross, which were nicknamed Stephen and Stitt after senior officials of the day.
The Governor was in hospital with appendicitis on the day of this building’s opening, so the ceremony was performed by his deputy, N. L. Smith, who was of the opinion that ‘generations yet unborn will gaze at it with something of the same gasp of admiration that we today bestow on, let us say, Durham Cathedral’. Mr Smith must momentarily have forgotten where he was, for in the Hong Kong way scarcely a single generation had passed before The Best Bank in the World was torn down to make way for the third headquarters (1985). This is said to have been the most expensive office building ever erected, and manages to represent not merely the glory of profit and the sumptuousness of wealth, but also the hard intelligence of the financial life. It was designed by the Englishman Norman Foster. He made it a stunning centrepiece for the whole of Hong Kong, at least for the moment, and since for reasons more of legal advantage than of public sp
iritedness the whole of its ground floor is a public passage, all Hong Kong passes beneath its presence as beneath a frigid benediction.
We should spend longer with this building, because it was the first truly original modern structure to go up in Hong Kong. Among the slavishly trendy skyscrapers of Central, which had assiduously followed every architectural fashion from curtain-walling to mirror-glass, it erupted almost extra-terrestrially. Built of steel girders sheathed in grey, which gives it an erroneously plastic look, it stands like a upturned casket of glass and metal, bound about with massive girders and crowned with a ship-like miscellany of block-houses and aerials. It is entirely contemporary, except for Stitt and Stephen still recumbent outside its doors.
One’s first impression, entering that open-sided ground-floor patio, is one of forbidding cloisteredness. Two long escalators, installed skew-whiff at the geomancer’s insistence, crawl in steep diagonal through the open space to the working floors above, and riding up there feels like riding up to the gondola of a fairly unwelcoming airship. But just as Hong Kong itself combines the steely with a distinct note of the celebratory, so this remarkable building also gradually reveals to the visitor a kind of audacious endearment – a touch of devil-may-care. It is all so boyishly modern, so absolutely state-of-the-art, so piratically pleased with itself! Wherever you look there is something startling – mirrors to deflect sunlight into working areas, criss-cross escalators, vistas of bare steel. Through the enormous glass windows on the north side you can see the grand expanse of the harbour, and the ships lying there rank on rank look almost as though they are awaiting a signal from The Bank to sail away with their booty.
10
Such are three old corporate stalwarts of Hong Kong capitalism: but down the generations much of its fiercest entrepreneural energy has been provided by private citizens, remembered not just as the presiding names of institutions, but as individuals. Here are a few examples:
