Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  ¶ George Duddell was Hong Kong’s first master of the auction. In 1845 he successfully bid for the Hong Kong opium monopoly, paying $8,250 for it and re-leasing it to Chinese operators for $1,710 a month. Thereafter he never looked back. He became an auctioneer himself, and although in 1850 he was discovered to have knocked a ship down to his own bid at far less than its proper price, was appointed the official Government Auctioneer anyway. He also had a bakery, which baked much of the European community’s bread after the affair of the poisoned bread in 1857, and at one time he was the third largest landowner of Hong Kong; he had bought four of his holdings, at $1 the lot, from the impoverished Colonial Auditor A. E. Shelley. By the mid-1870s Duddell had left Hong Kong, having sold his handsome waterfront office to Jardine, Matheson, and retired rich if not universally respected to live the rest of his life, it is said, in Brighton.

  ¶ ‘Captain’ John Lamont, a self-educated shipwright from Aberdeen, Scotland, was the first European shipbuilder of Hong Kong. Arriving in the colony at its foundation, he set up a slipway immediately beside Jardine’s go-down at East Point, and there he not only maintained Jardine’s vessels for them, but also built Hong Kong’s first foreign-registered ship, the yacht-like schooner Celestial. He became a famous figure of the east, as probably the best shipwright of the China seas, and ended up as owner of the Lamont Dock at the other Aberdeen, the one on Hong Kong’s southern shore. When he died the Governor of the day, in the manner of the day, personally proposed a toast to this ‘once common carpenter’ who had made himself uncommon in Hong Kong.

  ¶ When the East India Company still maintained its concessions at Guangzhou, a Mr Edward Lane was a butler in its employ. When the first European shops were established in the new colony of Hong Kong, a Mr Ninian Crawford was a clerk in one of them. Today the names of their two families are household words in Hong Kong. Joining forces in the colony, between them the Lanes and the Crawfords ran, at one time or another, ships’ chandlers, auction houses, hotels and bakeries. One Lane was involved in the Keying enterprise, one Crawford was secretary of the Hong Kong Club, and their memorial is Lane Crawford’s, the oldest and most exclusive of Hong Kong’s department stores, now Chinese-owned but still decidedly old-school.

  ¶ Douglas Lapraik, origins unknown, began his Hong Kong career in 1845, aged twenty-four, as an apprentice to a watchmaker, and ended it in 1866 a shipowner, a dockowner, and the principal hotel proprietor of the colony. He had invested in the Keying, too – some said he went in disguise to Guangzhou to buy the ship, the sale of junks to foreigners being forbidden. He was a partner of Lamont at the Aberdeen docks, his seven steamships held a near-monopoly of the trade with Fuzhou, Shantou and Xiamen, and he it was who gave to the city the Pedder Street clock. For years he lived with a Chinese mistress in an engaging Gothic folly, Douglas Castle, which survives to this day as a student hostel; but when he went home to England he married a bride from the Isle of Wight, and very soon died.

  ¶ In 1883 there arrived in Hong Kong from Baghdad a young man who preferred to call himself Kelly, perhaps supposing that the British Establishment was fonder of Irishmen than it was of Jews. His real name was Ellis Kadoorie, and with his brother Elly he established a famous Hong Kong Jewish dynasty. They set up business as general brokers and agents, in the local tradition, but went into the hotel business and presently acquired control of the China Light and Power Company, which ran all the colony’s power stations and distributed all the electricity. The Kadoories became, and remain, great powers in Hong Kong. They gave vast sums of money to charitable causes, were lavish patrons of Happy Valley, and were to be rewarded not only with a couple of knighthoods but also, as we know, with the first of all Hong Kong peerages.

  ¶ Paul Catchik Chater, a Christian Armenian from Calcutta, disembarked in Hong Kong in 1864, aged eighteen. Starting as a bank clerk, he soon had a finger in every kind of profitable pie – wharfing, electricity, rope-making, trams, ferries, banking, hotels, land. His Hong Kong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company became Hong Kong’s chief dock operators, his most brilliant real-estate coup was the Praya Reclamation Scheme in Central, which created a slab of the most valuable building land on earth. An Anglophile and enthusiastic royalist, Chater threw himself into all the right activities (almost all – his young Scandinavian wife, extracted from Lyndhurst Terrace, was never accepted at Government House). He was a Mason, an art collector, a passionate racegoer. He became almost unbelievably rich, and built himself a vast and awful palace in mid-Levels called Marble Hall. When he died on a May morning in 1926 he left instructions that he was to be buried within twelve hours. The Stock Exchange, having opened as usual, hastily closed its doors again to prepare for the funeral, and by five the same evening the old millionaire was safely under the turf.

  ¶ The first Chinese to make a really great fortune in Hong Kong was Robert Ho Tung, chief comprador at Jardine’s; born in 1862, he was a multi-millionaire by the turn of the century. Actually he was only half-Chinese, being the natural son it is thought of a Belgian merchant. Before he grew his mandarin beard he looked in some photographs distinctly European, with his long face, long nose and wide mouth, and the woman he married was Eurasian too – the daughter of a Jardine’s partner. Ho Tung thought of himself however as Chinese, and as year by year he amassed his tremendous fortune he became one of the great figures of the Hong Kong Chinese community, ever more venerable, ever more generous in good causes, a founding father of the University of Hong Kong, now presenting a warplane to the Chinese Government for its fight against the Japanese, now giving a couple of fighters to the RAF.

  He was knighted of course, a road was named for him, he was the first non-European to own a house on the Peak – four of them, actually – and he died in 1956 as patriarch of a whole clan of plutocrats, several of them millionaires and prominent still in Hong Kong life. When Oswald Birley painted his portrait in his old age, Ho Tung wanted to be shown wearing all his twenty-two decorations; Birley declined for aesthetic reasons, but painted the decorations themselves in a separate picture, to be hung nearby in its own frame.

  11

  Sir Robert was only the first. ‘Do you wish your child to study in one of the oldest and most respected public schools in England?’ said a Hong Kong press advertisement in 1986. ‘If so, here is a chance not to be missed. The headmaster of Uppingham School will be in town from 6th to 12th April. Why not leave a message at the Mandarin, and Mr Bomford will contact you …?’

  The Headmaster of Uppingham (founded 1584) had in mind children not of the English expatriate bourgeoisie, but of the ever-growing and ambitious Chinese moneyed classes. Today foreigners of many nationalities have joined the British in extracting the profits of Hong Kong, but it is the Chinese population that most spectacularly demonstrates the ideology of capitalism. The community’s model and epitome might well be Chan Hon-wah, a rich Hong Kong businessman of the 1950s whose career has been recorded by the historian James Hayes. Chan had left Guangdong forty years before with four dollars in his pocket. One went to pay his fare, two he sent home as Lucky Money, as custom required, and upon the single surviving dollar he built so steadily expanding an enterprise that by 1953 his company had branches and agencies in most of the big cities of southern Asia.

  If they are not all as successful as Mr Chan, on every social plane the Hong Kong Chinese are virtuoso money-makers. They are tireless workers. Kipling in From Sea to Sea, comparing the industrious inhabitants of Hong Kong with the languid natives of Bombay, said he had never seen a Chinese asleep in the daytime, and hardly ever seen one idling – ‘let us annex China,’ he concluded. The Hong Kong Chinese are wonderfully astute: even among the villagers of the outer islands, before they were leased to the British at all, illiterate middlemen and financial organizers dealt with most intricate arrangements of loan and mortgage: illiteracy did not matter, James Hayes tells us, ‘if other qualities required in this complex arena of money, chance, and human relationships were … demonstrable’.<
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  And they are opportunists of genius. When communal lavatories were first installed in Hong Kong, Chinese entrepreneurs took to sitting on them for so long that people were obliged to bribe them to come off. When during the plague of 1900 the Government offered two cents for every dead rat delivered to the authorities, there was a brisk flow of imported rodents from the mainland. When the first tramlines were laid, Chinese manufacturers devised handcarts with flanged wheels to fit the tracks.12 When the buses and trams themselves stopped running during the Second World War, Chinese operators pulled people about on flat-topped wagons.

  Marine Department employees posted to the signal station on the otherwise uninhabited Green Island took to breeding goats as a sideline.13 During the Japanese occupation the Chinese black market virtually took over the distribution of food. In the 1970s, when the future of Hong Kong first came into serious doubt, citizenship of a dozen foreign countries was offered by Hong Kong agencies, and one particularly persuasive operator even succeeded in selling people a World Passport, entitling them to go and live anywhere.

  They are endlessly inquisitive and innovative. In the late 1980s Chinese salesmen from Hong Kong opened up a new trading route 2,500 miles across the breadth of China to Xinjiang Province, on the frontiers of the Soviet Union. They sold electric goods from air-conditioners to calculators (mostly Shrap 838s) for distribution inside the Soviet Union. Russian-Chinese middlemen paid for their goods sometimes in sacks of hard cash, sometimes in barter goods, sometimes in black-market US dollars, and the Hong Kong traders easily doubled their investments on every trip.

  The Chinese magnates of Hong Kong are familiar figures of world finance, and those great Hong Kong companies which are not already Chinese-controlled are under constant threat of Chinese takeovers. Sir Run-Run Shaw, with his thin benevolent face and his wire-rimmed spectacles, his high brow and long fingers, looks like a Confucianist sage; he is the owner of two of Hong Kong’s TV channels and one of the world’s most successful film producers, whose sprawling studios above the sea at Sai Kung, in the New Territories, make far more films each year than Hollywood ever did. Gordon Wu, a developer of visionary energies, has built a mighty super-highway to connect Hong Kong with Guangzhou. Stanley Ho, of the compradors’ dynasty, owns the gambling concessions at Macao, together with many of the vessels that take the gamblers there, and has mansions in both cities. The richest Hong Kong resident of all is said to be the financier Li Ka-shing, who is not only chairman of one of the biggest ex-British hongs, Hutchison-Whampoa, with its many ancillaries and subsidiaries, but also controls the Husky Oil Company of Canada.

  These are the local heroes of Chinese Hong Kong, together with rock singers and Sir Run-Run’s film stars, and lower down the social scale a hundred thousand Hong Kong Chinese are still hoping to emulate them one day. There are no class inhibitions in this place. Almost everyone shares the memory of old hardships, if only by heredity, and almost everyone has similar aspirations. Nor is there much sense of corporate purpose, as there is in Japan: the Hong Kong worker works above all for himself, with no nonsense about the sacred function of the Company, and is perfectly ready to change jobs at any time, if he can get more money or better prospects.

  The 1850 report of the Hong Kong Education Committee remarked that the Chinese parent’s attachment to education was ‘secondary to his attachment to gain’. In fact the two enthusiasms have gone hand in hand, as they did in Samuel Smiles’ self-helping England. Hong Kong’s newly emergent middle class is immensely able and ambitious, and the mass of the proletariat, fastening its children’s blazer buttons as it sends them off to school, is a living testimony to the ideological inspiration of free enterprise. There are said to be 30,000 restaurants in Hong Kong, and nearly all are family concerns. There are 4,800 fishing-boats, each in effect a private company. Last time I checked there were 17,528 taxis, and 16,651 of them were singly and privately owned.

  12

  Soon after the beginning of British Hong Kong there was a plan to build its chief town in Happy Valley, linking it by canal to the sea, and creating wharfs and go-downs within the shelter of the hills. There was a plan to import Australian sheep-farmers and cattlemen, with their herds and flocks; the southern slopes of Hong Kong Island would be turned into grazing-land, speckled with eucalyptus trees no doubt, with tin-roofed ranches above the China Sea, and Chinese cowboys riding about in floppy hats.14 There was once a proposal to raze the entire island of Cheung Chau (population 40,000) to make way for a new airport.

  But then almost nothing has not been proposed, at one time or another, for the making of money in Hong Kong. The chief strength of this economy has always been its flexibility. Because it has been relatively free from Government interference, it has been able to switch easily from idea to idea, method to method, emphasis to emphasis. If it is frighteningly changeable sometimes, it has proved resilient too, swiftly recovering its poise after wars, revolutions, riots, share collapses and even treaties about its future. As 1997 draws near we see Hong Kong still working at the furious pace to which the world has grown accustomed; contemplating its apparently irresistible momentum I find it hard to remember that within my own lifetime it was considered a dull backwater of Empire.

  1 Which still flows, by the way, though in reduced circumstances, beside a pleasure park at Waterfall Bay.

  2 To insurers, too. Bought by Chinese owners for conversion into a floating university, the ship was burnt out in ill-explained circumstances.

  3 Though the one ship registered in Vanuatu, being of 48,000 tons deadweight, was far too big ever to have docked there.

  4 But is apparently unlikely to progenerate – if expatriate debutantes call a man ‘a merchant banker’, according to the Hong Kong Tatler, it means he has ‘proved to be totally inept in the arts of love’. E.g. (I extrapolate): ‘God, what a wet, he’s a right merchant banker.’

  5 Haunted incidentally by Mr Tse Pui-ying, whom we met on page 70, and who lives on the adjacent sidewalk.

  6 By which time its telegraphic address was inexplicably KREMLIN.

  7 And when I asked its manager if I could have a cat in my room next time I came, he said he thought that could be arranged. What breed did I prefer?

  8 Especially after his immortalization as Old Crow in John Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, London 1977.

  9 ‘Mr Butterfield retired from our firm at my suggestion,’ wrote Swire succinctly, ‘he was grasping and bothered me.’

  10 From Taikoo, by Charles Drage, London 1970: but Mr Drage suggests that ‘Nips’ means not Japanese, but alcoholic measures.

  11 Sic – and there is such a word.

  12 They were soon made illegal, and the offence of building them is still on the statute books – maximum fine $HK 100.

  13 There are goats there still, presumably destined for Hong Kong restaurants. The snakes which proliferate on the nearby Stonecutters Island, however, though some may also end up in cooking-pots, are not the product of Chinese entrepreneurship: they are said to be descended from a snake-pit established there by the Japanese during the Second World War for the provision of serum.

  14 Who would certainly have strengthened one of Hong Kong’s more mysterious contemporary institutions, the Hong Kong Graziers’ Union.

  1920s: DOGDAYS

  FOR THE BRITISH EMPIRE ALMOST EVERYWHERE THE YEARS between the two world wars were dogdays. The sacrifices of 1914–18 had exhausted the British people, and the fire of the imperial idea was fading. Imperialism’s morality was widely questioned, self-determination was everywhere in the air, so that more and more the administrators of Empire approached their task in an apologetic, or at least conciliatory mood. Men of vaulting ambition or reckless disposition seldom looked for a career in the imperial service now; in India the Civil Service was steadily Indianized, in the Colonial Service the recruits most required, it was said, were steady, decent, diligent men, preferably with second-class degrees.

  British capitalism seemed to be b
lunted. As a manufacturing nation Britain had been overtaken, as a commercial nation its supremacy was waning. No longer did the British merchant fleet have a virtual monopoly of the eastern trade. At home the General Strike of 1926, together with the subsequent great depression, seemed to many to signal the end of British prosperity – perhaps of British stability too.

  Although the Empire did not reach its physical apogee until the 1930s, it was patently past its prime. Great Britain could not maintain its posture as the first strategic power of the world. All the forms of superbia were maintained, but the British formally acknowledged that they were no longer the sole arbiters of the sea; in the Washington Treaty of 1922 they agreed to parity with the United States in naval forces everywhere, to parity in the eastern seas with Japan.

  All this affected Hong Kong more particularly than most other colonies. The ideal of laissez-faire, the very basis of Hong Kong, was out of fashion, as the conception of the Welfare State began tentatively to form, and strategically the colony seemed to be losing its meaning. At Washington the British also agreed to freeze the fortification of their strongholds east of the 110th meridian, which meant in principle east of Singapore, and in practice Hong Kong. The Furthermost Possession was no longer to be, it seemed, a link in Curzon’s chain of fortresses, and the size of the China Squadron was progressively reduced. Hong Kong became something of a backwater once more – one of dozens of Crown Colonies, one of the smallest, by no means one of the richest, and rivalled by the growing cosmopolitan glamour of Shanghai, where 7,000 British ‘Shanghailanders’ already considered themselves much smarter. Imperial reference books of the 1920s give Hong Kong short shrift, and the fashionable tourists of the day, though they often dropped in during the course of their journeys through the Orient, seldom stayed for long.