Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  Back across the water the Governors lived as Governors always had. Government House had undergone a metamorphosis. From the pleasant gentleman’s villa we saw in the 1880s it had developed into a palace more on the Anglo-Indian pattern, with the addition of a large annexe, almost as big as the original house, containing a ballroom, a billiard room, a supper room, card rooms and smoking rooms. The first great guest to be entertained there was Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar of Russia, who had found in Hong Kong, as we have seen, a fairly chilly public reception, and spent much of his time at Government House looking at his own ship through a telescope on the roof.

  Two men occupied the house throughout the 1920s, and offered a pungent contrast in gubernatorial styles. The first was Sir Reginald Stubbs, a caustic and sometimes ferocious autocrat who spoke no Chinese and believed in corporal punishment for the natives. He was the son of a famous father, Bishop William Stubbs the constitutional historian, and he himself was an Oxford double-first, with a reputation for quick wits and no fooling about. Ironically he was to be remembered best in Hong Kong not for his despotic tastes, but for an act of reconciliation – The Return of the Kam Tin Gates.

  These were the ancestral wrought-iron gates of Kat Hing Wai, the walled village at Kam Tin which we have earlier glimpsed. In 1898 they had been presented to the British Government by the Tang clan as a sign of submission to its authority, and whisked away to his home in Ireland by the Governor of the time, Sir Henry Blake. The Tangs had long regretted handing the gates over, and there were periodical requests for their return. Stubbs undertook to get them back. At first nobody could discover where they were, but they were eventually tracked down in Ireland and restored to the village at a cordial ceremony in 1925. Actually they were not a pair, Blake having simply selected for himself the best out of four, but they looked handsome enough anyway, and beside them a plaque was erected, in Chinese and in English, to tell the tale (‘from this can be seen the deep kindness and great virtue of the British Government …’).

  This was not, in general, the Stubbs style. He believed all his life in the firm imperial hand. He went from Hong Kong to govern Jamaica, where according to the Dictionary of National Biography he was well-fitted to keep any strivings towards democracy ‘within the bounds of realism’, and then to Cyprus, where unrealistic subjects had lately burnt down Government House. Ending his colonial career as Governor of Ceylon – he was one of the few men ever to govern four colonies – during the Second World War he became the chairman, not a reassuring chairman one would imagine, of a conscientious objectors’ tribunal.

  The Old Hong Kong Hands must have loved Stubbs, for all his Oxford manner, and one can imagine him easily enough in the Hong Kong of the 1890s, or even at a pinch the 1840s. His successor was a much more modern man, and much less to the taste of the die-hards – a regular China-lover, a speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, a skilled Chinese calligrapher. The son of an Indian Army officer, Sir Cecil Clementi was a classicist too, and a fine linguist. He had family connections with Hong Kong, and had begun his own career there at the beginning of the century, but since then he had served in British Guiana and Ceylon, had made a famous journey across Central Asia, and had come back as Governor full of liberal notions. Unlike Stubbs, he was distinctly a man of the new, enlightened imperial times. He was a bold critic of racial prejudice, and declared quite openly that the division between Chinese and European communities in Hong Kong ‘retards the social, moral, intellectual, and even the commercial and material progress of the colony’.

  Dangerous words in the Hong Kong of the 1920s, where even the island of Cheung Chau had its own lesser Peak, forbidden to Chinese residents, and where European shop assistants would not dream of shaking a Chinese hand. Clementi, though, matched them with action, going so far as to appoint a Chinese to his Executive Council, the Cabinet of Hong Kong. Chinese now became frequent guests at Government House, and once the Governor even suggested abolishing the Hong Kong Club, that holy of colonial holies, and replacing it with a club open to the membership of all races.

  Though Hong Kong did not recognize it, Clementi represented the way the British Empire was moving. As he frankly said, the day of European dominance in China, as in India, was coming to an end. By the end of the decade the British had renounced three of its concessions along the China coast, and had agreed in principle that all other extra-territorial privileges in China must gradually go. Among these they did not actually include the possession of Hong Kong itself. Even a Clementi could not yet imagine its return to China – ‘I cannot believe that the British Empire will ever acquiesce in the retrocession of Hong Kong.’ Nevertheless there were people alive in the colony then who really would live to see, never indeed the abolition of the Hong Kong Club, but plenty of Chinese members in it.

  For like it or not – ignore it if you could – all around the 4,500 Britons of Hong Kong lived 725,000 Chinese.

  Until now the Chinese of Hong Kong had been passive observers of its history. To visitors as to historians they figured only as an amorphous background, faceless and anonymous but for those few who, by adapting to western needs, had qualified themselves for notice. Very few Chinese names appeared in the history books, because very few Chinese had played public parts in the development of Hong Kong; and the mass of the Chinese population seemed to most observers oblivious to public events, intent only on making a living. ‘The general indifference of the Chinese to all matters of public life,’ Stubbs once said, ‘was almost unbelievable.’ But now, in this rather flat Hong Kong decade, for the first time the Chinese showed their strength. When the 1920s came to be remembered by those Old Hands, they would be remembered not after all for their ordinariness or their frivolity, but for their Troubles, the first Hong Kong had ever suffered, which came out of China to give the complacent colony early warning of things to come.

  China was in a particularly confused condition then. The euphoria of the 1911 revolution, which had abolished the Manchu monarchy, had soon been dispelled by conflicts among the revolutionaries, by the emergence of the New Culture Movement which advocated the abolition of all tradition, by the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and by the marchings here and there of restless war-lords with their private armies. In 1921, Beijing being in war-lord hands, Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution, was elected president of the Republic in Guangzhou. He was repeatedly snubbed by the British, who regarded him as a rebel still, and preferred anyway to maintain, in the absence of any sensible policy, that whoever ruled in Beijing was the rightful ruler of all China. Sun Yat-sen further antagonized the British Empire in general, and Sir Reginald Stubbs in particular, by turning his regime sharply to the left, legalizing trade unions and welcoming help from the Soviet Union. Under its auspices a powerfully revolutionary and xenophobic movement arose, based upon Guangzhou, and inevitably turned its attention downstream to Hong Kong – that stranglehold of foreigners, the one corner of China where alien capitalists sat in sovereign state.

  Within Hong Kong hundreds of thousands of Chinese, like the little porter of the Peak, still lived lives of terrible hardship, working cruel hours for miserable wages, often ill, often addled with drugs. Few of them had been born in the colony, but they were no longer fellow-pioneers, as the first Chinese settlers had been; they were mostly peasants from Guangdong Province plunged suddenly into the bewildering pressures of an advanced western urbanism. Poor people’s housing was not much different from that described by Chadwick in 1882, and the Government was doing little to improve it. An absentee landlord of Hollywood Road, it was recorded in 1924, sublet his tenement building to a middleman, who let it in separate apartments to other people, who rented out cubicles in each apartment – often twenty-five people in a single apartment, often far more. It was officially estimated, that same year, that about a quarter of the Chinese population smoked opium, and there were at least 2,000 opium divans. All the modernism of Hong Kong was designed to benefit the Europeans, not the Chinese: Station ZBW bro
adcast only an occasional programme in Chinese, and only one cinema provided a Chinese interpreter – who, sitting on a chair beside the screen, translated as he went along.

  But the Chinese were by no means as impotent as they had been forty years before. As Clementi’s dinner-table showed, there were many rich and influential citizens too – more every month, as refugees of substance fled the uncertainties of China. Educated Chinese had infiltrated many of the European residential districts, and Sir Robert Ho Tung had been lording it on the Peak itself for years. The University of Hong Kong, founded in 1911 by the personal efforts of the Governor Sir Frederick Lugard, was now producing a steady flow of Chinese graduates. The Tung Wah had developed into a powerful community organization. More ominously, there were active Chinese trade unions – not just old-fashioned guilds like the Firewood Dealers’ Industrial and Commercial Association, or the Jinseng and Deer Horns Commercial Guild, with their roots in Confucian ideas of loyalty and order, but modern and militant unions with their roots in revolutionary Marxism, and their inspiration in Guangzhou.

  The vast majority of foreign residents, as Maugham perceived, had not the slightest notion what was happening among the Chinese masses. The Chinese they met socially were all smiles and common interests, the Chinese they employed all charm and sycophancy. Social segregation kept the generality at a distance, and fierce punishments kept it in order – twelve months’ hard labour and eighteen strokes of the birch, for instance, for stealing a handbag with $HK24 in it, three months’ hard labour for taking a European’s hat as he rode in a rickshaw. Though there had been localized riots about food prices in 1919, and a seamen’s strike in 1922, it came as a shock to them in the middle of the decade to discover that the usual conspiracies of Triad and syndicate, the usual criminal activities in the congested tenements of Wanchai and Kowloon, the snatching of hats or handbags, could be directed to political ends.

  Such a shock! The disturbances were hardly more than communal grumbles at first, almost undetectable upon the Peak; but after the death of Sun Yat-sen, in 1925, and following anti-foreign troubles in Shanghai, they erupted into a full-scale General Strike, together with a boycott of all trade between Hong Kong and the province of Guangdong, which included Guangzhou itself and provided most of Hong Kong’s food. It was very nearly the rising that the British had feared, on and off, ever since the Indian Mutiny. For a few weeks the economic life of the colony was frozen. Seamen, students, hotel staffs, stevedores, domestic servants, bus and tram drivers all walked off the job. Even rickshaw men refused custom. Food prices soared, and there was a run on the banks.

  There was much violence, and more violent talk. On the one hand the strike leaders terrified workers into striking, on the other an unofficial strike-breaking body, the Labour Protection Bureau, behaved just as thuggishly. In the middle stood Sir Reginald Stubbs, threatening intimidators with the cat-o’-nine-tails and advocating armed intervention by the Royal Navy, as in the old days. Frightening rumours swept the colony. Bolshevist bogeys loomed large. The Hong Kong Volunteers were mustered for possible action, and a State of Emergency was declared. ‘Those who disturb the peace of the colony’, announced Stubbs, ‘will be treated, as is the way with the English, justly but sternly.’

  The Peakites now found themselves obliged to undertake all manner of tasks they were not used to, such as ironing their own clothes, cooking their own meals, burying their own night-soil and even looking after their own children. Volunteers kept things going in hotels and cafés, drove the trams and distributed the mail, while the Royal Navy took over the Star Ferry service, not altogether successfully – as one of the local newspapers complained, the Navy’s ‘spotless uniforms and trailing impedimenta of silken hankerchiefs and lanyards’ were hardly the gear for it. The strike leaders encouraged all Chinese to leave Hong Kong altogether, spreading rumours that the British were going to poison their water-supplies, and at the same time offering free train and steamer passage to Guangzhou. Thousands went, leaving the city half-empty and forlorn.

  To make matters worse there was a spate of piratical attacks upon British ships. Sometimes the pirates boarded ships from junks, sometimes they sailed as passengers, attacking the crew when they were at sea, and forcing them to sail to some secluded and sympathetic haven on the Chinese coast. A ferry was actually hijacked on its way from Cheung Chau to Central; relatives in Hong Kong were sent the amputated ears of three passengers, and a large ransom was paid. A special body of guards, many of them White Russian, was raised by the Government, and many ships went to sea with iron grilles isolating passenger quarters, bridges and engine rooms.

  In these circumstances the strike leaders’ demands do not sound exorbitant. They included an eight-hour day, the prohibition of child labour, the suppression of police brutality, an end to segregation on the Peak, a 25 per cent reduction in rents and labour representation in the Executive Council. These requirements were summed up in a South China Morning Post headline as LABOURERS’ EXTRAORDINARY ATTITUDE, and they severely damaged economic confidence. Stocks, shares and land values dramatically fell, and there were many bankruptcies – twenty a day in September, 1925. A deputation of businessmen even asked Stubbs to arrange a $3 million trade loan from Britain to see them through the crisis. A loan, from Government to Big Business in Hong Kong – the times were topsy-turvy!

  The cash was reluctantly provided by the Treasury in London, which did not however inconvenience the British taxpayer with the matter. This was still the Empire, and the money was raised instead from the West African Currency Board and the Straits Settlements of Malaya.

  All in all the 1920s were not good years for Hong Kong, but they were not so bad either. They were dogdays after all. The political crisis did not last long, and the worst never happened. China’s pattern shifted again. Guangzhou became less fiercely hostile. By the end of 1926 strike and boycott had both fizzled out, like the General Strike at home in Britain, and Clementi, now the Governor, made a friendly trip up the Pearl River to seal their conclusion.

  Colonial life in Hong Kong resumed its style. ‘We are constantly receiving,’ announced Lane Crawford’s catalogue, Autumn 1926, ‘large consignments of Fascinating Creations for Evening Wear, all personally selected in London and Paris by our own representatives.’ The Chinese returned to docility, and nobody had trouble with rickshaw men any more – ‘you just go to the door and shout “Sha” ’, recorded an Englishwoman without malice, ‘and they come running up, seeing who can get there first’.

  1 In The British Empire, London 1925.

  2 Alan Reid, in The Thistle and the Jade, London 1982.

  3 From Wayfoong, by Maurice Collis, London 1965.

  4 Quoted in Paul Gillingham’s At the Peak, Hong Kong 1983, to which I am indebted for much in this chapter.

  5 In The Painted Veil, London 1925.

  6 In Under The Mosquito Curtain, Hong Kong 1935.

  CONTROL SYSTEMS

  1

  IN STATUE SQUARE THERE STANDS A DISTINGUISHED DOMED and colonnaded building, with Ionic columns and red-tiled roofs, which is a rare survivor of times lost. Designed in 1900 largely by Sir Aston Webb, architect of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it used to be the Supreme Court of Hong Kong, until that body moved to its air-conditioned tower-building along the road. It was neighbour to the Palladian City Hall, before that fine old structure was demolished, and to the Gothic Hong Kong Club, before the club’s metamorphosis into a skyscraper. It opened upon the cricket field, until the stumps were transferred to a less valuable pitch. It looked down upon the statues of Queen Victoria and her successors, until Their Majesties were removed by the Japanese Army. For a couple of generations it dominated the central ceremonial place of Hong Kong, a stone’s throw from the sea until reclamation took the sea away, and its dome was one of the prime symbols of the island skyline.

  Today it is dwarfed by the commercial structures around it, which have reduced that once fine piazza into a finicky municipal garden, t
risected by roads. The one memorial remaining is the Cenotaph honouring the war dead, the one statue still there is of Sir Thomas Jackson the bank manager. Legend says the gardens themselves are only spared, in one of the world’s most valuable patches of real estate, because they are essential to the happy feng shui of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s headquarters at the head of them; actually they are spared because in 1901 the Bank agreed with the Government to keep an open space there ‘for all time’.

  But the old domed building survives, and has been meticulously restored, and is now the headquarters of the Legislative Council, Legco, the nearest thing the Crown Colony of Hong Kong has ever had to a Parliament. It is here, on a Wednesday afternoon when the Council meets nowadays, that one can best start an exploration of the systems by which this territory has been governed for the past century and a half; a Wednesday some years back, in 1986, say, before the impending change of sovereignty began to alter everything, and made the British no longer their own masters in Hong Kong.

  2

  A session of the Legislative Council, in 1986, could be rather a comical affair. The Establishment of Hong Kong was there upon display. There was one double-barrelled Briton, there were Chinese with names like Rita, Lydia, Hilton or Donald, but no Japanese or Americans were present – this was still a British colonial assembly, run to its own rules. Hong Kong being what it is, a Florence of the art of public relations, television cameras were perpetually trained upon the assembly, while still photographs were taken through strategically placed windows on each side of the chamber – ‘The Governor takes a sip of water during the debate,’ said the captions next morning, or ‘Miss Lydia Dunn adjusts her microphone …’