by Jan Morris
Hong Kong has always paid for part of its own defence – 65 per cent of it in 1996 – and its forces spend much of their time keeping out illegal immigrants. Nevertheless it remains to this day part of the imperial military system. The Hong Kong Squadron exercises with the Royal Navy far from home, and Hong Kong remains one of the few exotic postings available to the British Army. It is only proper that in 1996 the single infantry unit on station is a battalion of Gurkha mercenaries from Nepal, last heirs to the Anglo-Indian Army of the Raj.
Like George Curzon, the Empire used to think of Hong Kong as a fortress – it had a Fortress Commander and Fortress Artillery. It was a strongpoint from which the British could carry out their imperial duties throughout the East. The Second World War proved this nonsensical, and today nobody pretends that the place could ever defend itself against a powerful enemy. The Royal Navy dry-docks have been filled in, only their concreted shapes remaining to show where the gunboats and submarines once lay, and everyone knows that the garrison is there only to maintain the status quo until the barracks and the gun emplacements, even Flagstaff House perhaps, are handed over to the People’s Liberation Army.
5
The imperial factor in Hong Kong reached its climax in 1897. It reached a climax then everywhere in the British Empire, for 1897 was that annus mirabilis imperii, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the crowning pageant of Empire, in whose celebratory parade Hong Kong Chinese policemen in conical hats marched through London with their comrades from all corners of the globe. Before the end of that same year the British raised with the Chinese Government the question of a lease in the New Territories, and the takeover of the new property in 1898 was the most conventionally imperialist event in the whole history of the colony.
For one thing it was the solitary example of military suppression, in the classic imperialist kind, during the presence of the British in Hong Kong. For another it was part of a general European grab in China – emulating, the more rabid expansionists hoped, the contemporary Scramble for Africa. People in Hong Kong had long been urging an extension of the frontier northward from Kowloon, partly because they thought the Chinese might one day attack the colony, partly because they saw prospects for land speculation. When the time came, however, it was in principle at least not for economic reasons, nor out of fear of China, that London authorized the acquisition of the New Territories; it was because the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Japanese were all getting their own colonies or Spheres of Influence on the China coast.
The British knew the New Territories, both mainland and insular, as a kind of exhibition of Chineseness in its pristine mystery, and as a good place for sporting expeditions. ‘Proceed overnight to Deep Bay by steam launch’, advised a sporting guide published in 1896 by R. C. Hurley, the man with the motor-less motor car, ‘accompanied by a sampan or a small punt or dinghy. Follow the beaten track skirting the many villages … and with shooting all the way, you will, in a few hours, find yourself on the shore of Castle Peak Bay, where your steam launch should be in readiness to convey you back to Hong Kong.’ The strategists coveted the mainland territory as a buffer zone, and the islands as a screen. As it was, they argued, a hostile army standing at Boundary Road, the northern limit of British territory since 1856, would be within artillery range of Hong Kong Island itself, while anyone could see what a nuisance could be caused by an enemy in the adjacent islands.
China being at that juncture half-prostrate before its various tormentors, the British extracted their concessions without too much difficulty. Under the Convention of Peking it was agreed that the new boundary should run some twenty miles to the north, where the mountain mass gave way to the flatlands beyond. It would cut off the peninsula from Mirs Bay to Deep Bay along the general line of the Sham Chun River (Ganges to the Anglo-Indian surveyors), both banks of which would be British. At the same time some 200 islands and islets, including Lantau which was twice as large as Hong Kong itself, would become British too. It was settled that the lease would run for a century, until 1997 – an eternity by British standards, a flicker of the eye by Chinese – and British and Chinese commissioners jointly surveyed the new boundaries, not always very accurately. Here and there you may still see the marker stones they erected.
Such was power! No rent was mentioned, or ever paid. The Chinese reserved their authority only within the walled Kowloon City, whose officials were allowed to maintain jurisdiction ‘except so far as may be consistent with the military requirements for the defence of Hong Kong’. The British announced that henceforth the New Territories would be ‘part and parcel of Her Majesty’s Colony of Hong Kong in like manner and for all intents and purposes as if they had originally formed part of the said Colony’.
The Viceroy of Guangdong obligingly reassured the people of the leased territory. The British had promised to treat them, he said, ‘with exceptional kindness’, and he enjoined them to obey the laws of their new rulers. For their part the British assumed that their new subjects would accept the change of regime with pleasure – or if not with pleasure, as the Governor, Sir Henry Blake, himself qualified the thought, at least with equanimity. The Queen-Empress, he told them, hoped that they would be prosperous and happy, like her subjects everywhere else.
Things did not go so easily on the ground. Echoing the ‘tremble and obey’ injunctions of the Dragon-Emperor, Blake had gone on to warn the indigenes that, whatever their equanimity, ‘all must render implicit obedience’. All, however, did not. The Viceroy of Guangdong might sanction the new arrangements, but the people of the 400-odd New Territories villages were profoundly suspicious of them. They had more or less run their own affairs for centuries, under the quavering but familiar authority of the Manchus. Their system of land tenure was infinitely complex, their clan system powerful. They were afraid that the British would play havoc with their traditions, and grossly damage the feng shui. ‘We hate the English barbarians,’ proclaimed a placard, ‘who are about to enter our boundaries and take our land, and will cause us endless evil.’
An armed resistance was organized by the elders of the clans, led by the Tangs. Village militias were mustered by runner and by signal drum, until some 2,000 men were in the field. When the British began to put up a mat-shed at Tai Po, as a first office of their authority, it was burnt down by a mob. When they raised the Union Jack above it, they were attacked by the militias. Troops of the Hong Kong Regiment went into action, with artillery support, and warships were summoned to support their flank – so serious did the situation seem, for a day or two, that the Hong Kong Volunteers were mustered to fight off possible attacks upon Kowloon itself. What had seemed a loftily straightforward extension of British power turned out to be the one occasion, urban riots apart, on which the Chinese of Hong Kong physically resisted British authority.
They could not resist it for long, of course. The Governor was not much dismayed by the turn of events – such sudden accesses of irritability, he said, often happened in Ireland – and between them the troops and the Royal Navy soon settled the opposition. As a token of their submission the elders of Kam Tin, the chief Tang stronghold, presented to Blake those famous ancestral gates, no longer of much practical use to them because the British had blown up their supporting walls. The Union Jack arose from Tai O to Sha Tau Kok, and even the waters of Deep Bay and Mirs Bay were declared to be British. Another wedge of civilization, exulted the Hong Kong Weekly Press in best imperialist style, driven into China!
With the size of the colony extended ten-fold at a stroke, Hong Kong acquired an immediate new status and security. The second Convention of Peking was, however, ill-devised. Imposed by the British in the fullness of their imperial confidence, it unfortunately allowed for differing interpretations. The British considered their lease tantamount to a cession, giving them complete sovereign rights in the New Territories – ‘part and parcel of Her Majesty’s Colony’. The Chinese thought they were to remain suzerains, and that the inhabitants would rem
ain Chinese, not British subjects. The Chinese later branded the Convention one of the ‘Unequal Treaties’ by which, they said, the West had bullied them into submission, and the differences of view were to rankle on until, nearly a century later, the impending end of the lease signalled the end of the Crown Colony too.
In the meantime the British soon extended their systems to the new districts. James Stewart Lockhart, the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, was charged with getting an administration going. For a time he advocated the expulsion of all those who had resisted – ‘these men did not wish to enjoy the benefits of British rule, so it will be no great hardship to them to transfer their energies to a soil more congenial’ – and he ruthlessly ignored all the rules of feng shui in establishing his police posts. So the resisting elders had been right, and if the disregard of cosmic forces did not bring bad luck to the villagers themselves, in the long run this little coup of Empire came home to disturb the imperialists.
6
By now the possession of Hong Kong is a doubtful asset to the British – some maintain it is a liability. Its imperial functions are vestigial, and in many ways it is hardly a colony at all. It is virtually autonomous in its internal affairs. Its currency is pegged to the US dollar, not the British pound, and its prosperity benefits the British economy only in the most indirect way, through the prosperity of British-owned companies. Strategically it means nothing to the British, diplomatically it has lately been a burden, industrially it is often in direct competition with Britain’s own industries. The ideal of civis britannicus sum has long since gone by the board in the easternmost possession – successive parliamentary acts in London have ensured that very few citizens of Hong Kong are qualified to possess full British passports, or have the right to settle in Britain itself.
The very word ‘colony’ is almost taboo in Hong Kong now, and the Colonial Secretary was renamed the Chief Secretary in 1976. After 1971 the Governors of Hong Kong were not former Colonial Service officers, but diplomats with experience in China, and the presence on their staff of a Political Adviser from the Foreign Office was a reminder that in London Hong Kong’s affairs was now seen more as a matter of foreign policy than of imperial duty. Recent Governors have rarely appeared in their full plumed coxcombery; Youde, a former Ambassador in Beijing, preferred not to appear in it at all. It came as an anachronistic shock when, in 1982, the Executive Council committed Hong Kong to contribute £10 million towards the cost of the Falklands War – a last arbitrary echo of the days when Colonies rallied to the beleaguered Flag.
Now and then one comes across reminders of the old dominion. Even in 1987 one could read in the Press that the Deputy Chief Secretary was leaving to become Governor of the Cayman Islands. Administrators are still sometimes awarded the Imperial Service Order, which includes no more than 600 overseas members, and policemen are still proud to get the Colonial Police Medal, which is embossed with a truncheon. The Queen’s head is on the postage stamps. The ships of the Hong Kong Squadron, their funnels emblazoned with coiled dragons, still project a little of the old superbia.
The police station at Yau Ma Tei, a stern and massive block all barbed and radio-masted, always reminds me of imperial police stations in Palestine long ago, and here and there are the unmistakable white houses of district officials, with flag-poles in their gardens. The best is Island House at Tai Po, built in 1906 as the domestic headquarters of the British Empire in the New Territories, which stands half-hidden by trees at the end of a causeway – once lonely among the waters of Tolo Harbour, like something in Venice, today with the tower-blocks of a New Town immediately at its back. It is no longer a residence of Government, but in its garden is a sad memento of its original purpose: the burial place of a young Englishman, only son to the District Commissioner, New Territories, who was killed in a car accident on Castle Peak Road.
And occasionally, almost to the end, one might still see, on a day of ceremony or celebration, an imperial exhibition of the old kind, bands and sergeant-majors shouting, every plume out of its Plume Box, judges in wigs and red robes, medals jangling on officers’ breasts, swords, white gloves and His Excellency in full fig. I watched such a parade one Armistice Sunday. I was standing on the little balcony which projects above the main door of the Hong Kong Club,3 and I looked down to the Cenotaph, the Legco Building and the ceremonials below. All was as it always was. The commands were barked. The sad old hymns were sung. Trumpets trumpeted. Salutes were saluted.
Around the green a rope railing had been erected, and a handful of Europeans, mostly tourists I suspect, stood there in twos and threes watching. Just beyond them, in Statue Square, the Sunday multitude of Filipina women was settling down to its weekly jollities, chattering, laughing and fussing about with paper bags, and beyond them again the life of the great city proceeded altogether oblivious of the few score imperialists, with guards and musicians, pursuing their rituals at the war memorial.
7
In any case, though the mighty links of Raj and sea-power were signs of the wider grandeur, even in the imperial heyday Hong Kong was never quite like other colonies. It never had been. In 1842 Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary in London, had sent Pottinger the first Governor a word of advice, the gist of it being that Hong Kong was geographically, historically and economically unique. ‘Hence it follows,’ wrote Stanley, ‘that methods of proceeding unknown in other British colonies must be followed at Hong Kong.’
It was to become odder still with the acquisition of the New Territories, which turned it into the most peculiar hybrid among all British territories. Some of it was sovereign territory in perpetuity, some of it was rented until 1997, and in time it became clear that the one part could not survive without the other. Then nowhere else was so small a possession so intensely populated, so dominated by an ancient alien culture, and as years went by, so sophisticated and so rich – ‘all this wealth,’ as Kipling cried, ‘wealth such as one reads about in novels!’ In a sense too Hong Kong was always a pawn of foreign rather than colonial policy; not only did it exist in reaction to China, but it played an inevitable role in Britain’s relations with France, Germany, Russia, Japan and eventually the United States.
‘It is occupied,’ it was said officially in 1843, ‘not with a view to colonization, but for diplomatic, commercial and military purposes,’ and in fact it was hardly a colony at all in the usual sense of the word. The British never exactly settled it – very few of them ever intended to stay there for long, and only a handful of Britons have ever made it their home. Nevertheless despite Lord Stanley the Colonial Service, and after it the Foreign and Commonwealth Service, was to govern Hong Kong conventionally enough.
The Crown Colony structure was more or less the same wherever it obtained, and the standard grades, substantive ranks and pay rates applied in Hong Kong.4 The District Officers of Hong Kong were very like DOs anywhere else in the Empire. Their duties were defined, by one of them, as being ‘land court judge, magistrate, public auctioneer … director of small public works, country judge for small debts, land tax collector, registrar of land deeds, rates collector, matrimonial disputes officer, forestry officer, agricultural “expert” (so called), land resumptions officer, and six or seven other things I can’t now remember’.
The one administrative innovation, perhaps, was the idea of having urban District Officers, instituted in 1968. This did provide a curious rider to the imperial legend, replacing Carruthers in his pith helmet on tour in the bush with a young man in a business suit in an office above a shop. Otherwise all in the system was standard, except for size and extravagance: the official establishment was one of the largest of any Crown Colony, and the Governor was always among the highest-paid of colonial governors.
If his status has also sometimes seemed grander in Hong Kong than elsewhere, that is because in this colony it has been deliberately heightened. Most of Hong Kong’s Governors have been career officials, men of the British middle rank; it has been the practice of the territory t
o make magnificos of them. Physical splendour has always been thought important to their function here; time and again I have been told of the particular effectiveness of Sir Murray MacLehose, Governor from 1971 to 1982, not so much because of his intellect or decision, but because he was 6′6″ tall.
In the past, as we have seen, Governors went about in extravagant sedan-chairs; until 1949 the front seat of the Peak tram was reserved for them; today’s incumbent is the only British functionary anywhere, except only the Queen herself, to qualify for an official Rolls-Royce Phantom, besides having at his disposal a venerable gubernatorial yacht, the Lady Maurine. His salary, in 1996, is about £245,000 a year (the British Prime Minister’s is £78,292). He no longer has Mountain Lodge, whose gardens were turned into a public garden when it was demolished in 1945, but he does still have Fanling Lodge in the New Territories, and as representative of the Queen he commands social precedence over almost anyone who visits the colony.
Until recent years the Governor was inescapable in Hong Kong. A survey of nouns, verbs and adjectives undertaken by the Department of Linguistics at Hong Kong University in 1973 found that the word ‘Governor’ was the third most commonly used in the South China Morning Post, so multifarious were the gubernatorial activities, and so fulsome was the attention paid to them. Governors and their ladies opened everything, presented everything, took every salute, presided over every ceremony, and there had accrued a ludicrous superfluity of streets, buildings, hills and institutions named for successive Their Excellencies.
