Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  There have been twenty-eight Governors of Hong Kong so far. In the past they were invariably knighted for their pains, even those who were not unqualified successes, and while many have been sufficiently unremarkable men, some have been memorable. Sir Frederick Lugard, for instance (remembered in Lugard Road), the creator of Hong Kong University, developed the system of colonial administration he called Indirect Rule, and as Lord Lugard became one of the patriarch sages of British imperialism; he said of his time in Hong Kong that never in his life had he experienced ‘such consistently hostile and sneering criticism’. Sir John Davis, that ‘pleasant little gentleman’ (Davis Street, Mount Davis), founded a scholarship for the study of Chinese languages at Oxford, still awarded to this day. Sir John Bowring (Bowrington Road) is said to have mastered thirteen languages. He was an M P for a time, edited the Westminster Review, wrote widely about every aspect of European literature, from Finnish runes to Bohemian verse, and was the author of a much-loved hymn, In the Cross of Christ I Glory.

  Sir Henry Pottinger (Pottinger Street, Pottinger Peak) made an adventurous journey through Baluchistan and Sind, and wrote a book about it. Sir Hercules Robinson (Robinson Road – and Rosmead Road, for he became a peer) was almost the archetype of a Victorian imperial administrator, holding governorates in New Zealand, Australia, and most importantly in South Africa, where he did his best to prevent the Boer War. Sir Matthew Nathan (Nathan Road) became Governor as a bachelor of thirty-two; the only Jew to hold the office, he was sadly infamous in later life as the Under-Secretary of State in Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising. Sir David Wilson, who arrived in 1987, had not only edited the China Quarterly, but was also a distinguished mountaineer; asked what he would like to have called after him, when the time came, he suggested a rock face somewhere (and he got a walking trail).

  Their job has never been a sinecure, but has varied greatly in significance according to the state of history. Bowen once wrote that ‘the ordinary work of a civil governor in Hong Kong … is not materially different from the ordinary work of the Mayor of Portsmouth,’ while Lugard said his role was to endure fools gladly, to sign his name perpetually, to agree to the suggestions of the Colonial Secretary and to ensure that the final outlet of the main China trunk railway should be at Kowloon. On the other hand Bowring personally precipitated a war against China, Sir Mark Young was the first British colonial governor ever to surrender a colony to an enemy, and in recent years, as the future of Hong Kong became a great diplomatic issue, the office of Governor assumed an immense sensitivity – a wrongly chosen word could cause a crisis of confidence, dangerously antagonize Beijing or send the financial index disastrously slumping. It is a curious irony of the imperial story that the last Governors of this, the last great British colony, should be in some ways the most important Governors of all.

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  They speak of ‘Government’ in Hong Kong, rather than ‘the Government’, allegedly to differentiate it from the United Kingdom Government in London, and this gives the administration to my mind an appropriately amorphous feeling. It is supported by an enormous civil service, now almost entirely Chinese, top to bottom. Until they mostly disappeared, in the 1990s, its senior expatriates were extremely well paid, and comfortably housed. In 1986 the Financial Secretary was paid about £6,500 a month, plus £450 expenses, and was given a large furnished house, a car and the services of two domestic servants, a cook and a driver; his electricity bill that year, paid by Government, came to about £15,000, and on retirement he was due to get a gratuity of about £72,000 in lieu of a pension. Once again I am reminded of old China, for this privileged official cadre was rather like the Celestial Empire’s celebrated bureaucracy, which formed a layer of society complete unto itself, severely detached from the ordinary people.

  For many years the senior administrators of Hong Kong were randomly selected. Government was administered by a mixed assortment of army men, ships’ officers and miscellaneous adventurers, often wandering up from Australia in search of fortunes, among whom a knowledge of the Chinese language was liable to be regarded not as advantageous, but as suspect. Some of these fortuitous appointees were diligent and able men – they included Eitel the historian and J. R. Morrison, who was said to be the best Sinologue of his day, and whose death at Macao in 1843 was described by Pottinger as an irreparable national calamity. Others were mere place-getters, using their official positions frankly to enrich themselves, and of these the archetype perhaps was William Caine.

  Caine dug himself into Hong Kong even before it officially became a colony. A captain of infantry with an undetermined past (he is said to have been a boy soldier in India), in 1841 he was appointed Magistrate, with powers over English settlers under English law, over Chinese under Chinese law. Although he seems to have established a precedent by being totally unqualified to administer either legal system, he never looked back. He was superintendent of the gaol as well, he was a member of the first Legislative Council, he became Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong and eventually, in 1854, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony – thirteen years from obscurity to consequence.

  But he had achieved far more than mere importance. He had become exceedingly rich, having made himself landlord to a large part of the expatriate community. He bought and sold property at enormous profits, and developed as a private speculation an entire new street – originally frankly called Caine’s Road, now softened to Caine Road (there is a Caine Lane, too). Caine retired and went home to England just before the appositely named Sir Hercules Robinson set out to clean the Hong Kong stables. He was fondly seen off by the many local people who had shared in his success, and presented by Chinese businessmen with an inlaid mirror: ‘doubtless’, remarked the Illustrated London News ambiguously, in reporting this gratifying gift, ‘Colonel Caine has done many a good turn for his Chinese friends.’

  Caine was one of many. Their Hong Kong was a frontier town, and its methods could hardly be officially tolerated in the sober heyday of Victorianism. When Robinson arrived in 1859 he was horrified to find that not a single senior administrator spoke any Chinese language, and two years later a cadet scheme was founded, to provide the nucleus of a properly professional civil service. Candidates were chosen by examination in England, as they were for the Indian Civil Service, that paragon of imperial system. They were given two years of language training, went to Hong Kong first as interpreters, later as administrators, and gradually transformed the standards of its Government. For nearly a century they were all British, nearly all public school and Oxbridge, and they formed a caste of their own, distinct even within the Hong Kong Civil Service – often scholarly, always gentlemanly, usually honest, but inclined to be clannish and conservative – they usually spent their whole lives in the colony, and in each others’ company.5 After the Second World War a few Chinese had time to become cadet officers, before the system was abolished, and there are senior administrators in Hong Kong now who are products of the scheme, and who still fondly assume that you know what they are talking about, when they say they began their careers as Hong Kong Cadets.

  Even so the expatriate civil servants remained almost to the end a remarkably mixed bag. From senior executives to police officers, they were drawn from many origins and many administrative and technical disciplines. They may have been inherited from lost colonies elsewhere – many moved on from Africa in the 1960s, many more from Singapore and Malaysia in the 1970s. They may have been recruited across the divide from private enterprise. Some just turned up, in the old way, and many were on short contracts: those who were making a career of the administrative branch were, in the British colonial tradition, expected to prove themselves as jacks-of-all-trades.

  In 1986 the Financial Secretary was a former chairman of Swire’s, while the Chief Secretary, having started life as a merchant seaman, had served as a colonial officer in Malaysia and was one of the few foreigners to speak both the Cantonese and the Hokkien dialects. The Attorney-General, previously a counsel to the Mini
stry of Defence in London, was the co-editor of Temperley’s Merchant Shipping Acts. The Chief Justice, a former Attorney-General of Gibraltar, was the author of The Bones of the Wajingas and How to Dispense with Lawyers. The Deputy Director of Trade had spent time on attachment to the Royal Visit Office, and the Staff Officer (Hawkers and Markets) had previously been Coordinator of the Festival of Asian Arts. In 1992 the newly appointed head of the Marine Department, responsible for one of the world’s greatest ports, was an Arabist, educated at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and at Harvard, who had previously served with the Housing Authority and been in charge of hawkers and markets at the Department of Urban Services.

  There are at least 180,000 servants of Government in all, 99 per cent of them Chinese, making it much the largest Hong Kong employer. The Government Telephone Directory is 569 pages long. The Government Land Transport Agency has more than 7,000 vehicles, six and a quarter for each mile of road. And the most heterogeneous of all Government branches is the Information Services Department, the front of it all, which includes twenty-seven Chief Information Officers, fifty-three Principal Information Officers, eighty-seven Senior Information Officers and eighty-seven Information Officers plain and simple. It is rumoured to act sometimes as a dis-information department: a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Adley, alleged in the 1980s that because of his heretical views on the future of Hong Kong the ISD had deliberately set out to besmirch his reputation, and reformist citizens of Hong Kong, too, have felt themselves to be the victims of its expertise.

  In the main though it is a vast and skilful publicity instrument. It publishes myriad books and pamphlets, from economic abstracts to architectural guides. It brings a ceaseless stream of overseas journalists, politicians and businessmen to Hong Kong, chaperones them carefully and sends them home to disseminate the received truth about the place. It shepherds foreign correspondents through their assignments, it briefs Government officials on their images, it produces every year the annual review of Hong Kong, almost as rich in colour plates as it is in statistics, which sells more copies in the territory than any other book. It publishes a daily digest of the Chinese Press. It is very kind to people writing books.

  An astonishing gallimaufry of people has found jobs in this organization, from many parts of the world. Distributed among Government offices all over Hong Kong, with representatives in London, Brussels, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York, between them they constitute a most powerful engine of propaganda: for the size of the colony, I would guess, the largest, most active and most aggressive of all State publicity machines – so important is image to this system of control.

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  Hardly less varied are the officers who administer the Common Law in Hong Kong. They are no longer called upon to administer Chinese customary law, and are not obliged to understand any Chinese language – except in special hearings of trivial offences, the language of the courts is English, laboriously interpreted into Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo or Tanka. There are four degrees of court, from magistrates’ court to Court of Appeal, and in serious criminal cases juries of seven people are required to reach a verdict. I have spent many days, over many years, haunting the courts of Hong Kong, from the High Court to district magistrates’ courts, and I have never seen, anywhere in the world, such a variegated assortment of jurists.

  There are judges of a truly awful Englishness, the very embodiment of the Common Law, rigged out of course in full paraphernalia of full-bottom wigs and buckled shoes, and fluent in the circumlocutions of their trade. There are learned Chinese, similarly accoutred, just as bewigged, and hardly less as to the manner born. There are the inevitable Australians. I remember with affection a small neat judge, Scottish I think, who seemed to be in a condition of perpetual fidgety motion, never still, never at repose – now twitching his head this way and that, now suddenly removing his spectacles, now moving his pen, rearranging his papers, looking suddenly around the court, shifting his wig, putting his pen down, picking his pen up, for all the world as though he were some kind of mechanical toy, made in Hong Kong no doubt, and would presently run down into a recess.

  It would be a miracle if all the legal men of Hong Kong were of high standard. For most of them the only true inducement to work in the territory is the inducement of money, and the quality of the law they administer seems to me distinctly variable. It is degrading enough, for my tastes, that after 150 years of British rule a population 98 per cent Chinese should still have many of its cases tried in English. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ judges sometimes irritably inquire, when interpreters are delayed by knotty points of translation, and the cry rings shamefully: how terrible to see, as I saw with pity one day, a young man from a refugee camp, charged with murder in the misery of his condition, tried before a European judge, British, Australian, Indian and New Zealand lawyers and a jury of five Europeans and two Chinese, all in a language he did not understand, below the crest of a monarchy resident on the other side of the world! I would not like to be defended by some of the lawyers appearing in the courts of Hong Kong. Nor would I happily appear before some of the magistrates. They are all professionals, members of the Civil Service, but some are both more professional, and more civil, than others.

  Observe for example the magistrate, nationality immaterial, presiding over this morning’s petty cases in one of the air-conditioned lower courts. He is a master of the legal cliché, besides being a stickler for every last nicety of the Common Law. The rules of evidence are sacrosanct to him, the pedantries of the court are as the bread of life, and sitting as he does alone upon his bench, hearing cases involving simple Chinese in a language he does not understand, he has long since perfected his techniques of brief authority. He bullies defendants mercilessly – ‘Shut up, don’t you open your mouth and blurt out.’ He bludgeons witnesses – ‘I’ll ask you the question ten times, 100 times, 1,000 times if necessary, until it sticks into your thick skull.’ He testily proclaims his own importance – ‘This is a court of law, not a fish market, and I am presiding over this court. Do you understand that? Do you hear me? I am not speaking German or Greek to you.’ And when at last he fines some miserable prostitute, or sends a bewildered hawker off to the cells, he does so without a flicker of regret, without a hint of understanding, only a petulant exertion of his own supremacy.6

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  Of course he stands very low in the hierarchy of imperial justice, which until the Chinese take over in Hong Kong, still ascends, as it did in all the Empire once, to that ultimate court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

  Once this was among the most august of all lawcourts, with a jurisdiction far exceeding that of the Roman Empire at its widest. It heard appeals from every part of the British dominions. Its judges were drawn from all over the British world, and its plaintiffs and respondents too came from anywhere the flag flew. Today its powers are sadly shrunken, few countries now recognizing its authority, but far away in London it still represents the ultimate hope of justice for appellants in Hong Kong.

  Cases seldom in fact reach the Privy Council – it is not easy to get leave to appeal there, and the cost is great. Among those that were heard in the past, some must have made Whitehall hearts sink, so peculiarly complex were the affairs of this possession. Cases of land tenure were always especially awkward, and all too often Hong Kong legal affairs impinged in one way or another upon international law. A piquant example was the case of The Attorney-General of Our Lady the Queen for the Colony of Hong Kong versus Kwok A Sing, which reached the Judicial Committee in 1863.

  Kwok A Sing was one of 310 Chinese migrants who boarded a French ship in Macao, bound for a new life in Peru. They were indentured labourers, and were treated almost as slaves, kept below decks at night, and separated from the crew quarters by armed barricades. This was not what Kwok A Sing had expected, as he set off for his fresh start, and after a few days at sea he and several other men attacked the captain and crew. They
killed some, and obliged the rest to sail the ship back to China. The mutineers disappeared, but Kwok A Sing presently turned up in Hong Kong. There he was arrested as a suspicious character, and when his identity was established the Chinese authorities applied for his extradition.

  This was refused. The Chief Justice of Hong Kong maintained that the extradition treaty with China did not apply to political offences, which Kwok’s arguably was, or to crimes like piracy which were justiciable in Hong Kong, while conditions on board the ship, it might also be argued, were such as to make murder justifiable – part of ‘the first law of nature, committed under the right of self-preservation’. Anyway, the Chief Justice ruled, since the crime was committed on board a French ship on the high seas, only the French could demand extradition.

  The French had in fact considered asking for it, but perhaps preferred not to have conditions on board a French ship exhibited, and decided not to pursue the claim. Kwok was freed. The Attorney-General immediately had him re-arrested and charged with piracy, a crime justiciable in the colony regardless of the nationality of the ship on which it had been committed; but the Chief Justice promptly ordered him released again, on the grounds that the facts had not altered, and an accused could not be placed in second jeopardy.

  Unhappy Kwok! The Chinese wanted him, the French did and didn’t, the British in Hong Kong could not agree. Six thousand miles away five eminent judges pondered the rights and wrongs of his predicament – Sir John Colville, Sir R. Phillimore, Lord Justice Mellish, Sir Barnes Peacock and Sir Montague E. Smith – far from the China seas, remote indeed from the slave ship on its way to Peru. What they decided was this: that on the one hand, the murder by a Chinese subject of a person who was not a subject of China, committed outside Chinese territory, was not an offence against the law of China, so Kwok was not extraditable there. On the other hand the Attorney-General was right, and he should indeed be re-arrested and tried in Hong Kong on a charge of piracy under the Law of Nations.