Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  In Stanley Camp things were rather different. There the civilians reproduced among themselves, in grotesque microcosm, nearly all the characteristics of peacetime Hong Kong. Gimson, as the senior official internee, never for a moment relinquished his Governmental authority over his fellow-prisoners. ‘The British Government in Hong Kong,’ he proclaimed, ‘is still in being and functioning except where prevented by the Japanese’; indeed he claimed that as chief representative of the Crown he should conduct the Government-in-captivity’s foreign policy – that is to say, its relations with its captors. He resisted all proposals that British civilians should be repatriated, as the Americans presently were, on the grounds that this might prejudice the status of Hong Kong after the war, and when some of the internees signed a petition asking him to change his attitude, he called them disloyal to the British cause.

  The internees behaved much as you might expect them to behave. They were after all colonial Hong Kong concentrated, men, women and children, people of all ranks, deprived of their servants and thrown into each others’ intimate society. They squabbled about hierarchy and precedence. They formed committees. They put on plays. They remembered the happy old days. They bowed as required when they passed a Japanese and they became far more resourceful, as the years passed, in looking after themselves. The businessmen grumbled, as was the Hong Kong tradition, about Gimson and about the Government, which many of them blamed for its failure to declare Hong Kong an open city. Gimson no less traditionally grumbled about them – ‘they cannot appear to consider any other world than that in which they can make money and retire’.

  And secretly, within their ranks, some heroic souls fought on. Links were maintained with the city still – with the bankers at their hotel in the first few months, with Selwyn Clarke who maintained a running supply of medicines into the camp until he was arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Now and then messages of boyish panache arrived from Ride and the BAAG. ‘It is the Empire that needs you, not Stanley,’ said one urging young internees to escape. ‘How many guests would be interested in Liberty Bonds?’ asked another. Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, chief manager of the Bank, was accused of espionage and imprisoned with appalling ill-treatment. In October, 1943, seven civilians were beheaded on Stanley Beach, almost within sight of the camp, for possession of a radio; they included the colony’s former Defence Secretary.

  One by one, we see in retrospect, the signs of tragedy sobered and matured the community within the wires. The sad little makeshift gravestones multiplied in the graveyard above the camp. Now one internee, now another, was taken away to torture, imprisonment or death. ‘It is with the utmost regret,’ said a notice signed by Gimson, ‘that I have to report that the death of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn occurred at 7.30 a.m. on the 22nd instant in the Stanley Prison Hospital’ – and everyone knew the horror that lay between the lines. D. w. WATERTON, said a mis-spelled graffito in a cell, with the days on a calendar scratched off beside it, ARRESTED STANLEY CAMP JULY 7TH 1943 COURTMARTIALLED OCT 19TH AND NO DEFENCE CONDEMNED DEATH EXECUTED DATE CALENDER STOPS …

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  Through it all the indomitable Gimson maintained his claim to authority, and when news of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies reached Stanley on 16 August 1945, he immediately exerted it. By then everyone in the camp was exhausted. The Japanese were demoralized, the internees were half-starved. There was nobody to object when Gimson declared himself Acting Governor and representative of His Majesty King George VI in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It was not until eleven days later that a message from London, conveyed via Macao by an agent of the BAAG, authorized him to do so, and by then Gimson had already set himself up with an administrative staff in offices in Queen’s Road, meaningfully close to the Bank. On 30 August the South China Morning Post reappeared on the streets of Hong Kong, after an absence of nearly four years. It consisted in its entirety of seven paragraphs on a single sheet. It was endearingly headed EXTRA, and this is how it began:

  The first communiqué from the Hongkong Government to the people of Hongkong since December 1941 was issued this morning at 11 o’clock as follows: ‘Rear Admiral Harcourt is lying outside Hongkong with a very strong fleet. The Naval Dockyard is to be ready for his arrival by noon today …’

  Gimson’s action may have changed the course of history. It had been agreed among the Allied Powers that liberated territories should be surrendered to those who had liberated them: since nobody had actually liberated Hong Kong, logic suggested (and the Japanese themselves assumed) that it should be surrendered to the supreme commander of the war zone in which it was situated. This was Chiang Kai-shek, who as we know disputed the legality of the British presence in Hong Kong. Handing the colony over to him, backed as he was by an America distinctly unsympathetic to the British Empire, might well mean that the British flag would never go up above Government House again.

  But Gimson created a fait accompli which nobody felt able to reverse, and when two weeks later the Japanese formally surrendered Hong Kong after three years and seven months of occupation, they handed their swords to Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt, RN, who had sailed into the grey and desolate harbour, littered with wreckage, in his flagship the cruiser Swiftsure, attended by the battleship Anson, two aircraft carriers, eight destroyers, eight submarines and a flotilla of minesweepers.

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  Captain Shadwell, RN, of HMS Maidstone, was among the first to get to Stanley Camp. He was described by one ecstatic internee as being ‘so lovely and cheerful, plump and priceless’, and the arrival of the Royal Navy certainly did wonders to restore morale and confidence. It was almost like old times! The Navy provided films for the cinemas, dance bands for celebratory reunions, and after three years without much fun the city was, we are told by the South China Morning Post, introduced to jitterbugging ‘under the expert tuition of rhythm-minded members of the Fleet’.

  In an astonishingly short time Hong Kong recovered its bearing – sooner perhaps than any other occupied territory, in any theatre of the Second World War. A British military administration took over from Gimson, handing over eight months later to a restored Colonial Government; very soon almost every aspect of the territory’s life was back to normal, and the British had expunged nearly all traces of their humiliation.

  They left the railway-station tower on Government House. They had been planning to build an altogether new mansion higher up the hill, but the Japanese had rebuilt the old one so thoroughly that they abandoned the idea, and the tower became one of Hong Kong’s most familiar architectural images: its rooms proved popular among Governors’ wives – sunny little chambers, reached by steep wooden staircases and just as suitable for embroidery as for calligraphy. However after several attempts the military blew up the Shinto-blessed Temple of the Divine Wind, which the Japanese never had time to complete; today only its cyclopean foundations can be seen, acting as podium to the three apartment blocks called Cameron Buildings, above Magazine Gap, and commanding still one of the most triumphant views in Asia.

  They tried several Japanese officers and men for atrocities, executing some with a dreadful rightness at Stanley, sentencing some to imprisonment, finding some innocent. They hanged as a traitor one Hong Kong Chinese, a particularly vile creature of the Kempeitei, but decided that only those who had directly helped the Japanese in cruel acts against the populace should be punished for collaboration with the enemy; in the end about fifty of all races were found guilty. They replaced the Japanese military currency with new notes flown in from London within the month. They honoured the so-called ‘duress notes’ – Hongkong and Shanghai Bank notes which had been issued by the Japanese without proper financial backing; there had been much speculation in this strictly illegal currency, and its official recognition in 1946 was the foundation of several fortunes. They also honoured most of their wartime IOUs, even sometimes to the most blatant profiteers.

  They commemorated their dead in a beautiful war cemetery above Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island, l
ooking across the water to the east, where their soldiers of all origins were honoured side by side, Winnipeg Grenadiers beside Rajput infantrymen, six drummers of the Middlesex Regiment beside a host of poor fellows with no known names. They put up a headstone to the only grave within the precincts of the Anglican Cathedral, that of Private R. D. Maxwell, Hong Kong Volunteers, killed 23 December 1941.

  They rescued some timbers from the Tamar, and made new doors for the Cathedral out of them. They found the looted statues of the kings and queens of Statue Square, still intact in Japan; but times had changed, and only Queen Victoria’s was re-erected – far from the centre of things, in Victoria Park at Causeway Bay, where under the Pleasure-Ground By-Laws children are forbidden to steer their remote-controlled cars around its plinth.

  They confirmed Gimson in his Colonial Secretaryship, and he went on to be Governor of Singapore. They restored Sir Mark Young to his interrupted Governorship. They gave his Professorship back to Lindsay Ride, and he became the University’s Vice-Chancellor. They awarded Ha Chan the Military Cross. They were never quite sure again about Sir Robert Kotewall, but since he was a very old friend of many of them, besides being one of the richest men in the colony, on the whole they gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  For a striking thing about this aftermath was its swift decline of recrimination. Getting back to business was everybody’s only aim. The territory was desolate. Bomb damage was everywhere, the harbour was full of sunken ships, everything was dingy and unpainted. Only 150 cars were left in the entire colony, and the 17,000 telephones of 1939 were reduced to 10,000. There was no time for reproach, as Government and business community alike, British and Chinese, civilians and military, set about repairing the damage. Admiral Harcourt himself had defined his task, when his ships swept into harbour that day, as being to return to Hong Kong ‘freedom, food, law and order and a stable currency’. So successfully was the job done, and so quickly was confidence in the colony restored, that by the end of 1945 the population was back to 1.6 million – just what it had been at the beginning of 1941 – and Sir Robert and Lady Ho Tung were able to celebrate their Diamond Jubilee quite in the old style, in the presence of His Excellency at the Hong Kong Hotel.

  As the liberated soldiers and the surrendered Japanese departed on their troopships, and many of the Stanley internees sailed home to recuperate, in flooded a new wave of Hong Kong opportunists. They came not only from China, where war was now resumed between Kuomintang and Communists, but also from Europe, Australia and America – a new generation of traders. merchants, speculators and entrepreneurs. In the prevailing post-war climate of liberal imperialism there were plans to give the people of Hong Kong a measure of self-government, but the public response was apathetic, and they were soon shelved. All Hong Kong’s reviving energies went into the accumulation of profit. Within a couple of years all the docks were restored, the wrecks in the harbour were salvaged, and 46,000 vessels cleared the port in a single year. The Bank resumed its glory, the old hongs bounced back, and even the Japanese community was presently flourishing once again. Already we detect, so soon after the calamity, the first tentative outline of the skyscraper City-State that was to come.

  Yet Hong Kong was profoundly and permanently changed by the experience of war. The pageantry of Government was soon restored, but this was never again to feel quite like a British colony. Its balance had been permanently shifted. Ride said in 1942 that the British had become known as ‘the run-away British’, and when Admiral Harcourt’s fleet of liberation arrived it found itself greeted only by multitudes of Chinese flags, with hardly a Union Jack to be seen on junk or housetop. After the war the colonists were not, it seems, often taunted with their military failure – they had after all come back in triumph, and there is bound to be a Chinese saying about those who laugh last – but inevitably the relationship between the races had been altered by events. No longer could the British feel themselves in all ways superior to Asiatics, and though the manners of racial prejudice were to linger on, its forms disappeared.

  The last vestiges of segregation were renounced – by the end of the 1940s anybody who could afford it could live on the Peak. The Hong Kong Club moved reluctantly towards the admission of Chinese. Old residents returning after a war away were astonished by the new free-and-easiness of racial relations, and the social life of the expatriates was never quite the same again – the tea-parties never quite so ineffable at the Repulse Bay Hotel, the Club never quite so inexpressibly club-like, the bathing beaches, once so comfortingly reminiscent of Bournemouth, now swarming with Asians. Very soon Chinese had broken into every sphere of life, social and economic, and were challenging the British for the financial dominance of Hong Kong.

  More and more, too, Hong Kong began to behave like a semi-autonomous State. The British Empire was now moving towards its swift disbandment, as colony after colony gained self-government or independence, but Hong Kong stood apart. None of the usual standards of aspirations, it seemed, applied to this peculiar territory, Curzon was proved right, in his prophecy that when India was lost the rest of the Empire would go too, but Hong Kong did not count. Hong Kong marched to a different drum. Hong Kong ran its own economic affairs, Hong Kong soon evolved a new and even more glittering image of itself, and was indeed the one territory of the dependent Empire, presently to be reduced to hardly more than a ragbag of indigent islands, which was able to stand on its own feet. As the years passed, and arrogant Empire faded into generally amiable Commonwealth, successive Governments in London learned to make Hong Kong a perpetual exception to everything.

  The end of the imperial era, in fact, was leaving Hong Kong high and dry, but at the same time another mighty historical progression was about to toss the territory in its wake; for in the last year of the 1940s the Communists came to power in China, and everything changed again.

  1 Gwen Dew, Prisoner of the Japanese, New York 1943. The Japanese also took a number of books from the library of the Hong Kong Club, found on the quayside at Yokohama after the war and returned to their stacks.

  THE LANDLORD

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  UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, IF YOU WALKED UP TUNG TAU Tsuen Road north of the airport, just over the line between Kowloon and the New Territories, you would discover on your right-hand side a row of establishments curious even by the standards of this recondite place. One after another, glass-fronted to the street, they were the surgeries of unqualified dentists. Their windows were full of pickled abscesses, illustrations of impacted wisdom teeth, grinning rows of dentures, and in the background of each shop a dentist’s chair stood waiting, sometimes with the dentist himself reclining in it between customers while his ornamental goldfish (good for patients’ nerves) circumnavigated their illuminated tank in the background.

  Unqualified doctors and dentists still practise all over Hong Kong, but these particular practitioners were there for a historical reason. They believed themselves to be beyond the reach of Government regulations and inspectorates, because that side of that stretch of Tung Tau Tsuen Road once formed the rampart of the old Kowloon City. This was the place, you may remember, that the Manchus maintained as a fortified headquarters before the British ever came to Hong Kong, and in which they reserved their authority when the New Territories were ceded in 1898.

  In their time it was a walled city, rebuilt in 1847 specifically as a defence against the British across the water. It had six watch towers, walls fifteen feet thick, a garrison of 500 soldiers and a yamen, the administrative office, securely in the middle of it. Its guns were black with red muzzles, and its demeanour could be fierce: there are pictures of convicted criminals crouched outside its gates with placards round their necks, and of pirates, apprehended by the Royal Navy, decapitated on the nearby beach courtesy of the yamen.

  When the British took over the New Territories they very soon got rid of the Chinese officials at Kowloon, relying upon loose wordings in the Convention of Peking, and subsequent legal quibbles never quite settled the s
tatus of the place. It became a sort of no man’s land, known simply as the Walled City. The Chinese objected whenever the British proposed to pull the place down; the British never applied to it all their usual municipal regulations, and as late as the 1970s it was said that its only real administration was provided by the Triads.

  For as the city grew around it, the Walled City became a famous resort of villains. Never being absolutely sure what their rights were, the British generally let it be, hoping that it would wither away of its own accord. It very nearly did; in 1933 there were only some 400 inhabitants, and by 1940, almost all its houses had been demolished. However it revived remarkably after the Second World War, when squatters by the thousand moved in, and by the late 1980s it was thought to house some 30,000 people.

  By then the quarter bore no resemblance to the fortified town of the Manchus. Its walls had all been torn down by the Japanese, to be used as rubble for extensions to the airport, and very few of its structures were more than thirty years old. Nevertheless it still felt like an enclave within the city, extra-territorial and even slightly unreal. It was a frightful slum. No four-wheeled vehicle could enter it – there were no streets wide enough – and its buildings, rising sometimes to ten or twelve storeys, were so inextricably packed together that they seemed to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walkways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by foetid air-shafts.

  A maze of dark alleys pierced the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reached them. Looped electric cables festooned their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It was like a bunker. Sometimes you seemed to be all alone, every door locked around you. Sometimes the lane was suddenly bright with the lights of a laundry or a sweat-shop factory, and loud with Chinese music. In the one airy space of the labyrinth stood the old yamen, a low wooden building used as a school and community centre, and one got the impression even then of a close-knit, cohesive and homogeneous community, altogether separate from the colony outside. The Hong Kong sanitary laws were not applied. Fire risks were disregarded. The only planning restrictions ever enforced concerned the height of the buildings – as it was, aircraft landing at Kai Tak came screaming disconcertingly low over the rooftops.