“Pottinger’s Map” is arranged with the south at the top and must be looked at upside down in order to fit in with our customary way of reading maps. This may be because it is from the early period of British occupation. Attention had not yet shifted from water to land, and since they were facing south from the harbor, this gave rise to a map layout with land above water. It has been thought that Sir Henry occasionally suffered from inverted vision.
Some have seen the purpose of the map as a record of the first lots of land that Captain Charles Elliot, the plenipotentiary and superintendent of trade in China, sold hastily on the occupation of Hong Kong. That sale was subsequently not approved and for a time gave rise to disputes between the colonial government and traders. Only a small proportion of the lots marked on this map appear on later maps. However, there is no substantial evidence to support this idea. If the map was really drawn up by Pottinger in 1842, it could not be a record of Elliot’s land sales, because Pottinger arrived in Hong Kong in August 1841 and took over Elliot’s posts as well as being appointed the first governor of Hong Kong, and he would definitely not have made a record of Elliot’s “illegal” land sales. This argument is based on the hypothesis that the map was drawn up by Pottinger in 1842. If the hypothesis turns out to be false, another explanation will have to be found.
Notes taken by Pottinger’s adjutant, William Hahns, give a completely different version. Pottinger first arrived in Hong Kong on August 21, 1842, to inspect the local construction works. At that time there were as yet no buildings on the island and Queen’s Road was still being constructed along the northern shore. Hahns saw Pottinger entering the private part of the governor’s mat-shed and studying a sketch map supplied by naval personnel. He did not even bother to listen to reports about inspections of departing troops. The following day, the governor sailed north to take part in the campaign against ports on the China coast. Hahns recalled that during the campaign, Pottinger often found time on the warship to work on a map of the north shore of Hong Kong. From time to time he demarcated bigger and smaller leases along the shoreline, here and there filling in the names of big merchants like Matheson, Jardine, and Dent. He envisaged locations for a post office, land office, and marine office, outlined the scale of Government House, and sketched the long winding line of Queen’s Road. In Hahns’s words, “Sir Henry Pottinger early on envisaged his queen’s city on paper.”
On his return to Hong Kong in February 1842, Sir Henry Pottinger discovered that the deputy superintendent of trade, A. R. Johnston, had carried out an unauthorized sale of “public land” at low prices to British merchants and officials and that the lots sold were actually identical to the ones that he had marked out on his map during the military campaign. As a result, Pottinger overturned the land sale and established new procedures for selling land.
Hahns was accidentally killed by a sailor in a drunken brawl in 1843. He was thirty-five and unmarried and his only possessions were his everyday clothes and several books in which he had scribbled fragmentary notes and poems.
Pottinger spent his early years in India in the service of the East India Company. He had a rich experience of work in the colonies and received a knighthood. When he took part in the Afghan War, his inverted vision made him see in his imagination the enemy fighters as reflections in water.
19
GORDON’S JAIL
“Gordon’s Map” of 1843 is mentioned in the documentary records of Victoria. The original is impossible to find, but a still-extant map is said to be a copy. This map presents a general picture of Victoria at its birth and shows the orderly arrangement of the buildings lining Queen’s Road following the shore. The map’s most notable features are the jail and magistracy on what was then still a bare hillside. They encompassed an area equivalent to several dozen of the buildings along the shore and constituted by far the largest compound.
A. T. Gordon was the first head of the Land Office and subsequently became the first surveyor general in 1843. A large number of sketch maps thought to have been drawn by Gordon in Victoria were discovered among the possessions left behind by Gordon’s close associate, the merchant Jeremy Thompson. The sketch maps were kept in a mansion in Kent, England, that belonged to Thompson’s descendant Anne Thompson, but the originals were destroyed in a fire in 1945. However, the content of this set of maps can by and large be discerned from Anne Thompson’s book Jeremy Thompson: Merchant Pioneer and Humanist.1
Anne Thompson relates how as a child she won permission from her family to leaf through the sketch maps of her great-grandfather’s friend. There were altogether forty-five sheets, all of them depicting construction in the coastal areas of colonial Victoria in southern China. The maps, which were drawn up from February to December 1843, exhibited particularly striking changes in the configuration of Victoria Gaol to the south of the area known as Central District. In the first completed maps, Victoria Gaol and Magistrate’s Court were already the largest and most spacious landmarks in the city. Victoria Gaol, located on the hillside, subsequently changed its appearance on the maps several times. At times it expanded to the south, climbing up toward Mid-Levels, while at other times it extended north toward the harborside, even to the point of covering the entire Central District commercial area. It also radiated a netlike structure with dotted lines connecting it with the main buildings in Central District, Sheung Wan, and Wan Chai. A map from the end of July placed it on the land at the time occupied by Government House. Finally, in the white margin of the last map, from December 1843, Gordon simply wrote GAOL OF VICTORIA in capital letters, replacing the caption CITY OF VICTORIA. The jail and the city were one and the same.
The British occupied Hong Kong in January 1841, and William Caine was appointed chief magistrate and superintendent of the jail in April the same year. The building was completed by October in an exceptionally short time, and it was the first large-scale public facility to come into use.
1 The first edition of Jeremy Thompson: Merchant Pioneer and Humanist was published in 1934 with a print run of one thousand. Distribution records show that seven copies were sold in all and that the author gave away one hundred twenty copies. It is thought that the remaining more than eight hundred volumes were destroyed in the big fire at the country house in Kent. Jeremy Thompson (1795–1866) started out as an opium merchant, later turned to trade in medicines, and was quite a well-known philanthropist.
20
“PLAN OF THE CITY OF VICTORIA,” 1889
The 1889 “Plan of the City of Victoria” shows that the city was already quite well developed. The street network extended farther outward from Central District, Sheung Wan, and Wan Chai, reaching Kennedy Town in the west and Causeway Bay in the east, and expanding to the higher levels and the Peak in the south. To the north the shoreline was shifted into the harbor. Looked at from a distance, this monochrome street map resembles a yellowing sketch of the habitat of climbing plants.
The most striking and thought-provoking part of the map is an area to the north outlined with a dotted line along the harborside. If we accept Roland Barthes’ reading of photographs as put forward in Camera Lucida, we should then not exclude it from map reading. Our eyes are thus often struck by some indescribable punctum. It seems to me that the dotted line in the water is such a punctum. Even people with a limited understanding of maps know that dotted lines represent the extent of projected reclamation work, that is to say, the direction of the city’s future development. This was originally the most superficial and unremarkable meaning of the dotted-line symbol. However, it also added a layer of complexity to the grammar of map language: apart from affirming a perpetual present tense (i.e., repeating over and over to the reader: this is Victoria as it is now in 1889), at the same time it also pointed toward a future tense (i.e., the future Victoria is like this). Inevitably these tenses in the end become part of past time, thereby making it impossible for people to neglect the difference between tense and time. In this difference we can glimpse the city’s fic
tionality.
A “plan” is a plane figure but also a design, a present visualization of future form. On the one hand it does not yet exist and is unreal, but on the other hand it is being designed and will be constructed. A plan is thus a kind of fiction, and the meaning of this fiction is inseparable from the design and blueprint. A fiction is not the same as something completely lacking any connection with reality. On the 1889 “Plan,” the road along the northern shore of Victoria is the Praya, but the name was changed to Des Voeux Road on the completion of the harbor reclamation project in 1903, while the new waterfront street was named Connaught Road. Des Voeux Road and Connaught Road are in a distinctive sense fictitious, and Victoria can also be said to be a fictitious city that is continually drawn up with dotted lines on maps, a city forever combining the present, future, and past tenses. If you compare a map of Victoria from the 1840s with one from 1996, you will be amazed to see that the city is so fictitious that it easily matches the most unrestrained novel. The dotted lines are still being extended like a never-finished story.
Fiction is the essential character of Victoria and even of all cities, and city maps are by necessity novels expanding, altering, embellishing, and repudiating themselves.
21
THE FOUR WAN AND NINE YEUK
In 1903 the Hong Kong government published the boundaries of the city of Victoria in the government gazette and set up six boundary stones. These stones are said to have been located in the following places: (1) in a waterfront park north of Victoria Road, (2) opposite St Paul’s Primary School in Wong Nai Chung Road, (3) in Bowen Road about a third of a mile from its junction with Stubbs Road, (4) where Tregunter Path meets Old Peak Road, (5) in Hatton Road 1,300 feet from Kotewall Road, (6) on the pavement of Pok Fu Lam Road near lamppost 3987.2
Chinese residents in the area had different ways of demarcating the boundaries of Victoria, referring to the city as the four wan and the nine yeuk, literally “the four rings and nine neighborhoods.” The four wan were Ha Wan, or Lower Ring (i.e., Wan Chai, from Wan Chai Road to Arsenal Street), Chung Wan, or Central Ring (i.e., Central District, from the Murray Barracks Parade Ground to the junction of Wellington Street and Queen’s Road Central), Sheung Wan, or Upper Ring (from the junction of Wellington Street and Queen’s Road Central to the Government Civil Hospital), and Sai Wan or Western Ring (Connaught Road West to Kennedy Town).
There is as yet no accepted explanation of the reason for naming the four districts “rings.” Some understand “ring” as meaning “encircling,” that is to say an area that is surrounded. To be surrounded can further be understood as either of two opposites: “protected and immune to outside attack” or “beleaguered and with no escape.” No matter how it is explained, “ring” in this sense has an inward-looking point of view with focus on its own area. Conversely, some also understand “rings” as links in a chain-shaped relationship, that is to say a chain of interlocked rings. The districts become joined and closely tied together to the point that they are one another’s fetters, depending on as well as holding back one another. This is an external means of definition by creating meaning out of the relationships with other districts. Yet a third explanation is that “ring” stands for “cycle” or “period.” The “Four Rings” are thus a city that has undergone four cycles of change. So far no one has been able to verify or induce the rules governing its cyclical change, nor has anyone been able to explain the fact that, in addition to the perfect three-phase cycle of “upper,” “central,” and “lower,” there has also emerged the irregular “west” element. The post–New Age cartographic school who lay claim to be heirs to the Chinese tradition of geomancy insist that there is a profound spiritual mystery therein.
The nine yeuk are in the main explained by the old assertion that yeuk is a territorial division, close in meaning to “district.” The word yeuk has a specific sense of contract, agreement, or promise, that is to say, a formula for setting boundaries that is recognized by all parties. Some very meticulous textual researchers also feel that we must not neglect the fact that yeuk has the additional meaning of “about” or “around.” Thus they reach the conclusion that yeuk boundaries were approximate, ambiguous, and imprecise, something that has given rise to a debate about Chinese habits and the nature of the Chinese cultural tradition.
In his book Legends from the Four Wans and Nine Yeuks, the Englishman Norman Elton quoted what a local fortune-teller and letter writer by the name of Lam Kat had to say about the origin of the name the “nine yeuk.” A girl from the village of So Kon Po walked every day from east to west through the city to take a lunch basket for her father, who worked in a slaughterhouse in Kennedy Town. On her way through Sheung Wan she would always buy a steaming hot bun from the Tak Hing Tea House in Bonham Strand. A young waiter in the teahouse came to adore this girl and one day made an appointment to meet with her in the afternoon by the harbor in front of the infectious diseases hospital in Kennedy Town. However, something happened that made him fail to keep his appointment, so the next day he came to a new agreement with the girl to meet outside the Kam Ling Restaurant in Shek Tong Tsui. By unhappy coincidence the boy was again unable to make the appointment, and the two of them then changed the place of their rendezvous to the Government Civil Hospital in Sai Ying Poon. The same thing happened again and again as the couple made a series of appointments to meet in several places from east to west: the Tin Tin Hotel in Connaught Road West, Western Market, Central Market, Arsenal Street, and Wan Chai Road. For all sorts of reasons the boy always failed to meet the girl. On the ninth day, finally, the girl agreed to meet the boy at Goose Neck Bridge in Ha Wan but warned him that he must on no account break his promise again. The boy swore by high heaven that he would not do so, but afterward he bumped into a British sailor on the street and was beaten, and by the time he reached Goose Neck Bridge, the girl had thrown herself into the water and drowned.
The “Nine Yeuk” thus means the “Nine Agreements,” that is, nine failed appointments in nine different neighborhoods.
2 Si huan jiu yue (City of Victoria) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum, Sep. 1994), 7–8. This source is no longer extant.
22
THE CENTAUR OF THE EAST
In his El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings) Borges made an acute observation: the centaur of Western mythical zoology is the most harmonious of all creatures, but its heterogeneous character is often overlooked. Its heterogeneity lies in the fact that it consists of two separate and distinct halves joined (or juxtaposed) together to form a seamless perfection: its human part possesses purely human characteristics, and its animal part is a perfect configuration of a horse. Chinese mythology has no analogous example of a fantastic creature composed of two different parts. Although Chinese imaginary creatures are often made up of parts of different animals, these are amalgamations of many individual features rather than simple combinations of two parts. For instance, the Queen Mother of the West is described in “The Classic of the Western Mountains” (a chapter in The Classic of Mountains and Seas) as having a human shape, a leopard’s tail, tiger’s teeth, and the ability to roar.
There has long been a debate about the proper way to decipher maps of Victoria: is it a case of joining or mixing together? The former seems particularly suited to reading early maps of Victoria, such as the street map of 1889, where it is already possible to discern an obvious dividing line between Central District and Sheung Wan. With the exception of a few streets that run east to west (Bonham Strand, Queen’s Road, Hollywood Road, and Wellington Street) and connect these districts, Central and Sheung Wan present entirely different aspects. The Central District streets almost invariably have English names after people involved in the early development of Victoria (for example, Pottinger Street, named after the first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger; D’Aguilar Street, named after the general officer commanding of the early years, Major-General D’Aguilar; Aberdeen Street, named after the British foreign secretary of the 18
40s, Lord Aberdeen, and so on). However, most streets to the west of Tai Ping Shan in Sheung Wan have Chinese names (Po Hing Fong, Po Yan Street, Wing Lok Street, and so forth). Documentary evidence indicates that Pottinger Street also marked a boundary in architectural style, with Central District having British-type buildings and Sheung Wan Chinese-type housing. Seen from the harbor, it must have appeared as a juxtaposition of heterogeneity.
This view has been rejected as a simplification not in keeping with the facts. Cartographers have put forward all sorts of quantitative analysis and location and density data to explain that there was by no means a sharp line dividing eastern and western halves in Victoria. They have attempted to portray the city as a product of mixed blood ties, tangled up and impossible to dissolve—a hybrid. This traditional Queen Mother of the West paradigm held sway for a time, but the view of juxtaposed and coexisting halves still held a certain attraction among scholars. That is why some people still insist that Victoria is the “Centaur of the East.”
Borges also summarizes the fifth book of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things): The centaur is an impossible creature, for the horse reaches maturity before the human. By the age of three a horse is already full-grown, while a human is a child barely weaned. A horse’s life span is also fifty years shorter than a human being’s.
23
SCANDAL POINT AND THE MILITARY CANTONMENT
The intentions of the military authorities become quite clear in an 1880 map showing Victoria’s military installations. The map represents the district later called Admiralty. Murray Battery is to the left, on a hillside below Government House, and Murray Parade Ground is on a low slope northeast of the battery. Murray Barracks is to the east of the parade ground, on the other side of a road. On a knoll farther east from Murray Barracks stands the building known as Flagstaff House, which was the residence of the general officer commanding. The Naval Yard occupies the central portion of the waterfront and farther east are the Military Hospital and Wellington Battery. Victoria Barracks and the Arsenal are on the hillside south of the hospital, to the right on the map.
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