Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  There would be no elections in Hong Kong for 150 years. The colony was an example of benevolent paternalism, a place where hierarchy and status were enshrined to an almost absurd degree. The Governor and members of his staff formed an elite who, in their contempt for the taipan and merchant class, and in their own education in the Western Classics, very closely resembled the Chinese mandarin officials they had replaced. There were, in the early days at least, and right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, tensions between civil servants from the Governor down, who tended to be more pro-Chinese and could often speak Cantonese, and the less cerebral but more commercially astute merchants who staffed the offices of Jardine’s and Dent’s.

  The cadets, the junior civil servants who helped the Governor run Hong Kong, were recruited and trained in a system which was instituted by Hercules Robinson, the then governor, in 1862. The introduction of this cadet system created in Hong Kong a bureaucratic elite to replace the old mandarins who ran the Chinese Empire. The Chinese mandarin, deeply imbued with the Confucian classics, believed in the idea of a fumuguan, or father and mother official, whose duty was to treat the people under his administration like his own children. In the Chinese political tradition, this paternal metaphor was central to the idea of how a good official should behave. In the 1880s, the system of cadets in Hong Kong attained a shape it would retain till the 1940s, and central to the system was the dispatch of the young cadet to Canton for two years, when he was expected to learn Cantonese.

  The degree of progress individual cadets made in learning about Chinese society, as well as mastering the language, was determined by their own industry and talents. A future governor of Hong Kong in the 1950s, Sir Alexander Grantham, described how he had worked hard as a young cadet in the 1920s, but, after passing the examinations, he could ‘do no more than make myself understood when shopping’ or ‘read the easiest parts of a Chinese newspaper’. Others gained considerably more knowledge; Cecil Clementi, a prize-winning Classical scholar from Balliol College, Oxford, was recruited to the Hong Kong service in the 1890s and rapidly gained a fluency in spoken and written Cantonese which astonished the Chinese inhabitants of the colony. As governor in the 1920s, he was comfortable making public speeches in Cantonese and his linguistic skills were sufficiently good for Lu Xan, a renowned Chinese writer before the Second World War, to have mistaken a speech of Clementi’s for an awkwardly written piece by a former official of the imperial dynasty.18 Some cadets used the two years to travel widely in China, while others, perhaps the majority, were quite happy to spend time socializing with their fellow cadets and among the expatriate community.

  The term ‘cadet officer’ remained in official use for almost a century, until 1960. These cadets have been described as a corps d’élite, a ‘minuscule band of officials’ with the same values and from the same social background. Their sense of superiority did not, as in the case of the taipans, stem from wealth or race. In terms of their own society, back in Britain, they were not generally from a high social class. It is true that they were nearly all public-school educated, but, in the fine distinctions prevalent at that time, the schools they attended were ‘minor public schools and obscure private schools, not listed in the Public Schools Yearbook’: only one cadet from Eton and two from Harrow have been identified among the eighty-five cadets whose educational provenance is known, over the eighty years between 1862, when the scheme was started, and the Japanese invasion of 1941. The majority of the cadets were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, although a substantial contingent–about 30 per cent–came from universities in Ireland and Scotland. The fathers of the cadets were, for the most part, members of the older professions–the law, medicine and, especially, the Church; few of the fathers were businessmen or shopkeepers. It is important to notice that none was from an aristocratic background. Like so much of the snobbery in the British Empire, the superiority of the cadets lay in their education, not in their social status in Britain or their bank balances. The typical Hong Kong cadet was remarkably similar to his counterpart in the Sudan; he ‘came from a solid, though not rich, upper middle class family, went to a public school, but not to the most prestigious, and then went up to one of the older universities where he read classics or history and was noted for his application to study and interest in healthy recreation’. The cadets were from what one might term the public school middle classes, their main distinguishing features being a skill in passing exams and attendance at a fee-paying school, no matter how lowly.19

  The cadets displayed an arrogance, at times, that was breathtaking. Reginald Stubbs, who had been Cecil Clementi’s predecessor as governor at the beginning of the 1920s, remembered them as being ‘prepared to advance claims to act for the Almighty’. They saw themselves very much as prefects in the schools which had educated them. The model prefect was expected to be ‘fair, just, upright, dignified’; ideas of equality were not really part of the public school prefect’s mental universe. Authority, law and order were more likely to be concepts with which he would be familiar. In this hierarchical and intensely bureaucratic world, ideas of protocol and precedence were particularly important. The cadets also put a high premium on sociability, and their experiences involved endless picnics, swimming, polo, golf, tennis and bridge. When the New Territories (on the mainland and islands near by) were acquired on a ninety-nine-year lease in 1898, a further 350 square miles were added to the jurisdiction of Hong Kong. This newly acquired land offered the civil servants an opportunity to get out of the stifling atmosphere of Hong Kong itself, and walking expeditions in the New Territories became popular.20

  Few of the officials in London knew anything about conditions in Hong Kong and the government in London relied very heavily on the judgement of successive governors of the colony.21 One of the earliest, John Davis, had been famously shunned by the business community in the 1840s for being pro-Chinese. Davis had complained to Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, that it was a ‘much easier task to govern the 20,000 Chinese inhabitants of this colony, than a few hundred English’, and, when he came to leave in 1848, the English merchants boycotted all the farewell ceremonies.22 John Pope-Hennessy, something of an Irish political adventurer and a follower of Disraeli, who was governor in the 1880s, experienced similar treatment. He and his predecessor, Sir Arthur Kennedy, had offended the sensibilities of the English merchants, the taipans and their families, by inviting prominent members of the Chinese community to Government House, the elegant colonial-style mansion which had been build in 1855. The Europeans railed against Pope-Hennessy’s ‘Chinomania’ and his ‘native race craze’.23 The Chinese businessmen were regarded as dishonest and malevolent by the English merchants, who felt that Pope-Hennessy, an impoverished Irish squire, was betraying their interests. Relations between the taipans and the Governor became so embittered that the English merchants and their wives refused invitations to Government House and when, in March 1882, Pope-Hennessy finally left Hong Kong he had much the same experience as Davis, with none of the business community presenting themselves at the wharf for the conventional leave-taking ceremony. Chinese business leaders did attend; Pope-Hennessy was known to be sympathetic to the Chinese, and he was called by them ‘Number One Good Friend’.24

  In its first hundred years as a Crown colony, Hong Kong was an incredibly divided society. There were the obvious racial divisions between the English and the Chinese, which were not merely a matter of class and money, since, as already noted, some of the richest people on the island were Chinese. As early as 1881, all but three of the twenty highest taxpayers in Hong Kong were Chinese. Despite their wealth, the rich Chinese businessmen did not socialize with their European counterparts of equal wealth and commercial attainments. On top of racial divisions, there were divisions among the British themselves, the most obvious of which was the split between the official class, with their elite culture, their Classical education and their competence in the Chinese language, and the class of wealthy expatriate merchants. All
three of these elites, the British business classes, the Chinese business leaders and the colonial officials, more or less despised the vast mass of coolies, the working men without whom Hong Kong would never have been built. If anything, it was the colonial officers who showed the most liberal attitudes on race and class; the imperial civil servants were reflective enough to realize that, without the hard-working Chinese labourer, Hong Kong would die. In 1863, Hercules Robinson, another reforming governor, reported to the Colonial Office in London that ‘it is the Chinese who have made Hong Kong what it is and not its connection with the foreign trade’. This contribution was widely recognized. As E. J. Eitel, a German missionary and scholar, observed in his classic account of Hong Kong, Europe in China, published in 1895, ‘the rapid conversion of a barren rock into one of the wonders and commercial emporiums of the world has demonstrated what Chinese labour, industry and commerce can achieve under British rule’.25

  The coolies, however, were the great invisible masses. In March 1901, a group of ‘prominent Chinese residents asked Governor [Sir Henry] Blake to establish a special school exclusively for their own children’. These residents described themselves as ‘an important and influential section of the Chinese community’ and they were disappointed that education for the Chinese had been ‘directed almost exclusively’ towards the ‘lower and lower middle classes’ at the expense of the higher classes. The renowned Central School, which had been renamed Queen’s College, was excellent in its way, so the richer Chinese thought, but they objected to the ‘indiscriminate and intimate mingling of children from families of the most various social and moral standing’. This ‘mingling’ made the school ‘absolutely undesirable as well as unsuitable for the sons and daughters of respectable Chinese families’. Blake wrote to Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, that the ‘better classes of Chinese are as anxious as any European to preserve their children from contact with children of a lower class’.26

  The aspirations of the higher-class Chinese family were, of course, very low down on the list of priorities of the Hong Kong Club, which sought to imitate the smartest clubs in London’s Piccadilly and St James’s. In the Hong Kong Club, there reigned a social tyranny even more rigid and exclusive than that which prevailed in London. An illustration of this was the experience of the Sassoon family who, having lived in Baghdad for several centuries, had come to Hong Kong after a stint in Bombay. Although based mainly in Britain, the family, of which the war poet Siegfried Sassoon was a member, had diverse business and financial interests which spanned Asia and Europe. Frederick Sassoon sat on the Hong Kong Legislative Council in the 1880s but never joined the Hong Kong Club, ‘the members of which were notorious for their propensity to blackball applicants on the least excuse’.27 In London, the Sassoons could enter highest society, but in the stratified society of Hong Kong there were barriers which even a colossal fortune could not penetrate.

  The Chinese had long ago realized that money by itself was not sufficient to admit anybody into the highest social circles. The case of Sir Robert Ho Tung illustrates this very clearly. He was born in 1862, the son of Walter Bosman, an English trader of dubious origins, and a Chinese woman, whom Bosman had arranged to come to Hong Kong from mainland China to be his wife. They had seven children, of whom Robert was the eldest son. Robert Ho Tung, with his fair skin and cobalt-blue eyes, looked like a European in his youth, but essentially made the choice to live and act like a Chinese gentleman. He wore silk robes and grew a long beard, using a Chinese last name. He had attended the famous Central School, which had been founded in the same year as his birth. This school would produce an impressive roster of influential figures who would form the elite of Chinese Hong Kong. Ho Tung joined the Chinese Imperial Customs, but then in 1880, still only eighteen, he resigned to become a buyer, or comprador, for Jardine, Matheson and Company. By spanning two cultures, Ho Tung was an effective middleman and became very rich. By the age of thirty, he was already a millionaire and his business interests grew ever more extensive, as he used his trading profits to develop his own businesses in property, shipping and insurance.28

  Conscious that they would never gain admittance to the Hong Kong Club, Ho Tung and some of his associates established the Chinese Club in 1899, of which Robert Ho Tung was the first chairman. In this way the Chinese elites responded to exclusion and discrimination by creating their own parallel world of exclusivity and privilege. The Chinese Recreation Club was set up as the parallel to the exclusively European Hong Kong Cricket Club.29

  Perhaps the most sensitive racial issue for the wealthier Chinese residents was the difficult question of where to live. The most fashionable district of Hong Kong, the Peak, was effectively barred to Chinese until after the Second World War. Under the 1904 Peak District Reservation Ordinance, no Chinese, except for servants, were allowed to live there. The Peak, with its panoramic view of Hong Kong Island, was not only a beautiful place; it also symbolized privilege and exclusivity. In fact, the only Chinese resident in practice was Robert Ho Tung who, by 1917, owned three houses there, but he was never really accepted by his European neighbours.30 Although a man of great wealth, Ho Tung was particularly sensitive to slights and, like many of his contemporaries, he was anxious to acquire titles from the imperial government. He had been made an ordinary Knight Bachelor in 1915 for his commercial activities and his help in the war effort, yet twelve years later he had come to feel that this honour was unsatisfactory.

  At the beginning of 1927 Ho Tung entered into an extraordinary correspondence with the Colonial Office and the King’s Private Office, in which he asked for a KBE, or Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a notch above the ordinary knighthood he had received in 1915. He told Sir Ronald Waterhouse, an official at the palace, that the New Year’s Honours List, which had been published on 3 January, ‘makes for my great disappointment’, and this had been the third time ‘in succession’ that he had been disappointed. Ho Tung, now aged sixty-five, enclosed a detailed list of his ‘services rendered to Hong Kong and the British Government after the conferment upon me of the honour of a Knight Bachelor’. The letter was direct and uncompromising in its self-confident claims: ‘I make bold to assert that no Chinese resident has done more in the history of the Colony in aid of the Colonial services than I have.’ Ho Tung also stated that, when he had been in England in 1925, he had every reason to believe that he ‘might receive a K.B.E. from His Majesty’s Government’. Such an honour, Ho Tung believed, ‘would be acceptable even gratifying’.

  The boldness of Sir Robert Ho Tung’s letter is further revealed by the fact that in the same letter he even asked for a KCMG (the Order of St Michael and St George), a notch higher than the KBE: ‘At the same time if the Prime Minister should be kind enough, after consideration of the special merits of the case, to recommend the conferment of a K.C.M.G. the honour, if conceded, would be even more greatly appreciated.’ He then proceeded to list fifteen accomplishments which he felt had earned him the KBE; one of these was that ‘after twelve years of experimental work by my wife and myself, at great cost and labour, we succeeded in producing mulberry leaves . . . and producing silk in the New Territory’. Another was that he had acted as an honorary associate commissioner of the Hong Kong section at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925; he had paid for ‘all the expenses’ of the journey and had guaranteed the exhibition against any losses the Hong Kong section might accrue.31

  Waterhouse was stunned, and wrote to an official at the Colonial Office that the ‘Eastern tranquillity of his effrontery’ made it ‘really very difficult to resist without rudeness’. The Prime Minister was being ‘systematically bombarded on the subject’. Finally, at the end of 1927, another Honours List was submitted and still Sir Robert Ho Tung’s name failed to appear. This time, the Colonial Office was ready simply to absorb the venting of Ho Tung’s frustrated ambition. ‘Sir Cecil Clementi has submitted his recommendations for the New Year 1928 but while recommending two other Chi
nese has made no reference to Sir Robert Ho Tung,’ wrote E. H. Howell to Sir Gilbert Grindle, Deputy to the Permanent Under-Secretary. More damningly, Howell observed, ‘no action [is] required until Sir Ho Tung again brings his claims forward’. Sir Gilbert believed that the Chinese themselves looked down on Ho Tung because he was ‘a half-caste’. 32 In the end, Sir Robert Ho Tung got his KBE, but he had to wait another twenty-eight years to receive the honour, in January 1955, when he was ninety-two. The important point about the episode of Sir Robert and his KBE was how much a man who was known as the ‘grand old man of Hong Kong’, and who enjoyed tremendous business success, really cared about the titles and baubles of empire.

  Ho Tung’s correspondence about his knighthood would have been strictly confidential and, indeed, the documents were not released until 1978. Yet, in the status-conscious world of the Hong Kong colony, an exchange of this kind was unsurprising. Somerset Maugham, the great short-story writer, captured a great deal of the oppressive snobbery of Hong Kong between the wars in his novel The Painted Veil, in which a world of endless bridge parties, dinner parties and adultery is described with remorseless precision. In fact the whole plot of the book hinges around an adulterous affair, in which Kitty, the heroine, falls in love with the Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charles Townsend, deceiving her husband, Walter Fane. Fane is a doctor, a bacteriologist, and is therefore a man of little consequence in the colony: ‘From a social point of view the man of science does not exist,’ was one of Walter’s more barbed remarks on the subject. The narrator observes that, as the wife of the ‘Government bacteriologist’, Kitty ‘was of no particular consequence’ and this ‘made her angry’.