Hong Kong (11 page)

1840s:
ON THE FORESHORE

I
N THE 1840S QUEEN VICTORIA’S EMPIRE WAS JUST GETTING
into its stride. To the footholds in India and the Caribbean which it had inherited from the eighteenth century, to its settlements in Canada and Australia, since the end of the Napoleonic wars it had added new possessions in many parts of the world – Singapore (1820), Assam (1826), Aden (1839), New Zealand (1840), Sarawak (1841), Sind (1843), Natal (1843). The British had been engaged in wars victorious (against the Sikhs) and calamitous (against the Afghans), they had thrown their naval weight about from the Atlantic to the eastern seas, and they were beginning to accustom themselves to the heady romance of imperialism.

It was an excitement then, but hardly a surprise, when in the spring of 1848 the junk
Keying
, the first such vessel ever to round the Cape of Good Hope and visit the western world, sailed under the British flag up the River Thames and docked at Gravesend. She was a spectacular sight, very large and ornamented with painted eyes upon her bows, besides being so high of prow and poop, and so rounded of hull, that she seemed to lie almost semi-circularly in the water. The
Illustrated London News
said she looked ‘aboriginal, or arkite’, and reported that she carried as passenger ‘a mandarin of rank’.

She had come (via as it happened New York, thanks to adverse
winds and an uncooperative crew) from the new and still imperfectly conceived colony of Hong Kong, away beyond India somewhere, Hong Kong seemed an infinitesimal jewel indeed in the imperial diadem, and very likely paste at that. Its status was inexact, its reputation cloudy, its location, for most people, vague. It was not one of the great imperial fortresses, like Malta or Gibraltar, to which lordly captains of the fleet were proud to be posted. It was not one of your famous trading centres, like Bombay or the fast-emergent Singapore. It had been acquired in one of the more dubious of the colonial wars, and lived so it was said by disreputable means. Its infrequent appearances in the news columns were generally in contexts of squabble or disaffection. If, as know-alls argued, it was the key to vast new markets in the sequestered Chinese Empire, little showed for it yet, and in fact there had been recurrent rumours that the Government was planning to abandon the place – ‘The Queen,’ minuted Her Majesty on the subject to her Foreign Secretary in 1844, ‘taking a deep interest in all these matters … begs Lord Aberdeen to keep her always well informed …’

Even the genesis of the junk
Keying
was unclear to most of the amused Britons, including Charles Dickens and the Duke of Wellington, who went aboard her down at the East India Docks, and might not have pleased them if they had known it. The vessel was named for a Chinese statesman, Qi-ying, who had been a signatory of the Treaty of Nanking six years before. Qi-ying had twice visited the new colony, had expressed himself overjoyed by what he had found, had bestowed fulsome compliments upon its colonists but had gone home to report to the Dragon-Emperor that all this was only persiflage, designed to keep the ignorant Barbarians under control.

The colonists in return, though they had been entertained by Qi-ying as a person (he was amiably described by the
Friend of China
as resembling a large boiled turnip), had certainly not been deceived by his diplomacy, and believed him to represent a thoroughly decadent and hopelessly inefficient civilization; so it was a measure of their cynical opportunism, not by and large what the British Empire preferred to admire in itself, that they had named their vessel after him, manned it with a crew partly British, partly Chinese, and sent it around the world on what was in effect a publicity cruise.

Which is to say that Hong Kong, 6,000 miles away at the other end of the Empire, was already
sui generis:
a distant and not altogether suitable maverick of the imperial order, like no other colony, and in
some sense as much a part of the Manchus’ Empire as it was of Queen Victoria’s.

Seen from the sea, especially through painterly eyes, Hong Kong in the mid-1840s looked quite encouraging. The hills of the island were almost treeless in those days, and against their brown bareness the more substantial buildings of the infant colony stood white and cocky on the northern shore. A handful of warehouses and merchant offices were lined up along the quays, walls rising sheer from the water, with their own piers and their boats hung on davits. Here and there were comfortable-looking bungalows, built so a contemporary reporter said ‘in an Anglo-something style, with verandahs’, and a few quite charming villas had appeared on the waterfront and on the slopes of the hills behind, giving the scene a first inkling of that languid, easy-going look beloved of the imperial water-colourists.

There was always shipping in the harbour, too, to enhance the composition. Much of it was coastal shipping passing through, Chinese junks and sampans using the strait as they always had, but there were also warships, opium clippers, heavy Indian merchantmen, American whalers, gigs, the swift many-oared craft, nicknamed centipedes and looking like Venetian galleys, which maintained a passenger service to Macao, and by the middle of the decade the first few tall-funnelled paddle-steamers.

So from a distance it did not look too bad, and the artists, erecting their easels aboard their anchored ships, did their best to idealize it. It was only when you went ashore, expecting perhaps a trim and finished colonial seaport, that you realized how crude and straggly a place it was, and how infinitely remote from home. It was more like a gold-rush town than an imperial foundation. Victoria, the main settlement, extended sporadically for about a mile along the shoreline, in a muddle of the orderly and the haphazard – here a few pleasant houses or some well-organized offices, next door a wasteland or a shambles – at one corner a Baptist church or the Catholic Chapel of the Conception, at another a sleazy pub. Untidy mat-shed structures were all over the place. Camps and depots were deposited wherever the military authorities felt like it. Queen’s Road, the settlement’s main thoroughfare, was hardly more than a rough track still, in dry weather thick with dust, in wet ankle-deep in mud, and its spasmodic grandeur was interspersed with warehouses, mat-sheds and knock-about seamen’s taverns.

More disconcerting still to the ingenuous new arrival, the streets of Victoria were full of Chinese – hawkers with pack-ponies, country boys riding water-buffaloes, coolies with long shoulder-poles, drunks, beggars and idlers. Only a few hundred yards along Queen’s Road, Chinatown began, a muddle of sheds and squatters’ huts, with ramshackle theatres, opium divans, schools, temples formal and improvised, duck-pens, pig-sties, gambling halls, eating-stalls, and all the tumbled accessories of Chinese life – a terrible shock to unaccustomed European sensibilities. By 1845 there was a shifting population of some 20,000 Chinese on the island, including not only merchants of substance, artisans and tradesmen of every kind, thousands of Tanka boat-people and Lamqua the well-known portraitist from Macao (whose sign proclaimed him Handsome Face Painter), but also, or so it sometimes seemed, half the riff-raff of Guangzhou.

The British thought the proximity of this motley crowd terribly unhealthy. The colony’s first decade was full of ups and downs – typhoons, fires, shifts of confidence – but the colonists were chiefly troubled by disease. Quite apart from the toxic emanations of Chinatown, Hong Kong’s climate was authoritatively defined, by the Hong Kong Directory itself, as ‘about the most unhealthy upon the face of the globe’. Some said the very island rocks gave out pernicious influences. Malaria and dysentery were endemic, there were frequent epidemics of typhus and cholera, and among the military garrison, in particular, the death-rate was appalling. In 1842 one contingent of Scottish soldiers was described poignantly as being no more than ‘a mass of emaciated dying lads’, and in 1848 one in five of the European soldiers died.

No wonder few early observers had much good to say about the place. Robert Montgomery Martin, an early Colonial Treasurer, arriving in 1844, dismissed it almost at once as ‘small, barren, unhealthy and valueless’, and thought it ought to be handed back to China. Robert Fortune, author of
Three Years’ Wanderings in China
, spoke disparagingly of its stunted trees, lack of birds and superfluity of wild goats, and feared that ‘viewed as a place of trade’ it was sure to be a failure. Orlando Bridgeman, a subaltern of the 98th Regiment, thought it ‘a horrid place – inferior to Sierra Leone for the fact of its being less healthy, less amusing and less near England’. Undoubtedly Hong Kong had yet to prove itself as an asset to the Crown. It consisted still only of Hong Kong Island itself, and in 1845 fewer than 600 Europeans, including some ninety women, had yet decided to risk their fortunes or their lives in the colony.

It was not like other colonies: the presence of that far larger Chinese community, itself a community of settlers, with its smells and its noises, its disregard for privacy and its unsettling air of indifference, made the infant Hong Kong feel less than utterly British, in the way that most imperial towns were British. The Chinese were very different from flexible Bengalis, naïve Africans, charming Malays or frankly hostile Pathans. They infiltrated everything with a peculiar air of self-sufficient calculation, and seemed hardly like subjects at all. Several hundred million of their compatriots lived just across the water, and they had been brought up one and all in the conviction that every Chinese ever born was superior to every foreigner.

The British of course felt precisely the opposite, and were for the most part animated by a profound contempt for all things Chinese. The very purpose of the colony was to puncture the pretensions and delusions of the Celestial Empire, and the naming of its principal town after the Queen of England would, as was claimed by its first newspaper, the
Friend of China
, ‘prelude a glorious victory over the superstition, pride and prejudice of the Chinese’.

The colonists accordingly, in their own sufficiently untidy enclave on this foreshore, set out to live very Britishly. For a start they symbolically renamed much else in Victoria after their monarch and her ministers. There was Victoria Peak, Victoria Harbour, Queen’s Road, the Royal Battery, while the smaller settlements of the island’s southern shore, reached by bridle-paths over the mountains, were named respectively for Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Lord Aberdeen, Foreign Secretary. Chinese residence was banned in the central part of Victoria, and the neighbouring bazaar quarter was reserved specifically for Chinese who had helped the British in the recent war – collaborators, in fact.

Standard institutions of colonial life were soon established, on the pattern of Crown Colonies like Jamaica or Mauritius. Hong Kong was ruled by a Governor, assisted by a three-man Council nominated by himself, and supported by a proper little hierarchy of official grandees – a general in command of the garrison, a commodore in charge of the naval establishment, a Colonial Secretary and a Colonial Treasurer and a Colonial Chaplain, a Chinese Secretary, a Registrar of the Supreme Court, a Chief Justice, an Auditor-General, an Attorney-General. (They were not always as stately as they sounded,
though, there being no professional Colonial Service in those days: in Pottinger’s administration the Chinese Secretary was a Pomeranian clergyman, the Treasurer a former ship’s mate, while in 1849 the Registrar-General dropped everything and joined the Gold Rush to California.)

The Governor was absolutely in command. He was subject directly to the instructions of the British Government, indirectly to the decisions of Parliament at Westminster, and theoretically to the will of the Queen, but since it took anything up to a year for any message from Hong Kong to get an answer from London, in immediate matters what he said went. Moreover he was not merely a Governor. Once reconciled to the fact of Hong Kong, Palmerston had seen it chiefly as an off-shore station from which would be supervised the trade of the new Treaty Ports – Guangzhou, Amoy (now Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo) and Shanghai. By 1844 some fifty British firms were operating in the ports, and another twenty or so Indian, also of course entitled to the imperial attentions. Lord Aberdeen went further still, and envisaged Hong Kong, the only British possession east of Singapore, as a military and administrative centre for the entire Far East. The Governor was therefore, ex officio, also Her Majesty’s Plenipotentiary and Envoy-in-Ordinary, whose authority embraced all matters of British concern in the Far East – ‘accredited’, recorded Sir John Bowring of himself with satisfaction, ‘to a greater number of human beings (indeed no less than one-third of the human race) than any individual had been accredited before’.

His more responsible officials too, military or civilian, saw themselves as more than mere island functionaries, but as members of the wider imperial system. In general it was the example of India that they looked towards, like all British imperialists in those days. The three Governors of the 1840s were all Anglo-Indian by background – Pottinger’s brother Eldred, ‘The Hero of Herat’, had entered the Anglo-Indian pantheon because of his exploits in the war against the Afghans – and the affairs of British India preoccupied the colonists. Indian reports figured prominently in the
Friend of China
, from entire pages about the The Situation in Afghanistan to foot-of-the-column reports about petty promotions in Madras. The East India Company rupee was legal tender in Hong Kong. Indian opium was the staple of its finance. Many Anglo-Indian words and phrases – tiffin, mullah, punkah, sepoy, verandah – entered its English vernacular. Many Indian merchants had followed the flag to the new colony, among
them rich and influential Parsees, and the Indian troops regularly stationed there, the constant comings-and-goings of ships from Calcutta or Bombay, added satisfactorily to the Anglo-Indian illusion.