Hong Kong (20 page)

We have glimpsed them rich and poor, but their great strength now lies in their young, educated, clever, modern and progressive middle class. This has been brought into existence by the British, during half a century of liberal education, and is unlike anything in China proper. You see its members everywhere. Consider for example this cluster of university students on the upper deck of an out-island ferry – a Saturday-morning ferry, say, taking them for a day’s hiking and picnicking somewhere. They are extremely lively, extremely neat, extremely polite and engaging young people. Talking loudly, laughing a lot, with their bright blue rucksacks, their sneakers and their Walkman radios they look thoroughly modern, and if you engage them in conversation you will find that they are liberated in their emotions too. They may seem to think more practically, calculate more exactly than their counterparts in the west. They are still, as a rule, far more devoted to their families. But they are certainly not interested only, as the old Hong Kong canard has it, in money, and they are noticeably not respectful to the old Confucianist ideas of a rigid social order. They are just as idealistic, no more, no less, than young Europeans or Americans, just as concerned with a proper balance of life, between the necessary making of money and enjoyable ways of using it. Some are power-hungry, some drop-outs, some honest plodders, some dreamers. All in all, they are as likeable and normal a generation as you will find anywhere in the world, freed at last from the burdens and inhibitions of the Chinese condition.

At least I think they are. That is how they strike me, whenever I meet them, but history may prove me wrong. The twenty-first century may find these young people returning to ancestral kind after all, or adapting to Communist requirements, for nothing is more flexibly
resilient than Chineseness. When a New Town goes up in Hong Kong it feels at first utterly sterile and forbidding. All mass and concrete angles, it looks as though it will desiccate the humanity that comes to live in it, overwhelming ordinary lives by sheer size and functionalism.

But hardly have the first Chinese families moved into their apartments, still smelling of paint and cement, than everything changes. Almost overnight, that monolithic cheerlessness is dispelled. The first lines of washing appear, the first advertising signs go up, the first street-stall opens for business, the first restaurant announces its celebratory opening night – and next time you go back, all that cold new place is made real and vivid by the organic energy of Chinese life, its fructifying untidiness, its boisterous lack of privacy, its comforting pandemonium and its inescapable air of purpose.

The British Empire at its most tremendous failed to make much impression upon this down-to-earth genius, and the mass of the Chinese in Hong Kong today are not a jot less Chinese because they live beneath the Union Jack. A surprising number, after 150 years of British rule, still speak no English, and even those who enter the universities are often handicapped by an imperfect command of it.

For myself I find this stoic continuity obscurely comforting, and sometimes sailing not in a Star ferry across the harbour, but in a ramshackle sampan crab-like against the current from one island to the other, to the laboured chugging of diesel engines, and the creaking of timbers – old rubber tyres slung amidships, helmsman, though surrounded by talkative friends and relatives of all ages, ever-attentive in his little wheelhouse above – sometimes I feel I would like to be assimilated into Chineseness myself, and sail these waters under Chinese helmsmanship for ever.

The colonial masters of Hong Kong, though, have not always been so seduced by their subjects’ ability to remain themselves. As was said in a querulous way by Sir William Robinson, Governor of Hong Kong in the very heyday of British imperialism, the reluctance of the vast majority of Chinese in Hong Kong to become in the least Anglicized was ‘extraordinary, not to say discreditable …’

1880s:
THE COMPLEAT COLONY

T
HE CHINESE OF HONG KONG MAY HAVE REMAINED
unaccountably Chinese, but forty years after its foundation, as the British Empire approached its apogee of power, and Sir William Robinson his Governorship, the colony had become in British eyes The Pearl of the Orient, depicted at the head of its own coat of arms clasped between the paws of a lion rampant. The 1880s were high imperial years. Gordon was in Khartoum, Rhodes was in South Africa, Kipling was in India. The British Army went into action against Boers and Afghans, Sudanese and Burmese, and nations from Nigeria to New Guinea were newly embraced within the Pax Britannica.

In this atmosphere of mounting climax, Hong Kong found its own exotic place as the easternmost of all Her Majesty’s dominions. It had greatly changed since our inspection of the 1840s. Wild and raffish no more, it had become in many ways the Compleat Colony, and looked the part perhaps more absolutely than it ever would again. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had brought it closer to the sources of glory; the rising power of Empire illuminated it. To be sure the refulgence was partly illusory, like much else in the imperial show. Hong Kong’s economic character had proved disconcertingly volatile, and the treaty port of Shanghai, not British at all, seriously challenged the colony as
the most important entrepôt of the China coast. Also several foreign Powers had by now insinuated themselves into Chinese concessions. An explosion of railways in China, connecting other ports with the markets of the interior, seemed to mean that the island off the shore of Guangdong might one day be superseded, and the state of Hong Kong’s founding hongs proved the point; Dent’s had collapsed in 1867, Russell’s had given up in 1879, and even Jardine, Matheson were concentrating their business in Shanghai. As for the Hong Kong Mint, set up in 1866, it had been closed within two years because it lost so much money.

But for the moment Hong Kong was booming – ‘we have passed through our bad times’, Jardine’s taipan told Kipling, ‘and come to the fat years.’ Two million tons of ocean shipping entered and left its harbour annually, and it no longer felt remote; there were weekly sailings to Europe and Japan, monthly sailings to Australia, bi-weekly sailings to San Francisco (connecting with Pullman Palace Sleeping Cars for New York and New Orleans). There was also telegraphic communication with Britain, so that the Governor no longer made so many of his own decisions. The whole pace of life had been fiercely intensified by new technologies: as a local poet had it,

Besides, for all those rival concessions Hong Kong was still the only foreign sovereign possession in China, and this gave it a status and a dignity all its own, satisfying to British self-esteem and important it was thought to British prestige. No longer did the colony seem to the British at home a mere barren rock of uncertain reputation, possibly to be abandoned; now they saw it as an exhibition of their splendour in the eastern seas.

‘I sometimes imagine Britannia,’ wrote a gentle and learned Sinologue, Revd James Legge, who had come to Hong Kong in the 1840s and stayed there for thirty years, ‘standing on the Peak and looking down with an emotion of pride upon the great Babylon which her sons have built.’ Certainly Hong Kong no longer looked like a trading post upon the island shore. The Empire was immensely proud of its cities, translations
in distant parts of the great commercial cities of Britain itself, and Hong Kong, though scarcely Babylon perhaps, since its total population was no more than 180,000, now stood recognizably in the pattern of Birmingham and Bombay. Since 1860 its limits had included the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula over the harbour, where an observatory upon a hillock, a police station, docks, go-downs and barracks had arisen, and this gave a new completeness and sense of permanence to the ensemble.

By now the few substantial buildings of forty years before had been absorbed into an urban mass. The waterfront was graced with an esplanade, the Praya, reclaimed from the sea, and all along it offices and warehouses stood in parade, each with its house flag flying, white launches on davits at every door and small craft jostling the water-steps. A city hall in French classical style, a handsome clock-tower and the twin-steepled Catholic cathedral gave a touch of romantic variety to the sea-shore silhouette, while up the hill the Anglican cathedral, which had once seemed so alien an intrusion, now looked almost venerably organic. Victoria had filled itself in, from Happy Valley in the east to Kennedy Town in the west, and rose in layers of villas and bungalows up the hills behind. Even the hills themselves had changed, for they had been planted with vast numbers of China pines and fourteen different species of Australian eucalyptus – by 1884, 714,000 new trees in all.

Pedder Wharf, named after the first harbour-master and crowded from dawn to dusk with launches, ships’ boats and sampans, was where newcomers went ashore. Immediately they found themselves in the heart of commercial Hong Kong. No longer were its streets precarious with rutted mud and littered with mat-sheds; now they were proper Victorian thoroughfares, gas-lit and paved, such as the British had laid in commercial cities all over their Empire. ‘If it were not for the sedan-chairs and palanquins,’ wrote Lady (Anna) Brassey, in what was her highest category of commendation, ‘one might fancy onself in dear old Gib!’
¹
She was not stuck with the sedan-chairs, either, for though the horse had almost vanished from Victoria the black-hooded rickshaw, known colloquially as ‘the rick’, now made getting about much easier.

Pedder Street, which extended inland from the wharf, was really more a square than a street, and was the focus of business life. At its head stood that clock-tower, 150 feet high; its clock was said to suffer
‘fits of indisposition’ owing to the climate, but was illuminated at night anyway, and acted as a beacon for boats coming into the wharf. The street itself was lined with a double row of trees, giving it rather a Mediterranean look. Sedan-chair men waited for their masters in the shade, and on each side were the arcaded premises of merchant houses, attended by Sikh doormen.

Beyond it Queen’s Road, which we last saw in so patchy a condition, was now lined east and west with heavy business buildings and shaded here and there by fine banyan trees. A short way along the Praya stood the dignified but peculiar new building of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, one façade in totally different style from the other. The City Hall was a few yards beyond, and conveniently to hand was the six-storey Hong Kong Hotel, whose dining room overlooked the harbour, and whose smart white launches met all in-coming mail-steamers.

Gone, in short, was the old waterfront feeling of dubious adventurism; it was through a display of ample, well-established, rather pompous mercantile order that the stranger now entered the colony of Hong Kong.

Most of the appurtenances of modern life – the accessories of Empire – were available to such a newcomer. A Chamber of Commerce would advise him on prospects. Plenty of brokers, agents and insurers would accept his custom. The Post Office would sell him Hong Kong’s own postage stamps, of which the 2¢ rose-lake was generally considered the prettiest. He could exchange his money drafts for the paper currency of four different issuing banks, or for the colony’s own coinage which had a hole in the middle if of low denomination, a portrait of the monarch and the inscription
VICTORIA QUEEN
if more valuable.