Hong Kong (21 page)

If he was Anglican, the Bishop of Victoria was said to be famously hospitable. If he was Catholic, the Bishop of Acantho was in residence to bless him, and twenty-six nuns, mostly Italian, would pray for him at the Caine Road convent. If he was Jewish the synagogue on Hollywood Road would welcome his attendance, if a Mason, there were now nine chapters and lodges in the colony.

Six hundred policemen, 18 per cent of them European, 25 per cent Indian, the rest Chinese, were there to assure his safety (their officers could easily be distinguished, because they wore white topees and carried swords). Seventeen consulates were there to help (the German had its own Physician and Shipping Master). Three daily papers in
English would not only give him the news, but entertain him in the facetious style British colonial newspapers preferred.
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T. N. Driscoll, tailor by appointment to HIH The Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, would soon make a suit for our newcomer, and Mrs J. Rose Harmon, with the help of her assistants the Misses Ford, Carr and Woodford, would quickly run up a dress for his wife. G. Falconer, who also dealt in Patent Mechanical Fog-Horns, would mend his watch. G. Panati would give him piano lessons. A Portuguese barber, a German gunmaker, French bankers, Jewish brokers, English lawyers were all at his disposal, and you could hardly find, anywhere in the Empire, a more capable physician than Patrick Manson, MD.
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Until he found a house for himself he would be perfectly comfortable, we may be sure, at the Hong Kong Hotel: and if he was the sort of person we feel sure he must have been, it would not be long before he was fixed up with membership of the Club.

Several thousand Europeans and Americans now lived in Hong Kong, and everywhere there were signs of a flourishing social life. Isabella Bird characterized it as a life of cliques, boundless hospitality, extravagances, quarrels, gaieties, picnics, balls, regattas, races, dinner-parties, tennis, amateur theatricals, afternoon teas – the classic imperial social arrangement, in fact, ‘with all its modes’, as Miss Bird coolly added, ‘of creating a whirl which passes for pleasure or occupation’.

As always, sport was important. A fine cricket field had been laid out beside the City Hall, with its pavilion on the waterfront; the great game of the season was the annual match against Shanghai, but another popular fixture was Monosyllables v Polysyllables (captains, 1885, D’Aeth and Holworthy). Besides the snipe and duck shooting they had always enjoyed, sportsmen could now go rabbit hunting, Mr Phineas Ryne having lately established a colony of rabbits on Stonecutters Island. There was a Yacht Club, and a Regatta Club, and a golf course at Happy Valley, and although lawn tennis had been invented only in 1873, Hong Kong bungalows already came with their own courts.

In the afternoons ladies would be carried out in their wicker sedan-chairs for promenades, along Kennedy Road to the place they called Scandal Point, after the Simla original, or into the fine new Botanical Gardens; and there they would sit and read in the fresh air, still in their chairs, looking out across the harbour while their chairmen sat gossiping on the grass beside them. In the evening, with luck, there might be a play to see. The amateur dramatic society had long moved out of its mat-shed auditorium into a more solid Theatre Royal within the City Hall; although the actors all used stage names – the taipans objected to the names of company employees appearing in theatre programmes – there was strong competition for parts, and capacity audiences were guaranteed.

As for Happy Valley, by now the racecourse was very different from the easy-going track of the 1840s, and a meet there no longer looked much like a Galway point-to-point. The Jockey Club came into being in 1885, and a picture of the Hong Kong Derby three years later shows a most elegantly ordered scene. The long row of cast-iron grandstands was gay with flags and flowers, the course was lined with flower-pots, and soignée ladies strolled here and there with parasols, escorted by sun-helmeted beaux.

The owner of the winning horse, Leap Year, was listed on the race card as John Peel, Shanghai, but this was only a pseudonym for Jardine, Matheson, who were as interested in horse-racing now as they had been forty years before. ‘The Princely Hong’ was still an emblematic force in Hong Kong life. It had outlived both its great original rivals, it had outstayed nine or ten governors, younger merchant houses had not discountenanced it, and it had a finger in a multitude of pies. William Keswick its chairman was also chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, as well as a Legislative Councillor, while the company largely controlled the Hong Kong dockyards, and as owner of the sugar refinery was the colony’s biggest industrial concern.

In this mercantile city it seemed only proper, especially to merchants, that Jardine’s town office should be the very first building to greet the new arrival at Pedder Wharf, with its house flag flying and its liveried watchmen at the door. The taipan’s No. 1 House was supplemented now by The Mount, a luxurious summer retreat on the Peak, augmenting the merchant-prince effect; and when, at noonday every day, a gun resounded across the colony, it was not a salute from the Royal
Artillery, or the Commodore’s flagship, but the customary firing of Jardine’s cannon at North Point.

But the 1880s being the years they were, the balance of circumstance had swung towards Government, and there had been in recent years a triumphant embellishment of the colony’s official display. For the moment at least the Governor was palpably grander than any taipan. No longer did His Excellency live in rented accommodation, or, so to speak, in rooms above the shop. By the 1880s he had moved into a palace. It was modest perhaps by the standards of the British east, offering nothing like the magnificences of Calcutta or Madras, but it did possess a sovereign consequence unattainable even by the Princely Hong.

It stood on a plateau beside Upper Albert Road, on what used to be called Government Hill, opposite the Botanical Gardens, not far from military headquarters and the Anglican Cathedral, and looking down to the harbour in a posture of unmistakable authority. Every view-picture showed it. It was neo-classical in style, pillared all around, with a flight of ceremonial steps leading steeply down to the garden. It had a stately
porte-cochère
and a handsome pair of guardhouses, and it was lit throughout by gas, a convenience not appreciated by all its residents, who found it exceedingly expensive and not very efficient (‘smoke and heat with very little light’, thought Sir Richard MacDonnell, complaining to the Colonial Office in 1866 about his annual lighting bill of £500).

Its roof was flat, offering its occupants a quiet retreat in the sunshine and a lovely view over the harbour, and there were five tennis-courts, three grass, two asphalt. Its domestic staff were dressed in long blue gowns and white gaiters, and wore pigtails so long that they reached almost to the ground. When the Governor formally received guests he did so in a pillared hall the height of the house, Hong Kong’s equivalent of a Durbar Hall, with a band playing in the garden outside. When he left the building on an official visit he was conveyed out of the grounds, wearing his gorgeously embroidered jacket, white breeches and cocked hat, in a sedan-chair carried at a jog-trot by eight Chinese bearers in red. When he went to sea he travelled, like a Doge, in a twelve-oared official barge.

A constant procession of grandees now passed through Hong Kong, and nearly all experienced the hospitality of Government House. Some of course were grander than others. The sociologist H. J. Lethbridge tells us
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that even visiting authors could expect to be invited for a chat
with His Excellency, while HM the King of the Sedangs, who turned up wearing a uniform of his own design in 1888, was actually an engaging French adventurer named David de Magrena. But there were real swells too. There were the admirals of the world’s fleets, nearly all of whom sent their vessels to Hong Kong at one time or another. There were the royal princes Albert (‘Eddy’) and George, and foreign potentates more genuine than the King of the Sedangs, and inspecting politicians from Westminster, and eminent financiers, and Ulysses S. Grant, and George Curzon the future Viceroy of India, who arrived in time for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, during which three men were killed by celebratory salutes and two by firework displays – ‘No Englishman can land in Hong Kong,’ wrote Curzon none the less, ‘without feeling a thrill of pride for his nationality. Here is the furthermost link in that chain of fortresses which from Spain to China girdles half the globe …’

Beneath this lordly aegis Hong Kong was far more structured than it had been in its pioneering days. The colonial statutes book had grown apace, and hardly a week went by without some new regulation in the Government Gazette. There was the Preservation of Wild Birds and Game Ordinance, the Child Adoption and Domestic Servitude Ordinance, the Married Women’s Disposition of Property Ordinance, and there were decrees about the siting of Chinese cemeteries, and orders about the treatment in prison of First Class Misdemeanants (they were to be allowed their own food, plus half a pint of wine and a pint of malt liquor every twenty-four hours). Rickshaws were regulated, hawkers were regulated, even brothels were officially licensed now.

Calmness, aloofness of authority was the Empire’s criterion, and as if to give physical expression to the ideal, Hong Kong was now equipped with its own exclusive hill station. A hill station was essential to your compleat colony. In India the archetypes had been built on high ridges of the Himalayas, or in the rolling Nilgiri hills, but less majestic possessions also had their examples. In Malaya there were the Cameron Highlands, in Ceylon there was Nuwara Eliya, and most pertinently another small island colony of the east, Penang off the coast of Malaya, possessed a hill station on the very doorstep of its town, with a bungalow for the Governor on top.

Victoria, Hong Kong, also had a mountain at its back door, and
successive Governors had toyed with the idea of creating a hill station on the Peak. Despite the thick mists and the pervasive damp, it would provide healthy relief from the humidity down below, in summer the temperatures up there being five or six degrees lower than the temperatures at sea-level. It would also offer Europeans a retreat from the pushing Chinese community with its queer tastes and unhygienic habits – the hill station always was an epitome of imperial separateness.

The Government had made a start in 1867 by acquiring a former Army sanitarium, 1,700 feet up, and renaming it Mountain Lodge as a summer resort for the Governor himself. Though not all incumbents made much use of the place, and some of them intensely disliked it (‘a damp and gloomy prison’, Sir William Des Voeux called it) nevertheless it had become the nucleus of a settlement. Paths had been cut up the mountainside, the white speckles of villas appeared more frequently in the water-colours of each successive year, and in 1887 one of those ordinances reserved the whole of the Peak district for European residence (Chinese were not excluded in so many words, but were effectively kept out by a combination of building regulations and innuendo).

Until then one went up the Peak on foot or on pony, by camel perhaps if you were Mr Belilios, or most probably by sedan-chair, carried up the winding narrow tracks by teams of two or four Chinese chairmen – every Peak house had its chair-shed, the Hong Kong equivalent of a coach-house. The arrival of so many prosperous new householders, though, and the promulgation of the Peak Residence Ordinance, led to the opening in 1888 of the steam-powered High Level Tramway, the first cable railway in all Asia and one of the steepest in the world.

This became one of the sights of Hong Kong. A tram left every quarter of an hour, the ride took eight minutes, and at its steepest point the gradient was one in two. It was a spectacular demonstration of British technique, for everything was made in England, put together by Scottish engineers, and run by British employees – drivers, brakesmen, conductors and all. In those days the Peak tram ran from its lower terminal near St John’s Cathedral almost entirely through undeveloped hillside, and from far below in the harbour people could see its unwavering line precipitous up the mountain, and the shapes of its trams crawling so daringly up and down – an image of imperial accomplishment in the benighted East.

Beside the upper terminal stood the Peak Hotel, which soon became one of the colony’s chief social centres. Unassuming enough at first, and intended chiefly as a way-station on the way to the summit, it had been amply extended, and people went there now for tea and dinner in the cool evening. Valetudinarians retired there, and there were summer balls and dances. So, with the Governor in his lodge, the rich Europeans in their villas (Cloudlands, The Eyrie, Tor Crest, Strawberry Hill), an Anglican chapel-at-ease for Sunday service, the Peak Club for bridge and gossip, a police station for security, the trams bravely trundling up and down, cucumber sandwiches at the hotel and the natives well out of sight, up there among the China mists of Victoria Peak the colonial aesthetic was fulfilled.

Far below, very early every morning, eleven filthy junks tied up at the Praya, and were filled to the gunwales with human excreta, tipped out of tubs by smeared coolies. Brown and stinking these nightmare craft lurched away through the harbour shipping and made their way to Guangzhou, where the colonial night-soil was sold as manure. They were instruments of private enterprise in the classic Hong Kong kind, for the public lavatories of the colony were run by private contractors, who first charged for shitting, and then sold the shit; but they were also a reminder of the squalor that still, despite first appearances, defied all colonial improvement.

Hong Kong’s Chinatown, said the British traveller Henry Norman,
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was ‘probably about as insanitary as any place in the globe under civilized rule’. Those public lavatories, for example, were uniformly nauseating, while most Chinese households drained their effluence into open cesspools – if it was drained at all, for much of it, too, was bought for re-sale by freelance scavengers. Living conditions in the poor quarters were fearful. An officially commissioned report in 1882 – in effect the first Hong Kong social survey – showed that Chinese houses were generally divided by partitions into many cabins, each a dwelling about ten feet square. In one row of eight such houses 428 people were living. Hardly any houses had running water (and water from public fountains was available only in the small hours of the morning). Many had no chimneys, the smoke from their fires issuing from the windows, and in many pigs lived among the humans upstairs as well as down.