Hong Kong (22 page)

The smells were terrible, the dangers all too obvious. The author of the report, an engineer named Osbert Chadwick, warned that one day it would all erupt into frightful epidemic, and he was right – in the next decade bubonic plague fell upon Hong Kong, killing more than 2,500 people, nearly all of them Chinese but including the Governor’s wife, and forcing scores of thousands to flee the colony. But even without the plague, in 1882 the mean life expectancy was eighteen years and four months; if you survived to the age of twenty, you could expect only another twenty-three years of life.

Directly, of course, most of these horrors affected only the Chinese community, which now numbered at least 150,000, and contributed virtually the whole of the colony’s proletariat. Even in the most bigoted eyes, this was no longer a community entirely of riff-raff. Though it included all those slum-dwellers, and some 29,000 boat-people, it included too many wealthy businessmen, shipowners, agents and compradors. It was said that 90 per cent of the colony’s revenue was contributed by Chinese; in 1885 eighty-three British property-owners were rich enough to pay property tax, 647 Chinese, and seventeen Chinese were among the eighteen richest of all (the eighteenth was Jardine, Matheson). There were many scoundrels still, but many Chinese professional men and craftsmen worked in the colony now. Lamqua the Handsome Face Painter had been succeeded by six professional portraitists, four daily newspapers were printed in Chinese, and the Tung Wah hospital was already active. In 1884 there were seven Chinese Justices of the Peace, and a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn named Ng Choy had been appointed the first Chinese member of the Legislative Council.

Nevertheless European prejudice against all things Chinese remained incorrigible, in matters legal as in social attitudes. Racial segregation was as absolute as the Europeans could make it. Chinese were not only barred from the Peak, they were also kept out of most central residential districts, and they were freely insulted by the cruder of the European colonists. ‘You cannot be two minutes in a Hong Kong street’, wrote Isabella Bird, ‘without seeing Europeans striking coolies with their canes or umbrellas.’ There was no chance, of course, of even the most distinguished Chinese joining the Hong Kong Club; Major-General Edward Donovan, commanding the garrison in 1880, said that Chinese people gave ‘ocular, auricular and nasal demonstration how unfitted they were for the neighbourhood of Europeans’.

The Chinese were often arrogant too, and could certainly be
annoying. Their concern for hygiene was vestigial, and to European ears the noise they made was indescribably awful – it was estimated that if every Chinese street-hawker uttered his street cry only once a minute, that would amount to a million raucous cries a day. Chinese could also be frightening. Violent crime was common still among them, and the local Triads were now said to have enrolled 15,000 members. If you took a sampan to dine aboard a ship in harbour, the pier-side constable took a note of its number, the sampan people having a habit of cutting their passengers’ throats, robbing them and throwing them overboard. Nor had the British forgotten the affair of the poisoned loaves. Xenophobia periodically flared up into violence in China itself, and the possibility of a rising was never entirely absent from European minds in Hong Kong. Kowloon City, just across the border, was notoriously full of toughs, and Henry Norman made his readers’ flesh crawl with the reminder that in a few hours 20,000 more could easily come down from Guangzhou.

Thus though the merchant community depended upon Chinese compradors, clerks and agents, and frequently liked them as individuals, distrust of the Chinese as a race seemed ineradicable; an element of fear and resentment, compounded by racial bigotry and reinforced by horrible social contrast, lay behind the grand imperial appearances of Hong Kong.

It was the ethnic injustices that chiefly offended the most remarkable Governor of the period, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, who came to the colony from the Windward Islands in 1877, and left in 1882, pursued by furious controversy, to be Governor of Mauritius. We may catch something of his personality from a picture taken in 1881, on the occasion of a visit to Hong Kong by King Kalakaua of Hawaii.
⁶
Having snatched this recondite monarch from the care of Jardine, Matheson, who represented his kingdom on the island, Pope-Hennessy entertained him handsomely, and sat with him in a garden somewhere for an informal celebratory photograph.

Framing the picture are the European worthies of Hong Kong, British and foreign, official and unofficial, stiff and self-conscious in
their whiskers, bowler hats, topees and cravats. In the front row, centre, sits the King, bewhiskered himself, wearing a straw boater and thickly suited. And beside him sits His Excellency the Governor, looking something like an Irish bookie, and something like Isambard Brunel the engineer, and a little like the Mad Hatter. He is very small, perky-looking, beardless with a beaky Roman nose, and he sits in an attitude of almost comical concentration, one hand holding a cane, legs elegantly crossed. On his head he wears a very tall pale-coloured top hat, tilted eccentrically over his eyes like the hat of a tipsy man-about-town, or an entertainer about to begin a soft-shoe shuffle; and all in all he projects a persona so sharp, so ludicrous, but yet so fascinating that the eye slides immediately over all those notables, over the King of the Sandwich Islands himself, to alight upon his peculiar presence.

He was an Irishman, and despite his profession a born rebel. Wherever he went in the colonial service he antagonized British settlers with his liberal views, especially on race, and infuriated the Colonial Office with his high-handed and often preposterous attitudes. His reputation had preceded him to Hong Kong, and a song in the colony’s Christmas pantomime, just before he arrived, hoped the coming year would be

In the event from start to finish of his Hong Kong governorate Pope-Hennessy was never without some flaming squabble on his hands. He upset his own subordinates as readily as he infuriated the business community, and could seldom resist a gibe. Even his honoured guests might feel the sting of him: even in his speech of farewell to King Kalakaua he made an unfortunate joke about the ‘trifling incidents’ which had in the past damaged relations between Hawaii and Great Britain, ‘such as the killing of Captain Cook by His Majesty’s predecessors …’

This strange but compelling administrator had come to Hong Kong with a beautiful young wife and a baby, and had instantly upset the business community by his partiality towards the Chinese. He was forgiving to Chinese criminals, advocated better education for Chinese children, and even tolerated the Chinese practice of
mui tsai
, the sale of young girls into domestic servitude. He outraged loyalists by proposing to call the new astronomical observatory not after Queen Victoria, but
after the Qing Emperor Kang Xi, who had built one in Beijing. He arranged full British nationality for eminent Chinese residents, he resisted racial segregation in the central town districts, he insisted that Chinese should have an equal right with Europeans to use the City Hall museum and library. It was he who appointed Ng Choy to the Legislative Council.

But it needed tact and understanding to lead the British community into more enlightened attitudes, and nobody could be less fitted for such a task than pesky Sir John. He had a genius for rubbing people up the wrong way, and unfortunately his idealism was hardly matched by his ability. He would accept no advice. He lost papers. He failed to answer letters. He quarrelled with the Colonial Secretary, because he insisted on handling everything himself, with the headmaster of the Central School, because he insisted on interfering with the educational processes, with the Registrar-General, whom he accused of immoral practices, with the Harbour-Master, whom he charged with dereliction of duty, with General Donovan, whose rival dinner-party in celebration of the Queen’s Birthday he forbade (there being only one band available), with the taipan of Jardine, Matheson about almost everything, and more or less as a matter of principle with virtually the entire British commercial community, who all hated him, and whom he thoroughly detested in return. To cap everything, in 1881 Sir John Pope-Hennessy attacked with an umbrella, in a public place, the leader of the Hong Kong bar, whom he claimed to have caught
in flagrante delicto
showing a book of indecent engravings to Lady Pope-Hennessy.

So he achieved little in the end, and failed to make Europeans and Chinese much better friends: even the promising Ng Choy presently left Hong Kong for China, changing his name to Wu Ting Fang and becoming Chinese Ambassador to the United States. At the same time Pope-Hennessy compounded the old enmity between officials and unofficials. When the irrepressible Governor left Hong Kong in 1882, on his way to create havoc in the Indian Ocean, he was given many presents by the Chinese community, assured that he ‘embodied the mind of heaven and earth’, and awarded (at least by his own account) the sobriquet Number One Good Friend; but few Europeans came down to the wharf to see him off.

Out at sea the ships perpetually lay. This was a sea-Empire, those were
the years of Rule Britannia, and Hong Kong’s imperial status was best exemplified by the spectacle of its harbour.

The China trade had not proved quite so lucrative as the merchants hoped, but Hong Kong had become an entrepôt serving a wider region, and it was primarily as a place of shipping that it was famous – after London and Liverpool, the Empire’s third port. Opium (its export to China now legal), sugar, flour, salt, earthenware, oil, amber, cotton goods, sandalwood, ivory, betels, vegetables and grains passed endlessly through the colony’s go-downs, and the papers were full of ship arrivals and passenger lists – the Revd Osborne Chestnutt, MA from Liverpool, Misses Whiteworth and Button from Shanghai … At any one time there were likely to be at least 1,000 seamen ashore in Hong Kong; it had become one of the most familiar of all sailor-towns, abounding with seamen’s boarding-houses and brothels, where merchant seamen (merchant Johns) got into fine old brawls with Royal Navy men (Johnny-haul-tauts), and well-loved grog-shops beckoned:

No wonder Press announcements warned that ships’ captains and agents were not responsible for debts incurred by their crews in port.

Any Briton would be gratified to see the majestic variety of craft that now frequented the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Centre-stage was the Royal Navy’s Receiving Ship, the massive old black-and-white troopship
Victor Emmanuel
. Hugely flagged and covered with white roofing, which made her look like an immense elongated oyster, she lay in the harbour as the Commodore’s headquarters, with her paddle dispatch boat, HMS
Vigilant
, usually alongside. She had been there since 1874, and was now one of the best-known vessels in the world. Every visiting admiral was entertained in her wardroom, and it was her guns that saluted the arrival of visiting warships (also the Queen’s birthday, the anniversary of Her Majesty’s accession, the anniversary of Her Majesty’s coronation, United States’ Independence Day, and the birthdays of the Prince of Wales, the King of Spain and the late George Washington).

In the naval anchorages around the
Victor Emmanuel
were sure to be other warships of the British China Squadron: the steam gunboats
Firebrand
or
Flying Fish, Linnet
or
Swift
, or perhaps the 6,000-ton ironclad
Iron Duke
, which was rigged as a three-masted barque but had a lumpish funnel abaft the foremast, and was chiefly famous for having rammed her sister ship
Vanguard
in 1875. Wandering ships of the far-flung fleet might sail in from Trincomalee, from Singapore, from Sydney; often foreign warships came too, and were ceremonially welcomed by the
Victor Emmanuel
whatever the current state of diplomatic relations.

By now there were as many steamships as sailing ships out there, with a Conradian variety of coastal freighters, British, German, Japanese (but mostly with British officers). There was an endless shifting mosaic of Chinese craft, 52,000 a year even in those days, fishing-boats from the outer islands, harbour sampans, great ocean-going junks with high poops and ribbed sails. There was a constant scurry of steam launches: many were privately owned – to possess a steam launch was already a sign of status in Hong Kong – many more flew the flags of the hongs, or of foreign consuls, or of hotels. There were the neat white paddle-steamers, like pleasure-boats on lakes, which maintained the ferry services to Macao and Guangzhou, and which the Chinese picturesquely called ‘outside-walkees’.

Grandest of all were the big ocean liners which now made Hong Kong one of their regular ports of call: Messageries Maritime ships from Marseilles and Indo-China, Pacific Mail ships from Japan and San Francisco, and pre-eminently the ships of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, at the last extremity of the all-red route from England – the liners of the P&O, Kipling’s Exiles’ Line, which were part of the very ethos of Empire.

Coming as they did to Hong Kong past the Rock of Gibraltar itself, through desert sands of Egypt and phosphorescent Indian seas, they lay there under their sun-awnings as a reminder to every resident of Hong Kong, every visitor too, that though the sun might set over the hills of China, it never set upon Queen Victoria’s Empire. One might doubt, said Des Voeux, leaving the colony at the end of the decade, whether any other spot on earth was ‘more likely to excite, or much more fully justify, pride in the name of Englishman’.