Hong Kong (26 page)

The Mandarin was the first of a new generation of
grande luxe
Asian hotels, but unlike the chain hotels which were to follow it, stood demonstrably in the line of the imperial caravanserai – the Peninsula across the water in Kowloon, Raffles in Singapore, the Galle Face in Colombo, the Taj Mahal in Bombay, Shepheard’s in Cairo. Its style is one of self-effacing but extremely expensive sophistication, rather like the style of your contemporary British taipan, and its roots in fact go back to the beginnings of British Hong Kong, for it was an offshoot of the Hong Kong Land Company, in which Jardine’s held a powerful interest. The hotel looks one way across Statue Square to the Hong Kong Club, another across Des Voeux Road towards the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and a third across Connaught Road to the waterfront skyscrapers and the harbour. Once its front rooms all faced directly across the water, but since the buildings that have since interrupted the view were all built by Hong Kong Land too, there could be no complaining – and actually the Mandarin’s present condition of enclosure, surrounded fraternally by such fabulously opulent neighbours, only enhances its cherished sense of Establishment.

Nobody could call it a beautiful building. Designed by the local architectural firm Leigh and Orange, who have been in Hong Kong since 1874, it looks rather squat and ordinary. However the moment its Rolls drops you at its front door you know you have struck quality. Hardly have the doormen courteously opened the door for you than a most elegant young assistant manager, Chinese or European and tending only slightly towards the starchy, is welcoming you to the hotel as he might welcome a distant, well spoken of and by all accounts extremely wealthy relative. How glad he is to see you! How genuinely he hopes your jet-lag isn’t too bad! How swiftly, giving you all his attention, he ushers you to your room – no need to check in, Good Lord no, we can see to all that kind of thing when you’ve had time to freshen up and enjoy a cup of Chinese tea!

The Mandarin is British-owned but cosmopolitanly run. Its manager, as I write, is Irish, its concierge Italian, its front office manager Chinese and the four-piece band that plays gentle swing at tea-time is a family of Filipinos. It has eight foreign chefs, 123 Chinese, Thai and Indian. It flies in its cheeses and hams from France, its steaks from the United States, and frequently has gastronomic festivals when it flies in chefs too from famous restaurants around the world.

It sees itself among the company of the discreet luxurious hotels that
have their epitomes in Europe, and especially perhaps in London, and has no lounge-cataracts, fancy-dress doormen or revolving restaurants. Its interior décor, restrained and adult, is by the eminent theatrical designer Don Ashton; a running motif, appearing throughout the hotel, is the Seal of the Grand Secretary, mandarin of mandarins in the old Chinese Empire. Everything is just sufficiently orientalized to make you feel you might be sleeping in the guest quarters of one of the more traditional Anglo-Chinese hongs – a contemporary version perhaps of Jardine’s old No. 1 House. For many years a soignée White Russian widow lived in the hotel (you could recognize her room from the outside by its profusion of potted plants), and moved about the building not like a customer at all, but absolutely like a friend of the taipan.

In short the Mandarin Hotel is an overt version of an inner Hong Kong style – the style of the loftier British of the China coast, tempered by long years of comfort and assimilation in the east. Once a month the Governor gives a luncheon party there, attended by a varying guest list of worthies; rather like the luncheons the Queen of England now and then gives at Buckingham Palace, though the victuals may be better.

Nevertheless buying and selling, even speculating and servicing, are no longer the chief functions of Hong Kong. Since 1950, when the United Nations clamped an embargo upon trade with Communist China, Hong Kong has turned itself into one of the world’s great manufactories.

There were industries in the territory before. There were the traditional fishing, quarrying, shipbuilding and farming industries. There had long been industries making joss-sticks. In the nineteenth century Hong Kong preserved ginger was patronized by Queen Victoria herself, and was consequently to be found on all the most fashionable English dinner-tables. Sugar-refining flourished for a time, cloths and cottons were made, the Do Be Chairful Company were well-known makers of rattan furniture. There was a wolfram mine in the New Territories – once the miners had been persuaded the earth-spirits would not be angered, they made themselves an underground town, complete with shops, houses, markets, cafés, bars and even brothels. After the Second World War Hong Kong went in for
cheap and nasty toys, and for electric torches, a speciality it has retained. The victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war expelled to Hong Kong a powerful group of Shanghai manufacturers, who often brought their work forces with them – sometimes even their machinery – and established in the territory a vigorous textile industry.

But it was the Korean War embargo that sealed the development. Chinese Hong Kong, in particular, heeded the example of those astute and adaptable newcomers from Shanghai, who had been driven out of one profitable society, and had shown themselves determined not to be impoverished in another. The first sign of changing philosophies was the sudden emergence of an artificial flower industry, a trade until then dominated by the Italians; thereafter factories of all kinds erupted, especially in Kowloon, which now dramatically burgeoned.

To start with they were mostly hole-in-corner affairs, in lofts and backyards, in ramshackle warehouses, frequently in squatters’ huts and sometimes even on board sampans. Hong Kong industries then were often Dickensian: sweatshop workers labouring terrible hours for miserable wages, small children assembling toys or picking at fabrics, makeshift machinery improperly protected, squalid conditions, ruthless methods, fantastic production levels and enormous profits.

It was an ugly thing to see in the enlightened 1950s. Though its exploiters, like its exploitees, were nearly all Chinese, the Hong Kong Government was repeatedly anathematized, in the House of Commons at Westminster as in the pages of newspapers around the world, for its slavish devotion to
laissez-faire –
for years it even declined to produce proper industrial statistics. But at however high a social cost, temporarily deprived of one function Hong Kong permanently acquired another.

Gradually that explosion of productivity was brought into some sort of order, and Hong Kong industry began to conform with international norms. Factory conditions became less awful, wages more humane, the exploitation of children less blatant. The
ad hoc
nature of it all gave way to more contemporary organization; by the 1970s Hong Kong industry was relatively respectable, and the colony was no longer an underdeveloped country with a sophisticated entrepreneurial superstructure, but one of the world’s great productive Powers. The 418 registered factories of 1939, the 1,266 of 1948, had become by 1986 148,623. It was the most phenomenally rapid of all the world’s industrial revolutions.

Now Hong Kong stands, they say, sixteenth among them all, exporting, with its 6.4 million population, more than India’s 880 million. Its average wages are second only to Japan’s in Asia. Critics say it is still too improvisatory or even amateurish of method, too dependent upon cheap labour and traditional management, and that there is a growing shortage of sufficiently advanced technicians. Nevertheless the territory shows no signs of falling back. Every quarter a fat and glossy catalogue is produced, to show prospective customers what Hong Kong is producing, and it makes startling and curious reading. Such endless variety of ingenuity, given to the world by such splendid-sounding concerns – the Grand Dragon Universal Sales Company, the Ever-Rich Industrial Company, or the perhaps unfortunately named Flying Junk Industrial Company Ltd!

Here is a radio you can float in your bath, here an electronic stud-finder. A hair-dryer is combined with an electric iron, a calculator with a paper-clip. There are electronic ashtrays. There are sonic rat-repellers. There are devices for the detection of counterfeit money. There are dolls of a thousand faces, and armouries of toy machine-guns. Hong Kong is the world’s largest exporter of textiles, toys and watches. It prints books in every language, and makes more films for the cinema than anywhere else except India.

The little colony thus qualifies as one of the most intensely productive regions of the world. Yet surprisingly little of it shows. There are few factory chimneys in Hong Kong, few great industrial complexes; it is as though all that work is done in secret, hidden away in back streets of the urban mass.

Even now much of this energy can be traced back, in one way or another, to the British hongs which we saw establishing themselves in the 1840s, congratulating themselves in the Victorian prime.

They used to adopt Chinese sobriquets, generally with the help of scholars and soothsayers, and these are still remembered, if only by the writers of company histories; for the most part though they have lost the grand corporate images they inherited from the days of the East India Company and the Guangzhou concessions. Their premises are mostly subsumed in anonymous skyscraper blocks, their interests are so diffuse, and spread through so many subsidiary companies, that their power has lost some of its old public impact. Countless newer houses,
most of them Chinese, many of them American or Japanese, have joined and often superseded the senior firms. By the late 1980s Japanese and American investments had both exceeded British, Hong Kong’s chief trading partners were, after China, Japan and the United States, and only one in twenty-five of the ocean-going ships that used the port flew the Red Ensign. Nevertheless much real power in Hong Kong, during these last days of its colonial status, remains in the hands of a few old British or Anglo-Chinese companies. In 1987 Hutchison-Whampoa published an advertisement demonstrating how widespread was its influence in Hong Kong throughout a working day: whatever you did, you were almost bound somehow or other to be contributing to its coffers, whether you were shopping at one of its 200 supermarkets, using one of the myriad products its agencies handled, buying an apartment, drinking a bottle of pop, having a drink at the Bull and Bear pub, switching on the electric light, using a cellular telephone or driving on an asphalt road.

Hutchison-Whampoa, though British by origin, is now Chinese-controlled. Other old companies remain in British hands, and under British management. They began often enough as furiously competitive shippers and port agents, but are often linked now behind the scenes, or rather in the pages of the Directory of Directors, in almost incestuous intimacy. Three institutions in particular form part of the fabric of the place.

The youngest has the Chinese name of Taikoo, Great and Ancient. In 1869 there visited Hong Kong a Yorkshire businessman of all the Yorkshire orthodoxies – John Samuel Swire, shrewd, steady, sarcastic, dictatorial, who frequently said ‘I told you so’ and was given to Yorkshire dicta like ‘I write as I speak, to the point’, or ‘I aim to be strong enough to be respected, if not beloved’. He was the perfect businessman – ‘a person’, wrote an American contemporary in admiration, ‘who lives by and for business alone’ (besides being backed by ‘practically unlimited supply of British pride and capital’). His partners called him ‘The Senior’.

Together with a Lancashire mill-owner, Richard Butterfield, Swire and his brother William had founded a shipping and trading firm in Shanghai in 1866, and from there he extended his activities to Hong Kong. Butterfield was soon disposed of,
⁹
and the firm grew rich, in the
classic Hong Kong way, as shipowners, ship repairers, agents, importers and exporters of many commodities. Its headquarters were always in England, it was active in Japan and China too, and John Swire did not himself stay long in Hong Kong; but by the time he died in 1898 the firm of Butterfield and Swire was one of the most powerful in the colony, with all the arrangements of the older companies, an office on the Praya, messes for the young gentlemen assistants and a house on the Peak for the taipan.

This hong was not always loved in the colony, partly because of its relatively liberal racial views. ‘An undignified style of action,’ commented an observer from Russell’s (‘The Flag Prospers’), when Butterfield and Swire invited Chinese freight brokers to a dinner, ‘the Swire lot blustering away among the Chinamen … [hobnobbing] with every unwashed devil in the place.’ Swire’s helped to destroy Russell’s in the end, as they had helped to drive the old and respected firm of Dent’s (‘Precious and Compliant’) into bankruptcy, and were also considered rather too ruthless in their methods. They were, said a writer in the
Hong Kong Telegraph
in 1891, ‘the everlasting Bugbears of Eastern commerce, the nigger-drivers, the sweaters, the Jews – worse than Jews, for no Jew was ever so full of hatred and persecution and intolerance of all others …’ During the First World War the Governor himself, Sir Henry May, accused Swire’s of reluctance to help the war effort – they were ‘the most remiss in furnishing volunteers for the defence of the Colony’.

Certainly the firm seems to have lacked the easy-going style of the older British hongs. ‘You are ruining your chance as regards advancement in our firm,’ wrote Swire’s taipan to one of his employees in the 1900s – ‘ “American Women and Nips”. We will not tolerate these vices, they lead the man into trouble, destroy his efficiency, & he sets a bad example to others.’
¹⁰
‘The Firm do not approve,’ it was announced in 1900, ‘of their Employees being interested in Race Ponies … to so interest themselves, in future, will certainly prejudice their chance of promotion.’ ‘I hope you will make that young nephew of mine work,’ wrote Warren Swire when John Kidston Swire joined the Hong Kong office in 1914, ‘he is
not
in China for his own amusement …’ Nevertheless they have prospered ever since. The name of Butterfield was eventually expunged, but the firm remains ubiquitous in Hong Kong,
controlling immense properties, running innumerable concerns. It flies its house flag (quartered in white and red, with a blue vertical stripe) on many vessels, and has a controlling interest in the colony’s chief international airline, Cathay Pacific, one of the most important in the east. Listed as one of the most profitable companies in the territory, Swire’s is really a world-wide conglomerate, with interests in tea plantations in Kenya, container terminals in Japan, oil in the Gulf, property in Florida, cold storage in Canada, hotels in Mauritius and bottling in Salt Lake City. Descendants of ‘The Senior’ are still prominent in its affairs.