Hong Kong (6 page)

If there is no civic diagram to Hong Kong, no more is there a Hong Kong style of architecture – even the standard forms of Britain’s eastern empire found only precarious footholds in this colony. The old Chinese buildings here and there are, for the most part, just old Chinese buildings, while except for a few recent surprises the Euro-American blocks are standard modernist mediocrity.
¹

The British first raised the flag at the north-western end of Hong Kong Island, at a spot they called Possession Point. Today it is well inland, and is occupied by indeterminate Chinese tenements, apartment houses and offices, with no plaque to mark the spot, only the name Possession Street on a lane nearby. Somewhere here, we may assume, the colonists put up their first temporary buildings – the shanties which are still called in Hong Kong mat-sheds, walled with bamboo poles and roofed with matting. The first permanent European building in Hong Kong, however, was very properly a granite warehouse built without official permission by Jardine, Matheson, while the first proper European house was James Matheson’s verandahed bungalow nearby, cattily described at the time as being ‘half New South Wales, half native production’, and surrounded by a plantation of sickly coconuts.

Presently buildings went up in a neo-Mediterranean mode copied from Macao. Along the island waterfront arose offices and warehouses with tiled roofs and arcades, awnings and jalousies, which becoming fretted and peeling as the years passed at least gave the place an authentically hot-weather look. The traveller Isabella Bird, in 1879, thought it looked like Genoa. The young Kipling, arriving ten years later, was reminded of the Calcutta style. Very few of these buildings are left intact, but embedded among the tower-blocks one may sometimes see the half-blocked remains of a colonnade, with balconied windows above it, perhaps, as of a
piano nobile
, and sagging jalousies.

The later Victorians built Victorianly, regardless in their confident way of climate or precedent. They built some grandiosely classical buildings, and some engaging examples, with balustrades and pointed arches, of the style they used to call Indo-Saracenic. They erected no prodigies in Hong Kong, like their masterpieces in India, but for a time they did give the place some monumentalism. The buildings around Statue Square, the shipping offices with their tiers of Venetian arches, the pompous banks, the properly Gothic university – when the globe-trotters of
fin-de-siècle
sailed into Hong Kong these buildings made them feel they were entering an outpost of the great imperial order. ‘A little England in the eastern seas’, dutifully but unconvincingly wrote the future King George V, at the instruction of his tutor, when with his brother Eddy he visited Hong Kong in 1881.

But it never acquired majesty, or real elegance, or cohesion, or even an assured identity. A reporter for the
Illustrated London News
, surveying the Anglican cathedral when it first went up, called it ‘an unsightly pile, quite disturbing the oriental appearance of the place’, while
The
Encyclopedia of the British Empire, c
.1900, remarked coolly that ‘the architecture of Hong Kong is of a somewhat mixed character’. Mixed it has decidedly remained, and a tragic lesson in wasted opportunity – for what a miraculous city could have been built upon this site, backed by hill and island, fronted by the China seas! Too late: as it approaches its end as a City-State Hong Kong is more than ever a topographical marvel, an architectural hodgepodge.

The fundamentals then are plain and practical, the design is inchoate, the architecture of a somewhat mixed character; yet Hong Kong is astonishingly beautiful. It is made so partly by its setting, land and sea so exquisitely interacting, but chiefly by its impression of irresistible activity. It is like a cauldron, seething, hissing, hooting, arguing, enmeshed in a labyrinth of tunnels and flyovers, with those skyscrapers erupting everywhere into view, with ferries churning and hoverfoils splashing and great jets flying in, with fleets of ships lying always off-shore, with double-decker buses and clanging tram-cars, with a car it seems for every square foot of roadway, with a pedestrian for every square inch of sidewalk, and funicular trains crawling up and down the mountainside, and small scrub-faced policemen scudding about on motor bikes – all in all, with a pace of life so unremitting, a sense of movement and enterprise so challenging, that one’s senses are overwhelmed by the sheer glory of human animation.

Or perhaps by the power of human avarice. The beauty is the beauty, like it or not, of the capitalist system. More than a usual share of this city’s energies goes towards the making of money, and nobody has ever pretended otherwise: as a
Hong Kong Weekly
writer calling herself ‘Veronica’ frankly put it in 1907, in this colony ‘plenty of money and plenty of push will always ensure you a seat in High Places, supposing you are desirous of the same’. It was the prospect of wealth, more than the exertion of pride or power, that brought the British here in the first place, in a classic reversal of the dictum that trade follows the flag. Even in times when evangelical improvement was a powerful motive of imperialism, the merchants of Hong Kong abided by the principles of
laissez-faire
at their most conscienceless – ‘We have every respect’, as James Matheson himself wrote, ‘for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited to the drug trade.’

Today only a solitary bronze financier stands in Statue Square, but even in the prime of Empire, when Queen Victoria was still on her plinth and the offices of Authority stood lordly all around, the most imposing of the central buildings were those of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the Chartered Bank next door and the Hong Kong Club, storeyed stronghold of the business classes. The merchants and financiers have always aspired to be top dogs in this city, and have never been afraid to show it, in a conceit that is notorious, a histrionic flair and a legendary hospitality to strangers. James Pope-Hennessy, writing about Hong Kong in the 1960s, waspishly dubbed it Half-Crown Colony, and used as the text for his book
²
the one famous poem ever written in English about the place, W. H. Auden’s
‘Hong Kong’:

To the comic muse perhaps, at least in the eyes of iconoclastic 1930s poets, but to the epic muse too, for there has frequently been something heroic to the ostentation of Hong Kong. In its early days the crews of Hong Kong clippers earned far more than other sailors, and splendidly proclaimed the fact in the polish, the gleaming paintwork, the scrub-white decks and elaborate decoration of their ships. Today’s rich are much the same, and as a matter of fact the wealth is remarkably widely distributed. Its impact upon the temper of the place is by no means confined to the business centre and the expensive residential areas, where the prevalence of high finance sometimes makes everything feel like Conglomerate City, an international settlement of the plutocracy. On the contrary, a sense of satisfied avarice is pervasive nearly everywhere, because almost everybody makes
more
money here: the Chinese taxi-driver gets far more than his comrade in Guangzhou, the Australian journalist makes far more than his colleagues in Sydney. Chinese dollar-millionaires, though difficult to pin down, can certainly be numbered in their scores of thousands, while a foreigner can spend a few years in Hong Kong and retire home rich – in 1987 a British lawyer threw a party to celebrate the earning of his first
£
1 million from a single protracted court case.

The most showy of the plutocrats are the Chinese. That pink Rolls-Royce could only belong to a Chinese magnate.
⁴
That young man so loudly quoting multi-digital investment terms over his cellular telephone in the coffee-shop is inevitably a Chinese broker. Chinese tycoons own all the most exuberantly exhibitionist of the mansions, the ones with the palace gardens, the ceremonial gateways and the great red dragon sentinels. But irrespective of race a deliberate display of wealth characterizes all the upper ranks of the business community, and unavoidably affects the general atmosphere.

For example every Sunday morning you may see, bobbing off-shore beside Queen’s Pier at Central, or in the harbour at Aberdeen on the island’s southern coast, the launches, yachts and shiny motorized junks that take the well-off to their Sabbath pleasures. Some fly the flags of great banks or merchant companies, some belong to lesser concerns – even law partnerships maintain pleasure-junks in Hong Kong. Some are just family craft, or love-boats. Whatever their ownership, they are likely to have trimly uniformed Chinese boat crews, and awnings over their high poops, and probably white-clothed tables already laid with bottles, coolers and cutlery. Off they go, one after the other, towing speedboats sometimes, with laughter ringing out across the water. Girls are stretched out for sunbathing on the prow, owners in blazers and white slacks are already sharing a first Buck’s Fizz with their guests, who are very likely visitors from overseas, and look at once jet-lagged, red-faced from the sun and elated by the lavishness of it all.

The rich of Hong Kong, if they do not live in plush apartments, tend to live in Marbellan or Hollywoodian kinds of houses, all marble pools and patios on hillsides, and love to show themselves at
public occasions – looking bronzed and well-diamonded at cocktail parties, vulgarly furred at the races (Hong Kong shamelessly declares itself the fur-buying capital of the world), bidding effervescently at charity auctions or most characteristically of all, perhaps, sailing into the Sunday morning on those yachts and varnished junks. All this is faithfully recorded in the pages of the
Hong Kong Tatler
, which supplements its portraits of successful financiers, its property pages advertising attractive well-converted farmhouses in the vicinity of Grasse or fabulous golfing environments on the coast of southern Spain, with well-illustrated reports of the social goings-on.

I thumb my way through a few typical issues of the late 1980s. Dr and Mrs Henry Li, Sir Y. K. Pao, Lady Kadoorie, Mr Simon Keswick and Mr Hu Fa-Kuang celebrate the recent elevation of the Hon. H. M. G. Forsgate to his Commandership of the Order of the British Empire. Mr Stanley Ho, Mr Teddy Yip and Dr Nuno da Cunha e Tavora Forena welcome Mr Henry Kissinger to a dinner party. Who are these lovely people enjoying their drinks aboard the yacht
Bengal I?
Why, they are members of the 100 Elite of Hong Kong, the magazine says, being entertained by the Japanese billionaire Masakazu Kobayashi in Repulse Bay. ‘He came, he saw, he cocktailed’, quips the
Tatler
of a visit by the Chinese People’s Republic Director of Hong Kong Affairs, and here he is doing it, wearing a very large boutonnière. M. and Madame François Heriard-Dubreuil, of Remy-Martin Cognac, present the Remy X.O. Cup to Mr Wong Kwoon Chung and his fellow owners of Champion Joker (trainer Kau Ping Chi, jockey B. Raymond): and sure enough, here on a back page associates of Beresford Crescale (Far East), enjoying a party aboard the brigantine
Wan Fu
, are to be seen upon the quarterdeck toasting the world with frosted drinks in the sunshine.

There are always visiting swells to grace these occasions. To many fashionable transients Hong Kong is hardly more than a distant extension of the New York-London-Paris round of profitable socializing, and everyone grand and famous comes to Hong Kong at one time or another. I was once strolling in the Botanical Gardens when Bernhard Prince of the Netherlands appeared with a brisk retinue of courtiers, all of whom looked like elderly English colonels in a British movie of the Second World War. Startled by their sudden arrival, and not at first recognizing the royal features, I stopped dead in my tracks and demanded of this impressive brigade who they all were; but they took me for an Extremist, and hurried by.

Of course it is not all pleasure – it soon becomes apparent to the stranger that few smart events in Hong Kong are pure pleasure. They are nearly always viewed with an eye to the main chance, and in fact half the parties recorded in the
Tatler
are really commercial functions, to woo clients, to cherish business associations or even frankly to plug a product. Business life is a gamble, and both the British and the Chinese have always enjoyed gambling (the Chinese used to run books on competing candidates for the Imperial Civil Service Examinations); so since the early days of the Crown Colony one of the chief places for combining business with pleasure, and thus exhibiting the plutocratic style of Hong Kong, has been the racecourse.

Since 1871 gambling in the colony has been legal only if you are gambling on horses. The Chinese have always assiduously evaded this puritanical decree, betting incessantly on mah-jong behind closed doors, crossing the border to clubs and casinos in more tolerant places – in former times to Kowloon City or the village of Shenzhen across the Chinese border on the mainland, nowadays to Macao, whose casinos are Hong Kong-owned. They will gamble on anything, and are obsessed with omens and numbers; rich Chinese will happily pay millions of dollars for lucky car numbers, when the Government auctions them for charity.

And Ring-a-Rolls will send you, if you ask them, a lucky-numbered Silver Shadow or Silver Spur to take you to the Happy Valley racecourse on Saturday afternoon. Several million citizens would rent one, if they could afford it, for the races grip the Hong Kong masses as nothing else: when, in 1986, 300 detectives in forty squads simultaneously cracked down on drug-traffickers and loan-sharks all over the territory, they chose that moment of universal distraction, the start of the three o’clock race at Happy Valley.