Hong Kong (7 page)

The course is almost as old as Hong Kong itself. It occupies a valley in the island hills which the early settlers thought especially desirable, but which was later found to be unhealthy for European residence and reserved instead for recreation (and for burial, in cemeteries on the slopes around). There is a second racecourse now at Shatin in the New Territories, but Happy Valley, still overlooked by its burial-grounds, remains the headquarters of the Hong Kong Jockey Club and thus one of the symbolical assembly points of Hong Kong.

They used to say that the colony was ruled by the Jockey Club, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the Governor,
⁵
and the club remains immensely influential still. Its twelve stewards invariably include leading members of the old British merchant companies, who have been racing their ponies and horses at this track for 140 years, and representatives of the newer but equally powerful Chinese plutocracy. Its chief executive has usually been a retired British general, but a Chinese financier is in charge now. Legally the Jockey Club is obliged to hand over its profits to charitable purposes: it largely paid for the Hong Kong Polytechnic, and all over Hong Kong you may see clinics, schools and other worthy bodies financed by its totalizers.

But Happy Valley on a race day (twice a week throughout the season) does not feel a charitable place. For a start its arrangements are exceedingly lavish. Even the horses at their training stables beyond the course have air-conditioned quarters and swimming-pools. In the middle of the track a vast video screen shows the whole of every race, so that no punter need miss a single foot of the action, and throughout the grandstands computers are clicking and screens are flashing. Nothing feels cheap or makeshift, and this is only proper, for I have been told that as much money is often laid during an afternoon at Happy Valley as is staked on one day in all the racecourses of England put together.

The Jockey Club’s own premises are very splendid. Up in a hushed elevator one goes, and on every floor there seems to be a different restaurant – each with a different name, each jam-packed with racegoers Chinese and European, scoffing
coq au vin
with Chambertin in one, bird’s-nest-soup with brandy at another, while keeping watchful eyes flickering between race cards and the closed-circuit TV screens dotted around the walls. Hong Kong’s palpable aura of money is everywhere – scented as always with perfumes, cigar smoke and the smells of rich food, and accentuated by the small groups of men who, standing aside from the bars and restaurants, are here and there to be seen deep in distinctly unfrivolous (and patently uncharitable) conversation.

Other clubs have their own quarters in the stands – the Hong Kong Club, the American Club, the Lusitano Club – and high above it all are the private boxes of the very, very influential, where the greatest merchants and their guests, a visiting Senator from the United States
perhaps, a TV star from London, a couple of Italian tycoons, some Japanese bankers and a Scottish earl eat magnificent luncheons, discuss terms, conclude deals, swap innuendos, savour nuances and adjourn now and then to watch the races in an atmosphere of impregnable exclusivity, heightened into excitement partly by alcohol, partly by the prevailing sense of power. Once I lunched myself in such a box, feeling shamelessly privileged; more often I have glimpsed these occasions through half-open doors, as I have prowled the corridors outside, and this is a far more suggestive experience.

Like Hong Kong itself, Happy Valley on race day is a bitter, brilliant, grasping place, not in the least blasé or world-weary. The tension which grips any racecourse towards the end of a race seems to affect Happy Valley with an extra
frisson
, sweeping through the stands like a gale out of the hills. The Chinese proletariat below may take it stoically, and the rich Chinese above them, too, preserve for the most part their smooth self-control, but the Europeans are different: eminent financiers and women in silks leap to their feet with the thrill of a finish, the men shouting meaningless exhortations like ‘Come on, Champion Joker’, the women sometimes jumping up and down like participants in an American TV quiz.

It is a curious spectacle, in a city that spends all its working days so assiduously in the pursuit of profit – who would think a casual bet could mean so much? – and it leaves in more dilettante minds a disturbingly fanatic impression. If you are of this temperament, better not look through your binoculars at the faces of the winning owners or the successful trainer, when the victorious horse is led into the ring below, and the big gold cup is presented – occasionally one can get a nasty shock, from the malevolent satisfaction their expressions seem to convey, as they look triumphantly round them at their rivals.
⁶

We are talking of impacts, and undeniably an impression of the unscrupulous, paling into mere shadiness, has always struck observers to Hong Kong. Few outsiders have ever thought this a
nice
place. The mid-Victorian Colonial Secretary Bulwer-Lytton said that his dispatches from Hong Kong revealed ‘hatred, malice and uncharitableness in every possible variety’, while in 1859
The Times
observed
that the very name of the colony ‘may be not inaptly used as a euphonious synonym for a place not mentionable to ears polite’. The place was fostered, after all, by the narcotics trade, and problems of law and order, mayhem and immorality have plagued its rulers always.

Piracy was the first basis of Hong Kong crime, together with smuggling, and was for years a local way of life. Pitched battles between the Royal Navy and pirate fleets were not uncommon, and while pirate commanders could be unbelievably bloodthirsty, sometimes they saw themselves in a romantic light – ‘Chief of the Sea Squadron’, proclaimed the banner flying from the masthead of one such nineteenth-century bravo, ‘who takes from the rich and not from the poor’. As late as the 1930s the steamers for Guangzhou and other China ports went to sea with their superstructures fortified with barbed wire, machine-guns mounted on their bridges and passengers locked in their cabins. The last pirates were driven from these waters only when the Communists took over the mainland harbours, and by then the tradition had diversified: it was in the skies between Hong Kong and Macao, in 1948, that a Hong Kong-owned Catalina flying-boat became the first aircraft to be hijacked – four armed pirates took it over, but in a struggle the pilot was shot, the aircraft crashed, and twenty-six people were killed.

Some of the territory’s best-known crime stories have been wonderfully piratical. There was the occasion in 1878 when a gang of toughs sealed off a whole city block, fought off armed police, ransacked a store and escaped across the harbour in a steam launch. There was the mass escape, in 1864, of 100 convicts from the prison hulk
Royal Saxon –
nearly half its inmates, some of whom were never caught. There was the discovery in 1921 of eight and a half tons of Persian opium, guarded by an armed sampan in a cliff cave on the uninhabited island of Kau Yi Tsai. There were the robbers who, in 1865, spent several weeks tunnelling into the vaults of the Central Bank of Western India, getting away with a fortune in gold bullion. There was the attempted shooting in 1912 of the new Governor, Sir Henry May, when having at that moment disembarked from his ship from Fiji to take up his office, His Excellency was attacked at point-blank range while riding along the quay in his sedan-chair, carried by eight bearers in white gaiters and feathered hats and escorted by Sikh policemen through ranks of saluting soldiers. Best of all, there was the celebrated Poisoned Bread Case of 1857.

This was a dramatic realization of that favourite Victorian chiller, the Yellow Peril. A Chinese patriot named Cheong Ah Lum, responding to the wave of xenophobia then sweeping China, decided to exterminate the principal British residents of Hong Kong. Since he was the most respected baker of the island, he was in a strong position to achieve this, and by slipping arsenic into his loaves he did indeed give some 400 Britons very severe indigestion (though by putting in too much, and thus making them vomit, he did not succeed in murdering them). Panic understandably seized the colony, the British Empire having only just been plunged into the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, but the plot was discovered and Cheong Ah Lum, though acquitted of murder for lack of evidence (by a judge and jury all of whom had swallowed some of his arsenic) was deported to China. With a shudder British society returned to normal, the Governor, Sir John Bowring, himself composing a hymn of thanksgiving to be sung in the Cathedral. For years afterwards visitors were shown Cheong Ah Lum’s bakery as a Chamber of Horrors, and a chunk of the poisoned bread, well-preserved by its arsenic, was kept in a cabinet in the Chief Justice’s office until the 1930s.

Pick up any local newspaper, and you will see that Hong Kong crime today, though generally less spectacular, can be just as surprising. The tang of it is always in the air, like the sting of profit; often the two merge, confirming I suppose the belief of idealistic Marxists that capitalism is a misdemeanour in itself.

Though by international standards the rate of serious crime is remarkably low, the streets are generally safe and vandalism is rare, there is all the general chicanery one expects of a great city, especially a port-city so volatile as this: protection rackets, pornography, prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, violence of one sort or another. Every few months the Tactical Unit of the Hong Kong police force mounts an intensive anti-crime sweep, setting up road blocks, stopping and questioning thousands of citizens, raiding night-clubs, dance-halls and mah-jong schools, but though a few dozen arrests are always made the great body of organized crime is scarcely affected.

The drug trade in particular is always on the boil. Until the 1930s the Hong Kong Government still leased out an opium farm, or agency, and the smoking of opium was legal here until 1940 – extraordinary
survivals of old imperial mores. The subsequent banning of all narcotics has led to an inexpungable black market in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. In 1995 73 people were prosecuted for murder and manslaughter, 1,102 for rape and indecent assault, but 5,669 were charged with drug offences, whether with trafficking or with simple possession. At the other end of the crime market, ever and again the predictable cases of crooked dealing emerge from the affairs of big business.

Much of the crime is organized by the Triads, secret societies which began as subversive political organizations in Manchu China, but developed into huge ramifications of skulduggery. Triads have been at work in Hong Kong almost since the start of the colony, and as 1997 impends are apparently intensifying their activities while the going is good. There are said to be at least fifty separate gangs in the city now, with at least 100,000 members, binding themselves together with secret oaths and rituals, and engaged like the Mafia in many kinds of criminal enterprise. They are supposed to number in their ranks many a well-educated and professionally respectable citizen, but they can be primitively brutal: a businessman stabbed to death by Triad hit-men in 1987 had been sent in warning, a few days earlier, the severed head of a dog.

The largest Triads are far too prominent to be entirely clandestine, and play a more or less open part in Chinese community affairs, rather like the IRA in some parts of Northern Ireland. They are said to have infiltrated many schools, and young men join them as a demonstration of their manhood, or are trapped into complicity by their own dependence on drugs. The largest society of all, the Sun Yee On or 14K Triad, which moved to the colony from China after the Communist Revolution, is believed to have at least 25,000 members. Some Hong Kong Triads have become internationally powerful too, especially in the heroin business, with branches in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the United States, and agents in every overseas Chinese community: one of the most active along the drug routes is said to be the Tai Huen Chai Triad, the ‘Big Circle People’, which was set up in Hong Kong by former Chinese Army soldiers disgraced during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

The Triads are seldom entertaining, but the small-time misbehaviour of Hong Kong can be wonderfully picaresque. The Hong Kong newspapers devote whole pages to the local court news, in the manner of English or American provincial newspapers half a century ago, and by
monitoring them just for a few days I culled the following cases more or less at random:

A house agent, pretending to be the owner of two premises, rents them out to twelve separate clients, taking deposits from each.

A brothel manager is caught by the police hiding on an external second-storey ledge of his premises with an entirely naked employee.

A woman police inspector, charged with stealing five cosmetic items and a birthday card from a store, says she was thinking about an important case she was involved in, and forgot to pay.

A sixty-nine-year-old caretaker, charged with indecently molesting small girls, says that fondling children brings him good luck in gambling.

Two men are fined for smuggling giant-panda furs on a sampan out of China.

Undercover policemen posing as construction workers are caught gambling on the building site by other undercover policemen.

A man advertising his Mercedes for sale is invited to bring it to a Kowloon hotel, where he is obliged to sign the papers of sale and is left bound and gagged while the villains sell the car to someone else.

Most notoriously, Hong Kong has specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery, variously euphemized as ‘
cumshaw’
, ‘squeeze’, tea money, steak fees, kickback or entertainment expenses, has always been a fact of life, whether it is a street-vendor bribing the local constable to let him stay on his pitch, or a building contractor slipping a few thousand dollars to an appropriate Government department. Ever since the days of the compradors, the Chinese intermediaries who interpreted and negotiated for the early British merchants, Hong Kong has been run very largely by brokers, agents and go-betweens, and it is a small enough step from commission to graft. Besides, it is a dazzling, tempting city in itself – just the place to seduce those who are, as Conrad once wrote of corrupt officials in the East, ‘not dull enough to nurse a success’.