Hong Kong (13 page)

Another mid-century observer, the civil servant Alfred Weatherhead, declared that the chief reason why people remained in Hong Kong was ‘the powerful, all-absorbing love of gain’. So it was, and not least among the well-mannered but extremely hard-headed Scots who set the tone of Jardine, Matheson. When in 1850 a partner’s daughter, a Miss MacLean, had her wedding breakfast at the East Point compound, with fifty guests and a merry dance, the company accountant wrote characteristically to a friend recently returned home, when the festivities were over: ‘It was a capital chance for your Plate, which I began to despair of selling, and I got old MacLean to take it at your price of $200 …’

Inevitably these two societies, the official and the merchant, clashed. They mingled at weddings of course, they shared the Club and the racecourse, but their differences were fundamental. The best of the officials – only the best – were concerned with the imperial interest, the general extension of trade, Christianity and all else that went with the glory of England. The best of the merchants – even the best – were concerned with self-enrichment. Government sought to raise sufficient revenue to pay for the administration of the place. Merchants resisted all efforts to raise taxes, and they were perfectly ready to evade British
authority altogether, if necessary, by becoming honorary consuls of foreign powers, or by sailing their ships under Danish or American flags. The two sides thus worked to different rules, all too often honoured different standards, and the life of the colony was punctuated by rows between them – the London
Times
once remarked in despair that Hong Kong seemed always to be racked by ‘some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war or some discreditable internal squabble’.

In particular the merchants were antagonized by Governors of liberal tendencies, Governors who were thought to be too sympathetic to the Chinese, or Governors who showed insufficient respect for Free Trade in all commodities, especially opium. Pottinger the first Governor, a militant man, seemed at first to be just their kind, and when he posted an order (later rescinded anyway) that opium ships would not be allowed in the harbour, James Matheson commented knowingly: ‘Sir Henry never means to act on it, and no doubt privately considers it a good joke.’ Even he, though, upset nearly everybody in the end, and his successor Sir John Davis, who headed the administration for most of the 1840s, had nothing but trouble.

For Davis was not only a Protectionist, but also a Sinologue, having lived and worked on the China coast on and off for thirty years, mostly with the East India Company which the independent merchants had so detested. He was a man of fastidious if intrusive culture, had translated some of the Chinese classics into English, and was always saying ‘That’s not how the Company used to do it.’ He was hardly the man to please the traders, and in return he frankly despised most of them. In no time at all he had infuriated them by reducing the terms of their land leases (they claimed they had been promised perpetual tenure), imposing a property tax, setting up Government opium and salt monopolies to be let at auction, and trying to make everyone, English or Chinese, register with the Government.

The merchants disliked everything about Davis. They were affronted when they discovered he had emblazoned his own armorial bearings, displaying three stars and a bloody hand, on the tower of the new Cathedral, whose foundation stone he had laid. They were irritated by his choice of street names for the growing town: he named Shelley Street after the later bankrupted Colonial Auditor, and he named Hollywood Road after his own family home at Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol, but ‘not even a lane’, wrote Alexander Matheson crossly, ‘for a merchant’. They were so furious about the registration plan that
Davis was forced to withdraw the proposal, and impose the register only upon the Chinese.

Not only did the merchants stir their lobbyists in London into action against Davis, but they treated him with boorish incivility. A memorial of protest they once sent to him was so rudely worded that he refused to accept it, and when the unfortunate Governor was due to present the Plenipotentiary Cup at Happy Valley in 1848, not a single horse was entered for the race. ‘It is a much easier task’, wrote Davis querulously to Lord Stanley, ‘to govern the 20,000 Chinese inhabitants of this colony, than a few hundreds of English.’

The temper of Hong Kong being what it was (‘the land of libel and the haunt of fever’), Davis was also led into controversy with some of his own officials. He was at odds with his Colonial Treasurer, Robert Montgomery Martin, the man who thought the very possession of Hong Kong a mistake, and who once likened the island to a decayed Stilton cheese. Despite the street name he described his Colonial Auditor as dissipated and negligent. He was daggers drawn with his Chief Justice, John Walter Hume, whom he rashly accused, in a letter to Lord Palmerston himself, now the Prime Minister, of being a habitual drunkard.

When London unexpectedly responded by ordering an official inquiry into this charge, Davis lost his nerve and offered his resignation. It was, says E. J. Eitel, Hong Kong’s first historian, ‘unhesitatingly accepted’,
³
and the delighted merchant community boycotted all the farewell ceremonials, when Davis sailed away from the quayside to ‘the faint cheer of a few devoted friends’. The
Friend of China
cocked a last snook with the sarcastic valedictory: ‘Never, surely, in the Heavens above, or in the earth beneath, did there ever exist, embodied or disembodied, such a pleasant little gentleman as Sir John Davis.’

His successor, Sir George Bonham, was much more to the merchants’ taste. Since he concentrated on reducing official expenditure rather than raising more revenue, and since he spoke no word of any Chinese language, and indeed declared the mere study of Chinese ‘warping to the mind’, they thought him a capital fellow.

These unlovely conflicts at the heart of things, at the beginning of things, did not help to raise the moral standards of Hong Kong as a
whole, and already an insistent strain of villainy ran through its affairs, orchestrated by rumour, gossip, backbite, slander and intrigue.

At the top was the presiding dubiousness of the opium trade. At the bottom, every kind of vice flourished among the Chinese proletariat and the crowds of sailors, soldiers and miscellaneous beachcombers of the waterfront. In the middle was a floating population of European adventurers and confidence tricksters – ‘Why did he leave home?’ was the first question asked about any unannounced newcomer. Almost everything was tainted in one way or another. Official dispatches were often carried on opium schooners, and the equivocal cleric Karl Gutzlaff, Chinese Secretary, had previously acted as an interpreter on Jardine’s drug-smuggling ships, distributing Christ’s message to the heathen at the same time.

For all those burgeoning symptoms of the imperial order, this was a tough town. It was a seaport of the east, a garrison town, a smuggling centre, a haunt of pirates and racketeers, a drug market and already, with its admixture of Portuguese, Parsees, Americans and many other nationalities, among the most cosmopolitan of all Her Majesty’s possessions. Triads from Guangzhou had very soon infiltrated the Hong Kong underworld, bringing to the colony every kind of hustler. Opium divans and gambling schools abounded, brothels flourished: the Chinese population of Victoria, it was estimated in 1842, supported 439 prostitutes in twenty-three houses, 131 opium sellers in twenty-four shops.

It was a great place for pubs, too, many of them kept by former seamen and pretty tough themselves: we read of the British Queen, the Britain’s Boast, the Britannia, the Golden Tavern, the Caledonian, the Eagle, the Waterloo, the Commercial, and we hear frequently of drunken brawls outside them – the
Friend of China
reported one day in 1842 that two sailors from the
Blenheim
, drunk, stripped to the waist and streaming with blood, fought a boxing match outside Labtat’s Tavern watched by a crowd that included half-a-dozen policemen.

Sharp dealing in currency was rampant: coins from Britain, China, India, Spain, Mexico and all South American states circulated legally and were ripe for manipulation. As for the profiteers who flocked to every nineteenth-century frontier town, every new settlement upon a foreign shore, they were in their element here: H. C. Sirr, newly arrived as Attorney-General in 1844, claimed that his boarding-house, through whose windows the rain dismally poured, was as expensive as a first-class London hotel (he was explaining, in the magistrate’s court, why he had felt it necessary to assault its proprietor).

Hong Kong’s tradition of enthusiastic crime reporting was already born, and many columns of the newspapers were filled with dastardly news. We are told of ‘astounding rumours implicating certain Chinese residents … in dark deeds of piracy and crime’. We are told of the ‘diabolic procedures’ employed by the hordes of pirates infesting the Pearl River Estuary. We hear at length of ‘the ruffian Ingood’, who specialized in robbing drunken sailors, and who, having drowned one over-protesting victim, became in 1845 the first European to be hanged in Hong Kong. We read of a plot to poison twenty-five men of the Royal Artillery, of a battle in the harbour between junks and boats of HMS
Cambrian
, of an attempt to burn down the Central Market, of a reward offered for the Governor’s assassination, of protection rackets, robberies with violence and incessant housebreaking. We hear of Mr Sirr fined $HK 10 for assault.

It was distinctly unsafe to wander the town after dark, and the nights were hideous with the watchmen’s drumming of their bamboo tympani. It was dangerous to stray beyond the urban limits even in daylight; in 1849 two army officers out for a stroll near Stanley were murdered when they stumbled by mistake upon a pirate ammunition depot. The Government was haunted by problems of law and order – more than once the home of the Governor himself was burgled – and in 1845 Charles May, a London policeman, was brought out as Superintendent of Police to stiffen the colony’s constabulary (seventy-one Europeans, forty-six Indians and fifty-one Chinese, most of them corrupt, many habitually drunk and some too fond of boxing matches). Helplessly trying to clamp down on Chinese organized crime, the administration also issued a brave but totally ineffectual ordinance ‘to Suppress the Triads and other Secret Societies, which Associations have Objects in View which are incompatible with the Maintenance of Good Order and constituted Authority …’

Penalties were fierce, especially for Chinese offenders. The Chinese who had followed the flag to Hong Kong, most of them Hakkas, did not much endear themselves to the British. The first Registrar-General, Samuel Fearon, described them as ‘careless of moral obligation, unscrupulous and unrespected’. They came and went as they pleased, many of them lived on their boats, and everyone agreed, even Sir John Davis, that they needed firm discipline. Before the registration system began they were obliged to carry lanterns if they went out between sundown and ten p.m., and after ten p.m. they were in theory forbidden to go out at all.

Chinese criminals were tried, as the Treaty of Nanking had stipulated, under Chinese forms of law, and suffered Chinese penalties (except where a Chinese precedent was ‘repugnant to those immutable principles of morality which Christians regard as binding’). Punishment frequently started with the cangue, a wooden board clamped around the neck, or the cutting off of pigtails, said to be a particularly galling sign of humiliation. Members of secret societies might be branded, originally on the chest, later on the ear-lobe or under the arm, and deported. Pirates were sometimes hanged, often sentenced to long terms in irons, with hard labour. Floggings were frequent, not being repugnant to those immutable principles of morality – they were frequent everywhere under British rule. On a single day in 1846 fifty-four Chinese, arrested for not being in possession of registration tickets and unable to pay a $HK 5 fine, were flogged in public; when in the following year the police rounded up diseased or decrepit destitutes in the streets, twelve of the poor vagrants were first flogged, then taken over the harbour and deposited on Chinese territory.

Thus there was no pretending that Hong Kong was a very gentlemanly place. Britons obliged to go there on duty, wrote Sirr, must have ‘a stout heart, and a lively trust in God’s mercy’. No wonder Donald Matheson, taipan of the greatest of the hongs, surveying the moral standards of his business, decided in 1848 that he could stomach it no more, and giving up all financial interest in the firm, went back to Scotland, home and good works.

So already, long ago near the start of the great enterprise, Hong Kong was definitively Hong Kong. For a century or more nothing that befell it would really change its character. The urge for profit, the taste for good living, the flair for the dazzling, the energy, the mayhem, the gossip – all were there. East and West merged kaleidoscopically in the city streets. Merchants’ suits were well-tailored, and they wore them well.

And also apparent, it seems in distant retrospect, was an unfulfilled rootlessness behind the energy, blunting the sensibilities and making the place feel empty at the core. The circumstances were truly exciting, the chances of wealth were real, events moved at a tumultuous pace, there was a raffish and vagabond element that seemed a promise of adventure. Yet all too often Hong Kong depressed its visitors – ‘like a
beautiful woman with a bad temper’, thought Lawrence Oliphant, who went there in the next decade. Was it just the climate? Was it the cramped and improvised environment? Was it the lack of any higher purpose or ideology, such as inspired the imperialists in other parts of their Empire – Raffles of Singapore, for instance, who hoped the British would leave a message for posterity ‘written in characters of light’? Or were the colonists of Hong Kong even then, consciously or subconsciously, overawed by the presence of China beyond the harbour, so enervated and contemptible in the 1840s, but surely so certain, one day, to come mightily into its own?

Far away the junk
Keying
excited no such sensations. She was merely a curiosity to the rulers of the seas. After exhibiting herself around the British ports she was broken up at Liverpool, and her teak was used to build River Mersey ferry-boats. Almost certainly it was one of her Chinese complement – perhaps that ‘mandarin of rank’? – who, attending the opening of the Crystal Palace by Queen Victoria in 1851, was mistakenly supposed to be an Ambassador from the Celestial Empire, and is to be seen in the official painting of the event standing composed and picturesque in the forefront of the diplomatic corps.