Hong Kong (29 page)

1920s:
DOGDAYS

F
OR THE BRITISH EMPIRE ALMOST EVERYWHERE THE YEARS
between the two world wars were dogdays. The sacrifices of 1914–18 had exhausted the British people, and the fire of the imperial idea was fading. Imperialism’s morality was widely questioned, self-determination was everywhere in the air, so that more and more the administrators of Empire approached their task in an apologetic, or at least conciliatory mood. Men of vaulting ambition or reckless disposition seldom looked for a career in the imperial service now; in India the Civil Service was steadily Indianized, in the Colonial Service the recruits most required, it was said, were steady, decent, diligent men, preferably with second-class degrees.

British capitalism seemed to be blunted. As a manufacturing nation Britain had been overtaken, as a commercial nation its supremacy was waning. No longer did the British merchant fleet have a virtual monopoly of the eastern trade. At home the General Strike of 1926, together with the subsequent great depression, seemed to many to signal the end of British prosperity – perhaps of British stability too.

Although the Empire did not reach its physical apogee until the 1930s, it was patently past its prime. Great Britain could not maintain its posture as the first strategic power of the world. All the forms of superbia were maintained, but the British formally acknowledged that
they were no longer the sole arbiters of the sea; in the Washington Treaty of 1922 they agreed to parity with the United States in naval forces everywhere, to parity in the eastern seas with Japan.

All this affected Hong Kong more particularly than most other colonies. The ideal of
laissez-faire
, the very basis of Hong Kong, was out of fashion, as the conception of the Welfare State began tentatively to form, and strategically the colony seemed to be losing its meaning. At Washington the British also agreed to freeze the fortification of their strongholds east of the 110th meridian, which meant in principle east of Singapore, and in practice Hong Kong. The Furthermost Possession was no longer to be, it seemed, a link in Curzon’s chain of fortresses, and the size of the China Squadron was progressively reduced. Hong Kong became something of a backwater once more – one of dozens of Crown Colonies, one of the smallest, by no means one of the richest, and rivalled by the growing cosmopolitan glamour of Shanghai, where 7,000 British ‘Shanghailanders’ already considered themselves much smarter. Imperial reference books of the 1920s give Hong Kong short shrift, and the fashionable tourists of the day, though they often dropped in during the course of their journeys through the Orient, seldom stayed for long.

It was only appropriate that visually Hong Kong seemed to have a completed air. Though it was still the third port of the British Empire, it was not in the condition of excitement, whether commercial or imperial, that we have noticed on earlier visits. It had calmed down. The Hong Kong dollar, worth 6s. 2d. in 1919, throughout the 1920s never rose higher than 3s., and this was no time for adventurous construction. The twin cities of the harbour remained the only substantial towns. The modernist styles about to fall upon Europe and America would not reach Hong Kong for another two decades, and people were still building much as they had been forty years before.

There had been great changes, of course, since 1880. Victoria had been transformed by Paul Chater’s Praya Reclamation Scheme. The waterfront of the 1880s was now a block away from the sea, and on the extra land had appeared new premises for the Hong Kong Club, a new Supreme Court and sundry commercial blocks, all fronted by a new esplanade called Connaught Road. Statue Square, then called Royal Square, had doubled its size. It now contained a Cenotaph in memory of the war dead, and effigies of Queen Victoria, largely under a canopy
in the middle, Edward VII, George V, Queen Alexandra and the eponymous Duke of Connaught on the esplanade. (The future Edward VIII had vetoed a statue of himself, suggesting that the money be put to better causes.) The Pedder Street clock-tower had gone, having been declared a hazard to traffic, and Jardine’s had largely abandoned their East Point headquarters: the tea-chests in their go-downs there were full of archives, and in 1921 a last farewell had been said to No. 1 House with a sentimental candle-lit dinner. Across the water the Kowloon waterfront was now dominated by the towered terminal of the Kowloon to Guangzhou railway, and the four-square hulk of the Peninsula Hotel.

But all the new buildings remained sedately within colonial conventions – fan-cooled, teak-banistered, the Hong Kong Club with Moghul turrets over colonnades, the Supreme Court with a classical dome over arcades, the railway station in a sort of Indo-Byzantine style, the Peninsula perceptibly Chinoise, and most of the office blocks in varieties of tropical-Gothic. A quaint old Receiving Ship still dominated the harbour view – the former troopship
Tamar
, but looking much like the old
Victor Emmanuel –
and the fact that the Praya now extended further to the west, running in a wide sweep along the foreshore towards Possession Point where it all began, only seemed to confirm the sensation that this was the definitive Hong Kong, as it always would be. The French observer, Albert Demangeon, writing in 1925, summed it up, once and for all it seemed, as ‘the proudest monument of England’s commercial genius’.
¹

Over the hills behind Victoria the scatter of cool white villas now extended to the island’s southern shore. The Repulse Bay had entered its delightful career of tea-dances and sundowners, and at Shek O, away on the island’s western tip, a group of expatriate country-lovers were building themselves nice tiled bungalows, attended by gravel drives and ornamental flower-beds, almost as they might somewhere in the Green Belt of London. Even Kowloon, though it had grown explosively since the turn of the century, had developed in a seemly way, and the railway station tower was a proper substitute for the lost Pedder Street clock, guiding the ferry-boats, when the fog lay low, just as faithfully into their piers.

Colonial Hong Kong was set in its ways, too. It had been in existence as a British possession for close on eighty years, and the expatriate
community had evolved its own values, rituals and conventions, soon picked up by newcomers and passed on to successors. It had its long-familiar pecking orders of race, function and residence. It had its naval balls and cricket tournaments. Going to see one’s friends off on the P. & O., with all the well-loved festivity of gramophone music, streamers and popping champagne bottles, was part of life; so was the King’s Birthday Party up at Government House, whatever you happened to think of the Governor.

Everyone in this society had his place – Lane Crawford’s floorwalkers in their company mess, the corporal’s wife in her married quarter at Murray Barracks, Lady Southorn the Colonial Secretary’s wife in her stately drawing room on the Peak, Captain Wotherham, veteran of thirty years in the eastern seas, in his new retirement house overlooking the ships at Kowloon, Mr Kadoorie the vastly successful financier in his enormous house on Nathan Road, the harbour-master in the harbour-master’s house, the general still in Head Quarter House, the Astronomer in his house beside the Royal Observatory, Ethel Morrison in Lyndhurst Terrace, Jardine’s taipan well-fed as ever at The Mount, the Governor in his palace, electrically illuminated now, opposite the botanical gardens on Upper Albert Road.

By now the great business companies, once so agile and predatory, had acquired a portlier air – the air of Establishment. They had been on the China coast for several generations, and despite the uncertain times were at the apogee of their commercial supremacy, just as Hong Kong had reached its peak as an entrepôt of the China trade. The hongs held an economic stranglehold on South China, Guangzhou nationalists complained, and they were active everywhere else in China too. The Germans having been eliminated from the Far East – ‘the impact of World War I on Jardine’s’, drily wrote one of the firm’s directors in retrospect, ‘was not disastrous’
²
– among their foreign rivals only the Japanese really counted, and their participation in China’s affairs seemed by now no longer a great adventure, but simply business practice.

Their ships dominated the China coast, and provided the chief means of transport into the interior. Their money was behind railways, breweries, fur traders, hotels, textile mills, newspapers. Jardine’s had offices
in all the main Chinese cities, and also in Japan, Manchuria and Taiwan. The Hongkong Bank built itself, in 1923, a Shanghai office even bigger and grander than its headquarters at 1 Queen’s Road Central – and it was only one of half a dozen great buildings on the Bund designed by the Hong Kong architects Palmer and Turner.

But middle-age had set in, abetted by tradition. Asked to account for a certain malaise at Swire’s, one of its managers said that it was becoming dominated by ‘a lot of old crocks 50 to 55 years and upwards’, and J. K. Swire himself said there were ‘too many deadheads at the top out East’. The young John Keswick, arriving for his first job at Jardine’s Shanghai office, was handed the same pen that his father had used, when he joined the firm, and was reminded that his grandfather, his great-uncle, his father and his elder brother had all been in their day Chairmen of the Shanghai Municipal Council. The representatives of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank were bigwigs too, great men in the East. The blind Sinologue Guy Hillier, the bank’s manager in Beijing for thirty-nine years, was certainly one of the most influential people in the capital, and when in 1925 his successor Mr Allen concluded an interview with the then-dominant war-lord Duan Qi-rui, ‘the Marshal [saw] me to the door of the apartment himself, which my interpreter told me was an unusual compliment for him to pay’.
³

All this was apparent in Hong Kong, the source of so much power and profit, but less in flamboyance than in accomplished routine. The trading post had got used to itself. Taipans no longer hissed at Governors, scandals were subdued, libel actions out of fashion. Some of the flash had left the place, as it had left the Empire as a whole. When a steamer of Swire’s China Navigation Company sailed for Xiamen or Fuzhou now, it sailed with immensely practised ease, drawn from long experience; its brasses polished as ever, its black hull fresh-painted, its house flag proudly flying, its awnings crisp and white, its dinner menu offering roast beef and Yorkshire pudding as well as shark-fin and pigeon-egg soup; but it lacked perhaps the old panache, either of High Imperialism or of illegitimacy.

Almost as if in response to the flagging of public exuberance the colonists of Hong Kong lived their private lives intensely. People were living intensely all over the western world, in the days of the
Charleston and the cocktail, but it showed more in this minute enclave of western ways, set among its archipelago in the mighty flank of China.

The European and American community was still dominated by its Britons, but not quite so absolutely. The German colony had been dispersed by the war, its memory besmirched by propaganda – as a home-grown victory song had it,

On the other hand there were more Americans about – some 500 in the later 1920s – more Frenchmen, more Dutch and far more Japanese, while the Jewish, Indian and Portuguese communities had all produced rich and eminent citizens to challenge the supremacy of the British.

But the British did not care, for the kind of Britons who lived in Hong Kong still felt themselves to be at the apogee of their national achievement. It took time for metropolitan attitudes to filter through to this remote possession. Like Jardine’s, Hong Kong had not suffered much from the Great War, and for the most part people felt as privileged by destiny as they had forty years before. ‘She had never’, wrote Somerset Maugham about one of his Hong Kong characters,
⁵
‘paid anything but passing and somewhat contemptuous attention to the China in which fate had thrown her,’ and she doubtless felt almost as superior to Dutchmen or Japanese (two half-Japanese girls, indeed, particularly admired by officers of the Royal Navy, were thought unsuitable guests by the loftier chatelaines of the day).

At the start of the 1920s much about the colony seemed to visitors quaintly old-fashioned. The up-to-the-minute Hong Kong of the 1890s had long been left behind. If you were invited to dinner at the Peak from Kowloon, for instance, you took a rickshaw to the ferry-station, a Star Ferry to Central, another rickshaw to the lower Peak tram station, a tram to the upper station and a third rickshaw to your host’s front door – anachronism indeed to a traveller from post-war London. The chief noises of the city streets were still the old noises, the cries of
Chinese hawkers, the clanging of tram bells, plus the hooters and chugging engines of the ships at sea.

In the course of the decade things changed. For one thing motor cars arrived in force – ‘coughing, spluttering, honking demons’, as a Chinese protest to the Governor called them. The Governor himself had ridden around in a car, rather than a sedan-chair, ever since the attempted assassination of Sir Henry May in 1912, and by 1929 there were 1,400 private cars in the colony, mostly American-built but including two Rolls-Royces, together with 247 taxis, 150 buses, 446 trucks and 460 motor cycles. The roads were beginning to be congested, and as early as 1925 Howard T. Werschul, an American flour merchant, got two months’ hard labour for ‘wanton and furious driving’.