Hong Kong (30 page)

European social life grew more sophisticated, as the years passed, but even so it sounds a sadly provincial society. It saw last year’s films at the cinema (evening dress only in the Dress Circle), it played the gramophone records of the day before yesterday (
One Stolen Kiss
, or
Deep in My Heart, Dear
), it eagerly read the social news from London (‘News and Gossip from the Metropolis’). It went to dinner-dances a lot, and to beach parties at Repulse Bay, where a row of 120 mat-sheds provided shelter for hamper lunches, and steam launches waited off-shore to take the revellers home. It smoked a great deal, drank without much finesse – gin before dinner, whisky during the meal, brandy afterwards: Governor Sir Henry May, opening a drinking-water reservoir in 1918, had pointedly observed that because of the general preference for stronger liquids only one in two of the lower-rank European civil servants ever lived to draw their pensions. Sometimes the Tramway Company arranged evening excursions to the beaches at North Point, and parties got together to swim hilariously in the moonlight to the music of a band.

The community prided itself on its English idiosyncrasies, sometimes rather silly ones: the Governor Sir Reginald Stubbs, who attended Council meetings every Thursday morning and afternoon, said he might as well have tripe for his Thursday lunch too, and so instituted a luncheon club called the Victoria Tripe Hounds, with Master and Whips, which ate tripe and onions among comic flummery at Government House. At the same time, like most societies in the English-speaking world, Anglo Hong Kong was becoming slightly Americanized. The stars of Hollywood were the stars of its cinemas, the songs of New York were the songs on Radio Station ZBW (except on Sundays, when air-time was reserved exclusively for higher things).
‘Cascade?’ asked an advertisement for beer, and the answer was pure America:
‘You Betcka!’

In 1922 the Prince of Wales arrived for a three-day visit, with Lord Louis Mountbatten as his equerry: it was somehow characteristic of the place that when they walked for the first time into the apparently empty gardens of Government House there was a sudden blast of a whistle, and out of the shrubberies sprang a horde of boy scouts and girl guides, ‘all yelling’, we are told, ‘shrilly’.

At the summit of expatriate activities stood the Peak, by now a snootier hill station than any of its Indian progenitors. It was officially defined by height – the Peak District constituted anything on Hong Kong Island above the 788-foot contour – and its allegorical situation up there among the clouds meant that altitude had become a kind of obsession. Peakites, as they were known, looked down not just topographically but socially too upon those with houses on lower contour lines.

Bowen Road? Where was Bowen Road? Why, down in mid-Levels, at least 200 feet too low.

By now the Peak was a very beautiful residential area, its winding lanes half-hidden by trees, lined with ferns and shrubberies. No motor road ran up there yet, and the Peak tram, electrified in 1926, was busier than ever, and very obliging; if by any chance you missed the last tram up, which left Victoria at 11.45 p.m., you could order a private tram at any time up to three in the morning. The more traditional of the Peak’s grandees, nevertheless, were still carried up and down in sedan-chairs; some went up by chair, down by bicycle, and Mr R. C. Hurley, whose house stood rather lower than the upper tram terminal, liked to complete his journey home on his ‘motor-less motorcar’, a four-wheeled carriage which enabled him to free-wheel all the way to his front door.

There were officers’ messes on the Peak now, and a number of
messes housing the young assistants of the great companies, so that the social life was lively. Dropping one’s card at the Peak residences was an essential introduction to Hong Kong society, and every self-respecting household maintained a card-box by the gate; as Lady Southorn was to write,
⁶
the card-box was the very symbol of western civilization – ‘the West has a box and the East doesn’t’. Bridge sessions were popular. Crumpets at the Peak Hotel were excellent still. Dinner-parties were lengthy, six or seven courses being eaten, black ties worn, music sometimes provided by Filipino bands, additional young men courtesy of the Royal Navy.

A formidable Residents’ Association kept up the tone of this Elysium, vetting even European governesses before they were allowed to accept employment (though it was up to the Governor himself, under the Peak Preservation Order of 1918, to decide who might be householders). The Chinese coolies who brought supplies up the Peak were forbidden to use the tram, and were obliged to labour with their heavy loads of coal, ice, food and building materials up the steep and often rain-washed tracks. In 1921 a compassionate clergyman discovered that one small labourer, aged six, spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, carrying fifty-eight-pound loads of coal from the waterfront to a house of lofty eminence.

A rung or two down the social ladder, many Europeans lived in the mid-Levels swathe of residential streets, between the Peak and the commercial waterfront, but by the mid-1920s there was a shift of social emphasis off the island altogether, across the harbour to Kowloon. Until the acquisition of the New Territories, twenty years before, such a movement had seemed inconceivable. Nobody then lived in Kowloon, it used to be said, except soldiers and Portuguese, and almost nobody respectable went there except to have a seaside picnic. There was nothing much to do there anyway, except for men of raffish tastes. In those days Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare, had degenerated after half a mile or so into a rutted country lane, and ended altogether at Boundary Street, marked by a bamboo frontier fence. Beyond were the mysteries of China, where superstition reigned, where bandits and tigers lurked, where ne’er-do-wells went to gamble with the natives, and unspeakable things went on in opium dens.

By the 1920s the New Territories had become the countryside of Hong Kong. People went hiking and picnicking there, looked at walled villages or collected wild flowers. Sportsmen shot duck in the Mai Po marshes, and the Governor had a country house at Fanling (much nicer, most incumbents thought, than Mountain Lodge). As the gateway to all these pleasures, Kowloon was no longer a disreputable enclave on a foreign shore, but was fast becoming a twin city to Victoria, and much of the colony’s vigour had migrated there.

Old-fashioned ladies still asked of men ‘Are you married or do you live in Kowloon?’, but in fact besides many well-heeled Chinese, Indians and Portuguese, who often found it more congenial than the stuffier Hong Kong-side, a perfectly respectable British society was now settled in spacious and shady colonial houses on the edge of the town. Engineers, middle-rank officials, merchant-navy officers had settled there, and had formed a Kowloon Ratepayers’ Association, like the more stately association of the Peak, to try and keep the Chinese masses out of their district too. And in 1927 the social balance was still further shifted by the opening of the Peninsula Hotel, much the grandest in Hong Kong, along the road from the railway station on the waterfront of Tsim Sha Tsui.

This was a world away from the now shabby corridors and old-fashioned saloons of the Hong Kong Hotel, long left high and dry away from the sea by the march of reclamation. Six storeys high and designed to international standards of luxury, the Peninsula was really a transport hotel, built to serve passengers disembarking from ocean liners, or arriving on the train from Guangzhou, Beijing, Moscow, Paris or London. But it became the smartest place of all to have a dance or give a party, the focus of young European social life, and for three decades the best-known building in Hong Kong.

Back across the water the Governors lived as Governors always had. Government House had undergone a metamorphosis. From the pleasant gentleman’s villa we saw in the 1880s it had developed into a palace more on the Anglo-Indian pattern, with the addition of a large annexe, almost as big as the original house, containing a ballroom, a billiard room, a supper room, card rooms and smoking rooms. The first great guest to be entertained there was Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar of Russia, who had found in Hong Kong, as we have seen, a fairly chilly public reception, and spent much of his time at
Government House looking at his own ship through a telescope on the roof.

Two men occupied the house throughout the 1920s, and offered a pungent contrast in gubernatorial styles. The first was Sir Reginald Stubbs, a caustic and sometimes ferocious autocrat who spoke no Chinese and believed in corporal punishment for the natives. He was the son of a famous father, Bishop William Stubbs the constitutional historian, and he himself was an Oxford double-first, with a reputation for quick wits and no fooling about. Ironically he was to be remembered best in Hong Kong not for his despotic tastes, but for an act of reconciliation – The Return of the Kam Tin Gates.

These were the ancestral wrought-iron gates of Kat Hing Wai, the walled village at Kam Tin which we have earlier glimpsed. In 1898 they had been presented to the British Government by the Tang clan as a sign of submission to its authority, and whisked away to his home in Ireland by the Governor of the time, Sir Henry Blake. The Tangs had long regretted handing the gates over, and there were periodical requests for their return. Stubbs undertook to get them back. At first nobody could discover where they were, but they were eventually tracked down in Ireland and restored to the village at a cordial ceremony in 1925. Actually they were not a pair, Blake having simply selected for himself the best out of four, but they looked handsome enough anyway, and beside them a plaque was erected, in Chinese and in English, to tell the tale (‘from this can be seen the deep kindness and great virtue of the British Government …’).

This was not, in general, the Stubbs style. He believed all his life in the firm imperial hand. He went from Hong Kong to govern Jamaica, where according to the
Dictionary of National Biography
he was well-fitted to keep any strivings towards democracy ‘within the bounds of realism’, and then to Cyprus, where unrealistic subjects had lately burnt down Government House. Ending his colonial career as Governor of Ceylon – he was one of the few men ever to govern four colonies – during the Second World War he became the chairman, not a reassuring chairman one would imagine, of a conscientious objectors’ tribunal.

The Old Hong Kong Hands must have loved Stubbs, for all his Oxford manner, and one can imagine him easily enough in the Hong Kong of the 1890s, or even at a pinch the 1840s. His successor was a much more modern man, and much less to the taste of the die-hards – a regular China-lover, a speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, a skilled
Chinese calligrapher. The son of an Indian Army officer, Sir Cecil Clementi was a classicist too, and a fine linguist. He had family connections with Hong Kong, and had begun his own career there at the beginning of the century, but since then he had served in British Guiana and Ceylon, had made a famous journey across Central Asia, and had come back as Governor full of liberal notions. Unlike Stubbs, he was distinctly a man of the new, enlightened imperial times. He was a bold critic of racial prejudice, and declared quite openly that the division between Chinese and European communities in Hong Kong ‘retards the social, moral, intellectual, and even the commercial and material progress of the colony’.

Dangerous words in the Hong Kong of the 1920s, where even the island of Cheung Chau had its own lesser Peak, forbidden to Chinese residents, and where European shop assistants would not dream of shaking a Chinese hand. Clementi, though, matched them with action, going so far as to appoint a Chinese to his Executive Council, the Cabinet of Hong Kong. Chinese now became frequent guests at Government House, and once the Governor even suggested abolishing the Hong Kong Club, that holy of colonial holies, and replacing it with a club open to the membership of all races.

Though Hong Kong did not recognize it, Clementi represented the way the British Empire was moving. As he frankly said, the day of European dominance in China, as in India, was coming to an end. By the end of the decade the British had renounced three of its concessions along the China coast, and had agreed in principle that all other extra-territorial privileges in China must gradually go. Among these they did not actually include the possession of Hong Kong itself. Even a Clementi could not yet imagine its return to China – ‘I cannot believe that the British Empire will ever acquiesce in the retrocession of Hong Kong.’ Nevertheless there were people alive in the colony then who really would live to see, never indeed the abolition of the Hong Kong Club, but plenty of Chinese members in it.

For like it or not – ignore it if you could – all around the 4,500 Britons of Hong Kong lived 725,000 Chinese.

Until now the Chinese of Hong Kong had been passive observers of its history. To visitors as to historians they figured only as an amorphous background, faceless and anonymous but for those few who, by adapting to western needs, had qualified themselves for notice. Very
few Chinese names appeared in the history books, because very few Chinese had played public parts in the development of Hong Kong; and the mass of the Chinese population seemed to most observers oblivious to public events, intent only on making a living. ‘The general indifference of the Chinese to all matters of public life,’ Stubbs once said, ‘was almost unbelievable.’ But now, in this rather flat Hong Kong decade, for the first time the Chinese showed their strength. When the 1920s came to be remembered by those Old Hands, they would be remembered not after all for their ordinariness or their frivolity, but for their Troubles, the first Hong Kong had ever suffered, which came out of China to give the complacent colony early warning of things to come.

China was in a particularly confused condition then. The euphoria of the 1911 revolution, which had abolished the Manchu monarchy, had soon been dispelled by conflicts among the revolutionaries, by the emergence of the New Culture Movement which advocated the abolition of all tradition, by the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and by the marchings here and there of restless war-lords with their private armies. In 1921, Beijing being in war-lord hands, Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution, was elected president of the Republic in Guangzhou. He was repeatedly snubbed by the British, who regarded him as a rebel still, and preferred anyway to maintain, in the absence of any sensible policy, that whoever ruled in Beijing was the rightful ruler of all China. Sun Yat-sen further antagonized the British Empire in general, and Sir Reginald Stubbs in particular, by turning his regime sharply to the left, legalizing trade unions and welcoming help from the Soviet Union. Under its auspices a powerfully revolutionary and xenophobic movement arose, based upon Guangzhou, and inevitably turned its attention downstream to Hong Kong – that stranglehold of foreigners, the one corner of China where alien capitalists sat in sovereign state.