Hong Kong (34 page)

The police station at Yau Ma Tei, a stern and massive block all barbed and radio-masted, always reminds me of imperial police stations in Palestine long ago, and here and there are the unmistakable white houses of district officials, with flag-poles in their gardens. The best is Island House at Tai Po, built in 1906 as the domestic headquarters of the British Empire in the New Territories, which stands half-hidden by trees at the end of a causeway – once lonely among the waters of Tolo Harbour, like something in Venice, today with the tower-blocks of a New Town immediately at its back. It is no longer a residence of Government, but in its garden is a sad memento of its original purpose: the burial place of a young Englishman, only son to the District Commissioner, New Territories, who was killed in a car accident on Castle Peak Road.

And occasionally, almost to the end, one might still see, on a day of ceremony or celebration, an imperial exhibition of the old kind, bands and sergeant-majors shouting, every plume out of its Plume Box, judges in wigs and red robes, medals jangling on officers’ breasts, swords, white gloves and His Excellency in full fig. I watched such a parade one Armistice Sunday. I was standing on the little balcony which projects above the main door of the Hong Kong Club,
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and I looked down to the Cenotaph, the Legco Building and the ceremonials below. All was as it always was. The commands were barked. The sad old hymns were sung. Trumpets trumpeted. Salutes were saluted.

Around the green a rope railing had been erected, and a handful of Europeans, mostly tourists I suspect, stood there in twos and threes watching. Just beyond them, in Statue Square, the Sunday multitude of Filipina women was settling down to its weekly jollities, chattering, laughing and fussing about with paper bags, and beyond them again the life of the great city proceeded altogether oblivious of the few score imperialists, with guards and musicians, pursuing their rituals at the war memorial.

In any case, though the mighty links of Raj and sea-power were signs of the wider grandeur, even in the imperial heyday Hong Kong was never quite like other colonies. It never had been. In 1842 Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary in London, had sent Pottinger the first Governor a word of advice, the gist of it being that Hong Kong was geographically, historically and economically unique. ‘Hence it follows,’ wrote Stanley, ‘that methods of proceeding unknown in other British colonies must be followed at Hong Kong.’

It was to become odder still with the acquisition of the New Territories, which turned it into the most peculiar hybrid among all British territories. Some of it was sovereign territory in perpetuity, some of it was rented until 1997, and in time it became clear that the one part could not survive without the other. Then nowhere else was so small a possession so intensely populated, so dominated by an ancient alien culture, and as years went by, so sophisticated and so rich – ‘all this wealth,’ as Kipling cried, ‘wealth such as one reads about in novels!’ In a sense too Hong Kong was always a pawn of foreign rather than colonial policy; not only did it exist in reaction to China, but it played an inevitable role in Britain’s relations with France, Germany, Russia, Japan and eventually the United States.

‘It is occupied,’ it was said officially in 1843, ‘not with a view to colonization, but for diplomatic, commercial and military purposes,’ and in fact it was hardly a colony at all in the usual sense of the word. The British never exactly settled it – very few of them ever intended to stay there for long, and only a handful of Britons have ever made it their home. Nevertheless despite Lord Stanley the Colonial Service, and after it the Foreign and Commonwealth Service, was to govern Hong Kong conventionally enough.

The Crown Colony structure was more or less the same wherever it obtained, and the standard grades, substantive ranks and pay rates applied in Hong Kong.
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The District Officers of Hong Kong were
very like DOs anywhere else in the Empire. Their duties were defined, by one of them, as being ‘land court judge, magistrate, public auctioneer … director of small public works, country judge for small debts, land tax collector, registrar of land deeds, rates collector, matrimonial disputes officer, forestry officer, agricultural “expert” (so called), land resumptions officer, and six or seven other things I can’t now remember’.

The one administrative innovation, perhaps, was the idea of having
urban
District Officers, instituted in 1968. This did provide a curious rider to the imperial legend, replacing Carruthers in his pith helmet on tour in the bush with a young man in a business suit in an office above a shop. Otherwise all in the system was standard, except for size and extravagance: the official establishment was one of the largest of any Crown Colony, and the Governor was always among the highest-paid of colonial governors.

If his status has also sometimes seemed grander in Hong Kong than elsewhere, that is because in this colony it has been deliberately heightened. Most of Hong Kong’s Governors have been career officials, men of the British middle rank; it has been the practice of the territory to make magnificos of them. Physical splendour has always been thought important to their function here; time and again I have been told of the particular effectiveness of Sir Murray MacLehose, Governor from 1971 to 1982, not so much because of his intellect or decision, but because he was 6′6″ tall.

In the past, as we have seen, Governors went about in extravagant sedan-chairs; until 1949 the front seat of the Peak tram was reserved for them; today’s incumbent is the only British functionary anywhere, except only the Queen herself, to qualify for an official Rolls-Royce Phantom, besides having at his disposal a venerable gubernatorial yacht, the
Lady Maurine
. His salary, in 1996, is about £245,000 a year (the British Prime Minister’s is £78,292). He no longer has Mountain Lodge, whose gardens were turned into a public garden when it was demolished in 1945, but he does still have Fanling Lodge in the New Territories, and as representative of the Queen he commands social precedence over almost anyone who visits the colony.

Until recent years the Governor was inescapable in Hong Kong. A survey of nouns, verbs and adjectives undertaken by the Department of Linguistics at Hong Kong University in 1973 found that the word ‘Governor’ was the third most commonly used in the
South China Morning Post
, so multifarious were the gubernatorial activities, and so fulsome
was the attention paid to them. Governors and their ladies opened everything, presented everything, took every salute, presided over every ceremony, and there had accrued a ludicrous superfluity of streets, buildings, hills and institutions named for successive Their Excellencies.

There have been twenty-eight Governors of Hong Kong so far. In the past they were invariably knighted for their pains, even those who were not unqualified successes, and while many have been sufficiently unremarkable men, some have been memorable. Sir Frederick Lugard, for instance (remembered in Lugard Road), the creator of Hong Kong University, developed the system of colonial administration he called Indirect Rule, and as Lord Lugard became one of the patriarch sages of British imperialism; he said of his time in Hong Kong that never in his life had he experienced ‘such consistently hostile and sneering criticism’. Sir John Davis, that ‘pleasant little gentleman’ (Davis Street, Mount Davis), founded a scholarship for the study of Chinese languages at Oxford, still awarded to this day. Sir John Bowring (Bowrington Road) is said to have mastered thirteen languages. He was an M P for a time, edited the
Westminster Review
, wrote widely about every aspect of European literature, from Finnish runes to Bohemian verse, and was the author of a much-loved hymn,
In the Cross of Christ I Glory
.

Sir Henry Pottinger (Pottinger Street, Pottinger Peak) made an adventurous journey through Baluchistan and Sind, and wrote a book about it. Sir Hercules Robinson (Robinson Road – and Rosmead Road, for he became a peer) was almost the archetype of a Victorian imperial administrator, holding governorates in New Zealand, Australia, and most importantly in South Africa, where he did his best to prevent the Boer War. Sir Matthew Nathan (Nathan Road) became Governor as a bachelor of thirty-two; the only Jew to hold the office, he was sadly infamous in later life as the Under-Secretary of State in Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising. Sir David Wilson, who arrived in 1987, had not only edited the
China Quarterly
, but was also a distinguished mountaineer; asked what he would like to have called after him, when the time came, he suggested a rock face somewhere (and he got a walking trail).

Their job has never been a sinecure, but has varied greatly in significance according to the state of history. Bowen once wrote that ‘the ordinary work of a civil governor in Hong Kong … is not materially different from the ordinary work of the Mayor of Portsmouth,’ while Lugard said his role was to endure fools gladly, to sign his name
perpetually, to agree to the suggestions of the Colonial Secretary and to ensure that the final outlet of the main China trunk railway should be at Kowloon. On the other hand Bowring personally precipitated a war against China, Sir Mark Young was the first British colonial governor ever to surrender a colony to an enemy, and in recent years, as the future of Hong Kong became a great diplomatic issue, the office of Governor assumed an immense sensitivity – a wrongly chosen word could cause a crisis of confidence, dangerously antagonize Beijing or send the financial index disastrously slumping. It is a curious irony of the imperial story that the last Governors of this, the last great British colony, should be in some ways the most important Governors of all.

They speak of ‘Government’ in Hong Kong, rather than ‘the Government’, allegedly to differentiate it from the United Kingdom Government in London, and this gives the administration to my mind an appropriately amorphous feeling. It is supported by an enormous civil service, now almost entirely Chinese, top to bottom. Until they mostly disappeared, in the 1990s, its senior expatriates were extremely well paid, and comfortably housed. In 1986 the Financial Secretary was paid about £6,500 a month, plus £450 expenses, and was given a large furnished house, a car and the services of two domestic servants, a cook and a driver; his electricity bill that year, paid by Government, came to about £15,000, and on retirement he was due to get a gratuity of about £72,000 in lieu of a pension. Once again I am reminded of old China, for this privileged official cadre was rather like the Celestial Empire’s celebrated bureaucracy, which formed a layer of society complete unto itself, severely detached from the ordinary people.

For many years the senior administrators of Hong Kong were randomly selected. Government was administered by a mixed assortment of army men, ships’ officers and miscellaneous adventurers, often wandering up from Australia in search of fortunes, among whom a knowledge of the Chinese language was liable to be regarded not as advantageous, but as suspect. Some of these fortuitous appointees were diligent and able men – they included Eitel the historian and J. R. Morrison, who was said to be the best Sinologue of his day, and whose death at Macao in 1843 was described by Pottinger as an irreparable
national calamity. Others were mere place-getters, using their official positions frankly to enrich themselves, and of these the archetype perhaps was William Caine.

Caine dug himself into Hong Kong even before it officially became a colony. A captain of infantry with an undetermined past (he is said to have been a boy soldier in India), in 1841 he was appointed Magistrate, with powers over English settlers under English law, over Chinese under Chinese law. Although he seems to have established a precedent by being totally unqualified to administer either legal system, he never looked back. He was superintendent of the gaol as well, he was a member of the first Legislative Council, he became Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong and eventually, in 1854, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony – thirteen years from obscurity to consequence.

But he had achieved far more than mere importance. He had become exceedingly rich, having made himself landlord to a large part of the expatriate community. He bought and sold property at enormous profits, and developed as a private speculation an entire new street – originally frankly called Caine’s Road, now softened to Caine Road (there is a Caine Lane, too). Caine retired and went home to England just before the appositely named Sir Hercules Robinson set out to clean the Hong Kong stables. He was fondly seen off by the many local people who had shared in his success, and presented by Chinese businessmen with an inlaid mirror: ‘doubtless’, remarked the
Illustrated London News
ambiguously, in reporting this gratifying gift, ‘Colonel Caine has done many a good turn for his Chinese friends.’

Caine was one of many. Their Hong Kong was a frontier town, and its methods could hardly be officially tolerated in the sober heyday of Victorianism. When Robinson arrived in 1859 he was horrified to find that not a single senior administrator spoke any Chinese language, and two years later a cadet scheme was founded, to provide the nucleus of a properly professional civil service. Candidates were chosen by examination in England, as they were for the Indian Civil Service, that paragon of imperial system. They were given two years of language training, went to Hong Kong first as interpreters, later as administrators, and gradually transformed the standards of its Government. For nearly a century they were all British, nearly all public school and Oxbridge, and they formed a caste of their own, distinct even within the Hong Kong Civil Service – often scholarly, always gentlemanly, usually honest, but inclined to be clannish and conservative – they
usually spent their whole lives in the colony, and in each others’ company.
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After the Second World War a few Chinese had time to become cadet officers, before the system was abolished, and there are senior administrators in Hong Kong now who are products of the scheme, and who still fondly assume that you know what they are talking about, when they say they began their careers as Hong Kong Cadets.