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HONG KONG
GENE GLEASON
The John Day Company, New York
© 1963 by Gene Gleason
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be
reproduced in any form without permission. Published by The
John Day Company, 62 West 45th Street, New York 36, N.Y., and
simultaneously in Canada by Longmans Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalogue
Card Number: 63-7957
Manufactured in the United States of America
_To all who helped—particularly, Pat_
Contents
INTRODUCTION 11
1. UP FROM BRITISH BARBARISM 15
2. AN AVALANCHE FROM THE NORTH 47
3. CONFLICT AND COEXISTENCE WITH TWO CHINAS 85
4. INDUSTRIAL GROWTH AND GROWING PAINS 113
5. HIGH LAND, LOW WATER 155
6. A NEW DAY FOR FARMS AND FISHERIES 175
7. CRIME, POWER AND CORRUPTION 201
8. TWO WORLDS IN ONE HOUSE 227
9. RAMBLING AROUND THE COLONY 259
10. SHOPPING BEFORE DINNER 289
INDEX 309
_Sixteen pages of illustrations will be found following page 160._
Hong Kong
[Illustration: BRITISH CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG and Adjacent Areas]
Introduction
Hong Kong is a high point on the skyline of the Free World. As
a free port operating on a free-world basis, it is too valuable
to lose.—SIR ROBERT BROWN BLACK, Governor of the British Crown
Colony of Hong Kong, 1962
Except for Portugal’s tiny overseas province of Macao, Hong Kong is
the last Western outpost on the mainland of China. It is the Berlin of
East Asia, poised in perilous balance between two ideologies and two
civilizations.
The government and people of Hong Kong have performed a matter-of-fact
miracle by saving the lives of more than a million refugees from Red
China. Without appealing for foreign aid or emergency subsidies from the
home country, the colony’s rulers have provided jobs, homes and freedom
for the destitute. Private charitable organizations overseas and outright
gifts from the governments of Great Britain and the United States have
achieved miracles on their own in feeding, clothing and educating the
poor of Hong Kong, but the main burden is too great to be borne by any
agency except the full public power of the royal crown colony.
Most of Hong Kong’s people are too poor to afford what an American would
consider minimum comforts. They came to Hong Kong with nothing, yet every
day they send thousands of food packages back to Red China, hoping to
save their relatives from starvation.
These are only the workaday miracles of Hong Kong; the greatest
miracle is that it exists at all. It has never had enough of the good
things—land, water, health, security or money—but always a surplus of the
bad ones—wars, typhoons, epidemics, opium, heroin, crime and corruption.
It is one of the most contradictory and baffling places in the
contemporary world—a magnificent port and a teeming slum; a
bargain-hunter’s paradise and a nest of swindlers; a place of marginal
farmland and superlative farmers, efficient and orderly, sly and corrupt.
It has outlived a thousand prophecies of its imminent doom. Its people
dwell between the claws of a tiger, fully aware of the spot they’re on,
but not at all dismayed.
Tourists and sailors come to Hong Kong by the hundreds of thousands every
year, half-expecting to discover inscrutable Orientals, or to be followed
down a dark alley by a soft-shod killer with a hatchet in his hand.
The Orientals turn out to be the noisiest, most gregarious people the
Westerner has ever seen. No one follows him down a pitch-black alley at
midnight, unless it’s a stray cat looking for a handout, or a shoeshine
boy working late.
The real magic of Hong Kong is that none of it is exactly what you
expected. You prowl around for handicraft shops and find them next to an
automated textile mill. You’ve been told to keep your eye open for the
sprawling settlements of squatter shacks, and you find them slowly being
swallowed up by multi-story concrete resettlement estates. You turn on
the faucet in your hotel at noon and it issues a dry, asthmatic sigh; you
try it again at six and it spits at you like an angry camel, splashing
all over your suit.
You look for a historic hill in Kowloon, and there is what’s left of it—a
stumpy mound, shaved down by a bulldozer, with the rest of it already
dumped into the sea to form the foundation of a new industrial city. You
look for the romantic hallmark of Hong Kong, a Chinese junk with bat-wing
sails, and it putt-putts past on a Diesel engine without a scrap of
canvas on the masts.
You fear for your life as you stand on the crowded sidewalk, plucking
up the courage to bull your way through a fantastic tangle of autos,
motor-scooters, double-deck trams, rickshaws, massed pedestrians
and laborers carting bulky loads on bamboo shoulder-slings, but the
white-sleeved patrolman in the traffic pagoda parts the torrent with a
gesture like Moses dividing the Red Sea and you cross without a scratch.
A small, slender Chinese beauty in a closely fitted Cheongsam strolls by
with a skirt slit to the mid-thighs, and you begin to perceive the reason
for the thousands of Caucasian-Chinese intermarriages in the colony. Such
unions go so well they hardly merit comment in today’s Hong Kong gossip;
a generation ago, they would have overturned a hornet’s nest of angry
relatives in both racial groups.
Hong Kong is like the Chinese beauties in their Cheongsams; no matter
how often you turn away, your next view will be completely different and
equally rewarding.
CHAPTER ONE
Up from British Barbarism
The common disposition of the English barbarians is ferocious,
and what they trust in are the strength of their ships and the
effectiveness of their guns.—GOVERNOR LU K’U OF CANTON, 1834
In 1841, the British crown colony of Hong Kong attached itself like
a small barnacle to the southeast coast of the Celestial Empire. The
single offshore island that constituted the whole of the original colony
was a spiny ridge of half-drowned mountains forming the seaward rampart
of a deep-water harbor. Before the British came, it had no geographic
identity. They gave it the Chinese name “Hong Kong,” usually translated
as “fragrant harbor,” which distinguished the one appealing feature of
its forbidding terrain.
Sparsely inhabited from primitive times, Hong Kong, the more than two
hundred rocky islands scattered outside its harbor, and the barren
seacoast opposite them lay far out in the boondocks of China. Its
innumerable, deeply indented coves and mountain-ringed harbors made it a
favorite lurking place for coastal pirates.
For centuries, fleets of pirate junks had apportioned their rapacity
between pouncing on coastwise ships and pillaging isolated farms and
fishing settlements. The Manchu emperors, lacking the unified navy
necessary to sink these cut-throats, attempted to bolster the thin
defenses along the pirate-infested coast of Kwangtung Province by
offering tax-free land to any of their subjects who would settle there.
Even so, there was no wild scramble to accept the gift.
Less troublesome than pirates but hardly more welcome to the rulers of
China were the European traders who had been plying the Chinese coast
since the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the middle of that
century, Portuguese merchant-sailors overcame part of this hostility by
employing their well-armed ships to help the Chinese emperor crush a
pirate fleet. They were rewarded with imperial permission to establish a
small trading outpost at Macao, forty miles west of Hong Kong Island.
Traders from Spain, Holland, England, France and America soon began to
operate out of Macao, and the British East India Co. opened a trade base
at Canton in 1681 to supply a lively English market with Chinese tea and
silk. Canton, the only Chinese port open to world trade, stood due north
of Macao and ninety-one miles northwest of the future colony at Hong Kong.
Throughout a century and a half of dealings at Canton, European traders
enjoyed the same degree of liberty: they were all free to pay whatever
prices or imposts the Chinese Hong merchants and customs officials chose
to demand. The Chinese wanted neither foreign goods nor foreign traders,
but if the latter persisted in buying and selling at Canton, they were
expected to submit to strict Chinese regulations or get out.
There were rules forbidding any foreigner to live in Canton except during
the six-month trading season, rules denying foreign women the right to
enter the city, rules against possessing firearms and an absolute ban
against bringing foreign warships past the Boca Tigris (Tiger’s Mouth),
the fortified strait on the Canton River estuary leading to the city.
In practice, the rules were a kind of game; few were consistently
enforced unless the Western traders raised a howl over Chinese customs
duties or bumptiously insisted on dealing directly with the officials of
the Celestial Empire instead of its merchants. Then the reins were yanked
up tight, and the commercial interlopers had to obey every restriction to
the letter.
Foreigners at Canton remained in a weak bargaining position until a few
European traders, particularly the English, discovered one product that
the Chinese passionately desired. It was compact, easy to ship, extremely
valuable, and it brought full payment in hard cash upon delivery. It
could be brought from British India in prodigious quantities, and because
it contained great value in a small package, it could slip through
Chinese customs without the disagreeable formality of paying import
duties. This was opium—the most convincing Western proof of the validity
of the profit motive since the opening of the China trade.
The Chinese appetite for opium became almost insatiable, spreading upward
to the Emperor’s official family and draining away most of the foreign
exchange gained by exporting tea and silk. The alarmed Emperor issued
a denunciation of this “vile dirt of foreign countries” in 1796, and
followed it with a long series of edicts and laws intended to stop the
opium traffic.
The East India Co., worried by repeated threats of imperial punishment,
relinquished its control of the opium trade and dropped the drug from its
official list of imports. Private traders with less to lose immediately
took up the slack, and after opium was barred from Canton, simply
discharged their cargoes of dope into a fleet of hulks anchored off the
entrance of the Canton River estuary. From the hulks it was transshipped
to the mainland by hundreds of Chinese junks and sampans. Chinese port
officials, well-greased with graft, never raised a squeak of protest.
The Emperor himself seethed with rage, vainly condemning the sale of
opium as morally indefensible and ruinous to the health and property
of his people. Meanwhile, the trade rose from $6,122,100 in 1821 to
$15,338,160 in 1832. The British government took a strong official line
against the traffic and denied its protection to British traders caught
smuggling, but left the enforcement of anti-opium laws in Chinese hands.
A joint Sino-British enforcement campaign was out of the question, since
the Chinese had not granted diplomatic recognition to the British Empire.
This insuperable obstacle to combined action was the natural child
of Chinese xenophobia. When Lord Napier broached the subject of
establishing diplomatic relations between Britain and China in 1834, the
Emperor’s representatives stilled his overtures with the contemptuous
question, “How can the officers of the Celestial Empire hold official
correspondence with barbarians?”
The glories of a mercantile civilization made no impression on a people
who regarded themselves as the sole heirs of the oldest surviving culture
on earth. To the lords of the Manchu empire, English traders were crude,
money-grubbing upstarts who had neither the knowledge nor the capacity
to appreciate the traditions and philosophy of China. What could these
cubs of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution contribute to a
civilization of such time-tested wisdom? They could contribute to its
collapse, as the Chinese were to learn when their medieval war-machine
collided with the striking power and nineteenth-century technology of the
British Navy.
After the East India Co. lost its monopoly on the China trade in
1833, the British government sent its own representatives to settle a
fast-growing dispute between English and Chinese merchants. Once again
the Chinese snubbed these envoys and emphasized their unwillingness to
compromise by appointing a new Imperial Commissioner to suppress the
opium trade.
For a time, the British merchants comforted themselves with the
delusion that Lin Tse-hsu, the Imperial Commissioner, could be bought
off or mollified. He dashed these hopes by blockading the Boca Tigris,
surrounding the foreign warehouses at Canton with guards and demanding
that all foreign merchants surrender their stock of opium. He further
insisted that they sign a pledge to import no more opium or face the
death penalty.
Threats and vehement protests by the traders only drove Lin to stiffer
counter-measures, and the British were at last forced to surrender more
than 20,000 chests of opium worth $6,000,000. Commissioner Lin destroyed
the opium immediately. British merchants and their government envoys
withdrew from Canton by ship, ultimately anchoring off Hong Kong Island.
None of them lived ashore; the island looked too bleak for English
habitation, though it had already been considered as a possible offshore
port of foreign trade.
With the British out of the opium trade, a legion of freelance
desperadoes flocked in to take it over, leaving both the British and
Chinese governments shorn of their revenue. Further negotiation between
Lin and Captain Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade in
China, reached an impasse when Lin declined to treat Elliot as a diplomat
of equal rank and advised him to carry on his negotiations with the
Chinese merchants.
Having wasted their time in a profitless exchange of unpleasantries, both
sides huffily retired; the Chinese to reinforce their shore batteries and
assemble a fleet of twenty-nine war junks and fire rafts, and Captain
Elliot to organize a striking force of warships, iron-hulled steamers and
troop transports.
The junk fleet and two British men-of-war clashed at Chuenpee, on the
Canton River estuary, in the first battle between British and Chinese
armed forces. It was a pushover for the British; Chinese naval guns were
centuries behind theirs in firepower, and the gun crews on the junks
were pitifully inaccurate in comparison with the scientific precision
of the British. Within a few minutes the junks had been sunk, dismasted
or driven back in panicky disorder. The British on the _Hyacinth_ and
_Volage_ suffered almost no damage or casualties.
No formal state of war existed, however, so Captain Elliot broke off the
one-sided engagement before the enemy had been annihilated. He pulled
back to wait until orders came from Lord Palmerston, British Foreign
Secretary, directing him to demand repayment for the $6,000,000 worth of
opium handed over to Lin. At the same time, Elliot was told to obtain
firm Chinese assurance of future security for traders in China, or the
cession of an island off the China coast as a base for foreign trade
unhampered by the merchants and officials of the Celestial Empire.
Palmerston, maintaining the calm detachment of a statesman 10,000 miles
distant from the scene of battle, thought it would be best for Elliot to
win these concessions without war.
Elliot, mustering the full strength of his land and sea forces, blockaded
the Canton and Yangtze Rivers, occupied several strategic islands and put
Palmerston’s demands into the hands of Emperor Tao-kuang. Humiliated by
the irresistible advance of the despised foreigners, the Emperor angrily
dismissed Commissioner Lin. His replacement, Commissioner Keeshen, began
by agreeing to pay the indemnity demanded by Lord Palmerston and to hand
over Hong Kong Island, then deliberately dragged his feet to postpone the
fulfillment of his promises. Elliot, fed to the teeth with temporizing,
ended it by throwing his whole fleet at the Chinese. His naval guns
pounded their shore batteries into silence, and he landed marines and
sailors to capture the forts guarding Canton.
The Chinese land defenders were as poorly equipped as the sailors of
their war junks; when they lighted their ancient matchlocks to fire them,
scores of soldiers were burned to death by accidentally igniting the
gunpowder spilled on their clothing.
In a naval action at Anson’s Bay, the flat-bottomed iron steamer
_Nemesis_, drawing only six feet of water, surprised a squadron of junks
by pushing its way into their shallow-water refuge. A single Congreve
rocket from the _Nemesis_ struck the magazine of a large war junk,
blowing it up in a shower of flying spars and seamen. Eleven junks were
destroyed, two were driven aground and hundreds of Chinese sailors were
killed within a few hours. Admiral Kwan, commander of the shattered
fleet, had the red cap-button emblematic of his rank shot off by the
British and was later relieved of the rank by his unsympathetic Emperor.
Keeshen hastened to notify Elliot that he stood ready to hand over Hong
Kong and the $6,000,000 indemnity. But even the shock of defeat had not
flushed the Emperor from his dream world of superiority; he repudiated
Keeshen’s agreement and ordered him to rally the troops for “an awful
display of Celestial vengeance.” Well aware of the hopelessness of his
situation, Keeshen tried to hold out by postponing his meetings with
Elliot. Elliot, not to be put off this time, countered by opening a
general assault along the Canton River. Within a month, his combined land
and sea offensive had reduced every fort on the water route to Canton and
his ships rode at anchor in front of the city.
British preparations to storm the city were well advanced when a fresh
truce was arranged. The entire British force sailed back to Hong Kong,
having retreated from almost certain victory. Elliot, however, felt no
disappointment; he had never wanted to use more force than necessary to
restore stable trade conditions. He feared that full-scale war would
bring down the Chinese government, plunging the country into revolution
and chaos.
Hong Kong had become _de facto_ British territory on January 26, 1841,
when the Union Jack was raised at Possession Point and the island claimed
for Queen Victoria. Its 4,500 inhabitants, who had never heard of the
Queen, became her unprotesting subjects.
The acquisition of the island produced ignominy enough for both sides;
Keeshen was exiled to Tartary for giving it up and Elliot was dismissed
by Palmerston for accepting “a barren island with hardly a house upon
it,” instead of obeying the Foreign Secretary’s orders and driving a much
harder bargain.
A succession of disasters swept over the colony in its first year of
existence. “Hong Kong Fever,” a form of malaria thought to have been
caused by digging up the earth for new roads and buildings, killed
hundreds of settlers. Two violent typhoons unroofed practically every
temporary building on the rocky slopes and drowned a tenth of the boat
population. The wreckage of the ships and buildings had scarcely been
cleared away when a fire broke out among the flimsy, closely packed mat
sheds. In a few hours, it burned down most of the Chinese huts on the
island.
The flavor of disaster became a regular part of Hong Kong history. Its
own four horsemen—piracy, typhoons, epidemics and fires—raced through the
colony at frequent but unpredictable intervals, filling its hills and
harbor with debris and death. There is still no reason to assume that
they will not return, either singly or as a team, whenever the whim moves
them.
Even imagining Hong Kong as an island bearing no more than a minimum
burden of natural hazards, it is difficult to understand how it became
settled at all. The London _Times_ scorned it editorially in 1844 with
the comment that “The place has nothing to recommend it, if we except the
excellent harbor.”
The original colony and the much larger territory added to it in the next
120 years have no natural resources of value, except fish, building stone
and a limited supply of minerals. Only one-seventh of its total area is
arable land; at best, it can grow enough rice, vegetables and livestock
to feed the present population for about three months of a year. There
is no local source of coal, oil or water power. Fresh water was scarce
in 1841, and in 1960, after the colony had constructed an elaborate
system of fourteen reservoirs, the carefully rationed supply had to be
supplemented with additional water bought and pumped in from Red China.
Hong Kong has an annual rainfall of 85 inches—twice that of New York
City—but three-fourths of it falls between May and September. At the end
of the rainy season, ten billion gallons may be stored in the reservoirs
but by the following May, every reservoir may be empty. Water use,
especially during the dry winter, has been restricted to certain hours
throughout the colony’s history. Running water, to the majority of Hong
Kong’s poor, means that one grabs a kerosene tin and runs for the nearest
public standpipe. Those lucky enough to reach the head of the line before
the water is cut off may carry home enough to supply a household for one
full day.
The industries of the colony, which expanded at a spectacular rate after
World War II, could never have survived on sales to the local market.
Most of its residents have always been too poor to buy anything more
than the simplest necessities of food, clothing and shelter. No tariff
wall protects its products from the competition of imported goods, but
resentment against the low-wage industries of the colony continually
puts up new barriers against Hong Kong products in foreign countries,
including the United States.
From its thinly populated beginnings, Hong Kong has been transformed
into one of the most dangerously overcrowded places on earth, with
1,800 to 2,800 persons jamming every acre of its urban sections. Eighty
percent of its population is wedged into an area the size of Rochester,
N.Y.—thirty-six square miles. About 325,000 people have no regular
housing. They sleep on the sidewalks, or live in firetrap shacks perched
on the hillsides or rooftop huts. A soaring birth rate and illegal
infiltration of refugees from Red China add nearly 150,000 people a year.
Fire is the best-fed menace of contemporary Hong Kong. In the 1950-55
period, flash fires drove 150,000 shack and tenement dwellers out of
their homes, racing through congested settlements with the swiftness and
savagery of a forest in flames. Tuberculosis attacked the slum-dwellers
at the same ruinous pace. No one dares to predict what would happen if
one of the colony’s older, dormant scourges—plague or typhus—were to
break out again. But the colony found cause for relief and pride when a
1961 cholera scare was halted by free, universal inoculations.
More than a century of turmoil and privation has taught the colonists to
accept their liabilities and deal with their problems, yet they prefer to
dwell on the assets and virtues which have enabled them to endure, and in
many cases, to prosper tremendously.
Hong Kong harbor has always been the colony’s greatest asset. Of all the
world’s harbors, only Rio de Janeiro equals its spacious, magnificent
beauty, with its tall green mountains sloping down to deep blue water.
Perhaps Rio has a richer contrast of tropical green and blue, but the
surface of Hong Kong harbor is so irrepressibly alive with criss-crossing
ferry lines, ocean freighters riding in the stream, and tattered junk
sails passing freely through the orderly swarm that it never looks the
same from one minute to the next and is incapable of monotony.
An oceanic lagoon of seventeen square miles, the harbor lies sheltered
between mountain ranges to the north and south and is shielded from the
open sea by narrow entrances at its east and west ends. Vessels drawing
up to thirty-six feet of water can enter through Lei Yue Mun pass at the
eastern end of the harbor. Through the same pass, jet airliners approach
Kai Tak Airport, roaring between the mountains like rim-rock flyers as
they glide down to the long airstrip built on reclaimed land in Kowloon
Bay, on the northern side of the harbor.
The intangible ramparts of the colony are as solid as its peaks: the sea
power of the British and American navies, and the stability of British
rule. At their worst, the colony’s overlords have been autocratic,
stiff-necked and chilly toward their Chinese subjects.
The same British administrators who nobly refused to hand over native
criminals for the interrogation-by-torture of the Chinese courts could
flog and brand Chinese prisoners with a fierce conviction of their own
rectitude. Nevertheless, they brought to China something never seen there
before; respect for the law as an abstraction, an objective code of
justice that had to be followed even when it embarrassed and discommoded
the rulers.
Almost from its inception, the colony attracted refugees from China. Many
brought capital and technical skills with them, others were brigands and
murderers fleeing Chinese executioners.
Banking, shipping and insurance services of the colony quickly became the
most reliable in Southeast Asia. Macao, in spite of its three-century
lead on Hong Kong, was so badly handicapped by its shallow harbor,
critical land shortage, and unenterprising government that it sank into
a state of suspended antiquity. Hong Kong merchants, eager for new
business, kept in close touch with world markets. Labor was cheap and
abundant, still it was more liberally paid than in most of the Asiatic
countries. Labor unions numbered in the hundreds, but they were split
into so many quarreling political factions that they could rarely hope to
win a showdown fight against the colony’s business-dominated government,
although the Seamen’s Union did obtain many concessions after a long
strike in 1922.
Notwithstanding the social gulfs between the British, Portuguese, Indian
and other national elements in the colony, all of them march arm-in-arm
through one great field of endeavor; the desire and the capacity to make
money. Hong Kong lives to turn a profit, and its deepest fraternal bond
is the Fellowship of Greater Solvency.
Motivated by this common purpose, the British and Chinese dwelt together
in peaceful contempt during the first fifteen years of the colony’s
history, sharing the returns of a fast-growing world trade. The opium
traffic resumed as though there had never been a war over it. The only
enemy that worried the merchants became the Chinese pirates who preyed on
their ships.
From Fukien to Canton, pirate fleets prowled the China coast. Two of
their favorite hangouts were Bias Bay and Mirs Bay, within easy striking
range of Hong Kong. With the arrival of the British, they began looting
foreign merchant-ships with the same unsparing greed they had previously
inflicted on Chinese ships and villages.
British warships, superior to the pirate craft in all but numbers and
elusiveness, hunted them down with task forces. In four expeditions
between 1849 and 1858, the Queen’s Navy sank or captured nearly 200
pirate junks. Thousands of prisoners were taken, and a fair share of them
were hanged. British landing forces, storming up the beaches from the
warships, leveled every pirate settlement they could find.
The land-and-sea offensive had a temporarily restraining effect, but
new-born pirate fleets sprang up like dragon’s teeth to turn to the
practice of seaborne larceny. A fifth column of suppliers, informers,
and receivers of stolen goods within the colony obligingly assisted the
pirates in plucking their neighbors clean. Hong Kong’s oldest industry
has retained its franchise down to present times; in 1948, airborne
pirates attempted to high-jack a Macao-Hong Kong plane in flight.
The plane crashed, killing all but one person who was detained and
questioned, then released for lack of jurisdiction and sent back to China.
Piracy was the fuse that touched off a second Sino-British war in 1856,
when the Chinese government charged that a Chinese ship manned by a
British skipper was, in fact, a pirate vessel. While the skipper was
absent from the Chinese lorcha, the _Arrow_, his entire crew was taken
prisoner and accused of piracy by China.
The incident landed in the lap of Sir John Bowring, a former Member of
Parliament and one of the most curiously contradictory of all colony
governors. Philosophically a liberal and a pacifist, he was markedly
sympathetic toward the Chinese. A prolific author, economist and
hymn-writer, he had a brilliant gift for linguistics and was credited
with a working knowledge of 100 languages, among them Chinese. He
initiated wise and far-reaching improvements, including the first
forestry program, which were enacted into law by later governors. With
all these gifts, his five-year term (1854-1859) was marred by a series of
hot and futile wrangles with his subordinates.
This mercurial man reacted to the capture of the _Arrow_’s crew
by demanding an apology and their release. When the apology was
not immediately dispatched, he assembled a military force and set
out to capture Canton. War in India delayed the arrival of British
reinforcements, and Canton withstood the assault. Meanwhile, Chinese
collaborators in Hong Kong poisoned the bread supplied to Europeans;
Bowring’s wife was one of scores of persons who suffered serious illness
by eating the bread.
Shortly afterward the French joined forces with the English. Canton and
Tientsin were captured, and the Chinese government was forced to agree to
add more trading ports to the five provided by the 1842 Nanking Treaty.
The ensuing short-term armistice was broken by sporadic Chinese attacks
on British supply lines and a general resumption of hostilities, ending
in the occupation of the Chinese capital at Peking.
The Kowloon Peninsula, jutting from the Chinese mainland to a point one
mile north of Hong Kong Island, became involved in the war when its
residents rioted against British troops encamped there. The British
had considered the annexation of Kowloon for several years, realizing
that if the Chinese decided to fortify it their guns would command
Hong Kong harbor. Treating the riot as a compelling reason for taking
possession, the British obtained an outright cession of the peninsula
and Stonecutters Island, a little body of land about one mile west of
Kowloon, under the terms of the 1860 Convention of Peking.
Bowring, meanwhile, had created a public Botanic Garden—still a beautiful
hillside haven at the heart of the colony—laid down new roads and
erected a number of public buildings. But his daily relations with
other colony officials had degenerated into a battle-royal of insults
and counter-accusations. The home government, appalled at Bowring’s
un-British disregard for good form, rushed in a new minister to direct
negotiations with China and replaced Bowring as governor with Sir
Hercules Robinson, an unusually able colonial administrator. Bowring
left the colony with his reputation at low ebb, snubbed by its English
residents. The Chinese of Hong Kong, inured to snobbery but grateful for
Bowring’s attempts to help them, saw him off with parting gifts.
Sir Hercules began his administration with a piece of good fortune;
practically all the contentious subordinates who had made Bowring’s
tenure a long nightmare resigned or retired. The colony’s military
leaders kept the pot simmering by demanding most of Kowloon for their own
use, although Robinson wanted to preserve it for public buildings and
recreational grounds.
In England, where the brimstone smell of the Bowring affair lingered for
many months, the London _Times_ was moved to describe the China outpost
as a “noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented and insalubrious little
island” whose name was “always connected with some fatal pestilence,
some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble.” Robinson’s
skirmish with the military attracted no more attention than a stray
pistol-shot after a thundering cannonade.
Between wars and internal bickering, the colony was growing up. The
California gold rush of 1849, followed by a major gold strike in
Australia two years later, created a surge of prosperity as goods
and Chinese laborers funneled through the port on their way to the
goldfields. Japan was opened to world trade in 1853, and American
whalers and seal hunters had begun to call at Hong Kong. Total shipping
tonnage cleared through the port rose 1,000 percent in the fifteen years
after 1848. With skilled labor and well-equipped dockyards at hand, the
building, refitting and supplying of ships became the colony’s most
important industry.
Overseas shipment of Chinese laborers from mainland China to perform work
contracts in Central America, Australia, and the islands of the Indian
Ocean created grave human problems.
Chinese were being kidnaped, abused like slaves and packed into the
airless, filthy holds of sailing ships where they died at an alarming
rate. From 1855 on, the colony imposed tighter and tighter restrictions
on the trade, prescribing better living conditions aboard ship and
prosecuting kidnapers of labor. But the labor suppliers evaded the laws
of the colony by taking on provisions at Hong Kong and calling at other
ports along the China coast to shanghai contract workers.
The first of many waves of refugees to seek asylum in Britain’s
“barbarian” enclave arrived with the outbreak of the Tai Ping Rebellion
in 1850. Led by Hung Siu Tsuen, a Christian student, the rebels attacked
the ruling Manchu Dynasty and fomented wild disorder in Canton. Thousands
of apprehensive Chinese fled to Hong Kong, throwing themselves on the
mercy of the foreign devils.
Governor Robinson and the land-hungry generals eventually compromised
their conflicting claims to Kowloon real estate, but the colony
government spent years of patient effort in straightening out the fuzzy,
inexact and spurious titles to individual land-holdings on the peninsula.
On the whole, British courts achieved a fair adjudication of claims.
Sir Hercules did not permit his administrative successes to alter the
colony’s reputation for day-to-day blundering. He housed prisoners in
a hulk off Stonecutters Island where it was accidentally swamped by an
adjoining boat with a loss of thirty-eight lives. On a kindly impulse,
he belatedly moved the hulk closer to shore, and a group of convicts ran
down the gangplank to dry land and freedom.
Such oversights were exceptional; when Sir Hercules ended his term in
1865, he could look back on an administration which had put the unpopular
colony on its feet by reforming its courts and modernizing and expanding
its public works. This was no fluke, for he went on to similar successes
in Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa before being elevated
to the peerage.
During its formative period, the colony was predominantly a society of
adult males. Its merchants and workers came from China to earn a living
and to send their savings back to their wives and children; when they
grew too old to work, they returned to their native cities and villages.
But there was always a number of families among the population, and after
the refugees began pouring in, the percentage of children rose. In 1865,
children numbered 22,301 in a total population of 125,504. Only 14,000 of
these were of school age, and less than 2,000 of them attended school.
Missionaries began to run schools for Chinese and European children
almost from the time the colony was established, but the scale of their
undertakings was modest. The Chinese organized native schools, and like
the missionary ventures, floundered along with ill-trained teachers,
inadequate buildings and loose supervision. Government schools, low in
quality and enrollment, freed themselves of religious control in 1866. A
private school with advanced ideas instructed Chinese girls in English,
only to discover that its pupils were accepting postgraduate work as the
mistresses of European colonists.
Five Irish governors, starting with Sir Hercules Robinson in 1859,
ruled Hong Kong in succession, and three of them ranked among the
ablest executives in its history. Each one was in his separate way a
strong-minded, individualistic, and occasionally rambunctious chief.
After the Hibernian Era came to an end in 1885, no later governors
emulated their mildly defiant gestures toward the home government.
Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell, second of the Irish governors, was a tough
and seasoned colonial administrator who tackled the unsolved problems
of crime and piracy with perception and vigor. He saw that naval action
against the pirate fleets would bring no lasting results while the
sea-raiders had the assistance of suppliers, informers and receivers of
stolen goods within the colony. He put all ship movements in Hong Kong
waters under close supervision, and assigned police to ferret out every
colonist working with the pirates. To a greater degree than any of his
predecessors, he succeeded in checking piracy, but no governor has ever
stamped it out.
Macdonnell also intensified the campaign against robbery, burglary and
assault. Commercial interests applauded his increased severity in the
treatment of prisoners and his frequent reliance on flogging, branding
and deportation of offenders. Macdonnell himself saw no contradiction
between such rough-shod methods and, on the other hand, his generosity in
donating crown land for a Chinese hospital where the destitute and dying
could be cared for in a decent manner. Previously, relatives of ailing,
elderly paupers had deposited them in empty buildings with a coffin and
drinking water, leaving them to suffer and die alone.
Sir Arthur Kennedy, who followed Macdonnell, was one of the colony’s
most popular governors. He knew his job thoroughly and he combined this
knowledge with sound judgment, a lively sense of humor, and a rare talent
for pleasing the traders and the Colonial Office. He initiated the Tai
Tam water-supply system and continued Macdonnell’s relentless fight
against crime.
Kennedy threw his more orthodox colleagues into a dither by entertaining
Chinese merchants at official receptions in Government House, his
executive residence. He went so far as to invite these Chinese to suggest
improvements in the laws of the colony, and they promptly asked for a law
to punish adulterous Chinese women. Knowing that each of the petitioners
had several wives and concubines, Sir Arthur realized that his volunteer
legal advisers were actually looking for government sanction to hobble
their restless bedmates. He tabled the petition with tact.
External changes produced surprising mutations in the progress of the
colony. Its isolation diminished with the opening of the Suez Canal in
1869 and the completion in the next year of direct overland telegraph
connection with England. No longer was a governor left to his own devices
for days and weeks, improvising policy at the peril of his job until
orders arrived from home.
The hazards of life on the South China coast remained. In 1874, the
colony was devastated by the worst typhoon since 1841. Flying rooftops
filled the skies above the island, and 2,000 Chinese fishermen and their
families drowned in the ruins of their floating villages.
Sir Arthur’s departure to become the Governor of Queensland was a
melancholy time for the colony’s Chinese. They were openly devoted to
him—the first governor who had treated them more or less as equals. Even
the English liked him, and he became the first and only governor to have
a statue erected to his memory in the colony’s Botanic Garden. The statue
disappeared during the Japanese Occupation of World War II.
Kennedy’s successor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, not only preserved this
solicitude for the Chinese but provoked a storm of protest from European
residents by practicing leniency toward Chinese prisoners. When murders
and burglaries increased, his humanitarian policies were blamed.
Hennessy, a resourceful debater who was at his best in defending his own
policies, was not intimidated. The weak side of his administration showed
in a quite different area—his habitual neglect of essential paper work.
Hennessy’s friendliness toward the Chinese unexpectedly involved him in
controversy with the Chinese themselves. For centuries, wealthy Chinese
families had “adopted” little female domestic slaves by purchasing them
from their parents or relatives. In the households of the rich, these
Mui Tsai could be identified at once by their shabby clothing and their
general appearance of neglect.
Even families of limited means purchased Mui Tsai, so that the mother
of the family could take a job outside her home while the juvenile
slavey cared for the children and contended with the simpler household
drudgery. For the poorest families, sale of a daughter as a Mui Tsai
was the natural solution to an economic crisis. But the institution,
unacceptable to Western eyes from any aspect, had become the vehicle for
gross abuses—the kidnaping and sale of women as prostitutes in Hong Kong
or for transportation overseas. Kidnapings had become so numerous and
flagrant by 1880 that Governor Hennessy and Sir John Smale, the colony’s
Chief Justice, condemned the Mui Tsai system as contrary to British law.
The Chinese protested that Mui Tsai was not slavery; it was an ancient,
respectable adjunct of family life. Indeed, it was quite humane, for it
saved the daughters of many impoverished families from being drowned.
The English didn’t want that, did they? The Chinese offered no defense
of kidnaping and forced prostitution arising from the institution of Mui
Tsai.
Under pressure of the colony government, influential Chinese set up the
Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, to rescue women
and girls from flesh peddlers, provide a home for them in a section of
the Chinese-operated Tung Wah Hospital, and train them for respectable
occupations.
Hennessy, like Governor Bowring, entangled himself in a series of
acrimonious disputes with other colony officials, antagonizing them in
groups by lashing out at the school system, prison maladministration
and the harsh treatment of convicts. His most combative foe was another
Irishman, General Donovan, head of the colony’s armed forces. Their
verbal Donnybrook erupted over the perennially thorny question of how
much Kowloon land the military was entitled to.
General Donovan hit back at Hennessy with a sneak attack; he complained
to the home government about the outrageous sanitary conditions in
the colony—the lack of proper drainage, the polluted seafront, and
the verminous tenements where entire Chinese families shared one room
with their pigs and other domestic animals. All these conditions had
existed in Hong Kong since 1841, but no one had called them to the home
government’s attention with the holy indignation of Donovan.
Osbert Chadwick was sent from England to investigate and he found
sanitary conditions every bit as bad as Donovan had described them.
Chadwick’s report became the basis, after long postponement and inaction,
for the creation of a Sanitary Board and fundamental sanitary reforms.
Hennessy left the colony in 1882 to become Governor of Mauritius and to
lock horns with a new team of associates. Four administrators and two
governors passed through the colony’s top executive position in the next
decade, but none effected any substantial improvements in sanitation.
Every attempt to clean up pesthole tenements was balked by cries of
persecution and government interference from the landlords; they would
consent to no improvements unless the government paid their full cost.
In other directions the colony advanced steadily. It completed a new
reservoir system and central market and rebuilt the sewage and drainage
system. Ambitious land-reclamation projects were pushed ahead at Causeway
Bay and Yau Ma Tei to meet the unabating demand for level sites in the
crowded, mountainous colony. Kowloon, a wasteland of undulating red rock,
in the 1880s began cutting down its ridges and using the spoil to extend
its shoreline—a process that continues at an amazingly accelerated rate
today.
Hong Kong has never known an age of serenity; its brief interludes of
comparative calm have always been followed by cataclysmic upheavals. In
the spring of 1894, the colony was invaded by plague, long endemic on
the South China coast. Within a few months, 2,485 persons had died of
pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic plague, and Western medicine had no
more power to check it than had Chinese herb treatments.
The onset of plague was so terrifying that long-deferred sanitary reforms
were rushed through and rigidly enforced. Deaf to the protests of all
residents, British military units began regular inspections of Chinese
homes. Sanitary teams condemned 350 houses as plague spots and evicted
7,000 persons from infected dwellings. Resenting foreign invasion of
their privacy and mistrustful of Western medicine, the Chinese retaliated
by posting placards openly in Canton and furtively inside the colony
accusing British doctors of stealing the eyes of new-born babies to treat
plague victims.
Business came to a stop and ships avoided the plague-stricken port. The
plague abated for a year, then returned in 1896 to take another 1,204
lives. The Chinese kept up a rear-guard action against sanitary measures
with strikes and evasions, hiding their dead and dying or dumping their
bodies in the streets and harbor. Sometimes they exposed their dying
relatives on bamboo frames stretched across the narrow streets, hoping
that the departing soul would haunt the street instead of its former
house.
The benighted traditionalism of the colony’s Chinese awoke the British
administration to one of its most serious weaknesses; a half-century of
British rule had failed to give to 99 percent of the colony’s residents
any clear idea of the civilization they were expected to work and live
under. The tardy lesson eventually took effect, and the British embarked
on a long and intensive program of improving and enlarging their school
system. In the Tung Wah Hospital, English and Chinese doctors learned to
their surprise that therapies unlike their own were not necessarily sheer
quackery, and that they could work together for the benefit of their
patients.
With the population of the colony exceeding 160,000 in the early 1880s,
military and commercial leaders turned to the possibility of acquiring
more land on the Chinese mainland. They pressed the British Foreign
Office to seek the territory running north from the Kowloon Peninsula to
the Sham Chun River, about 15 miles away. The suggestions were rejected
as prejudicial to Sino-British relations until other foreign powers
started to thrust into Chinese territory for commercial concessions and
spheres of political influence.