1 HONG KONG HISTORY
By the Governor, the Right Honourable Christopher Patten
IN the hall of Government House hangs a picture by one of
my favourite young Hong Kong artists, Wang Hai. It is called 'Hong Kong History'. It is a dark, brooding picture, with only the slightest touches of colour in it to tell you that it is not simply an enlargement of a black-and-white photograph from the time depicted, October 1910. The occasion it shows is the last visit that Mandarins from Imperial China made to Hong Kong, for the opening of the Kowloon-Canton railway, a development that was to accelerate Hong Kong's growth and by the late 1920s help it to overtake Shanghai in the handling of China's international trade. The Mandarins in their traditional costumes stand around a dignified, elderly, Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi, all looking a little lost, out of place, out of time. At the end of the line, self- assured, hands thrust haughtily into pockets, stands a top-hatted European, the Chairman of the railway company, perhaps. The world he represented would wait until 1941 to be swept away. The world the Mandarins knew would last for only a few months before the 1911 revolution brought down the Ching Dynasty. And, in the date of its composition, June 1989, the painting carries yet another reference to the stirring events that have formed the backdrop to Hong Kong's history.
Since 1898, the year 1997 has been marked down in the calendar as a date of special significance, and today we are all hearing a lot about history. Films are being made, articles written, books published. Two themes tend to predominate, 'End of Empire' and 'Return of the Dragon'. Under the first, Hong Kong is looked at nostalgically, the last significant outpost and one of the most singular successes of Britain's imperial adventure. 1997 is the end of that story. The second theme is also largely about what is ending in 1997: the imperialist, opium-pushing intrusion into China, the end of humiliations inflicted on a weak Chinese government in the nineteenth century. It is very easy to become partisan on either of these interpretations, to overlook the truth in each, to overlook Hong Kong's own history, to overlook what Hong Kong now is.
Whatever the arguments about the rights and wrongs of the imperialist past, what has happened in Hong Kong is the coming together of two civilisations. The mostly Chinese men and women of this community have drawn on their own culture, but also on the ideas, the laws, the education and the arts of many other lands, adopting and adapting them to the growing needs of this city and its people. They have fashioned their own, usually successful solutions to maintaining a lively, harmonious society under unparalleled constraints of space and population density. This is not the debris from the collision of two civilisations but a new creation of them, offering fresh ideas to both.
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