ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG
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Vicar Apostolic, Bishop Raimondi, and the heads of the various Catholic missions and organisations. He attended mass daily at the new Catholic Cathedral in Caine Road. But he drew a blank: no Catholic institution was prepared to finance any of his schemes. He now threw away his mask of piety, doubtless with great relief, and settled down to enjoy himself and to gull another class of person. He soon installed a mistress in a rented house in Lyndhurst Terrace, loaded her with gimcrack jewellery and dresses from Gate and Fairall, the milliners of Queen's Road, and hired for her a sedan chair, complete with liveried chair-bearers. She appeared with the King on sundry royal occasions at the Hong Kong Hotel.
It is difficult to identify Mayréna's 'consort'. Soulié asserts that she was a Miss Dahlberg,25 who had accompanied her brother and Mayréna to Hong Kong on the Frejr, and that Mayréna met this blonde Swedish ice-maiden in 1888 at Bangkok, where she was engaged apparently in archaeological exploration; but other writers suggest Mayréna's new mistress was a lady from an Italian Opera Company touring in the East,26 which arrived in Hong Kong in late 1888. The latter seems the more plausible account, for at that time European opera singers and ballet dancers were often accommodating ladies who desired nothing better than to be set up in state by some rich protector. Whoever she was, all witnesses agree that the "Queen of the Sedangs' in Hong Kong was a most voluptuous demi-mondaine and that she fascinated the topers of the Hong Kong Hotel and the other hostelries that Mayréna frequented.
Much of Mayréna's roistering was done necessarily at the Hotel, since he could obtain credit and simply await the chits at the end of the month, and in its hospitable bar he met many kindred spirits, such as the atrabilious, scandal-mongering Robert Fraser-Smith,27 proprietor of the Hong Kong Telegraph, and also John Joseph Francis, Q.C.,28 Hong Kong's leading barrister and noted Irish tippler.
By 1888 the Hong Kong Hotel, established in 1860, had become Hong Kong's social centre. One author claims it was ‘rightly termed the heart of the Colony, for it is one great social rendezvous for dinners, teas, dances, and is probably the most noteworthy meeting place in the Orient'.29 'Proteus', in the Hong Kong Telegraph, supplies this description of its grandeur:
After a shower-bath and a change of clothes in our room—and all the rooms in the hotel are on the same scale of loftiness and