HONG KONG RIOTS OF OCTOBER 1884
55
have not considered that history to be of any great significance to anyone outside the Colony it is hardly surprising that it has not received the attention which it really deserves.
The lack of appreciation for Hong Kong's importance is especially evident when we look at the events of the Sino-French War. The Hong Kong Volunteers were expanded and rearmed in the years before and after the War. No doubt the 1884 riots3 assisted the process but James Hayes' "Short History" does not give the period of the war more than a passing notice indicating that the Sino-French War occurred and had some side effect on Hong Kong.* In his Laws and Courts of Hongkong James Norton-Kyshe did briefly discuss the riots, but he paid surprisingly little attention to the Peace Preservation Ordinance which was inspired by them.
Since the secondary material for this period in Hong Kong's history is so limited, any study of the period of the 1880s has to lean heavily on the equally scarce primary materials available outside the Colony. In this area the records of the Public Records Office in London are most helpful, but they can provide only the official version of the events. They seldom contain information on the motives of the participants, and are severely limited by the nature of government reports.
Though newspapers are frequently very poor sources of primary information, in this case the firsthand reports of the English language Hong Kong Daily Press are probably the most valuable source of information about the events which occurred there in the fall of 1884. Unfortunately the English press in Hong Kong, because of the prejudices of the reading public for which it was produced, is not a very good source of information about the Chinese community in the Colony. Many of the reports in the English press were colored by the prevailing attitudes of the European community toward the Chinese. However, this prejudice makes it just that much more important when the papers depart from those attitudes because that departure should indicate that something had occurred to alter the opinions of the reporters. As we will see, that is precisely the case with the editors of both the Shanghai-based North China Herald and the Hong Kong Daily Press in 1884.
What is really needed, and what is simply not available outside Hong Kong, is primary material which would enable us to ascertain what really were the motives of the Chinese participants in the