Hong Kong in Chinese history - community and social unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913

Historical Setting 33



that when a firm was listed as an importer and exporter of certain commodities to various cities or countries it often indicated that the firm was chiefly, rather than exclusively, engaged in trading with a particular city or country.

There were a total of about 1,700 Chinese commercial firms, large and small, listed in the Hong Kong directory of 1915 engaged in the importing and exporting of a wide variety of goods. Many Chinese businessmen tended to diversify their commercial interests, so that they were simultaneously proprietors and partners of several firms in various trades.

In addition to these, there were hundreds of foreign trading com­ panies based in Hong Kong, including the giant Jardine, Matheson & Co.; Butterfield and Swire; Siemssen & Co.; and Gibb, Livingston & Co.; etc. Many foreign companies and Chinese firms were closely tied to each other in a trade relationship. The foreign companies bought from Chinese firms the produce of China which were gath­ ered from the interior and the Chinese firms purchased from foreign companies the foreign commodities for distribution to the mainland.

Each year large volumes of China's imports and exports passed through Hong Kong . The percentage of China's trade with Hong Kong indicated the importance of Hong Kong as an entrepot. Al­ ready in the years 1871-73 Hong Kong handled 32.5 percent in value of China's total import trade and 14.7 percent of China's export trade. The percentages of the subsequent years were as follows:67





c h i n a ' s im p o r t s

c h i n a ' s e x p o r t s

YEARS

FROM HONG KONG

TO HONG KONG

1881-83

36.2%

25.4%

1891-93

51.2%

39.3%

1901-03

41.6%

40.8%

1909-11

33.9%

28.2%

1919-21

22.4%

23.8%



The decline in the percentage of China's trade with Hong Kong after 1909 indicated the growth of the trade of other ports of northern and central China such as Tientsin, Dairen, and Hankow. Still, Hong Kong maintained its significance as a trading center second only to Shanghai.68The colony's Chinese merchants had gained wealth from the expansion of Chinese and overseas trade.

The close business connections between Hong Kong and Shang­ hai, the two leading trading centers in China, formed a Hong Kong-

34 Historical Setting



Shanghai corridor. The powerful Kuang-tung pang (the circle or clique of Cantonese merchants) came to dominate the Shanghai business world. Continuously tapping the Cantonese community in Hong Kong for managerial talents, capital, and overseas connections, the Kuang-tung pang rose to a dominant position in rivalry with the Ningpo pang and outperforming many other dialect "circles" in Shanghai. While the Kuang-tung pang dominated such businesses as department stores, insurance, modem hotel, and the manufacturing of consumer goods, the Teochiu pang dominated Shanghai's grocery supplies from Kwangtung and Southeast Asia, via Hong Kong— dried goods such as shark's fin, bird's nests, sea cucumbers and other dried seafood.69 The Hong Kong-Shanghai corridor had an intellectual and cultural dimension as well; late Ch'ing reformers such as Wang T'ao, Cheng Kuan-ying, Tong King-sing, and Yung Wing spent substantial portions of their careers in or around the two cities, where they were exposed to Western culture and values.70 Two other reformers. Ho Kai and Hu Li-yüan, were lifelong residents of Hong Kong whose reform program was shaped by the business environment of the highly commercialzed port dty.

NUMBER OF



VESSELS

TONNAGE

3,756

7,216,169

4,621

7,720,875

6,828

4,630,364

1,310

743,992

1,581

70,021

29,564

2,651,470

47,660

23,032,891

419,202

11,216,532

40,772

1,778,887

507,634

36,028,310

By the first decade of the twentieth century, some sixty years after 1842, Hong Kong had become an extremely busy entrepôt port. During the year 1907 the total tonnage of shipping, including junks and steam ships (but excluding lighters, cargo boats, passenger boats, fishing crafts, etc.) entered and cleared in Hong Kong (that is, arriv­ als and departures put together) amounted to 507,634 vessels of 36,028,310 tons. They were as follows:71



British ocean-going ships Foreign ocean-going ships British river steamers Foreign river steamers Steamships under 60 tons Junks

Total foreign trade Steamships under 60 tons

in local trade

Junks in local trade Grand total

Historical Setting 35



Thus, during the year 1907 everyday an average of 1,390 large and small vessels of 98,707 tons entered and cleared the Hong Kong port, discounting large numbers of lighters, cargo boats, passenger boats, water boats, and fishing crafts of all kinds. This record exceeded that of any port in the world at the time.

Much of the prosperity of Hong Kong depended on the energy, ingenuity, and hard work of the overwhelming majority of the col­ ony's population, the Chinese laborers and merchants. The Chinese community thrived in the British colony.

How was the Chinese community formed and structured? How did it fare under British colonial rule? How was it related to the European community in Hong Kong and to the Chinese on the mainland? Chapters 2 and 3 examine these questions in historical context.

T W O

A Frontier Settlement: The Chinese Community Under Alien Rule, 1840s-1860s





[It is] the common practice of the Chinese of offering sedi­ tious resistance to a weak government by combining to strike work in order to mark their sense of irksome or imperfect legislation. — E. ]. Eitel





Historians have done considerable research on Hong Kong's rural society, but its urban community structure in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is still badly underresearched. Conse­ quently, many aspects of the city's social life and associations (such as craft and trade guilds, secret societies, native place associations, and commercial and labor organizations) are still imperfectly under- This chapter traces the formation of an urban Chinese com-

and the emergence and changing character of a community leadership from the 1840s to the 1860s. It examines the pattern of elite dominance and the complex relationship between elite, popu­ lace, Hong Kong government, and officials in Canton.

The colony's geographical proximity to the Chinese mainland was a decisive factor shaping its history. Its close social, economic, and demographic connections with China made its Chinese residents liable to the political influence and control of Chinese officialdom. Canton and Hong Kong authorities claimed the Chinese residents' allegiance, putting them in an ambivalent relationship with both

A Frontier Settlement 37



governments. This became particularly evident in times of social and political crises.

Since the British occupation of Hong Kong during the Opium War (1839-42) the Chinese had frequently been driven by poverty, hun­ ger, and sociopolitical disturbances on the mainland to take refuge in Hong Kong, which offered relative security and work opportunities. Therefore, it has often been asserted that "[i]nstead of imposing an alien government [on] the natives in the colony, the pattern of alien rule in Hong Kong is just the reverse. The colonized Chinese people came to Hong Kong to subject themselves voluntarily under the rule of an alien colonial administration."1In other words "most residents

. . . see themselves . . . as willing subjects of a foreign government rather than involuntary slaves of a conquering colonial regime."2

This assertion is true, but it tells only part of the story. There was a long tradition of popular animosity toward British colonial rule. This is an important aspect of the colony's history, which has been neglected by most scholars in Hong Kong studies, who have gener­ ally emphasized growth, development, stability, and alleged popular apathy, overlooking crises, tensions, and conflicts in the colony.



A Frontier Settlement Under the British in the 1840s

As previously indicated, the Chinese population of Hong Kong prior to the British occupation in 1841 numbered only about four thou­ sand, scattered in a few villages all over the island. In the absence of an established urban population the future dty of Victoria was to be built on the northern shore of the island. This was an important fact shaping the development of a Chinese community; for some decades after 1841 urban Hong Kong was a new settlement with little preex­ isting local power structure. Early Hong Kong was "a frontier outpost"3 off the coast of south China.

The town grew rapidly as people congregated there seeking em­

ployment opportunities. The Chinese migrants from different native places speaking different dialects were all strangers and newcomers in a frontier town, not subject to any established system of social control. They brought with them their religions, customs, prejudices, concepts, and experiences of social organization. Craft and trade guilds were formed. People speaking the same dialect clung together

38 A Frontier Settlement



for protection and mutual assistance, in competition with other dia­ lect groups for resources. But in the new environment of a frontier town under foreign colonial rule, Chinese residents of all dialects also experienced common problems that demanded cooperative so­ lutions. Hence they proceeded to organize their community to meet that demand. They gradually formed neighborhood associations (kai- fong) and temple committees, incorporating various dialect groups and providing public order and a rudimentary self-government. Thus, in the urban Chinese community of Hong Kong under alien rule, conflict and competition did not preclude cooperation among Chinese dialect groups.

Because of the sheer size and diversity of the British empire, the Colonial Office in London could not possibly administer every colony in detail. Decentralization became a hallmark of British imperial or­ ganization: each colony was governed according to local conditions. A "crown colony" like Hong Kong had considerable autonomy. A governor representing the crown was assisted by an executive coun­ cil and a legislative council, which could pass laws and issue ordi­ nances, though requiring Colonial Office approval.4 Both councils were composed at first of officials, with the subsequent addition of nonofficials appointed by the governor from among the colony's prominent residents.

Britain acquired Hong Kong primarily for the promotion of trade, not for territorial conquest. This primary concern shaped the govern­ ment attitude toward the Chinese residents. Far from seeking to assimilate them, British rule in its early years left the Chinese to their own devices, so long as public order was maintained and trade enhanced. The British did not have a blueprint for governing Hong Kong. In an empirical manner typical of the English they changed their administrative policy according to changing times and circum­ stances.

In order to induce the Chinese to settle in Hong Kong, Captain Charles Elliot proclaimed in 1841 that all Chinese inhabitants would be governed "according to the laws, customs, and usages of the Chinese (every description of torture excepted) by the elders of vil­ lages, subject to the control of a British magistrate," and all others "according to the customs and usages of British Police Law."5 Sub­ sequently two separate communities, Chinese and European, were formed, and the town divided into separate Chinese and European

A Frontier Settlement 39



quarters. This general pattern of segregation was maintained until the late nineteenth century, when the colonial government acceler­ ated the process of political integration to take more direct control over the Chinese community. During the first few decades of the colony's history, however, British control over Chinese community life was superficial.

The earliest Chinese migrants to Hong Kong were mostly from the poorest elements of society: the outcast Tanka boat people, laborers (a majority of Hakkas, but also Punti Cantonese), artisans, and ad­ venturers who gained profits by furnishing provisions and other services for fankwei (foreign devils). They defied Chinese officials' orders not to have any dealings with foreigners. In the aftermath of the Opium War Chinese magistrates still considered Chinese living under the British as traitors. But the prospects for profits were great in Britain's new colony. The construction of commercial establish­ ments, markets, warehouses, and government offices in the new settlement offered opportunities. Chinese from all neighboring dis­ tricts in the mainland flocked to Hong Kong. By April 1844 the Chinese population on the island had increased to 19,009. These consisted mostly of the lower classes: coolies, boat people, stonecut­ ters, domestic servants, craftsmen, small traders, in addition to Triads, pirates, outlaws, opium smugglers, brothel keepers, gamblers, and like adventurers.6

Much concerned about the type of Chinese who came to Hong

Kong, in 1844 the colonial treasurer reported to London that the mandarins' policy was to prevent respectable Chinese from settling in the colony: ''they encourage and promote the deportation of every thief, pirate and idle or worthless vagabond from the mainland to Hong Kong."7 Crime was rampant. Burglars even broke into the Government House (April 26, 1843) and attacked three mercantile houses (Dent's, Jardine's, and Gillespie's) in one night (April 28, 1843). Orders were issued in October 1842 and May 1843 prohibiting all Chinese boats from moving about the harbor after gunfire at 9

p.m. and requiring Chinese on shore to carry lanterns after dark and not to go outdoors after 10 p.m.8

Ignorant of the native language and customs, the European and Indian police had great difficulty regulating the Chinese population. Therefore, during the first two decades of the colony's history, the colonial government sought to implement the traditional Chinese

40 A Frontier Settlement



system of social and political control over its Chinese subjects. In 1844 Governor Sir John Davis adapted the Chinese pao-chia system of collective neighborhood responsibility by appointing native officers called paochang and paocheng to assist the police in such matters as rioting, thefts, robberies, smuggling, illegal assemblies, and registra­ tion. G. B. Endacott maintains that these unpaid native officers "had very little power and little incentive to perform their honorary but onerous duties/'9

As we shall see, the Chinese were developing their own mecha­

nism of social control, but it became clear that the pao-chia system adapted by the British did not work. During the 1840s the British exercised minimal direct control over the Chinese community life. An attempt to assume strict control provoked resistance in 1844.

On August 21, 1844, the Legislative Council passed an ordinance intended to control the Chinese population, through registration, and to check the influx of the "scum" of the Chinese into the colony. Government proclamations, posted on October 29, contained an am­ biguously worded Chinese translation of the ordinance, giving the impression that the one-dollar poll tax to be levied on the Chinese was monthly and not annual. Thus, Chinese laborers would lose half of their monthly $2-$3 wage. This exacerbated popular opposition to the colonial government. The Chinese hated the poll tax and refused to be individually registered. On October 31 laborers employed by the government and private individuals went on strike. A group of compradors threatened to leave the colony if the ordinance was not abrogated. On November 1 the Chinese went on a general strike. All shops and markets were closed; cargo boats were idle. Construction workers, coolies, and domestic servants were all on strike.10

The exorbitant demands of a foreign colonial government pre­ sented the Chinese of all dialect groups with a common problem requiring joint action. A sense of Chinese community was gradually being formed, as a deputation of the Chinese traders and compradors claimed to speak for the whole community. They sought to present a petition to the governor but were told that "no petition could be received, until the shops were opened, and the people returned to their labour." 1 In the meantime, an exodus of some three thousand Chinese had brought business to a complete standstill for several days. Eventually, on November 13, the Legislative Council was forced to amend the registration ordinance, abolishing the poll tax and

A Frontier Settlement 41



applying registration only to the lowest classes.12 A local English paper expressed great alarm: "This fatal error of hasty legislation has we fear lowered the English character in the estimation of the Chinese. They will on some future occasion attempt to starve their rulers into a compliance with their wishes, and it will require some wholesome discipline to convince them that government are [sic] not always to be intimidated."13

Collective action by the Chinese community seemed to have worked. The demands of an interventionist colonial government helped the formation of a sense of Chinese community. Tensions between Chinese and Europeans further enhanced the Chinese community conscious­ ness.



Tensions Between Chinese and Europeans in a Frontier Society

In the aftermath of the Opium War and throughout the 1840s ten­ sions and hostility characterized relations between the Chinese and the British in the whole Canton delta, the homeland of most Hong Kong Chinese. The "Canton city question" (i.e., British insistence on the right to enter the city) caused repeated popular outbursts against the Europeans in Canton. Governor Sir John Davis's naval expedition against Canton in April 1847 to force the opening of the city only aggravated mutual hostility. Foreigners were repeatedly attacked by the Cantonese populace in the delta. Governor Davis himself was assaulted on April 11, 1845, while on a visit to Macao. The Portu­ guese Governor of Macao, J. M. F. Amaral, was assassinated by the Chinese on August 22, 1849. Tensions in the Canton delta spilled over to Hong Kong. In September 1849 a rumor circulated among the Chinese in Hong Kong that the Chinese government had offered a reward for the assassination of Hong Kong governor Sir S. G. Bon­ ham, whose carriage was henceforth escorted by troops.14

Strong antiforeign feelings among the people in the Canton delta were naturally shared by the Cantonese in Hong Kong concerned about the life and safety of their relatives back home. Crime was rife in the colony during Governor Bonham's administration (1848-54). On July 8, 1848, some Chinese attempted to poison twenty-five men of the Royal Artillery. On December 24 another attempt was made to set fire to the Central Market.15 Piracy on the waters around Hong

42 A Frontier Settlement



Kong remained prevalent, especially from the 1840s through the 1860s, as did the daring robberies and raids in Victoria of armed gangs on stores, shops, and compradors' offices. The sociological significance of piracy and armed robbery in Hong Kong deserves further scholarly investigation.16

Eric Hobsbawm wisely cautions against treating all banditry as an expression of social protest or rebellion. He makes a distinction be­ tween “social bandits," who formed part of society in the eyes of the peasants, and the criminal underworld which formed an outgroup and was largely recruited from outgroup. Although Hobsbawm also recognizes that “people can readily be recruited from the first into the second [group],"17perhaps he distinguishes too sharply between the two groups. In the real world bandits can both help and abuse the poor.18 As with the Triads in Hong Kong, pirates frequently engaged in nonpolitical criminal actions, but occasionally they also acted politically.

The pirate chiefs Shap-ng-tsai and Chui Apo ravaged South China

seaboard villages and shipping, holding them hostage until ransoms were paid.19 But there were occasions when pirates helped innocent villagers against the fankwei, thereby becoming heroes in the eyes of the villagers.

On February 25, 1849, Captain Da Costa and Lieutenant Dwyer strolled into the village of Wong-ma-kok on the southern side of the island of Hong Kong, some ten miles from Victoria. “[I]n a state of intoxication," according to contemporary legal accounts, “they pro­ ceeded from house to house inquiring for women until they came to the house of an old man . . . [whose] wife and daughter-in-law were engaged in cooking." One of the British officers began to take liber­ ties with the young girl. And “on being remonstrated with by the old man and his wife, the . . . officer struck them both with his stick with such severity as to draw blood." The old man rushed to the door of the house and cried out to the neighbors for help. When the villagers arrived and attempted to pull the British officers out of the house, the latter resisted and beat them with their sticks. Hearing the commotion, pirate chief Chui Apo and his men "rushed in armed with spears and attacked the officers The officers upon retreat­

ing were hotly pressed by Chui Apo and his spearmen, over­ powered, and struck down." They hurled the officers' bodies into the sea.20

A Frontier Settlement 43



The following day the Hong Kong police and one hundred British troops scoured the island for the two missing officers. The village of Wong-ma-kok was found deserted, its inhabitants afraid of British retaliation. But the old man whose head was broken by the British officer was unafraid; he did not run away, because he said he “had done nothing wrong." On the evening of February 27 the police found the body of Captain Da Costa in the water. With Chui Apo and his spearmen now wanted by the colonial authorities, the British navy soon destroyed his pirate fleet and used treachery to capture him in 1851. He was tried in the Criminal Court in Hong Kong and sentenced to transportation for life. But Chui Apo sought release through suicide in jail.21 The pirate chief had defended the villagers of Wong-ma-kok against the fankwei's intrusion.



The Emergence of a Chinese Elite in the 1840s

Chinese adventurers in the new frontier settlement of Hong Kong had a complex and ambiguous character. They were people who took risks in a wide range of activities. They smuggled opium, com­ mitted crimes, defended the villagers against foreign devils, or col­ laborated with foreigners for self-enrichment.

Tensions and hostility were only one side of the relationship be­ tween Chinese and Europeans. This did not preclude cooperation and collaboration, a pragmatic side of their relationship. Given ma­ terial benefit and employment opportunities, the poor boatmen, la­ borers, artisans as well as traders and compradors were easily coopted by foreign colonists.

In the rough and fluid society of a frontier town in the 1840s, social mobility was great. A daring adventurer who acquired wealth could use his money in worthy causes and acquire social respectabil­ ity as a community leader.

A leading example was Loo Aqui, originally an outcast Tanka bum- boatman from Whampoa. During the Opium War he supplied the British fleet with provisions—risking the Chinese officials' displea­ sure—and was rewarded by the British with a large section of land in Hong Kong. Yet he adeptly played both sides of the game. The Chinese magistrates lured him back to Canton by offering him an official degree, which he accepted. He quickly slipped back to Hong Kong, however, to enjoy the rewards given him by the British. Loo

44 A Frontier Settlement



Aqui operated a gambling establishment and brothels and held the opium monopoly. He built a theater in 1845 and obtained the privi­ lege of operating a market. By 1850 he was collecting rent from more than one hundred houses and shops. He was charged by the colonial authorities with being in league with pirates, though this was not substantiated. Rumor continued to spread that he was the "Sea King/' tolling all who passed his squadron. 2

Such rumors struck fear in people's hearts, but Loo Aqui used his wealth wisely, winning him the Chinese community's respect. The ability to inspire both fear and respect simultaneously was an essen­ tial attribute of an elite in a rough frontier society, an elite being defined as individuals who exerted dominance over local society. He was a benefactor "unto whom those who were in distress, in debt, or discontented, resorted [for relief]." He "opened a place for gam­ bling on the hill side along Chung-wan, to which all among the fishing-boat people, who loved gambling, came." He operated a market for the inhabitants. With religion central to the life of the community, in 1847 Loo Aqui and Tam Achoy built the Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road, where "they 'judged the people' in public assembly."23

Tam Achoy, a native of K'ai-p'ing (one of the Sze Yap districts), had been a foreman in the government dockyard in Singapore. He came to Hong Kong in 1841 to serve the British and was granted land and business privileges. He began to buy up property until he had acquired an extensive sea frontage. As a contractor he built a number of pretentious buildings and operated a market. After 1848 he be­ came a leading broker and charterer of emigration ships. He "headed most of the subscription lists for worthy causes with generous dona­ tions." He was trustee for the I-Ts'z Temple in Taipingshan in 1851 and the temple in Queen's Road East at Wanchai in 1869.24

In a developing entrepot under alien rule elite individuals like Loo Aqui and Tam Achoy arose from very humble origins. They used various available resources (commercial, social, and religious) to earn and maintain their elite position. Their connections with the British served as a vehicle for social advancement. They collaborated with the British in return for privileges that they used to acquire wealth. Material wealth in turn enabled them to engage in worthy causes for the community. They operated markets to serve the inhabitants and

A Frontier Settlement 45



to create greater wealth. Invoking the moral authority of deities, they built the Man Mo Temple where they arbitrated disputes to maintain public order. In these ways a former Tanka boatman and a former foreman from a minority Sze Yap dialect group succeeded in becom­ ing community leaders in the frontier town of Victoria.



Native Place-Dialect Groups in Early Hong Kong: Conflict and Cooperation

The origins and background of these adventurers who became com­ munity leaders reflected the fluid social conditions of the colony in the early decades of its history. Even the outcast Tanka boat people sought to mix with the various dialect groups on shore and merge with the general population. According to E. J. Eitel (resident and official in Hong Kong from 1862 to 1897), the boat people “invaded Hongkong the moment the settlement was started, living at first on boats in the harbour with their numerous families, and gradually settling on shore." Those settled on shore tended to “disavow their Tan-ka extraction in order to mix on equal terms with the mass of the Chinese community." Loo Aqui, who emerged as a community leader, was one of them. Eitel testified to “a process of continuous re­ absorption in the mass of the Chinese residents of the Colony" throughout the nineteenth century.25

Kwok Acheong was another Tanka boatman that supplied the British forces with provisions during the Opium War. He settled on land and was closely associated with Tam Achoy, a Punti Cantonese. He became comprador of the P. and O. Steamship Company. During the 1860s Kwok Acheong developed a fleet of steamships. By then he had become one of the wealthiest Chinese in Hong Kong and was a liberal subscriber to all charities. Until his death in 1880 he re­ mained a community leader with whom the colonial government frequently consulted regarding affairs of the Chinese population 26

It would seem that a man's native place and dialect background was not a crucial factor in his social advancement at the time. Per­ haps it would be anachronistic to perceive early Hong Kong in the light of later regional associations (t'ung-hsiang hui-kuan), which only began to appear after the mid-1870s and did not proliferate until around 1911. Although the native place-dialect principle was an

46 A Frontier Settlement



important factor in Chinese social and economic life, in the first few decades of the colony's history it was not the most important basis for the Chinese community organization.

Though there has been little research on this subject, a recent article by Elizabeth Sinn confirms my study. She points out that apart from an obscure Hsin-an hui-kuan, which had appeared in the late 1840s and fizzled out in 1857, no other associations were organized primarily on a district-dialect basis. “It was common for people from the same districts and villages to engage in a particular trade, so that it was common for guilds to be also Landesmannschaften. But in Hong Kong's case most of the larger guilds, e.g., the Nanbei hang guild, the compradore, the rice, opium, piece goods and yard dealers' guilds, for instance, were not district-based." Thus, “until the mid- 1870's, district origin had not been an important organizing principle in Hong Kong.“ 27 By then, as we shall see, some of the most impor­ tant community organizations, such as the Nam Pak Hong (1868), the District Watch Committee (1866), and the Tung Wah Hospital Committee (1872), had already been formed, cutting across native district lines.

The late appearance of native district associations in Hong Kong

was probably due to a combination of reasons. The first could be the absence of a host community in Hong Kong. It was a frontier town in which all Chinese were strangers and newcomers. As Sinn rightly points out, "if district associations were created as a means to main­ tain identity vis-à-vis the host community, this precondition hardly existed in Hong Kong."28 Moreover, Hong Kong's ambulatory pop­ ulation and its geographical proximity to the mainland made native district associations rather superfluous. The colony's Chinese had families in Kwangtung and Fukien within a day or two's boat jour­ ney. They often moved back and forth between Hong Kong and their home villages. Unlike the Cantonese in Shanghai, nine hundred miles away from home, and unlike the Chinese communities living in isolation in remote foreign countries oveseas, necessitating native district associations for mutual aid,29 the Cantonese and Fukienese in early Hong Kong did not see the pressing need for such associations. Though not yet formally organized into native district associa­ tions, however, people speaking the same dialect still tended to cling together for protection and mutual assistance, often in competition with other dialect groups for resources and employment opportuni-

A Frontier Settlement 47



ties. Pugilistic clubs were formed for practicing the arts of self- defense.30 But in the rapidly expanding new frontier town of Victo­ ria, where practically all Chinese immigrants were strangers and newcomers, there was also a tendency to congregate and live in huts set up near the sites of new constructions in the port dty. They crowded into such districts as Saiyingpun and Taipingshan within the dty.

There were both conflicts and cooperations among the dialect groups in urban Hong Kong. As we shall see, fighting broke out in 1894 between coolies of different subethnic groups. But bloody armed feuds (hsieh-tou) seemed far less severe or frequent when compared with those that occurred among their brethren in Kwangtung and Fukien on the mainland. This could be attributed to several factors. First, the interventionist British authorities would not tolerate vio­ lence in the streets of Hong Kong, as public order was essential for the colony's trade and security. Equally important were the pattern of immigration and social structure in Hong Kong.

Most Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong came as individuals, leaving their families behind in their native villages in the mainland. Even after 1850, when some families started to move in, the majority of immigrants still consisted of individual settlers who went back and forth between the colony and their native villages. In 1848 the popu­ lation of Hong Kong numbered 21,514; only one-fifth were females. It rose to 39,017 in 1853, with one-third females, and to 125,500 in 1865, of whom sixty-three percent were adult males,31 still indicating the relative paucity of families in the colony. Nearly two-thirds of the Chinese residents were adult males who left their families behind in their home villages. Whereas dialect groups on the mainland were powerfully reinforced by kinship and lineage ties and by their pos­ session of lands and villages as subethnic power bases, the dialect groups in urban Hong Kong consisted mostly of rootless individual men living together in coolie houses carefully watched by the colonial authorities.

What is more, in a frontier town under alien rule all Chinese were new settlers sharing some common problems that frequently neces­ sitated cooperation and joint actions. They were all concerned with public order, security of life and property, and the often exorbitant demands of their foreign colonial masters whose language, laws, and courts they did not understand. For all of these reasons, tensions

48 A Frontier Settlement



and conflicts among Chinese dialect groups in the British colony did not exclude cooperation among them to solve their common prob­ lems. The Chinese community could only be formed through the coordination of its subethnic components.

There were variations in customs, beliefs, and social practices among the Chinese of different dialect groups. The Tanka boat people in particular had their peculiar ways and taboos. There was a differ­ ence in pronunciation of certain words between standard Cantonese and the boat people's Cantonese. Their customs and superstitions reflected their water-borne life-style. When they ate broiled fish they were careful not to break off any of the bones. When they had finished one side of the fish they did not turn it over to eat the other side. And when they drank wine, it was never bottoms-up. All these portended shipweck.32

Despite variations in their subcultures, however, the Chinese of

all dialect groups under British colonial rule shared much common culture that served to bring them together into a community. 3 They worshipped the same gods—Tin Hau (Ma Tzu), Hung Hsing, Kwun Yum (Kuan-yin), Fuk Tak Kung, Kuan Ti, and so forth. As religion was central to the lives of the Chinese residents, temples served as community centers.



Temples and Community Social Structure

Temples dominated the community social structure in early Hong Kong. James Hayes's essay on temple and shrine organizations in urban British Hong Kong shows that "inter-dialect communities or­ ganized to arrange the worship of street shrines" protecting the well­ being of their localities. The Chinese settlers of all dialects, including the Tanka boat people, came to worship the same gods in shrines and temples because of "their universally desired end—namely, com­ munal good fortune and prosperity under the protection of the gods."34 The earth god shrine in the Saiyingpun district of Victoria provides

a good example of the unifying force of common beliefs. Local tradi­ tion traces the shrine's beginnings to a great epidemic (probably in 1894), which caused many deaths in the district—although it could be even older than that, since the district was already well estab­ lished by the 1850s. The shrine was dedicated to the earth god Fuk Tak Kung, who in his lifetime was a noted Chinese medical practi-

A Frontier Settlement 49



tioner and in death became the guardian god of a crowded city district. So great was his reputation that people from other districts came regularly to worship at the shrine. A committee consisting of kaifong (street neighborhood leaders and prominent shopkeepers of the district) ran the shrine. They arranged for chanting by Taoist priests on the god's birthday in the first moon and at the Yu-lan Hungry Ghosts Festival in the seventh moon. Religious rituals were often accompanied by a puppet show to please the god. Local resi­ dents considered the shrine to be of great importance to their well­ being.35

In the crowded district of Saiyingpun fear of disease posed a common threat to all residents from whatever native places. Epidem­ ics of fever visited the colony each summer, causing much mortality and alarm. Malarial fever and plague knew no dialect differences. The earth god Fuk Tak Kung protected all residents and discrimi­ nated against none. In each district of Hong Kong there was at least one shrine dedicated to the earth god, who looked after the district under his jurisdiction. The shrine committee in each district was composed of the kaifong of the respective district. As with the com­ mittee in Saiyingpun, the shrine committee in the Taipingshan dis­ trict was concerned with religious matters of that district.36 But the committee of the Man Mo Temple in Hollywood Road performed the duty of looking after both religious and general civil affairs of the area. Indeed it claimed jurisdiction over the whole Chinese commu­ nity of Hong Kong as early as the 1850s.

The Man Mo (Wen Wu) Temple was dedicated to two gods: Lord

Man Cheong (Wen Ch'ang), who presided over the destinies of dvil officials, and the martial god Kuan Ti, who personified loyalty and righteousness. Together, the two gods had the purview of protecting people's well-being and bringing peace and prosperity to the com­ munity. The temple originated from a small shrine, probably dating back to the founding of the port colony in 1842. An inscription on a brass bell in the temple records a date of "the 27th Year of Emperor Tao-kuang [1847 A.D.],"37 the year when Loo Aqui and Tam Achoy built the temple.

The Man Mo Temple was repaired and enlarged in 1851. E. Sinn shows that it was a colonywide project, with support cutting across regional and dialect group divisions and coming from various guilds. Loo Aqui was Tanka. Tam Achoy was from K'ai-p'ing, one of the Sze

50 A Frontier Settlement



Yap districts in Kwangtung. Ho Asik, who later succeeded Tam Achoy as the account manager, was from Shun-te. Several people from Panyu donated a couplet, and a mason named Tseng, probably a Hakka, contributed the stone columns at the main entrance. The Pork Dealer's Guild provided the stone lions in the yard, which were to scare away evil spirits. Several tablets were presented by various guilds, including the Shoe Makers' Guild and the Washermen's Guild. The enlarged temple cost nearly a thousand pounds to erect, reflect­ ing the Chinese community's growing wealth. The temple commit­ tee, elected in 1851 by shopkeepers of the Sheung-wan district of Victoria, judged all cases of public interest there. The base of the commiittltee was gradually extended, until by 1874 the kaifong leaders of all miajor city districts in Hong Kong were represented.38 The Man Mo Temple became a focal point of Chinese community life. Coolies and pugilistic clubs of various dialect groups vied with each other in providing lion dance teams for the religious processions organized by the temple committee.

The kaifong leaders were prominent merchants and shopkeepers of the street neighborhood. H. J. Lethbridge states that they were "groups of civic-minded, status-seeking and paternalistic citizens in a partic­ ular area of the city who set themselves up . . . as a public body" to manage public matters. They were accepted by the Chinese populace because "they commanded the social skills and had . . . much to offer the poor—money, alms and services."39 The kaifong leaders serving on the Man Mo Temple Committee arbitrated disputes and managed community affairs in a "public affairs office" (kung-so) built in 1862-63 beside the temple.40 Thus, the merchant elite acted like China's gentry managers (shen-tung),41 managing public affairs and arbitrating civil and commercial disputes among the Chinese com­ munity in Hong Kong. They invoked the moral authority of the temple's two deities: the god of literature. Lord Man Cheong, and the god of war, Kuan Ti, whom the merchants regarded as a god of wealth and fidelity in business transactions.

A matter that concerned the colony's Chinese, regardless of origins, was the urgent need for a common ancestral temple to serve the dead—specifically to receive the deceased persons' tablets awaiting transfer to their native villages. To the colony's growing Chinese community this was a matter of great importance that required the cooperation of all dialect groups. In 1851 Tam Achoy, Lu A-Ling, and

A Frontier Settlement 51



twelve others petitioned the government for a grant of land to build such a temple.42 Given a piece of land in Taipingshan, they raised funds to build the Kwong Fook I-ts'z (wide benevolence common ancestral temple). Like the erection of the Man Mo Temple, this again reflected a growing sense of Chinese community consciousness and the emergence of community leadership.43

The Chinese and European communities remained segregated. The Chinese were allowed to manage their own affairs as long as public order was maintained and trade carried on. But when order and security were at stake the British colonial authorities were quick to resort to force. This became evident in the crises of the 1850s.



Tensions and Crises in the 1850s

Paradoxically, this was a decade of rapid economic growth and socio­ political crises. As stated in chapter 1, during the Taiping uprising (1850-64) tens of thousands of Chinese, including wealthy merchant families, fled the disorder on the mainland for the relative order and security of Hong Kong. The influx of people and capital stimulated trade and brought about commercial prosperity. But disorder on the mainland also caused tensions and crises in Hong Kong.

The Taiping rebels were active in and around the British colony, where they made common cause with pirates, brigands, and the Triads. From late September 1854 Kowloon City, across from Victoria Harbor, was contested between the Taipings and the Chinese impe­ rial forces. Armed Taiping bands occasionally paraded the streets of Hong Kong. On December 21, 1854, the Hong Kong police arrested several hundred armed rebels who were about to embark on an attack on Kowloon City. On January 23, 1855 a fleet of Taiping war junks came to the brink of a naval battle with the Chinese imperial war junks in Victoria Harbor but were ordered away by the British colonial authorities. Officers of the Taiping war junks fraternized with the Hong Kong Chinese Christians and some missionaries.44 In Hong Kong the Taiping leaders' friends and relatives, such as Hung Jen-kan and Li Cheng-kao (Li Tsin-kau), formed close relations with missionaries such as Theodore Hamberg, James Legge (of the Lon­ don Missionary Society), and Rudolph Lechler (of the Basel Mission­ ary Society), who wished to use such relations to exert influence on the Taiping movement.45

52 A Frontier Settlement



Tensions in the colony were compounded by the Arrow War. The Arrow Incident on October 8, 1856, involved a lorcha named Arrow that was owned by some Hong Kong Chinese. Anchored off Canton, it was registered with the British colonial government, flying a British flag. With the excuse of searching for pirates Chinese officials ar­ rested its twelve Chinese crew members and hauled down the British flag. Britain used this incident as a pretext to press for the opening of Canton and for more concessions from China. Failing this, the British started the Arrow War (1856-60) against China. In response to the British bombardment of Canton in October and November of 1856, Viceroy Yeh Ming-ch'en put a price of one hundred taels of silver on each English head and called upon the Chinese in Hong Kong to leave the colony immediately. Under his instruction placards were posted in the streets of Hong Kong and Canton inciting people to fight the British enemy by any means.46 The placards also offered rewards for the heads of compradors collaborating with the foreign enemy.47The police quickly pulled down the placards.

The British bombardment of Canton, their blockade of the Canton river, and other war acts naturally aroused anti-British sentiments among the Chinese in Hong Kong, who worried about the safety of their families, relatives, and homeland property. Indeed, the ambu­ latory Hong Kong Chinese themselves were threatened by the British war actions. Apprehensive of an uprising, a British gunboat named Acorn was anchored near the Central Market on December 30, 1856, to overawe the Chinese “rowdies" congregating there. The police force was strengthened and night pass regulations strictly enforced.48 On the morning of January 15, 1857, the European community in Hong Kong was seized by a panic because their bread had been poisoned. About two or three hundred Europeans who had partaken of the bread supplied by the E-sing Bakery suffered, more or less, from arsenic poisoning. Some became seriously ill, including the governor's wife. Lady Bowring. Cheong Ah-lum, the bakery's owner and a well-known comprador, had left that morning for Macao with his father, wife, and children, but they themselves were also poi­ soned. Cheong Ah-lum was arrested in Macao. The police also ar­ rested fifty-one of his workmen, who were detained until February 3 in a tiny room measuring only fifteen-feet-square at a police station. Finally a doctor urged the authorities to remove them to the jail. It was believed that the poisoning was ordered from Canton, but nei-

A Frontier Settlement 53



ther proof nor the culprits could be found. At the trial the attorney- general asserted: “Better to hang the wrong men than confess that British sagacity and activity have failed to discover the real crimi­ nals.“ 49

As there was no evidence incriminating the suspects, they were acquitted by a British jury. But they were quickly rearrested as "sus­ picious characters." What did the Chinese elite do on behalf of the bakery owner and fifty-one workmen who were acquitted and rear­ rested? The leading Chinese merchants petitioned the governor against their retention and recommended “voluntary banishment" instead. The Chinese elite could do no more than this when the colonial authorities were determined to use force to keep public order and ensure the security of the European community. Fifty-one European residents memorialized the governor to urge forceful deportation of the prisoners to Formosa. Fourteen others petitioned the governor to express their concern that prisoners, once acquitted, "cannot be twice called in question for the same offence," and that their rearrest would "throw discredit on our system of administrating justice in the eyes of the Chinese population." Nevertheless, the petitioners rec­ ommended that each prisoner "should be compelled to absent him­ self from the Colony." In other words, the European petitioners thought that the acquitted Chinese could not be legally expelled but must nevertheless be expelled from the colony. Eventually the crowded conditions of the jail induced the governor to release the rearrested prisoners, who were ordered never to return to Hong Kong.50

Meanwhile, indiscriminate mass arrests occurred. Some five

hundred or six-hundred men were rounded up and 167 deported to Hainan; 204 "suspicious looking characters" were arrested in Bon­ ham Strand, and 46 others imprisoned. A further 146 men were apprehended.51 The Chinese community elite remained subdued during the whole operation.

As no culprits could be found, a local English paper subsequently speculated that the bread poisoning might have been caused by a mere accident: flour could have been contaminated on board a cargo ship also carrying arsenopyrite.52 Whatever the real cause of the bread poisoning, it revealed a great social tension in the colony. The damage to racial relations had been done by the colonial govern­ ment's arbitrary measures and indiscriminate mass arrests and de­ portation. Among the Hong Kong Chinese the incident had left a

54 A Frontier Settlement



legacy of bitterness and anticolonialism. It also magnified the Euro­ peans' fear and defensiveness, widening the divisions existing be­ tween them and the Chinese community.

The bread poisoning incident was significant in still another way. It revealed the dilemma of the Hong Kong Chinese resident caught between the conflicting demands of the Chinese and British authori­ ties. During the Arrow War mandarin intimidation caused some Hong Kong Chinese merchants, who had been providing provisions for the British, to close their businesses and return to the mainland. Cheong Ah-lum, the comprador and the bakery's owner, had been warned many times by the Chinese residents in Hong Kong about his dealings with the British, and his shop in Canton had been set on fire. But he ignored all warnings. He continued to provide bread and other provisions for the Europeans, making big profits until the bread poisoning case broke out. Expelled by the colonial govern­ ment, Cheong Ah-lum dared not return to China. He boarded a ship for Saigon.53

This incident served to highlight the predicament of the Chinese residents in Hong Kong. Both Canton and Hong Kong authorities claimed their allegiance, putting them in an ambivalent relationship with both governments. This became particularly evident in times of crises such as the 1856 Arrow incident and the 1857 bread poisoning case. And it would be evident again in the 1858 exodus and the conflicting responses of the colony's Chinese to foreign intrusion during the Second Opium War.

Tensions continued throughout the war. Incendiarism was preva­

lent in the colony. George Duddwell's bakery, which had taken over from Cheong Ah-lum the supplying of bread to the European com­ munity, was burned on February 28, 1857. It was then discovered in April 1857 that a vast conspiracy in Canton was organized to make war against British lives and property in Hong Kong. British shipping and even gunboats were frequently attacked. On December 28,1857, the Anglo-French forces commenced a bombardment of Canton, which fell on January 5, 1858. Vicerory Yeh Ming-ch'en was captured and sent to Hong Kong en route to Calcutta. Canton was occupied by the Anglo-French forces and governed by the Allied Commissioners from January 5, 1858, to October 21, 1861. Rural militia under the gentry and loyalist officials offered vain opposition to the occupation forces.54

The Chinese magistrates of the neighboring districts had repeat-

A Frontier Settlement 55



edly called on the Chinese residents of Hong Kong to fight with any means against the foreign invaders. The magistrates now moved the rural militia "to compel all village elders to cut off the market sup­ plies of the Colony and to send word to their respective clansmen in Hongkong to leave the Colony immediately on pain of their relatives in the country being treated as rebels." This resulted in an exodus in July 1858 of over twenty thousand Chinese—mostly laborers—from the colony back to their homeland. They boycotted the European community by staying away and stopping the food suplies. No work of any kind could be accomplished, since tailors, shoemakers, car­ penters, and artisans of every kind had departed from Hong Kong. 5 Governor Bowring issued a proclamation calling on the Chinese mag­ istrates and gentiy to help end the boycott. When a British crew was fired upon by the braves of Namtao, a walled town in Hsin-an district. Bowring sent a naval force to take Namtao and to coerce the magistrates to restore the market supplies to the colony.56 This rep­ resented another instance of large-scale hostile confrontation be­ tween the Chinese and the British colonists.

Some Chinese historians are quick to claim that the 1858 exodus reflected popular nationalism against foreign imperialism, meaning that the Chinese laborers who left the colony were motivated by a sense of collective identity with and loyalty to China as a nation­ state.57 But anti-British feelings did not necessarily entail Chinese national consciousness. The historian should not magnify the exodus into an incident of popular nationalism. Until solid evidence is found to support the Chinese historians' daim, perhaps it is better to regard the exodus as a response of the Hong Kong populace to the Chinese magistrates' coerdon. Nevertheless, the hostile confrontation had exacerbated tensions and mutual suspidon already existing between Chinese and Europeans in the British colony.



Conflicting Responses to Foreign Intrusion

Dr. E. J. Eitel (who was a missionary in Hong Kong from 1862, acting Chinese secretary to Governor Hennessy, and inspector of schools, 1879-97) admitted that "from the first advent of the British and all through the wars with China, the Puntis [Cantonese] as a rule were the enemies and the Hakkas the friends, purveyors, commissariat and transport coolies of the foreigners, while the fishing population

56 A Frontier Settlement



provided boatmen and pilots for the foreign trade."58 This was a frank admission by a high colonial official that the Punti Cantonese, the majority of Hong Kong's population, were the enemies of the British colonists.

In fact, however, the Punti Cantonese merchants were also easily coopted by the British. The brothers Li Sing and Li Leong, for in­ stance, had diversified their investments in the money changing business, shipbuilding, trade, opium monopoly, gambling, and coolie labor brokerage. With so much investment in Hong Kong, they iden­ tified their interests with the British when China was at war with Britain and France. They "gave contributions to foreigners to the extent of over a lakh of ready money and recruited native braves who went to the front at Tientsin. When peace was declared they shared in the War Indemnity as well as in the Imperial effects and curios of the Yuen-ming-yuen [Summer Palace]."59 A Chinese coolie corps of seven hundred and fifty Hakkas was organized to work for the Anglo-French forces in 1857.60Again, two thousand Hakka cool­ ies were easily recruited in 1860 to serve as porters for the Anglo- French expedition forces against T

Thus, given material benefit, r boat people and Hakka laborers as well as the Punti Cantonese merchants were easily coopted by the foreign invaders. The majority of the Hong Kong Chinese, however, remained suspicious of and hostile to the British invaders, whose acts of war had directly threatened the lives and safety of many people. The Chinese residents of Hong Kong found them­ selves in a dilemma. Forced by poverty and disturbances on the mainland to move to Hong Kong, which offered relative security and job opportunities, they submitted themselves to foreign colonial rule, which they hated. This predicament helped to explain their conflict­ ing responses to the progress of the war between China and the Anglo-French forces. Eitel observed:

The defeat of the British fleet at the Peiho (January 25,1859), while it depressed the foreign community of Hong Kong, appeared to evoke no feeling of any sort among the Chinese population. In­ deed, those Chinese who gave any thought to the matter, seemed rather to regret this temporary success of Mandarin treachery. But the capture of Peking in 1860 and particularly the flight of the Emperor was felt by all but the Triad Society partisans as a national disgrace.61

A Frontier Settlement 57



If this was true, it indicated a faint beginning of national aware­ ness on the part of some Chinese residents in Hong Kong in 1860. They seemed to realize that their fate was tied to events in Peking, China's national capital. In a colonial situation where the Chinese were a subject people, ruled, dominated, and discriminated against by the British masters, it was probably easier for them to acquire a sense of identity with the Chinese nation than it was for their coun­ trymen in the interior of China.



Primary Concern with Livelihood, Not with Nationalism

But one must not exaggerate the extent of Chinese national con­ sciousness in the British colony at that early date. In their daily struggle to make a living, the issue of national awareness was only incidental to the Chinese in Hong Kong, especially after the war was over and peace restored. Of primary importance to the common people was one's daily means of subsistence. Whenever an employ­ ment opportunity working for the foreign colonist became available, it was quickly seized upon. When livelihood was threatened, either by employers or by the colonial government, the Chinese rose in resistance, both individually and collectively. Their primary concerns were with local issues affecting their daily existence. Issues of na­ tional or international import, if not related to the realities of their daily experience, and if not fused with concern about their liveli­ hood, had limited appeal to the ordinary people.

Hence, in the aftermath of the Arrow War, the cession of Kowloon

to Britain in the Peking Convention (October 24, 1860), and the British takeover of the peninsula on January 19, 1861, evoked no Chinese resistance.62 On the other hand, when the colonial govern­ ment sought to regulate the lives and work of the Chinese, they rose in protest. Eitel affirmed that it was "the common practice of the Chinese of offering seditious resistance to a weak government by combining to strike work in order to mark their sense of irksome or imperfect legislation."63 In January 1853, for instance, pawnbrokers "complain[ed] against the action of the Police in occasionally intrud­ ing upon their premises in search of stolen property." Then, in July 1858, they closed their shops in protest against the exorbitant licence rate. And again, in 1860, they struck in protest against the Pawnbro-

58 A Frontier Settlement



kers' Ordinance regulating their business.64 The government made no concession on either occasion.

Detailed discussions of the lives, work, and collective actions of the laborers are provided in subsequent chapters. Suffice it here to note two labor strikes to illustrate the workers' major concerns in Hong Kong in the 1860s. A strike of the cargo boat people took place in 1861 in protest against an ordinance requiring the registration and regulation of those employed on cargo boats. But the firmness of the government brought them to submit to registration.65The chair cool­ ies also staged a strike in 1863 in opposition to an ordinance regulat­ ing and licensing public vehicles. They too had to yield after nearly three months of passive resistance. 6

While most chair coolies came from the Hoklo and Tieochiu dialect

groups, both cargo boat people and cargo-carrying coolies consisted of Chinese of different dialect groups and native place origins. De­ spite rivalry and tensions between the dialect groups, they took common actions in resistance when their livelihood was threatened by the colonial government regulations. As we shall see, in the process of their repeated confrontations with the colonial govern­ ment, they came to feel the identity of interests among themselves against a common foe.

Many Hong Kong Chinese had originally come from the villages of the surrounding regions where they were accustomed to manag­ ing their own affairs. The Chinese government generally governed by proxy. Absentee gentry landlords were concerned only with the collection of rents or other levies on land, making no attempt to control routine local affairs.67 The Chinese villagers moved to Hong Kong to make a living, expecting to be left alone. When the British colonial government sought to regulate their lives and work, they rose in resistance. Much of the coolie unrest in Hong Kong in the nineteenth century took the form of “reactive collective actions," to use Charles Tilly's term, which consisted of “group efforts to reassert established claims when someone else challenge[d] or violate[d] them."68 Many incidents of labor unrest in Hong Kong in the nine­ teenth century were provoked by the modem European interven­ tionist state's assertion of power to accelerate political integration and to impose direct government control on a community accus­ tomed to self-management of its own affairs. When coolie unrest occurred, the elite played an important role mediating the disputes.

A Frontier Settlement 59



The Elite and Its Organizations, the 1850s-1860s

The British colonial policy of segregation allowed the elite members to manage public affairs pertaining to the Chinese community. They arbitrated civil and commercial disputes among the Chinese. So far as they assumed the role of civil arbiters to help maintain public order, the British tolerated it. But that was also the limit of British tolerance, which allowed no room for the Chinese elite to possess private armed power.

In a recent volume of essays on local elites and patterns of domi­ nance Joseph W. Esherick and Mary B. Rankin rightly affirm that "different environments and resources available to elites in different areas of China and different periods of Chinese history . . . [have] produce[d] different types of elite."69There were also variations even within the type of "frontier elites" on the edge of Chinese society. The local arena of Hong Kong as a British colony limited the power of its Chinese elite. Loo Aqui and Tam Achoy were not the frontier strongmen commanding militia and armed followers that Johanna

M. Meskill finds in Taiwan in Ch'ing times,70 nor the militia leaders and military governor that Edward A. McCord finds in Kwei-chou from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth.71 The suspicious colonial authorities charged Loo Aqui with being in league with pirates, though it was not substantiated. And when Tam Achoy became involved in the use of armed force, he was quickly brought to court.

In 1860 Tam Achoy's home district of K'ai-p'ing in Kwangtung was ravaged by the Hakka armed bands. Several of his relatives, including his mother, were killed. In response to the mandarin's request for assistance, Tam Achoy engaged an armed corps of about a hundred Punti Cantonese, officered by some American and Euro­ pean sailors whom he despatched on a chartered steamer, flying the British flag, to attack a Hakka village near Macao. Three Europeans and several others were killed in the expedition. The Hong Kong police arrested Tam Achoy and charged him with piracy and murder. However, before sending off the expedition, Tam Achoy had notified a government officer of his intentions and received no warning of the illegality of his actions. Tam Achoy pleaded guilty of misde­ meanor and threw himself upon the mercy of the court. He was, thereupon, discharged with a reprimand.72

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According to Max Weber, the effective monopoly of the legitimate use of violent coercive force within a given territory is an essential attribute of a modem state.73 Britain would not tolerate the Chinese elite's use of armed force in the colony under her jurisdiction. But the Chinese government's connivance at the local elite's assumption of military power in other frontier societies like Taiwan and Kwei- chou was bom of necessity, for they laid largely beyond the reach of Chinese state power. Thus the power of the local elite was condi­ tioned by the local social context.

The composition of Chinese elite in Hong Kong began to change

with the changing social context in the 1850s and 1860s.74 New ele­ ments were added to the elite group. The turbulent conditions on the mainland created by the Taiping uprising led to the influx of Chinese families and capital into Hong Kong. This changed some­ what the characteristics of the Chinese population in the colony. “It acquired more stability, respectability and economic strength," as Carl Smith puts it. The elite who emerged in the 1850s and 1860s included more respectable wealthy merchants. Large merchant estab­ lishments known as hongs were set up in Hong Kong. In 1858 there were thirty-five and in the following year sixty-five hongs owned by merchants of different dialect groups, including Punti Cantonese, Teochiu, and Fukienese.75

Aspiring Chinese used all resources available to promote their power and influence. In Hong Kong connections with the British served as an important vehicle for social advancement. Chinese con­ tractors, merchants, and compradors formed business connections with the British colonists. Resources for the aspiring Chinese also included the native place-dialect ties as well as the transregional associations. These two were not perceived as mutually exclusive.

"In Hong Kong, . . . the Chinese were not divided to any great extent by dialect or provincial hostilities, only by differences in wealth and status," observes H. J. Lethbridge.76 This was true of the mer­ chants, though not quite true of the lower class Chinese who had no other resources but dialect group ties to rely on. Merchants of the same dialect and native place often joined together in business part­ nership, yet in the commercialized city of Hong Kong it was also common for merchants of different dialects to gather for social and business purposes. Moreover, commercial guilds in Hong Kong were organized on a transregional basis.

A Frontier Settlement 61



The colony's historical experience and social context helped to bring together merchants of various dialects. For several decades after 1841 Hong Kong was an entirely new settlement. The earliest pioneer merchants from different regions and dialect groups arrived in the 1850s and 1860s to set up their firms, clustering around a few narrow streets named Bonham Strand and Wing Lok Street. In a new settlement under alien rule they confronted common problems that demanded coordinated actions. To build an environment conducive to trade, they had to cooperate to promote market prosperity and assist the police in maintaining law and order. Among the small group of Teochiu pioneer merchants "business deals were sealed by the lips only. . . . Written contracts were unheard of and highly unnecessary." 7 In fact, in such a new settlement under foreign colonial rule, the small community of pioneer merchants from var­ ious native districts could more easily establish personal relations with one another and cooperate to build an environment conducive to trade.78

Merchants used all resources available that would enhance their business and social influence. They retained their separate native place loyalities and used such loyalities for social and commercial purposes. But they also joined together to found transregional insti­ tutions to promote their common interests and community welfare.

The District Watch Committee was such an institution. The Chinese residents of all dialects and native places in Hong Kong were faced with the common problem of maintaining public order and protect­ ing life and property. The colony had a regular police force whose main duty, however, was to protect the central business district where most of the European firms clustered. The European officers and Indian policemen spoke no Chinese; the Chinese constables were recruited from the dregs of society. The regular police were corrupt and inefficient. Therefore, the Chinese trade houses and neighborhoods were compelled to employ their own guards and watchmen.79

On February 1, 1866, a meeting of the kaifong leaders of all dty districts in Hong Kong decided to petition the government for per- mision to create a District Watch Force, to be supported by subscrip­ tions from the Chinese community. Sanctioned by the government, it was an amalgamation of private watchmen and guards already employed by merchants and shopkeepers. Supervised by a commit-

62 A Frontier Settlement



tee of Chinese merchants, and under the ultimate control of the Hong Kong Registrar General, the district watchmen assisted the police in keeping law and order in the Chinese quarters.80

The famed Nam Pak Hong guild was also founded on a transre­ gional basis. It was established in 1868 by some leading merchants of various dialect groups in Hong Kong "to promote members' welfare and market prosperity, to assist the police in the maintenance of law and order in the neighbourhood and to formulate plans for the prevention of fires and alleviation of disasters."81 Within the Nam Pak Hong guild were many Teochiu merchants who dominated trade with Southeast Asia, but Punti Cantonese merchants also played an important role in that trade. At first, the Nam Pak Hong (Nan-pei- hang literally means south-north firms) consisted of a few firms en­ gaged in the trading of native produce between regions south of the Yangtze and Northern China. In a few years its membership came to include dozens of trading firms run by merchants of various dialect groups and native districts. These merchants included the Punti Cantonese (e.g., Chiu Yue-tin, Lo Chor-san, Lau Lo-tak), the Teo­ chiu merchants (e.g.. Ko Man-wah, Chan Chun-chuen, Choi Si-kit), and the Hokkienese (e.g., Ng Li-hing, Wu Ting-sam, Wong Ting- ming). Also included in its membership were trading firms run by merchants of Shantung origin.

The directors and managers of the Nam Pak Hong guild were

mutually elected. For the first term Chiu Yue-tin served as the chair­ man of the Board of Directors, and Lau Lo-tak as the manager. Both were Punti Cantonese. The power and influence of the Nam Pak Hong came from its wealth and its connections with various trades in the Pacific commercial network. The Nam Pak Hong exporting and importing business stretched as far as Peking and Tientsin in North China to the distant countries in Southeast Asia. It later ex­ tended its scope to cover America and Europe as well.

Besides acting as a medium for trade, the Nam Pak Hong firms also served as banking institutes through which overseas Chinese remitted money home. In addition, the Nam Pak Hong guild pro­ vided important social services for the community, organizing a fire brigade, a street watch force, and religious celebrations.82 The wealthy Nam Pak Hong merchants came to dominate the Man Mo Temple Committee, which "secretly controlled native affairs, acted as com­ mercial arbitrators, arranged for the due reception of mandarins passing

A Frontier Settlement 63



through the Colony, negotiated the sale of official titles, and formed an unofficial link between the Chinese residents of Hongkong and the Canton Authorities."83 And as we shall see, in times of social unrest in the colony, the Nam Pak Hong merchants often played an important role mediating between the populace and the colonial authorities.

Though living under alien rule, the Nam Pak Hong merchants had to deal with the Canton government, which exerted some measures of political influence and control over the colony's Chinese residents. A number of wealthy merchants purchased the Chinese official de­ grees in order to protect their relatives and property in China, and also to enhance their position and prestige among the Chinese resi­ dents in Hong Kong.

The earliest Chinese community leaders in the 1840s and 1850s such as Loo Aqui, Tam Achoy, and Kwok Acheong, had originated from the marginal groups of society. Having acquired wealth, they sought to become "gentrified" in order to justify and rationalize their new social position and to promote their prestige in the eyes of the Chinese public. Kwok Acheong purchased Chinese official ranks. Loo Aqui acquired an official degree of the sixth rank. And Tam Achoy rendered services to his home district by supplying its militia with Western-made armaments, and thereby earned Chinese official recognition and a biographical notice in the K'ai-p'ing gazetteer.84 The Nam Pak Hong merchants, too, became gentrified, seeking to assert their "cultural hegemony" over the Chinese populace. As Mary Rankin and Joseph Esherick aptly observe, "a dear consdous- ness of dass and status existed both among elites and between elites and masses. . . . Superiority was demonstrated through life-styles, honor, and cultural display."85The following description of the nine­

teenth-century Nam Pak Hong merchants is most revealing:

With wealth came the desire for honour, and it was quite common that most of the better-off members held offidal sinecures which were bought from the Chinese government. This entitled them to don colourful official robe during the ceremonies and important festivals. It was a spectacular sight to see these celebrities moving around, impressively attired during the Chinese New Year when European executives from leading shipping and insurance compa­ nies called to present their greetings. These were usually carried out amidst highly decorated surroundings, coupled with theatrical

64 A Frontier Settlement



performances and lavish receptions which lasted for weeks. Class distinctions were obvious, and only the privileged few had the right of access to particular installations ranging from private clubs to public tea houses. An employee who was caught by his em­ ployer sneaking into one of these would be dismissed almost in­ stantly.86

Chinese official sinecures, colorful official robes during the ceremo­ nies and festivals, greetings from European business executives, the­ atrical performances, and lavish receptions all conveyed images of wealth, power, and authority, intended to induce popular subordi­ nation. These had "much of the studied self-consciousness of public theatre . . . designed to exhibit authority to the plebs and to exact from them deference," to use E. P. Thompson's words in his descrip­ tion of the gentry's elaborate hegemonic style in eighteenth-century England.87

With the creation of a unified District Watch Force in 1866 and the

powerful Nam Pak Hong guild in 1868, a sense of Chinese commu­ nity dominated by a merchant elite in Hong Kong was greatly en­ hanced. And it was to be further strengthened by the founding of a renowned institution, the Tung Wah Hospital, in 1872.

T H R E E

The Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation, the 1870s-1900s



Much credit is due to the influential Chinese residents who co­ operated so cordially with the Government officials to bring about a proper understanding with the hawkers, who have now resumed their avocations, and at the same time recognised the sovereignty of the law.

—Hongkong Daily Press, May 24,1883

The mighty spirit of free trade . . . fused the interests of Euro­ pean and Chinese merchants into indissoluble unity.

— E. ]. Eitel

I condemn the [Light and Pass] Ordinance simply because it is against the Chinese only. — Ho Tung



Like the gentry elite in late imperial China, the merchant elite in Hong Kong sought to foster a social consensus based upon Confu- cian ideals of social harmony and elite paternalism. But colonial experience made it different from elites in China in some ways. British colonial rule brought the local elite into a complex, interlock­ ing web of ambivalent relationships between elite, government, pop­ ulace, and mandarins in Canton. Chapter 3 examines how the Chinese community in Hong Kong was held together under the dominance of this merchant elite and how the scope of elite dominance changed

66 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



according to the changing social milieu in the years between 1870 and 1900.



The Founding of the Tung Wah Hospital, 1872

As previously noted, the I-ts'z common ancestral temple was built in 1851 by the Chinese community to receive the deceased persons' tablets awaiting transfer to their native villages. Soon afterward it began to house coffins awaiting shipment and even dying persons from among the colony's poor. Because of cultural prejudice and a strong aversion to Western medical practices (particularly abhoring surgical operation), the Chinese would rather die than enter the Government Civil Hospital. The I-ts'z increasingly looked like what was called the "city of the dead" in Canton; it became a "great nuisance" to the European community. Reports in 1869 by the acting registrar general and the inspectors of nuisances revealed the appall­ ing "filth and wretchedness of the place" and "the horrible indiffer­ ence" to the dying inmates. This caused an outcry among the Euro­ peans. The Chinese elite then came forward with liberal subscrip­ tions for the erection of a Chinese hospital to be managed by the Chinese and to provide Chinese medical treatment. Subsidized by the government grants of a site and $15,000, it cost about $45,000 to build the Tung Wah Hospital.1

The opening ceremony on February 14, 1872, was "the grandest ever witnessed in Hongkong," reported the local newspapers. At an early hour over seventy leading Chinese serving on the hospital committee assembled at the kung-so adjoining the Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road. They were "all dressed in the mandarin cos­ tume, some even with a peacock's feather attached to their buttons," displaying symbols of wealth, power and status designed to impress the general public and to enhance their social hegemony over the community. The elite joined a long and gorgeous procession that paraded the streets of the Chinese section of town leading to the hospital amid the din of gongs and drums. The concourse of specta­ tors was so great that the district watchmen and Sikh and Indian police were despatched to preserve order. Leong On (chairman of the committee, and comprador of Messrs. Gibb, Livingston & Co.) played a prominent role in the ceremony, offering sacrifice and per­ forming kowtows to the altar dedicated to the deity Shen Nung (a

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 67



mythical sage-emperor and discoverer of medicines). Accompanied by fireworks and the booming of guns, "the ceremony produced a profound impression" on the Chinese crowds.2

Governor Sir Richard MacDonnell honored the proceedings by his presence. Arriving at 2:30 p.m. at the hospital, his excellency took up his position in the center of the reception hall "amid the respectful salutes of the Chinese present." He praised the committee for under­ taking "a great and responsible task to give shelter, medical assis­ tance, and comfort to all indigent persons . . . without charge." While "not interfering with the Chinese arrangement of details," the governor reminded the Chinese, the government reserved for itself the "great power" to inspect and supervise the hospital. The gover­ nor acknowledged "the cordial co-operation . . . from the respectable members of the Chinese community in promoting law and order, and protecting life and property in the Colony."3 Promising a gov­ ernment fund of one hundred thousand dollars, MacDonnell de­ clared the formal opening of the Tung Wah Hospital, which was henceforth managed by the Chinese and supported by voluntary contributions from the Chinese community.

As Sinn has demonstrated, the hospital was managed by a general

committee consisting of managers, assistant directors, and directors. Central to the management system was a board of directors com­ posed of twelve members. The board was annually nominated by the major commercial guilds and elected by the hospital subscribers and the kaifong street neighborhood leaders. It usually consisted of three compradors, two Nam Pak Hong merchants, and one merchant each from the rice, piecegoods, opium, California trade, yarn dealers', and pawn brokers' guilds, in addition to one or two merchants from unspecified trades. These guilds made yearly contributions to the hospital's funds. As most of the guilds included both employers and employees, the guild-based structure of the Tung Wah Board of Directors allowed it to influence and find support from the Chinese lower classes. And the election process served both to legitimize its claim to represent the community and to inspire among the people "a sense of community, commitment, and participation."4

The Tung Wah's claim to represent the whole Chinese community was reinforced by a management structure that incorporated leader­ ship from various dialect groups. The Tung Wah directors and com­ mittee members included prominent merchants and businessmen of

68 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



different dialects and native origins.5 Wealthy Chinese, from what­ ever geographical and social background, served on its prestigious committee and directorate.6 In the highly commercialized and fluid society of Hong Kong, commercial wealth was a major resource for Chinese aspiring to an elite status. By performing public service on the hospital committee, they won respect and gratitude from the community residents.



Charity, Social Service, and Management of Public Affairs

In addition to medical care, the Tung Wah Hospital rendered impor­ tant social service. It housed the poor and sick and provided coffins and free burials for the dead. It repatriated shipwreck victims, coolie- emigrants abducted abroad, and women kidnapped for prostitution. To prevent the kidnapping of girls for sale, prostitution, and other immoral purposes, the Tung Wah elite organized the Po Leung Kuk (society for the protection of women and children) in 1878, giving shelter to destitute women and children and handling their repatria­ tion.7 The Po Leung Kuk board of directors, composed of Chinese merchants from different dialect groups, performed charitable work and advised the government on various issues concerning the wel­ fare of the Chinese. Closely linked to the Tung Wah Hospital, the Po Leung Kuk worked as its "junior association."8

The Tung Wah Hospital also provided free vaccinations both in Hong Kong and Kwangtung. Its charitable work was extended be­ yond Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland. To help raise relief funds during the 1877 North China famine caused by floods in Shansi, the governor of Fukien, Ting Jih-ch'ang, appointed Ko Man Wah and O Chun-chit—two Teochiu merchants in the Hong Kong Nam Pak Hong guild, who had served as the Tung Wah directors, and who had purchased Chinese official ranks. A large sum was raised by the Tung Wah Hospital, which in return received honors and awards of a plaque from the governor of Shansi, Tseng Kuo-ch'üan, and a tablet scroll from Emperor Kuang-hsu. A matter of pride for the Chinese community in Hong Kong, it greatly enhanced the power and prestige of the Tung Wah elite in the eyes of the Chinese public. For many years thereafter the Tung Wah continued to raise large amounts for relief in China. Its fame spread throughout the Chinese empire. In fact, the Tung Wah also served the overseas Chinese

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 69



communities, throughout the Pacific commercial network, which often sent money, letters, and other personal effects to the Tung Wah for distribution to their native villages on the Chinese mainland. Such services explain why the Chinese communities both at home and overseas subscribed readily and generously to its fund-raising cam­ paigns.9

Possessing wealth, moral authority, and prestige, the Tung Wah Committee extended its scope of activities beyond charitable work to include management of Chinese public affairs in Hong Kong. At the top of the Chinese social hierarchy, its authority was supported by the Po Leung Kuk, the District Watch Committee, the Man Mo Temple Committee, and the kaifong associations, all of which contin­ ued to function at their own levels. The Tung Wah Hospital became the most important civic center for the Chinese, where members of the community could bring forth any matters of public interest for discussion. On important occasions, as we shall see, several hundred people attended the meetings where the public voted on resolutions. As Sinn rightly contends, the Tung Wah Committee was "extremely responsive to public opinion," seeking to run community affairs by consensus. 10

The committee arbitrated civil and commercial disputes among the Chinese. Ever since the founding of the colony in the early 1840s, Chinese social customs had generally been tolerated or respected except where they conflicted with government ordinances. Wherever possible, the ordinary Chinese sought to avoid the British magis­ trate's court, whose laws and language they did not understand. They preferred the Tung Wah arbitration. For example, men whose wives or concubines had deserted them, craft masters whose appren­ tices had run away, and creditors claiming repayment from debtors would come to the hospital committee for justice. The committee used its social influence and moral authority to persuade and arbi­ trate. Where it failed to resolve disputes, it was willing to appeal to the legal, coercive power of the colonial government as a last resort. 1 To assert cultural hegemony over the populace, the Tung Wah committeemen consciously played the role of the elite. Periodic rit­ uals reconfirmed hierarchical social relations in the community. Wang T'ao, who spent most of the period from 1862 to 1884 in Hong Kong, observed: "Since the founding of the Tung Wah Hospital, the mem­ bers of its board of directors have begun to hold an annual gathering

70 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



to celebrate the lunar new year. For the occasion they don all sorts of fine headgear and gowns, as if they were illustrious officials having an audience with the emperor."12 On the occasion of a visit to the hospital by Governor Hennessy in 1878, nearly three hundred influ­ ential Chinese were present, of whom "some 50 or 60 were in their Mandarin costumes, some with blue buttons, some with crystal, and some with gold buttons, while a few had the additional honour of wearing the peacock's feather."13

The imposing hospital compound was designed to impress the public, as the traveler Isabella Bird recorded in 1879:

The Tung-Wah hospital consists of several two-storied buildings of granite, with large windows on each side, and the lofty central building which contains the directors' hall, the accommodation for six resident physicians, and the business offices. The whole is surrounded by a well-kept garden, bounded by a very high wall.

. . . It was a charming Oriental sight, the grand, open-fronted room with its stone floor and many pillars, the superbly dressed directors and their blue-robed attendants, and the immense costumed crowd outside the gate in the sunshine, kept back by crimson-turbaned Sikh orderlies.14

The display of cultural symbols of wealth, power and authority ri­ valed those at the official yamen compounds in China.



A Parallel to Elite Management of Public Affairs in Late Imperial China

The elite management of public affairs in Hong Kong paralled a similar development in late imperial China. The generalist county magistrate, representing the Chinese bureaucratic state, exercised formal and superficial control over local society, leaving much of the governance to local elites outside the bureaucracy. As Mary Rankin forcefully observes, the local elite's management of public affairs can be traced back to late Ming times, when gentry joined officials in managing public works like water control projects, using hired work­ ers rather than corvée labor. Commercialization and population growth from the sixteenth century had gradually brought about an increase in the numbers of market centers and an expansion in social mobility and organization. These changes enlarged the amount of nonoffidal elite management of public affairs in the eighteenth century, as the

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 71



Ch'ing state proved unable to finance and expand local government, and could no longer intervine vigorously in such matters as grain distribution and population movement. This trend continued into the first half of the nineteenth century, when local elite management augmented to include extensive educational, welfare, relief activi­ ties.15

The trend greatly accelerated during the Taiping rebellion, bring­ ing about widespread local militarization organized by the gentry elite. As Philip Kuhn shows, a t'uan-chia system emerged, in which pao-chia (collective responsibility) and t'uan-lien (militia) had merged. The supremacy of gentry ma "corner­

stone of local order." They pi. ^ security. tax collection, and public works.16 Postrebellion reconstruction, ac­ companied by augmented commercialization and foreign trade, opened up career opportunities for activist gentry and merchants and en­ couraged their fusion into a vigorous elite known as shen-shang (gen­ try merchants) or shen-tung. Rankin refers to them generally as "elite managers," because "they did not necessarily have formal qualifications or engage in such gentry occupations as schol< teaching, or estate management." Their power "rested on varying combinations of landownership, trade, usury, and degree hold- ing.

These developments in China had important impacts on Hong Kong. The turbulent conditions on the mainland created by the Taip- ings led to the influx of wealthy Chinese families into Hong Kong. The elite that emerged in the 1850s and 1860s included more respect­ able, wealthy merchants. Aspiring Chinese used all resources avail­ able to promote their power and influence—these included business connections with the British, the native place-dialect ties, the transregional guild and social associations, the charitable works, the purchase of Chinese official degrees and ranks, and the display of cultural symbols of power, wealth, and status.

In the post-Taiping era and thereafter throughout the Ch'ing pe­ riod, more of the colony's merchants became gentrified. The Tung Wah elite gained honor and official titles from the Chinese imperial court by raising relief funds for natural disasters such as the famine in North China in 1877. To raise revenue for reconstruction, the Chinese government expanded the sale of honors among the Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.18 The Tung Wah

72 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



elite vied with each other in acquiring Chinese official ranks and degrees, many by purchase and some by regular examinations. From then on, the mandarins and local people addressed these gentlemen respectfully as the aforementioned gentry merchants and gentry managers. The Chinese community in Hong Kong had matured. Its elite now consisted of respectable and gentrified merchants, not the type of rough frontier adventurers of the 1840s and 1850s like Lu Aqui, who operated local markets, brothels, and gambling houses, or Tam Achoy, who was charged with piracy and murder in connec­ tion with an expedition to attack a village near Macao.

Regarding the patterns of elite dominance in China Esherick and Rankin affirm: "[T]o maintain their position, local elites often seek influence at higher levels of the administrative hierarchy or rely on external social connections and economic resources, but they focus their activity and purpose on the local arena"; and to maintain their dominance they must control certain resources: material, social, per­ sonal, and symbolic.19 The history of the Ko family provides much information about how a Hong Kong merchant family used various resources to attain and maintain its elite status. It also provides interesting insights on three generations of an elite family, reflecting both changes and continuities in elite composition and commitment.



Gentrißcation of the Ko Family

Ko Man Wah (founder of the famed Yuen Fat Hong firm in 1853) was originally from a poor peasant family at Cheng-hai, Kwangtung, where he had learned how to read at a village temple, but he was still "hardly able to write a simple letter." During his teens he went to Siam, working as a cook and a rice cargo coolie for some years until he accumulated enough savings to start a rice mill. Later on he began to engage in a shipping business between Siam and Ch'ao- chou, reaping a high profit. In 1853 he commenced operating the Yuen Fat Hong, one of the earliest Nam Pak Hong firms in Hong Kong.20

Business obliged Ko Man Wah to travel between Bangkok, Singa­ pore, Hong Kong, and Swatow. On one occasion, when he returned to Cheng-hai in 1856, he was arrested by mandarins for "collaborat­ ing with barbarians." Obliged to pay eight hundred silver taels to

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 73



absolve the charge, he learned a hard lesson about the importance of official connections for self-protection. Subsequently he purchased a fifth rank official title to protect his family and property in China. To change his own self-image and enhance his respectability in the community, he acquired a new name, T'ing-k'ai, an honorable style (tzu), Tsung-shih, and a courtesy name (hao), Ch'u-hsiang, thus add­ ing more symbols of elite status. Having gained much wealth. Ko Man Wah became a leader of the Teochiu community in Hong Kong and one of the founders of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1872. During the North China famine of 1877 mandarins enlisted his support in raising relief funds in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. In return, he gained more Chinese official ranks and recognition.

Ko Man Wah's impressive life-style became the admiration of the town; he had five wives (the first wife in his ancestral home at Cheng-hai, the other four in Hong Kong and Bangkok) who bore him nineteen children. He was certainly a rich and capable man, as the Chinese would say. Some of his nine sons assisted him in the family's business in various ports overseas. To maintain the family's elite status he encouraged his sons to study for Chinese civil service examinations. His filial second son Ko Soon Kam (Kao Shun-ch'in) developed a genuine fondness for scholarship, which delighted the semiliterate father who had acquired official ranks—not in the ortho­ dox way of taking examinations, but by purchase. Ko Man Wah died in 1882, leaving his offspring two thousand mu of land and the family business in Swatow, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. The Yuen Fat Hong in Hong Kong came under the management of his favorite second son.

With an older cousin's able assistance the young scholarly mer­ chant Ko Soon Kam managed to run the family business and pursue classical learning at the same time, winning much respect and trust in the community. He was elected in 1882 to serve on the prestigious Tung Wah Board of Directors, quite a feat for a young man of twenty- six at the time. Then, in 1888, he earned a "real" chü-jen degree by examination, fulfilling his deceased father's life long dream for the family. Inspiring even greater respect and admiration, he was elected chairman of the Tung Wah directorate in 1892, reflecting the chang­ ing quality of elite in Hong Kong. Moreover, as a leader of the Teochiu minority group in the colony, where the great majority of

74 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



the population was the Punti Cantonese, his election to the position of Tung Wah chairman served to highlight the transregional charac­ ter of the elite organization.

Significantly, Ko Soon Kam earned the degree in order to continue his merchant profession, not to start an official career. With its pro­ prietor-manager so honored, the Yuen Fat Hong “entered its golden age." Merchants and traders vied with one another to contract with the hong for imports and exports. The firm in Hong Kong alone (not counting overseas extensions) made a net profit of over two hundred thousand silver taels each year during the period 1883-

siness expanded to include extensive transactions with for­ eign bankers and merchants as well. It acted as agent for the Scottish Oriental Steamship Company and for the Norddeutscher Lloyd's Bangkok-Hong Kong line of steamers. In addition. Ko Soon Kam also opened a commercial firm in Canton and another in Kobe, dealing in produce from China and Southeast Asia.

All over town, the admiring people began to wonder about the secret of the Yuen Fat Hong's prosperity. Some people said: It must be the auspicious feng-shui wind and water. The geomantic site of the Yuen Fat Hong is right, facing just the right direction! Others said: It must be Ko Soon Kam's pa-tzu, the cyclic characters for the year, month, day, and hour of his birth that brought him such good luck. Still others said: His father Ko Man Wah had done a great many good deeds in charitable works, founding the Tung Wah Hospital, bringing relief to the sick and poor, and saving the lives of tens of thousands of drought and famine victims in North China. According to Confudan and Buddhist teachings, the accumulated ancestoral virtue and deeds protected and rewarded the offspring. That must be it! Besides, through hard work Ko Man Wah had established a great family reputation and a solid business foundation for his off­ spring. “Early arrivers plant the trees, late comers enjoy the breeze," went one Chinese proverb. More important. Ko Soon Kam was, after all, no ordinary merchant, but a reputable scholar-merchant, honest and trustworthy, with official ranks and good connections, and so forth. So, the talk of the town went on and on.

The scholarly tradition was passed down to the third generation. Ko Sing Tze (or Kao Sheng-chih, Ko Soon Kam's oldest son. Ko Man Wah's grandson) earned a chü-jen degree by examination. As a scholar- merchant, he closely followed the footsteps of his father who, alas.

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 75



suddenly passed away at the prime age of forty-three on a business trip to Kobe in 1909. Ko Sing Tze took over the Yuan Fat Hong management. In fact, he further diversified the family interests by launching new industrial enterprises such as a textile factory at Cheng- hai and waterworks in Swatow. Though an extremely busy man. Ko Sing Tze secretly joined the republican revolutionaries in their con­ spiracy to overthrow the Manchu dynasty. Thus, while maintaining the family business and gentry status, he also launched modem industrial enterprises and made a new commitment to republicanism and nationalism. Unfortunately, his untimely death in 1913 proved ominous for the business decline of the Yuen Fat Hong, which even­ tually closed its doors in 1933, partly due to poor management.

The history of the Ko family illustrates how merchants in Hong Kong used various resources to enhance and maintain their elite status: material (commercial and industrial wealth, foreign business connections, land property); social (kinship, native place-dialect ties, transregional associations such as the charitable Tung Wah Hospital and Nam Pak Hong guild); personal (leadership and organizational abilities, personal qualities); and symbolic (honor, official ranks and titles, life-style). Particularly important among these resources was a set of cultural values and traditions shared by both elite and commo- mers up to the 1890s. Such values and traditions included beliefs and practices like feng-shui, religious worship, superstitions about pa-tzu and omens, veneration of ancestors, filial piety, family loyalty, and Confudan ideology. It was diese shared values that bound the Chinese community together and that distinguished it from the European community in the colony.



Confucianism as the Hegemonic Ideology

Like the gentry elite in China, the merchant elite in Hong Kong sought to foster social consensus based on Confudan ideals of sodal harmony and elite paternalism. The consensus was maintained through compromise and elite mediation in conflict situations. The Tung Wah elite arbitrated in dvil and commerdal disputes. Through community service and philanthropy, the elite affirmed its daim to social superi­ ority. It used all available sodal and economic resources to cultivate loyalties based on vertical ties of occupation, kinship, and ethnidty. Such loyalties reinforced Confudan ideals of social order, harmony.

76 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



and a sense of hierarchy. The elite sought to propagate Confucianism as the hegemonic ideology. Each year the Tung Wah directors per­ formed the Spring and Autumn Sacrifices to Confucius at the Man Mo Temple. They espoused the cult of Confucius by founding Con- fudan schools, encouraging veneration of the sage, and acting in Confudan ways.21

The colony's sodoeconomic structure provided a fertile ground for the Confudan ideology. Chinese merchants often hired their trusted kinsmen and fellow provindals as assistants, office coolies, and do­ mestic servants. Vertical, paternalistic relationships were usually maintained among them. This was also true of the commercial guilds, most of which included both employers and employees. Prior to the 1880s workers employed in the Chinese enterprises rarely took col­ lective actions against their employers. Labor unrest throughout much of the nineteenth century generally involved the relatively rootless coolies whose actions were directed against the colonial govern­ ment's assertion of power to regulate their lives and work. The elite often interceded in labor unrest to restore peace and order and to fulfil its moral commitment to the lower dasses.

Urban Hong Kong was in large part a dty of small shopkeepers. Though there were some large-scale enterprises, mostly owned and operated by foreign capitalists, the small business with only a few employees was the predominant type of business operation among the Chinese during the nineteenth century. Paternalistic relation­ ships easily developed between employers and employees, who often belonged to the same native place-dialect groups. In fact, there were large numbers of small shops owned and operated by family mem- d relatives. In much of the Chinese quarter of the town.

dal and residential areas were combined. These neighorhood shopkeepers were upholders of traditional Chinese way of life and sustainers of Confudan culture. As we have seen, the more prosper­ ous among the shopkeepers became leaders of the kaifong assodation who partidpated in the election of the Tung Wah Committee. Mer­ chants, shopkeepers, shophands, coolies, and servants shared a common culture.

Confudanism sanctioned social hierarchy and inequality but it also stressed redprodty and elite paternalism. The elite and populace were bound together in a community in a close relationship with redprocal rights and obligations. The elite used all resources avail­ able to induce popular deference and subordination; at the same time

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 77



it was obliged to fulfil its moral commitments to the populace, pro­ viding community services and philanthropy, representing the com­ munity in its dealings with the colonial authorities, and resolving conflicts. The Tung Wah directors were extremely sensitive to public opinion. They often felt strong pressure from the subordinated groups for fulfillment of the elite's moral obligations. As we shall see, ten­ sions even developed between the elite and the general public during the 1890s.

The Chinese merchant elite acted as self-proclaimed leaders of the community, managing public affairs in the colony. But why did the British authorities tolerate the elite's assumption of such power? There were several reasons. First, the elite management of public affairs was carefully watched by the colonial government. Unlike elites in late imperial China who played a prominent role in tax collections and military forces, the Hong Kong elite exercised no such power. Second, the elite provided important community services at no government expense. The charitable institutions were set up with the government's blessing, which in turn enhanced the elite's pres­ tige. Third, the colonial government had always looked favorably on the elite's espousal of Confucianism, a conservative ideology calling for peace, order, harmony, and social hierarchy. And fourth, the British needed elite support, which enhanced the government's pres­ tige and legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese public. The elite also provided the government with advice and information concerning the governance of the Chinese and the maintenance of law and order in the colony. Whenever coolie strikes broke out, elite mediation became indispensable to the colonial authorities.

During the nineteenth century labor unrest was mostly directed at the government's attempt to regulate workers' lives and work. But popular unrest threatened not only the government but also com­ munity peace and Chinese commercial interests. Moreover, the elite also had moral obligations to the lower classes in conveying their grievances to the government. Therefore, the elite sought to mediate to restore peace and order.



The Cargo Coolie Strike, 1872

The entrepot of Hong Kong had large numbers of cargo-carrying workers living in coolies houses that provided the basis for labor organization and collective action. The colonial government sought

78 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



to control coolie lodging houses by imposing on the coolie house­ keeper a license fee of five dollars per annum for every ten men boarded. Unwilling to pay such fees, the coolie housekeepers incited the coolies to strike, saying that the government intended to levy a poll tax of fifty cents on each coolie. Coolies hated poll taxes. A general strike of cargo coolies broke out on July 25, 1872. The police arrested about sixty agitators and ringleaders, of whom twenty-three were coolie housekeepers. Some were discharged but others were fined for obstruction or creating a disturbance. On July 29 ten coolie housekeepers who did not take out licenses were sent to jail for fourteen days and one month at hard labor. 2

All cargo coolies joined the strike. They numbered nearly nineteen thousand men. The loading and unloading at the harbor came to a standstill. Both Chinese and European business suffered. The Chinese trade was nearly paralyzed. Thereupon the kaifong leaders met with the coolie delegates in the Nam Pak Hong guild hall, urging coolies to end the strike and promising to exert themselves on behalf of the coolies. The cargo coolies resumed work on July 30, when they were given to understand that the government would consider repealing the license law. Meanwhile, a deputation of the leading Chinese waited on the registrar general, the Honorable C. C. Smith, request­ ing him to reconsider the license law. Smith intimated that the li­ cense fee could be changed, though those coolies imprisoned for intimidating other workers would have to serve their jail terms.23

Thus threatened by the government housing regulation, the cargo coolies of different dialect groups and native origins grew to perceive their common interests and purpose. They came together to join the strike, which seriously affected the entrepôt trade and commercial interests. Eager to restore law and order, the Chinese merchant elite served as intermediaries between coolies and colonial authorities to end the strike. In so doing the merchants were motivated by both their commercial interest and a sense of moral obligation as a social elite.

The workers' resistance to colonial government regulations was often organized along preexisting, traditional dialect and occupa­ tional lines. Coolies were organized on the basis of native place and dialect groups. The carrying work was largely controlled by either Tung-kuan or Sze Yap coolies. The Tung-kuan coolies lived in the coolie houses run by Tung-kuan housekeepers and Sze Yap coolies

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 79



in those run by Sze Yap housekeepers. These rival dialect groups fought over employment opportunities and the right to work at certain docks and wharves. The coolie houses provided the basis of an organization for boycotts and strikes.24 Rivalry and hostility be­ tween cargo coolies of different dialects, however, did not prevent them from coming together to protest government regulations threat­ ening their common interests. Similarly, chair coolies and ricksha pullers of different dialect groups also "combine to make common cause"; as the police chief observed, "the [chair] coolies of Chiu Chau [Ch'ao-chou, Teochiu] combine with the Punti coolies."25 This was also true of the hawkers, who were regarded as a "nuisance" by the colonial authorities.



Hawkers' and Rickshamen's Disturbances, 1883

In the 1880s there were several thousand hawkers (hsiao-fan) licensed and unlicensed. Hawkers from the same native district speaking the same dialect tended to group together at work and to live together in the same dwellings or area. The ground floors of a block of buildings in Taipingshan district were mainly tenanted by vegetable hawkers who washed their wares in the alley, making the whole place "con­ tinually damp and offensive."26 Among the various kinds of hawk­ ers, the colonial authorities regarded the fruit and vegetable hawkers as "the greatest obstructionists" and "most insanitary." Many of them thronged the approaches to the markets. The peddlars were "the most harmless and cleanest," and hardware hawkers also "caused little trouble." But the congee hawkers were "a great nuisance"; they "congregated mostly above the water side and streets adjacent." Finally, there were hawkers of miscellaneous goods, from live fowls, ducks and geese to toy lizards.27

Shopkeepers often rented the footpath or side channel in front of

their shops to hawkers for the accommodation of their stalls. These stationary hawkers were much better off than large numbers of poor ambulatory hawkers who often obstructed the approaches to the shops and who "go and come with the arrival and departure of the police," much to the annoyance of the shopkeepers.28 European businessmen were "constantly annoyed by the discordant yells of street hawkers, worse when they take the form of howls by Chinese urchins."29The Europeans' annoyance with hawkers led to the proc-

80 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



lamation of an ordinance in 1872 forbidding hawkers to cry out on the Praya and the Queen's Road and in Chung-wan, the central (European) part of the town.30To satisfy the annoyed Europeans, the magistrate imposed a fine of two dollars for street crying to stop the “nuisance."31 The police made frequent raids on hawkers.

In January 1883 "an influential Chinese deputation" waited on the administrator W. H. Marsh to advise him on the issues of gambling, sly (unregistered) brothels, and "the hawker nuisance." Speaking on behalf of the shopkeepers, the deputation asserted that "hawkers in many cases occupied positions to the detriment of the shopkeepers, who as householders paid high rents and taxes and required protec­ tion." As the approaches to the shops were often blocked by hawk­ ers' stalls, the government sought to bring hawkers under control. A new government regulation prohibited the licensed hawkers from maintaining stationary positions. When the police attempted to en­ force it, many hawkers felt that the government meant to deny them the right to make a living.32

Hawkers fought back. Rumors circulated that the Chinese were contemplating an uprising against the Europeans. "Highly inflam­ matory placards have been posted about Taipingshan fixing the 23rd May as the date for a rising against the Governor and the European community," according to the local press. The disaffection was be­ lieved to have originated among the hawkers. A few evicted squat­ ters and the jinricksha coolies lately thrown out of employment (due to the government's suddenly reducing the number of licenses from 898 to 500) helped to swell the outcry. "The Chinese higher class have been somewhat perturbed in mind as to the state of affairs." One or two days earlier, "a body of the [coolie] malcontents" had gone to the Tung Wah Hospital to lay their grievances before its directors, but the latter "shut the gates of the Hospital in its face." "The crowd," according to the press, "palavered for some time, and it probably occurred to one of its number to write and stick up the ridiculous placards." 3

Thus hawkers, unemployed ricksha pullers, and a few evicted squatters came together to express their displeasure with the colonial government regulations. But the Tung Wah directors had arbitrated in favor of the shopkeepers who were annoyed by the hawkers and ricksha coolies obstructing the approaches to their shops. Hau-tzu jih- pao, a local Chinese paper, defended the shopkeepers against the

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 81



lower class "stupid" hawkers who were "ignorant of the established laws of a well regulated state."34

Yet once the disturbance was created by hawkers the Tung Wah directors, eager to soothe the hawkers and to restore law and order, prevailed upon Governor G. F. Bowen to publish a proclamation on May 23, conceding that the removal of the hawkers' stalls from the major thoroughfares had not been "carried out in all cases with the necessary discretion and forebearance," and that "in the future, no summons shall be taken out against Chinese accused of infringe­ ments of Sanitary or Police Regulations without previous consulta­ tion with the Registrar General."35 In matters affecting the Chinese the governor was to obtain the elite's opinions through the registrar general, also known as the "protector of the Chinese."36 Appeased by the merchant elite's intercession and the governor's proclamation, hawkers resumed work on May 24. The Hongkong Daily Press com­ mented: "Much credit is due to the influential Chinese residents who co-operated so cordially with the Government officials to bring about a proper understanding with the hawkers, who have now resumed their avocations, and at the same time recognised the sovereignty of the law ."37

The government needed Chinese leaders' cooperation in maintain­

ing law and order in the colony but it also looked upon them with a watchful, suspicious eye, particularly when they were politically mo­ tivated and became closely connected with the Canton Chinese offi­ cials.



The Triangular Govemment-Elite-Mandarin Relationship

The colonial situation brought the local elite into a complex, inter­ locking web of ambivalent relationships. The geographical proximity of Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, and their close social, eco­ nomic, and demographic connections, made the colony's Chinese residents vulnerable to mandarin's political influence and control. Both Canton and Hong Kong authorities claimed their allegiance; the local elite therefore served two masters, frequently finding itself in a difficult situation but seeking to manipulate them to its own advan­ tage.38

To protect their families and property in China and to enhance

their local elite status, elite members actively sought Chinese official

82 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



degrees and ranks. But gentrifkation brought them not merely hon­ ors and status but also obligations to the Chinese officialdom, which made various demands on them (such as assistance in fund-raising for reliefs in China) and treated them as Chinese subjects under Chinese jurisdiction. This in turn incurred the displeasure of the colonial government, which insisted on its sole jurisdiction over all Chinese in Hong Kong. Thus, gentrification paradoxically brought elite members under mandarin control, which they resented; they therefore turned to the colonial government for protection against exessive mandarin demands. The colonial government needed the elite's cooperation in the maintenance of local community order, but the government also looked with a suspicious eye on the elite's connections with the mandarin in Canton. These complex relation­ ships were often revealed in crisis situations.

In 1884 the Sino-French War provoked a major social crisis in Hong Kong, an event discussed at length in a separate chapter. Suffice it here to note that the European community suspected some leading Chinese who had close connections with mandarins to be instigators of the unrest. Canton officials issued patriotic proclama­ tions exhorting all Chinese along the coast to use all means to do harm to the French enemy. The Hong Kong gentry merchants Ho Amei and Li Tak Cheung became involved with the circulation of mandarin proclamations in the colony supporting China's war against France.39 Moreover, Ho Amei despatched several telegrams to Vice­ roy Chang Chih-tung reporting on French movements around Hong Kong.40 When a riot broke out (unintended by elite and mandarin) the colonial government sent British troops to the scene to be quar­ tered in the great hall of the Tung Wah Hospital.41 In addition to pacifying the crowd the military occupation of the Tung Wah (the colony's Chinese civic center and power headquarters) was symbolic of the British authorities' determination and readiness to use forceful means to exert control wherever necessary. In reporting to Viceroy Chang Chih-tung on French movements in the colony. Ho Amei and Li Tak Cheung were motivated by Chinese patriotism while also fulfilling their gentry obligations to the mandarin. In so doing, they incurred British displeasure.

Yet, there were occasions when the local elite appealed to the British colonial government for protection against excessive man­ darin demands; one such instance occurred during a controversy

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 83



over a relief fund in 1886. When Kwangtung was devastated by floods in the spring of 1885 the Tung Wah Committee quickly sent foodstuff to the victims and helped to raise funds locally and over­ seas. Money began to pour in from the Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, America, and Australia, until a sum of $100,000 was collected, again reflecting the power and influence of the Tung Wah Hospital. Under the Tung Wah supervision most of the fund was expended on relieving die distressed, leaving a balance of $31,000, which was held by the Tung Wah Chairman Kwan Hoi Chun for safekeeping in the bank for use in the event of future distress. The Canton Board of Reorganization dispatched an instruction to the hospital ordering that the remaining fund be sent to the board to be used for repairing the embankments. However, the Tung Wah direc­ tors thought that any arbitrary use of the fund could subject the hospital to the fund subscribers' prosecution. This was another indi­ cation of the elite being extremely sensitive to public opinion. When acting registrar general J. Stewart Lockhart found out about the board's demand, he told Kwan Hoi Chun that the Chinese officials had no control over Chinese residents in Hong Kong. Kwan Hoi Chun there­ fore ignored the board's instruction.42

But the mandarins repeatedly sent letters to the Tung Wah direc­

tors demanding payment. Running out of patience, they wrote in a threatening tone:

As you, gentlemen, belong to the ranks of the Gentry, it was naturally supposed that you would be sure to desire to help and relieve the distressed; and accordingly an official communication was addressed to you, speaking of you in the highest terms of praise, and ordering you to at once forward the balance of the funds to Canton But you have not only delayed to send the

money as commanded, but have not yet petitioned a single word in reply This despatch of orders is therefore addressed to you,

again urging you (to forward the money). On arrival of these orders, you must immediately obey them Do not try to shirk

the matter by making excuses and let there not be the least neglect or delay, lest such conduct involve you in trouble.43

Thus, the mandarins treated the Tung Wah directors in the same manner that they treated gentry in China, reminding them of both their honors and obligations and disregarding British sovereignty over Hong Kong.

84 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



The Tung Wah chairmen Kwan Hoi Chun was three times sum­ moned to appear before the Canton Provincial Treasurer, but he was too terrified to comply. Alarmed that his wife, children, and property in Canton might suddenly be ruined, he felt compelled to tender his resignation as the Tung Wah chairman. But the hospital committee refused to accept his resignation. He finally petitioned the colonial authorities for protection. Under British protestation the Tsung-li Yamen in Peking telegraphed Canton to prevent further mandarin interference in the matter. 4 In seeking the foreign colonial power's protection, the Tung Wah elite incurred the mandarin's displeasure. The 1884 social crisis and the 1886 controversy over the relief fund illustrated the dilemma of the local elite in Hong Kong and the ways it sought to manupulate the situation to its own advantage. The colonial government frowned on the elite's dose connections with the mandarins and on its pretension to political power and influence over the Chinese in the colony. Henceforth, the government sought to assume direct control over the elite organizations and to restrict their activities to only philanthropy. At the same time, new avenues for sodal advancement were created for the aspiring Chinese, indud-

ing younger and Westernized Chinese.



New Channels for Social Advancement and Reorganization of the Elite-Sponsored Institutions, the Mid-1880s-1900s

As Sinn's study clearly shows, “the grace period" (1869-1882) in which the Tung Wah Hospital had received on the whole friendly and sympathetic support from the governors (especially the “pro- Chinese" John P. Hennessey) was over. Governor George Bowen (r. 1883-85) upgraded the office of the registrar general, through whom the elite's views regarding the Chinese affairs would be communi­ cated to the governor. Gradually more Chinese were able to under­ stand and appreciate the British way of government, and the number of naturalizations increased. The colonial government created other avenues for political partidpation, appointing the naturalized Chinese to serve on various offidal bodies such as the legislative coundl, the sanitary board, and the commission of peace. As these government- created channels to power and status evolved, the relative position of the Tung Wah Committee dedined.45

After consulting the "wealthy and better Chinese" Governor Hen-

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 85



nessey nominated Wu Ting-fang (Ng Choy, barrister, one of the Tung Wah founders) in 1880 to represent the Chinese on the legisla­ tive council. But it was a temporary position, which ended in 1882, when Wu resigned to join Viceroy Li Hung-chang's staff in Tientsin. The next Chinese to be given a seat on the legislative council was Wong Shing (one of the Tung Wah founders), who served from 1884 to 1890. Governor George F. Bowen described him as a man of property, “much travelled, speaking good English," and “fully qual­ ified to look at Chinese affairs with English and at English affairs with Chinese eyes." The prominent Chinese in Hong Kong endorsed Wong Shing's appointment.46 In 1890 Wong Shing's place was taken by Ho Kai (barrister, unaffiliated with the Tung Wah, a Westernized Chinese of a younger generation) who served on the legislative coun­ cil until 1914. Meanwhile a second Chinese member was added to the council when Wei Yuk (comprador, a Tung Wah committeeman) was nominated in 1896. Then Lau Chu Pak (a comprador) was ap­ pointed to serve on the Council from 1913 to 1922.47

In 1886 Dr. Ho Kai (a doctor and barrister at the age of twenty- seven) became the first Chinese appointed to serve on the sanitary board. Subsequently other prominent Chinese appointed to the board included at one time or another Wong Shing, Wei Yuk, Woo Lin Yuen (a Hokkienese), Lau Wai Chuen (comprador). Lau Chu Pak, and Fung Wah Chuen (comprador). The government also appointed the naturalized Chinese to serve as justices of the peace. Of the sixty unofficial justices in 1884, seven were Chinese. In 1893, twelve out of a total of eighty-four unofficial justices were Chinese.48 These were the colonial government's trusted agents and advisors to help main­ tain law and order in the colony.

Although many of these men were also members of the Tung Wah committee, they were government appointees directly dependent on the government's favor for their new positions. At the same time, such positions greatly enhanced their social status in the Chinese community. Of all elite members these coopted Chinese leaders en­ joyed the most influence with the government. Thus, after the mid- 1880s connections with the colonial government became the most important ladder to the top elite status in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the government also sought to reorganize the old elite-sponsored institutions to bring them under direct government control. In 1891 the District Watch Committee was reconstructed to

86 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



include twelve appointed members to advise the government on important issues concerning the Chinese. Further reorganized in 1899 on the recommandations of J. H. Stewart Lockhardt (registrar general and colonial secretary) and Wei Yuk (legislative councillor), the committee was strengthened to include not mere kaifong leaders but the wealthiest and most prominent Chinese who could better cooperate with the registrar general.49 Similarly, the Po Leung Kuk was also reconstituted in 1893. In addition to an annually elected committee, a permanent board of directors was nominated by the governor, including the registrar general as ex-officio president and the Chinese legislative councillor as ex-officio vice-president. Its au­ tonomy severely curtailed, the Po Leung Kuk became something like a self-funding department of government. Sinn aptly calls these de­ velopments a process towards "political integration" and a departure from "segregationism typical of the first four decades of British rule in Hong Kong."50

In this process, a number of wealthy, prominent Chinese were coopted by the colonial government. It must not be assumed, how­ ever, that the leading Chinese were given actual political power in the government. Most of the time, the sanitary board deliberated on such politically irrelevant matters as the disposal of dty refuse and night soil.51 Even members of the legislative council in fact served only as advisors to the colonial government, since the official mem­ bers always commanded a majority in the council, meaning govern­ ment executive control of the legislature. Hence the legislative council was in fact merely a consultative council.

Moreover, in a colonial situation most Chinese appointees were docile and subservient to the British colonial authorities. Governor Hennessey thought that Wu Ting-fang was "a cipher on the Legis­ lative Council." Wong Shing was satisfactory to the government because he "was content to adopt a co-operative attitude which at least had the merit of demonstrating that no hazard was likely to result from having a Chinese representative permanently on the Legislative Council."52 Ho Kai took an active part in the business of the legislative council from 1890 to 1914. He identified himself with the European unofficial members in a policy of "loyal opposition" to tire government. In recognition of his cooperation and loyal service, the British Crown named him in 1892 a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (C.M.G.) and bestowed a knighthood

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 87



upon him in 1912. Wei Yuk received the same honors in 1918 and 1919.

Such hononary titles and official recognition greatly enhanced the coopted Chinese elite's social status and prestige, adding an impor­ tant asset to the elite's business and professions. Most wealthy com­ pradors, businessmen, and professionals were therefore eager to cooperate with the colonial government, which in turn gained in some important ways from the elite's cooperation. Elite support en­ hanced the government's prestige and legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese public. Elite also provided government with advice and information concerning the governance of the Chinese and the main­ tenance of law and order in the colony.53The elite's cooperation with the government was reinforced by its economic ties to foreign capi­ talism in the colony.



The Elite's Economic Ties to Foreign Capitalism

E. J. Eitel observed in 1895: "[T]he mighty spirit of free trade . . . fused the interests of European and Chinese merchants into indisso­ luble unity. . . . [T]he tendency . . . was the inchoative union of Europe and China, by the subordination of the latter to the for­ mer."54 The numerous foreign firms in Hong Kong employed Chinese merchants as compradors and assistant compradors, who at the same time diversified their own interests in various enterprises. Compra­ dors were among the wealthiest and most prominent Chinese in the colony, including such famous names as Ho Tung, Ho Fuk, Ho Kam Tong, Wei Yuk, Fung Wah Chuen, Lau Chu Pak, and Lo Koon Ting. 5 All these gentlemen had at one time or another served on the Tung Wah Committee.

According to Governor G. W. Des Vaeux's report, in October 1889, the Chinese had began to make considerable subscriptions in com­ mon with Europeans to the joint-stock enterprises undertaken almost entirely with local capital. Thirty-five joint-stock companies had been formed since the beginning of 1888, "with capital already paid-up aggregating $9,508,475, for land investment, manufacture, and trade in Hong Kong and for mining and for planting enterprises in the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and Tonking." In addition, there were ten other joint-stock companies registered in Hong Kong, making a total of forty-five.56 European business enterprises attracted a number of

88 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



Chinese investors. Ho Kai, Wong Shing, Leung Pui Chee, and Fung Wah Chuen were among the shareholders of the Green Island Ce­ ment Company.57 Li Tak Cheung and Fung Tang worked with W. Reiners, E. R. Belilios, and H. Foss as directors of the Chinese Insur­ ance Company, Ltd.58 In the shareholders' meetings, Chinese mer­ chants sat side by side with their European colleagues and partners to discuss their common business interests.

Chinese barristers and solicitors also went into partnership with foreign firms of solicitors. Tso Seen-wan, after passing his law exam­ ination in 18%, practiced in Hong Kong as a partner of the Tso and Hodgson.59 The solicitor H. K. Woo (Hu Chiung-t'ang, second son of the reformer-writer Hu Li-yüan) worked in partnership with Geo.

K. Hall Brutton. Sinn Tak Fan (a prominent Chinese to chair the Tung Wah Board of Directors in 1908) worked as the managing derk and chief interpreter to Messrs. Ewens and Needham, solidtors. And more than a dozen Chinese architects, surveyors, and dvil engineers also worked in partnership with Europeans.60

The predominance of Western (espedally British) commercial, fi- nancial, and industrial establishments in China meant that Chinese merchants were to a large extent dependent on Western capitalism in such services as shipping, banking, insurance, and industrial equipment supplies.61 Kwong Hip Lung & Company, Ltd. (an engi­ neering and shipbuilding firm in Hong Kong), for instance, had a capital of two hundred thousand dollars in 1890. Its managing direc­ tor Chan Wan Chi had learned his craft in the European-operated Hong Kong Dock Company as an apprentice for eight years before founding his own in 1877.62 Chinese engineers and shipbuilders had to rely on foreign firms for the supply of equipment and machines. In banking, in addition to large foreign banks, there were at the end of the nineteenth century several dozen Chinese native banks in Hong Kong serving the colony and overseas Chinese communities. But the native banks had to rely on foreign banks in business trans­ actions. According to Wang Ching-yü, the "compradorization" (mai- pan hua) of Chinese native banks had occurred since the late 1860s when a dose connection was established between them and foreign banks in China. Foreigners used native banks as a tool of economic penetration, while native banks depended on foreign banks for loans and for honoring native bank orders.63The foreign merchants' accep-

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 89



tance of the native bank promissoiy notes enabled them to sell more goods than if they insisted on cash payments. At the same time the native banks, strengthened by their ties to foreign capital, now "turned to exports like silks and tea and imports like cotton textile"; the native banks also engaged in business with compradors and brokers who acted on behalf of foreign firms. The investors in native banks came to include compradors and "compradorized" merchants.64 In short, native banks became "compradorized," acquired some "mod­ em" elements, established economic ties to foreign capital, and in­ vested in the import and export business.



The Merchant Elite's Ambivalent Relations with Colonial Authorities and Foreign Capitalism

Such dose and extensive economic ties to foreign capitalist interests prompted the Chinese merchants in Hong Kong to support British colonial rule. This was espedally true of the wealthy compradors, businessmen, and bankers who occupied a strategic position in Hong Kong's entrepôt trade, involving large-scale importing and exporting businesses. They were eager to cooperate with the foreign colonial authorities to maintain peace and order in Hong Kong. As the Rev­ erend Dr. James Legge had remarked as early as 1872: "There is a large body of Chinese merchants who have as great a stake in the colony as the British and merchants of other nationalities have."65 Wealthy Chinese merchants, like their European colleagues and part­ ners, had a take in maintaining the colony's status quo.

Economu xrompted Chinese merchants to support and coop­ erate with their foreign colonial rulers. However, the relationship was characterized by both harmony and conflict, as Chinese mer­ chants sought constantly to gratify their economic and political as­ pirations. Their economic dependence on foreign capitalism did not predude political protest against it, though such protests were ulti­ mately ineffective and self-destructive for the Chinese merchants. 6 The status of economic dependency nurtured among them political resentment against foreign capitalist domination and control. Even compradors who collaborated directly with foreign capitalism as ju­ nior partners were not always subservient to it.67 Seeking to assert their independence, the Chinese merchants had to compete rigor-

90 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



ously with foreign capitalists in the colony who enjoyed the privi­ leged status of being the ruling class with political and economic power to influence the colonial government's action and policies.

To illustrate, one can cite the experience of Ho Amei and Li Tak Cheung (prominent merchants who chaired the Tung Wah Board of Directors in 1882 and 1883 respectively). In 1882 the colonial govern­ ment rejected on ethnic grounds their application on behalf of the Chinese-financed Wa Hop Telegraph Company for permission to lay a cable from Kowloon to Hong Kong. The government argued that a Chinese company controlling the telegraphic communication "might under certain circumstances be a source of serious danger."68 Signif­ icantly, this action was taken by the government under the suppos­ edly "pro-Chinese" Governor Hennessy. In the meantime, however, Li Tak Cheung and Ho Amei had other important commercial inter­ ests in the colony such as insurance companies that were closely tied to Western capital.

Thus, to Chinese merchants the foreign businessmen were simul­

taneously partners and rivals, friends and enemies. This relationship of both cooperation and competition created a major contradiction in the Chinese merchants—their cooperation with and dependence on the foreign capitalists on the one hand, and their resentment and political protest against them on the other. The Chinese elite's rela­ tion with the colonial government was therefore equally ambivalent, producing simultaneously collaboration and resentment. This rela­ tionship was rendered more complex by Hong Kong's colonial situa­ tion. It became part of a triangular relationship between government, elite, and populace.



The Triangular Govemment-Elite-Populace Relationship

The colonial government subsidized and supervised the operations of elite-sponsored institutions such as the Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk, which the suspicious government insisted must remain purely philanthropic, not political organizations. Ironically, it was through these organizations that the elite exerted sociopolitical influence over the populace, thereby cooperating with the govern­ ment. The government relied on the elite for advice on the gover­ nance of the Chinese, but it also looked upon the elite with a watch­ ful, suspicious eye. The elite in turn relied on the government's grace

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 91



and blessing to promote their social position and to pursue their commercial interests; so they cooperated with the government while also resenting its domination and jealous control over them.

In order to enhance their legitimate position as community lead­ ers, the elite had to demonstrate their concern for the people's wel­ fare. The Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk were intended to promote popular welfare and also to facilitate social control by alleviating social problems caused by coolie poverty. Coolies re­ sented their subsistence living. The colonial government encouraged and subsidized these charitable organizations because it also had a stake in social control and in promoting welfare to enhance its legiti­ macy in the eyes of the public. Due to racial tensions, however, the government sought to supervise and control the operation of these organizations, preventing them from becoming independent political power bases of the Chinese elite. Within the framework of govern­ ment supervision the Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk became vehicles with which the elite reached out to the people and exerted sociopolitical influence over them.

Poverty of the coolie working class was a source of tension in the colonial society. Each year the Tung Wah Hospital gave asylum and free medical treatment to hundreds of sick destitute and coolies. In the fourteen years from 1893 to 1907 the Po Leung Kuk recorded a total of 6,471 men, women, and children kidnapped from their homes in Hong Kong, Macao, and the adjoining districts on the mainland. Of this number, the Po Leung Kuk redeemed 929 victims and sent them back to their homes.69 The elite used charity to ease social tensions resulting from poverty, unemployment, and street crimes.

E. P. Thompson observes that " 'liberality' and 'charity' may be seen as calculated acts of class appeasement in times of dearth and calculated extortions (under the threat of riot) by the crowd: what is (from above) an 'act of giving' is (from below) an 'act of getting.' " 70 And as the anthropologist Kani Hiroaki contends, the colonial gov­ ernment and wealthy Chinese merchants had a mutual interest in seeking to use charity as a means to divert the direction of the lower class's anger and frustration away from them. They sought to use charity to ease social tensions, thereby helping to maintain political stability and perpetuate the existing system of commercial capitalism under British colonial rule.71 Where charity did not suffice, they resorted to coercion.

92 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



Crime thrived on poverty. The Victoria Jail in Hong Kong became overcrowded in the early 1890s, prompting the colonial government to build a new jail. However, all unofficial members of the legislative council representing the tax-paying commercial interests in the col­ ony opposed the vote for a new jail. Ho Kai argued that solitary confinement and nourishing food would hardly be a punishment for the criminals among the lower class Chinese. The acting registrar general asserted that three methods would make the jail more of a deterrent: depriving the prisoners of food, increasing hard labor, and solitary confinement.72A local English paper voiced support:

[The Chinese] are a stolid, nerveless race; and it is this stolidity which make them so indefatigable as workers and enabled them to support an amount of seclusion which would be insufferable to a European. . . . It is our opinion that if "bamboo chow chow" [the lashing with bamboo stick] were more frequently administered.

. . . the present accommodation in the Gaol, with perhaps some structural improvement, would be found ample for the needs of the colony.73

Similarly, the wealthy Chinese merchants petitioned the colonial government in 1893:

The prisoners have more space allowed them than they have ever had when not in prison. In a word, they are far better off in the gaol than out of it. Because the gaol is already looked upon as a paradise by many a rascal . . . , any extension of the gaol will certainly lead to an influx of bad characters from China [T]he

most efficacious way to prevent persons from committing crimes in the colony is to use more freely the power of banishment and

the rattan.74

In short, Chinese merchant elite advised the British colonial authori­ ties that the best ways to prevent the lower-class Chinese from com­ mitting crimes were flogging, banishment, and making prison con­ ditions more miserable.

During the 1890s tensions surfaced from time to time between the lower class Chinese and the merchant elite who collaborated with the colonial government to keep them in line. There was a case of a rice warehouse coolie who sustained a fractured leg and was taken to the Tung Wah Hospital. A European doctor came to look at his leg and ordered him to be sent to the Government Civil Hospital, and before

Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation 93



the relatives or the Tung Wah Directors could interfere the coolie's leg was amputated. Said a contemporary report, “The man's relatives and children go frequently to the [Tung Wah] Hospital now and give trouble to the Directors and say they had no right to amputate the man's leg without his consent and that he could not get his living to support his family."75 The elite had not been able to fulfill its obliga­ tions to protect the coolie, which caused coolie resentment.

In May 1894 an epidemic plague broke out in Hong Kong. To contain the disease the colonial government took certain sanitary measures, including house-to-house visits to search for infected per­ sons and the removal of such persons for isolation on board the Hygeria, a hospital ship attended by Western doctors. These mea­ sures caused mass resistance because of the deep-rooted Chinese bias against Western medicine and doctors. The Chinese complained that the privacy of women's quarters was invaded by the daily visits of the military and police; they suspected that the foreign devils “had sinister and unspeakable designs on the women and children."76 The crisis split the Tung Wah Committee. Hospital chairman Lau Wai Chuen (a naturalized British subject, justice of the peace, and member of the sanitary board) “lent the government his hearty co­ operation." In the words of the local English press, he had "an intelligence which unfortunately does not belong to all his country­ m en." 7Some of his colleagues resisted the government policy, caus­ ing European suspicion that they were creating a strong opposition among the native population to the authorities.78

In a mass hysteria, wild rumors began to spread that Western

doctors cut open pregnant women and scooped out the children's eyes in order to make medicines for the treatment of plague-stricken patients.79 Resentful of forcible removal of patients, the crowd block­ aded houses to be visited and stoned sanitary officers on May 19. Aggravated by the Chinese elite's inability to protect patients from Western doctors, a mob gathered at the Po Leung Kuk and broke its windows, but was dispersed by the police before doing further dam­ age.80

The following day a community meeting chaired by Lau Wai Chuen was held at the Tung Wah Hospital, attended by some seventy members of the leading firms and four hundred others. Captain Superintendent of Police F. H. May sought to explain the govern­ ment sanitary measures. While the meeting was in progress news

94 Chinese Community in a Colonial Situation



arrived that Lau Wai Chuen's shop in Bonham Strand was attacked by a mob, which complained that Mr. Lau as a member of the sanitary board had not protected the interests of his countrymen. He at once left the meeting, which then broke up, but no sooner had he got into his sedan chair than he was surrounded by a howling mob which turned his chair upside down and stoned him. He quickly got out of the chair and ran back into the hospital. Captain F. H. May at once sent a mounted contingent of armed Sikhs to the scene to prevent further disturbances. Mr. Lau had to be escorted by police to his residence. Two coolies were arrested in the incident and were each subsequently fined fifty dollars.81

Mr. Lau's collaboration with the colonial authorities incurred pop­

ular indignation. This was a great humiliation for the Tung Wah Hospital and its chairman, the result of the elite's inability to fulfill its moral obligation to protect the populace from the hated govern­ ment sanitary measures.

The plague of 1894 provided an occasion for the government to interfere in the operation of the Tung Wah Hospital. In 18% Gover­ nor Robinson appointed a commission to investigate its operation and organization.82 Despite the resistance of some of its committee­ men, the governor appointed for the hospital a Chinese doctor trained in Western medicine in 18%, and in the following year a Chinese steward was appointed to supervise the sanitary maintenence of the building. By these appointments the Tung Wah ceased to be the Chinese hospital offering purely Chinese treatment. The hospital's autonomy had been the basis of its claim to community leadership. The curtailment of its autonomy marked the decline of the hospital's community leadership and the acceleration of political integration underway ever since the mid-1880s. The British assumed more direct rule over the Chinese community, a departure from the govern­ ment's segregationist policy of earlier decades.83 All these events took place in a new social milieu.