an-illustrated-history-of-hong-kong-nigel-cameron

The Executive Council in 18 60, Sir Hercules Robinson seated wearing a top hat. W. T. Mercer, Colonial Secretar'y, is seated on the left, with Mr Leslie of Dent and Company, and Col. Haythorne, Captain Superintendent of Police, on the right.

92 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

held sporadically, covered a period of r3 months, the Council faced con­ tinually by 'equivocation, proved unreliability of witnesses, problems of interpretation and translation, and failure to produce evidence'. Caldwell was suspended as unfit to continue in his office because of his association with Ma Chow Wong. Yet some years later another administration was to find a use for his services. His Chinese wife, a former brothel girl, continued after his death in possession of the brothels into the r890s. May, Superintendent of Police, who was implicated in the affair, was exonerated.

Possibly even before he left London and certainly after the first few months of his tenure in Hong Kong, Robinson was convinced that the prime need in the colony was broad-based civil service reform. He complained in his first Annual Report in r85 9 about the absence of it, and thereafter aimed at achieving a properly organized administration under his control. He revived the cadet scheme. Recognizing another of the chronic ills of the service - the opportunity for corruption - Robinson raised salaries and instituted a Civil List of offices and their appropriate salaries, obviating the need . to re-vote them every year. He also enforced the principle that official members of the Legislative Council might not vote against any action proposed by the Governor, and he forbade communication by any member with the press on official matters. Finally, in this sensitive area, he introduced a pension scheme for civil servants.

It is on the basis of these measures in regard to the structure of the admin­ istration and its relations with the public, that the colony's public service has stood ever since. In its establishment may be seen Robinson's prime importance in Hong Kong history. He recognized that to fight against corruption and other endemic abuses in the administration was futile in the absence of trained personnel, financial inducement, and the assurance of a pensioned future.

The new Governor then tackled the press, which had been responsible for stirring the pot of social ill-ease. The hypocrisy of much press activity in Hong Kong to that date consisted of its posing as the guardian of public morals, and then turning to the self-serving dissemination of scandal, and now and then printing outright malicious libel. While adhering to the prin­ ciple of press freedom, Robinson now required all editors to pay much larger · sums of money as surety of their good faith. And he began publication (from r862) of the Government Gazette in a Chinese as well as the existing English version, for the first time affording the majority race the chance of reading ordinances and other official matters affecting them.

Robinson's attention to the Chinese majority stands in interesting contrast to the attitude of most of his predecessors and successors who usually made the mistake of ignoring them, or regarding them as a criminal class or as irredeemable savages. On his estimate, at most a mere 5 00 of the 1 20,000 Chinese in the colony knew anything about British laws or how they were

Consolidation under Robinson 93

administered. One comical example of that ignorance was the continued payments by the Chinese of salt revenues to extortionist gangs, even though the salt monopoly had been abolished in 18 5 8. Robinson ceased trying to govern the Chinese through their own headmen and made the Registrar­ General the channel of communication with the government. But in 1860 he met Chinese opposition when he introduced closer control over pawn­ broking. The pawnbrokers shut up shop and went on strike. So, too, did the cargo-coolies, and also the chair-coolies when he wanted to register them in 1861 and 1863. He took a firm line, refusing concessions. Registration took place.

With the Governor no longer responsible to consular officials in China, the island slowly ceased to be regarded as the centre for British trade and in­ fluence in the Far East. The Kowloon peninsula came once more to the fore­ front, as hostilities with China were renewed in 1860 to force the ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin. Anglo-French forces encamped there before embarking for the north. Bruce, British Minister in China, wanted Kowloon retained as part of the indemnity the Chinese would be made to pay at the conclusion of the treaty. Harry Parkes was entrusted with the negotiations. The result was positive. On 26 March 1860 the area south of a line drawn between Kowloon Fort and a point opposite Stonecutters island was leased in perpetuity to Britain and was handed over to Hong Kong. Charles May was made Special Commissioner, to employ Chinese laws and usage as far as he could. The Convention of Beijing in October 1860 cancelled the lease and ceded it outright as a Hong Kong dependency 'with a view to maintaining law and order in and about the harbour of Hong Kong'. It then came to light that there was no official record of ownership and tenancies of the land. What deeds did exist, did not define boundaries. And there had been neither time nor opportunity to carry out the necessary cadastral survey. At once a swarm of claimants appeared waving spurious deeds and clamouring for com­ pensation. The successful ones were to get 999-year leases on the same rental terms as previously. Inevitably justice was rough and ready, and where serious doubts were felt the land was sold, the proceeds being shared among claimants under Chinese official supervision.

The problems were far from solved, however. A dispute boiled up between

the Hong Kong government and the military, who claimed the whole area as a cantonment where all the troops in the colony could be housed. Ragged arguments dragged on for four years, pre-empting organization of the land for building or for recreation (as Robinson wished) to relieve what was seen as population pressure on Hong Kong island. The south-west portion of the peninsula, in his view, should be devoted to commerce and wharves since it fronted deep water, and he appointed a commission to sort the matter out. But the members of the commission - naval, military, and civil - failed to agree. Eventually Robinson managed to reserve the land he wanted for

94 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

commercial purposes, but his scheme for a praya running from the point at Tsim Sha Tsui to the boundary opposite Stonecutters island was never imple­ mented. Compensation for dispossessed Chinese (over $ 29,000) was delayed until 1864; but those not dispossessed received their 999-year leases; others were granted leases only sufficient to ensure they built durable structures.

During the debate the new Secretary of State for War, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, had taken up the cudgels on behalf of the army, and the Kowloon land use controversy was not to be finally settled, with plots marked out for sale and a sea wall built, until r864. The absurd demands of both army and navy in Hong Kong's early history were responsible for the postponing or even abandoning of many a good plan, and for malformation of what could have been intelligently designed urban areas.

At this time the Colonial Office woke up to the fact that the annual budget of Hong Kong had never been voted by the Legislative Council, as was standard practice in other colonies. And the Council from that time on did so. The local Post Office, previously run by the postal authorities in England, was now taken over and run locally. At first British 'stamp labels' were to be used, but London decreed that Hong Kong should print its own, and various denominations were designed, the colour being chosen by the Postmaster­ General, F. W. Mitchell. Robinson tried to get the Legislative Council to agree to an ordinance under which all vessels would carry Hong Kong mail free of charge, but they 'stoutly resisted its passage as interference with free

trade'. As in Britain when first introduced, the use of stamps in Hong Kong

w. as 'haile. d by' the community with little satisfaction' and 'apprehension of

1nconven1ence .



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A steam-assisted sailing ship in Hong Kong waters in r 860.

Consolidation under Robinson 9 5

The Governor now began. to apply his mind to the predicament of the courts, where pressure of work was excessive due to the number of cases admitted from the Treaty Ports, and also resulting from the colony's in­ creasing population. From 185 1, when the number of cases heard in the colony was 1,922, the workload had increased fourfold by 1860. Robinson set up a Summary Court and judges to relieve the High Court and Magistrates Courts, at the same time abolishing the offices of Chief and Assistant Magistrate in favour of two Police Magistrates. In this connection a know­ ledge of Chinese was seen as important - more important even than exten­ sive legal qualifications. Robinson's attitude to competence in Chinese brought the offer of $ 10 a month to any official who would learn - but there were only three takers.

The total inadequacy of the gaol had been apparent for many a year, one of

the grey areas in the colony's administration which tended to darken in hue with the passing of time. Under Robinson the whole topic of police and detention resurfaced. Bowring's gaol was too small even before it opened in 1862. Since then prisoners had greatly increased in numbers. A new gaol was urgently needed but, as usual in Hong Kong, the process of getting one was tortuous. Robinson wanted the gaol on Stonecutters island, out of the urban area. But the cost of building it and the time factor worried him. A stopgap in the shape of a hulk named Royal Saxon was bought and moored off Stone­ cutters, and filled with 280 convicts. Chinese squatters on the island were compensated and cleared. Then a boat with 3 8 convicts aboard capsized alongside the Royal Saxon, and an enquiry gave a verdict of accidental death, but was critical of discipline in the prison hulk and of the unseaworthy nature of the capsized craft. The superintendent of the Royal Saxon was dismissed and the vessel brought nearer to the shore so that the inmates could reach land via a gangway. This they promptly did in a mass escape of 100 in 1864. None was recaptured.

Simultaneously, for similar reasons, prisoners were escaping from the old

gaol on Hollywood Road, principally by the monsoon drains. A new super­ intendent named Douglas was appointed and the situation improved - the gaol thereafter being commonly referred to as Douglas Hotel.

Yet the colony's crime problem was far from solved. A battle in Kowloon lasting several days between Punti villagers and Hakka settlers had to be stopped. An opium scandal came to light, in which Indian merchants and an Englishman in charge of opium stocks aboard the receiving ship Tropic had defrauded the Chartered Mercantile Bank of two million dollars in 1862. Then the vaults of another bank were entered in 1865 by 'drain gangs' using stormwater drains from which to excavate tunnels under the floors. The bank lost $63 ,000 in notes and £11,000 in gold ingots, some of the notes being discovered on, the following morning floating about the streets.

Perhaps the major failure of the period, partly attributable to Robinson,

96 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

which fortunately did not result immediately in tragedy, concerned the old trio of interlinked problems - water supply, sanitation, and public health. When the Governor arrived there was a period of acute water shortage after poor summer rains. To this he responded, reviving a project shelved in Bowring's time, by offering a prize of $ 1,000 for the best scheme for bringing an adequate water supply to Victoria town. A civil employee of the Royal Engineers, R. B. Rawling, won the prize for a scheme envisaging the con­ struction of a reservoir at Pok Fu Lam on the south-west slopes of the Peak, and a conduit to lead the water round the hills to the north slopes at a level which later came to be named Conduit Road. Modified a little, the work was put in hand with Rawling supervising, at an estimated cost of £ 2 5 ,ooo plus another £ 5 ,ooo to provide for a future extension. The scheduled completion date was 1861- 2, and provision was made for a water rate to be levied at

2 per cent of the value of properties supplied. But water from Pok Fu Lam failed to flow until 1864, and then in quantities far from the copious supply promised. An extension to the scheme to furnish water to the eastern parts of the town had to be constructed in the first year of operation at an extra cost of $10,000.

This first major attempt to provide adequate water supplies was a partial failure, and as the population continued to increase it became even less satisfactory. The operation may be seen as the archetype of others repeated ad nauseam in decades to come, with reluctant administrations grudgingly enlarging, modifying, and tinkering with what in the first place had been insufficient schemes. Robinson, although to his credit he got the first scheme going, was no wiser than others in perceiving the future in terms of popula­ tion and water. In many ways Hong Kong was still like a small frontier town clapped together in response to the basic needs of gold prospectors. Sanitation was the last priority. But at least the town had a Governor with the relevant facts to hand, even if he did not visit those sections where the problem was at its most gruesome.

Dr L. Murray, a new Colonial Surgeon, arrived in 1859 to take charge of the new civil hospital, and was permitted to take up private practice to eke out his miserable salary. The following year, 1860, his report landed on the Governor's desk with what, when read, must have sounded in retrospect a · sickening thud. It was suppressed. In 1861 Murray tried again, making the same charges and recounting the same dire tale. It was returned to him for revision. Perhaps his language was on the outspoken side of tact, but the enormity of the conditions Murray described excused a conscientious medical officer some little intemperance of wording. Drainage and sewerage, he wrote, 'had never received adequate attention, nor been carried out on any comprehensive plan' - hardly surprising since there was only one Inspector of Nuisances, and the police usually did not trouble him with cases that would require his attention. Murray condemned the methods of collection of refuse

Consolidation under Robinson 97

and 'night soil', and suggested it be done before people went out to work. (In later times, until the mid-twentieth century, in parts of the colony where there was no sewerage, night soil was still being collected in the hours of darkness.) The hospital, Murray said, was inadequate, with no wards for infectious ( as opposed to other) diseases, no provision for Chinese patients, no baths or means of that ordinary cleanliness 'most often useful to medical treatment'. His sarcasm may have been what Robinson disliked. The prison with its stench and overcrowding, its lack of ventilation, he noted as 'beyond des­ cription'. Staff continually changed. He complained of the severity of floggings and the permanent deformities left by chaining. Yet in his previous year's report he had stated that 'the Chinese thrive amazingly in confinement and after a few months' incarceration are sent out fat and healthy'. A further year's experience in Hong Kong had apparently altered his first impression of this. If Robinson was irked by the style of the reports, it was hardly the mark of a responsible official to suppress them - for, sarcasm aside, what they described was a public health predicament teetering on the edge of public

calamity.

Some reforms were made, nibbling at a monstrously dangerous state of affairs. The civil hospital was enlarged and destitute Chinese were admitted. A medical superintendent was appointed to the hospital (the first one was dismissed for locking his door at night so that he could not be disturbed). The prevalence of cholera in China and Japan, and nearer home on Stonecutters island among the convicts, brought about the appointment of a Sanitary Committee in December 1862. And this committee reported the same appalling state of affairs as had been described by Murray (but in milder language) suggesting radical rethinking about the drainage 'system'. The Surveyor-General stated that the reason for the dismal state of sanitation was the unexpectedly high rate of population growth. He failed to remark on another - the extraordinary negligence of the government. The Colonial Office, informed of the cost of improvements, replied coldly that these might not be undertaken until the colony's revenues could pay for them. In spite of these conditions the general health of the population was passably good. But the makings of disaster lurked all around.

However alarming in terms of public health, the upsurge of the population was a contributory factor in Hong Kong's increasing prosperity. While in 1851 there were only 1,600 foreigners among a Chinese population of 85,3 30, by 1865 foreigners numbered 2,034, 'coloured' persons (Indian s) 1, 645, and Chinese 121,825. In the same period the income from land leases expanded just short of a hundredfold to £ 30,866. The revenue from auctions, largely engendered by Chinese, doubled in 1861 compared to the previous year. So too did levies for police and later water, while government revenues almost trebled to £175 ,717 in 1865 - as did expenditure. The home govern­ ment viewing all this with a somewhat acquisitive eye, never keen to spend on

98 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

the 'anomalous' colony, then exacted £20,000 in annual contribution to the upkeep of the military presence in Hong Kong - over Robinson's and the Legislative Council's strong protests. Payments began in r86 5 and continue down to the present day.

As prosperity increased there came a time to reconsider the old and vexed question of the currency - what was legal tender. The problem was a confused and confusing one, product of off-the-cuff decisions in the past, and of making do in the absence of any currency at all other than that of China and the internationally used Maria Theresa and Mexican dollars. Part of the problem was the number and variety of coins allowed as legal tender - various types of silver dollar, British and Indian coins, copper Chinese 'cash'. The difficulties had been recognized in Bowring's time but it was not then considered the opportune moment to make changes. Robinson reported that the currency proclamation of r 844, allowing the use of British and Indian silver and gold coins with silver dollars, was now outdated as all commercial accounts were kept in dollars. Little money was collected in sterling. The dollar was valued at four shillings and two pence. Chinese cash were valued in accordance with the weight of silver in the dollar (usually about r, 200 cash to the dollar). The Governor's proposals to mint a Hong Kong coinage in London proved in part unacceptable, because they involved large numbers of low-value coins of considerable weight, implying heavy transport costs.

Eventually the Colonial Office agreed that the colony's accounts might be kept in dollars, a reform introduced on r July r862. Robinson proposed setting up a Hong Kong mint to coin its own dollars, cash, and one- and ro­ cent coins. Until such time as the mint could begin operations, the coins were made at the London Mint. These went into circulation in January r864. The costly project of the Hong Kong Mint was left for the next governor to bring to fruition.

Along with currency reform came the wider question of banks and banking. Hong Kong's first bank was a branch of the Oriental Bank estab­ lished in r 845. Twelve years were to pass before its notes were recognized as legal tender; even then the bank was required to provide monthly informa­ tion on the state of its note circulation. By the time a competing bank had appeared in 1857, notes in circulation amounted to $342,965. The Chartered · and Mercantile Bank of India opened in August r85 7, followed by the Bank of India, Australia and China, and by the Agra and United Service Bank; and by that time there existed rules for official recognition of banks.

All the existing banks in the colony were primarily involved in exchange operations. The need was felt for what we would nowadays call a merchant bank. The first step was taken by Dent and Company who in the summer of r864 announced that they and others were contemplating forming a local bank to oil the wheels of trade between China and Japan. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was set up with a capital of $ 5 million

Consolidation under Robinson 99

in 20,000 shares. Merchants who formed the original committee included 14 from the largest trading houses in Hong Kong. The first manager, V. Kresser, took up his post on r January r86 5. The bank was the first to profit under the new limited liability regulations passed on that day, and officially opened for business on 3 March.



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The first European staff of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.



Among other novelties in Robinson's time were the setting up of a Chamber of Commerce in May r86 r, in an effort to protect commercial interests now that the Governor was no longer Superintendent of Trade; and the abolition of imprisonment for debt in the same year, bringing colonial law into line with that of Britain.

Robinson had arrived in Hong Kong somewhat in the way an emergency service answers a call. He was prepared for the worst in a colony which he described as 'publicly and socially ill at ease with itself '. 1 In his second



By 1861 Hong Kong was only 20 years old but the town of Victoria had grown remarkably, as this Chinese school painting shows. Paddle-steamers, three-masted men-of-war with square ports for cannon, clipper ships, and junks fill the harbour. The town, with the Cathedral and Government House above, covers the lower slopes, with Taipingshan in the right third of the picture.



Annual Report he remained sceptical about the idea that it could ever blossom into a considerable settlement, or would ever reach one-quarter of the size of Guangzhou. Nevertheless he developed an affection for the place, and on the whole its residents warmed to him - offering him a laudatory address as he went on leave for his 'indefatigable zeal and efficiency' in promoting public welfare and his 'kindness and urbanity [in] private inter­ course'. 2 It is easy to point to his deficiencies. Thaf 'zeal and efficiency' could scarcely be said to have extended to public health. But those were days of more casual attitudes to mortality from infectious disease of unknown cause. Yet a code of prudent practice in public sanitation was well accepted in Britain as some sort of preventative measure. It was this that Robinson neglected to enforce.

In assessing Robinson's effect on Hong Kong, Eitel is less enthusiastic than · were its citizens. While giving the Governor his due for keeping the peace and setting the colony back on its feet after the shambles left by his predecessor, he implies that Robinson was fortunate to have W. T. Mercer, without whom he would have been 'infinitely less successful'. Bowring had called him 'one of the most accomplished men in the colony but an unwilling reformer'. That was true. But it was Mercer who had recommended the scoundrel Bridges (a college friend) as Attorney-General under Bowring. He escaped unscathed in the ensuing scandal, writing to the Colonial Secretary: 'I have had a long and friendly but never intimate acquaintance with Dr Bridges.'3 Perhaps that was

Consolidation under Robinson IOI

the literal truth. During the absences of Robinson and after he left, Mercer administered the government for a total period of almost three years before leaving Hong Kong in May I 867. He had been in the colony since I 844. But he failed to secure what he really wanted, a colonial governorship.

There were, however, welcome signs of change in Hong Kong, both socially and materially, a new sophistication befitting a more settled place. The picture formerly characterized by quarrelsome men in and out of govern­ ment, of a barbarous place filled with unruly merchants and rough Chinese under venal administrators, had by the end of Robinson's governorship greatly altered. This dawning civic pride was to be symbolized by the erec­ tion of a clock tower, that epitome of mid-Victorian values. The tower, 80 feet high, rose at the junction of Pedder Street and Queen's Road, vaguely baroque, quite in keeping with the surrounding architecture, holding a white-



The clock tower at the corner of Pedder Street, seen from Des Voeux Road on the waterfront, with Jardine's on the right and the former p remises of Dent and Company opposite. The photograph is by Afong, a Chinese who did a thriving trade in local views in the r87os.



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faced clock, the gift of shipping tycoon Douglas Lapraik. Even at the tim·e of its building, this reminder of the need ro watch the fleeting hours constituted a slight obstruction to the traffic, and it stood there apparently immovable through a 29-year newspaper campaign to take it down, waged by a member of the Hong ,Kong Club, M. D. Stephens. The clock tower finally suc­ cumbed in I 9 I 3 when the congestion of rickshaws (introduced from Japan



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The Hong Kong Club on the corner of Queen's Road and Wyndham Street was established in r 846. From it were excluded 'shopkeepers, Chinese, Indians, women, and other undesirables'.



after it was erected), carriages, and sedan chairs round its base became intolerable. The clock itself was preserved and appeared with Lapraik's name attached in the new Post Office built in the early twentieth century.

By March r86 5 when Robinson left, shade trees had been planted in several streets of the town and, on the first day of January that year, to general amazement, the new gas street lighting was turned on. It seemed to many that a new era had arrived.





An East India Company officer, rolled chart in hand, points to his ship. Chinese school, c. 1800.



Tea being packed for sale to Western merchants. Chinese school, late eighteenth century.



Opium ships at Lingding Island. W. J. Huggins, I824.



A street in Guangzhou. William Prinsep, I 8 3 8.



A view of the Guangzhou factories. American, French, British, and Danish flags flank the church. Attributed to the Youqua, c. 1850.



Admiral Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief, who arrived in Macau in August r84r. Unknown artist.





A young Chinese merchant at Guangzhou, painted by the artist whom Westerners called Spoilum (Guan Zuolin), early nineteenth century.



An unflattering portrait of Commissioner Lin by a Chinese artist, c. 1840.



Macau, where the foreign merchants spent the off season, away from the Guangzhou factories. Chinese artist. Datable to bef'?re 1844.





Possibly the earliest oil painting of Hong Kong island, showing the path along the north shore (right) as it approaches the early waterfront settlement which became the town of Victoria. The Chinese name, 'Skirt String Island', was derived from the appearance of this path. Chinese artist, undated.





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The opium clipper Red Rover, built in Calcutta in late 1829, one of the fastest of her kind ever built. She eventually belonged to Jardine, Matheson and Company and could make three round trips a year to and from India, laden with opium. William Huggins (1771-1845), undated.



Two medals awarded to Sir Henry Pottinger for service in India and China. Sold at Christie's, London, in 1988.

IO. The Growth of Chinese Institutions, and

the Problems of Education



STO CK TAKING is such a complex phenomenon even in a small society that it is not easily accomplished at a given moment of its life. The balance of achievement and failure, the appearance of trends, are easier to discern in retrospect, although then they lack the muscle of contemporaneity.

In 1 866 when Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell arrived as its Governor, Hong Kong was not threatened by any immediate problem, other than those perennial ones present since the inception. In its 3 5 years the colony had produced more than its share of antagonisms - between governors and their administrations, between governors and governed, and among the citizens themselves. The existenc_e of a master and menial relationship between Westerners and Chinese of an ancient and proud, if decayed, civilization, could not be expected to result in easy social harmony. Yet the odd thing was that the mix of Western, capitalist, mercantile activity and the Chinese capacity for dedicated, intelligent work, allowed both sides to thrive. Despite insanitary conditions, the Chinese were evidently better off than in China, or they would have returned there; and the cleverer among them were making good money. The two communities went their separate ways in all things save for the common ground of commercial pursuits. Doubtless the . Chinese brought with them to Hong Kong many of the detractions of late Qing life in Guangdong Province, and the Westerners the shortcomings of Victorian Britain and nine.teenth-century Europe: and these were exaggerated by deracination. These underlay the bitterness of some of the social battles which raged.

The human consequences of the mushrooming of the Chinese population would have alarmed more caring rulers. But the growth of wealth among those who iri the nineteenth century might be presumed to have it makes remarkable reading. A.R. Johnston in the Journal of the Royal Geographical

104 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Society lists 3 88 Chinese traders, doubtless mostly with small capital resources, among them two compradors. The Chinese Directory for r872 lists 5 5 general merchants, r7 charterers, eight contractors, r6 gold dealers, seven money-changers, r8 opium dealers, six prepared opium dealers, two coal merchants, 4 r marine compradors and ship chandlers, and 4 5 foreign­ firm compradors. It was from among the last two categories that there emerged a Chinese elite. And from their ranks were drawn the people reflected in an earlier set of figures which showed that, among 1,999 persons liable for police rates of above f ro, a remarkable 1, 637 were Chinese, and only 186 British - the rest being other foreigners. Among 773 rated at over

£40, there were 410 Chinese. The trend is clear.

The number of Chinese compradors working for foreign companies was a fairly reliable guide to colonial commercial growth, and also to the rise of a Chinese elite. In r 876 there were 142 brokers, 215 trading hang merchants, and 67 marine compradors. By 1881, the figures were 4".5 5, 393, and 113 respectively. At the beginning of the twentieth century a visiting Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Norman, could write: 'The Chinese merchant is crowding out the British middleman . . . it cannot be long before the bulk of the real estate . . . is owned by Chinese.' The Chinese merchants seemed to him 'among the richest men in the community'. I

The rising affluence of this section of the Chinese, coupled with the need, especially acute for people living under an alien form of rule, to acquire a communal identity, began in the r86os and r870s to give birth to such institutions as the Tung Wah Hospital, established by an ordinance of r870 and opened by the Governor two years later. The response of the Chinese attempting to fit into a foreign system was twofold. First, they tried to adapt to its strange ways; second, they attempted to form some kind of organiza­ tion through whose aegis the British authorities could be persuaded that they were responsible members of society. But in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, Chinese society lacked that class of ranking men whose minds had been nurtured and proved in the traditional Chinese Civil Service examinations - men who in China were the leaders. In Hong Kong these men, who would have been able to communicate effectively in terms of trained intelligenc� with their rulers, were simply not there - so the Chinese had to form new societies.

The first of these were the triads, secret societies which today sound a note of menace, but which in nineteenth-century Hong Kong probably did as much good as harm. ' On balance,' Maurice Freedman writes, 'the secret societies were essentially movements which, while they may have found some of their leaders among members of officialdom and the gentry, expressed an opposi­ tion to the state characteristic of the poor and the peasantry.'2 In the four years 1879- 82 the average annual number of Chinese arrested for being out without a pass or a light at night was 1,000. They lived in a society of

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 105

Westerners of whose laws · they were either ignorant or uncomprehending, and whose hold over them seemed tyrannical, arbitrary, even at times cruel. No European ranking police officer, for example, in this period was a Chinese speaker. The Chinese had no recourse but their temples or religious associa­ tions which cut across dialectal, regional, and other divisions.

The Tung Wah rose to fill a communication gap between Chinese who felt a responsibility for the community as a whole, and the government. Its origins went back to a petition of 1851 signed by 14 Chinese. It asked for a grant of land on which to build a temple where, if they died in the colony, they would have a place to deposit their ancestral tablets, so that later 'their fellow villagers or connections visiting Hong Kong could carry them home'. The temple, soon constructed, came to be used as a place where dying Chinese were deposited. In April 1869 the Acting Registrar-General visited this temple and found the 'dead and dying huddled together indiscriminately in small filthy rooms'. It was this situation which prompted the opening of a subscription list by wealthy Chinese for the establishment of a regular Chinese hospital.

The Chinese subscribed $40,000 and the government donated $15 ,ooo and a site, together with $100,000 as capital, described as 'a gift from the Queen



The reception hall of the Tung Wah Hospital.

ro6 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

to the Chinese community', but which actually came from the Gambling Fund. The Tung Wah was what the ordinance described as 'a Chinese Hospital for the care and treatment of the indigent sick to be supported by voluntary contributions'. As such it has continued ever since. The first Chairman was Leung Hok-chau, comprador in Gibb, Livingstone and Company. Among the directors were the comprador of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Lo Chen-kong, and Wong Shing who was Dr Legge's collaborator in his translation of the Chinese Classics.

T�ng Wah activities on behalf of the poor and the sick expanded. The financial and later business management demands on its Chairman, Directors, and committee members increased so greatly that they came to be recruited only from that segment of Chinese society characterized by wealth and a sense of social responsibility. The Tung Wah in time acquired much property and invested its funds with great skill. .,

Aside from its medical, charitable, and educational activities, the Tung

Wah came to represent the interests of the Chinese at large. The composition of its committee - always including the wealthiest Chinese in Hong Kong and later on practically always the Chinese on the Legislative Council - ensured it a voice. And that voice in several ways took over the duties of the Protector of the Chinese when that office was eventually abolished. The person responsible for the Chinese was the Registrar-General. For him the Tung Wah proved to be his ear on the otherwise hermetic Chinese world; and for the Chinese, knowing that members of the Tung Wah directorate had the ear of the Registrar-General was an important political fact. There existed between the authorities and the Chinese, via the Tung Wah, an unacknow­ ledged symbiotic relationship.

By the late r870s, Lethbridge notes,



the directorate did begin to act as though it had inherited the magisterial function

. . . and the trappings of the imperial Mandarinate. At the formal opening of the Hospital in r 872, the full committee, some 70 or 80 in number, were 'all dressed in Mandarin costume, some even with peacock's feathers attached to their buttons' .3



The late nineteenth century had brought the antique rules of the Civil Service examinations in China so far into disrepute that degrees could be purchased. But what was important was that the directorate and committee members saw themselves in the role of mandarins. Each year at the spring and autumn festivals they went in a body to the Man Mo Temple to participate in the sacrifices to Confucius, the rituals being identical with those carried out by the magistrates of imperial China. The cult of Confucius was encouraged by the Tung Wah by the funding of Confucian schools. Other signs of the Tung Wah's regulatory scope within the Chinese community were such activities as the conveying of corpses to China for burial, sending the sick and

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 107

destitute back to their villages, and collecting money from overseas Chinese for famine relief in China. It became, in Middleton Smith's words, 'probably one of the largest philanthropic institutions in existence'. 4

In this way, on their own initiative, in response to the needs of a population unrepresented in the government of the community, the Chinese made a start on the regulation of their part of that community.

Except in such publications as the journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and

the like, and in some scholarly books, the history of Hong Kong has been documented and expounded largely from a Western point of view. Possibly only a Chinese could successfully do otherwise. Europeans take the stage as principals, the Chinese relegated to the role of virtual extras. Only the most powerful moves made by such organizations as the Tung Wah found acknowledgement until very recently. A detailed history of the interaction of such Chinese bodies with officials and official thinking in the government in the one hundred and fifty or so years of the colony has yet to be attempted, and until it is written there can be no balanced history of Hong Kong. Yet it is at least possible to argue that the gathering stability, as well as the more gen­ eral evolution of Hong Kong, owed something to such informal exchanges. Government of a majority Chinese population by mostly non-Chinese­ speaking officials has certainly been eased by the existence of communicating Chinese bodies, and the interactions have allowed the Chinese some feeling that their way of life has a certain weight in the broadly Western-style management of the colony.

The Tung Wah (that 'eleemosynary corporation' as Eitel calls it) has had

counterparts in at least two other influential kindred societies - the Po Leung Kuk and the District Watch Committee.

The beginnings of the Po Leung Kuk lie in an old Chinese custom which tangled with British law and British Victorian views on sexual morality. Gutzlaff's census of Hong Kong in 1844 recorded among the 1, 3 00 Chinese residents only 3 15 families, and of the 43 6 permanent houses only 13 were private Chinese dwellings. Chinese houses, that year, were outnumbered by the 3 2 brothels. In the 1870s this state of affairs was not greatly altered. Charles May, by then Police Magistrate, wrote in 1877 that only one in six Chinese women in Hong Kong lived with one man 'either in marriage or in concubinage, and all the rest come under the denomination of prostitutes to whom money being offered they would consent to sexual intercourse'. A Chinese doctor who owned a chemist's shop in Taipingshan and had worked in the colony for 23 years, stated that the percentage of 'respectable' Chinese women was in the region of about 25 per cent. The census of 1876 showed 24,3 87 Chinese women in Hong Kong and 81,025 Chinese men. The in­ cidence of prostitution was, not surprisingly, high.

When the Po Leung Kuk was founded in 1878 (its official English name is

the Society for the Protection of Women and Girls) it was within this context.

108 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

There was extensive trafficking in females, most of whom were brought into the colony from China by Chinese living on immoral earnings - brothel brokers, brothel mesdames, and pimps. Chinese males were reluctant to expose their wives and families to the abnormal conditions in the colony (in comparison to those in the average South China village, social conditions were abnormal, even if the money was good). A contemporary comment in 1 860 argues that 'the dearness of house rents may partly account for this as houses with apartments exclusively for the females are very expensive; out of

all proportion to what the Chinese are accustomed to pay in China' .5 There was · little repugnance in Chinese thinking to prostitution. The restraints simply operated less firmly in Hong Kong where there were no village elders.

'

In parallel ran the ancient Chinese custom of buying and selling girls as domestic servants - called mui tsai (Mandarin: mei zu) meaning 'little sister'. The custom was open to abuses but it answered the need both for domestic help and the relief of poorer families with numerous girls to feed. Nominal adoption of the girl in return for a fee paid to her parents was the usual way this worked. The Attorney-General in 1 878 was of the opinion that the practice was not an offence in law; the Governor, Hennessy, thought other­ wise. At the same time there was much kidnapping of girls for transport to South-east Asia. Chinese feeling was strong on this subject, and a petition was forwarded to the Governor for permission to set up an Anti-kidnap Asso­ ciation employing detectives. He responded by setting up a committee including Eitel to discuss the matter, and permission was granted. Thus was born the Po Leung Kuk. Its early existence was threatened by the Chief Justice who insisted that domestic servitude was illegal. The matter was eventually referred to England where the Colonial Office, recognizing the deep-seated nature of the Chinese custom, sided with the Governor.

The main function of the new society, the detection of kidnapping of girls for immoral purposes, was energetically pursued by employing detectives who gathered information both openly and clandestinely. But the society, having apprehended kidnappers, then had the job of looking after the kid­ napped girls, whom they clothed, housed, and fed until mui tsai employment could be arranged or until suitable matches could be made for them. While no.

doubt an element of self-serving entered into the operation, as it produced a

stream of suitable domestic servants for the well-to-do Chinese running the society, it would be unfair and incorrect to see its work as only that. The expenses were subsidized by leading members of the community, and the society was aided by the Tung Wah which provided shelter, and by the Man Mo Temple. In time the Po Leung Kuk became a kind of junior associate of the Tung Wah. But it was not an affluent organization and by 1 892 an ordinance was drafted to assist it. This came under heavy criticism in the Legislative Council, T. H. Whitehead of the Chartered Bank calling the Kuk a secret society. The ensuing accusations and counter claims among members



Dr Kai Ho Kai and Sir James Stewart Lockhart at the opening of the Po Leung Kuk in 1896.

J.

of the administration and the Chinese and others dragged on until the Colonial Secretary, H. Stewart Lockhart, recommended the society be given legal status and a grant. The ordinance of incorporation became law in 1 894, establishing a permanent board. This was Lockhart's personal triumph; a second, since it was he who in 1 891 had succeeded in establishing the Chinese District Watch Committee.

Between 1 888 and 1 892, proving its usefulness, the Po Leung Kuk restored no less than 2,41 2 males and females to their families, married off 21 8 women, and arranged the adoption of 46 children. The society was also effective in dealing with the provisions of the Protection of Women and Girls ordinance of 1 899.

The Registrar-General had in the Po Leung Kuk one more effective channel of communication with and a source of information about Chinese affairs, and the Chinese had the ear of the administration. D uring Lockhart's time the office of Registrar-General became one of much greater import in the government, the importance of the Society rising with it. The inference must be, with regard to Lockhart and other officials in these years, that they sought in the regulation, recognition, and funding of such societies, to incorporate the opinions of a rising Chinese class of influential men into the counsels of government. But it was initially Chinese pressure that brought about the formation of the societies, which were later seen by both Chinese and British as useful means of stabilizing aspects of a community in need of mutual understanding.

11 0 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Both the Tung Wah and the Po Leung Kuk must be seen as powerful forces delaying any too abrupt Westernization in matters affecting the Chinese at large.

The third organization was the District Watch Committee. An American researcher, Lennox A. Mills,6 after a period spent in the colony, called it 'in reality the Chinese Executive Council in Hong Kong'. Yet 'legally, it is merely a committee of fifteen Chinese who meet under the chairmanship of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs to manage the District Watch Force'. At the time he was writing (1941) , this was a body of 1 20 Chinese constables and detectives recruited and funded by the Committee to patrol the Chinese areas of urban Hong Kong island and Kowloon. The Committee, consisting of wealthy Chinese from all walks of life, included the unofficials of the Legislative and Executive Councils, and so exercised considerable political power within the Chinese community. Hence its opinions were listened to by the government. Its origins lay far back in the nineteenth century.

The few inhabitants of Hong Kong, when the British arrived, lived within the traditional structure of South Chinese rural society, bound by kinship, clan loyalties, and (other than the boat-dwellers) by the wider forms of social integration and controls found in any Chinese country community. The British assumed quite otherwise, lumping these people together with the piratical boat-people and with immigrants who arrived after the colony was annexed. The latter were mostly urban Chinese lacking roots in Hong Kong, and soon outnumbered the local inhabitants. They, and the newly arrived Westerners, were in this sense similar to each other and differed from the indigenous people. Soon both were faced with the problems of maintaining law and order in their own communities; and, as to the Westerners, within all communities. Both parties soon discovered that the answer was at least in part to employ their own guards for their property; and some householders, individually or collectively, employed street watchmen too.

The Chinese were rootedly opposed to being regulated by Western standards. Even in the first decade of the colony they had formed their own associations. The committee of the Man Mo Temple, Eitel relates:



rose to eminence as a sort of unrecognized and unofficial local government board . . . [They] secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbiters, arranged for the due reception of mandarins passing through the Colony, negotiated the sale of official titles, and formed the unofficial link between the Chinese residents of Hong Kong and the Canton authorities .



This preceded the recognition of the Tung Wah committee. Naturally such organizations acted somewhat clandestinely - the risk of antagonizing the British authorities being very real.

The District Watch Committee was formed after a meeting of the Chinese

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 111

community on 1 February ·1866. The Registrar-General reported in 1867: 'After much discussion, the community of the Five Districts to the west of the Parade Ground, agreed to ele ct a certain number of their body to act as Watchmen, whose pay should be disbursed by themselves'. They petitioned the government for permission to organize a force of Chinese watchmen, claiming that rough elements in Guangzhou intended to celebrate the New Year by coming to Hong Kong 'with the object of committing e xtensive robberies under cover of a conflagration'. 7 The suggested force commended itself to the Governor, and by an ordinance (No. 7, 1866) the District Watch Committee came into being. Doubtless the rumours of 'rough elements' had been used as a good excuse for forming what was in effect the ir own police force, paid and controlled by the Chinese. They had every reason. The regular police (if such they may be termed) were corrupt, drunken, and venal - and offered little or no protection to the Chinese. The duties of the new force and its usefulness expanded, and its success may be measured by its longevity - it remained intact until 1949. The controlling Committee always included members or ex-members of the Tung Wah and Po Leung Kuk Committees, and the trio of organizations formed a body of considerable power outside the government. It was a force in most aspe cts benign, solidly advisory, even cautionary, at the e lbow of the administration.

The utility, the necessity of such groupings in the Hong Kong context

cannot be denied. Where there is no social contact between two sections of a society it is all but impossible for e ither side fully to understand the other. There was of course, unacknowledged, even unmentionable in that e ra, the shady world of sexual relationships between Western males and their Chinese mistresses. But that was sc_arcely a bridge for understanding ordinary Chinese life and opinion. Nearer the mark was another small world - the affectionate relationships that flourished betwe en Western children and their Chinese amahs. Many of those youngsters picked up Cantonese, becoming quite fluent, and were able, in the licence allowed to children, to make lasting bonds of friendship which they would recall in adult life with pleasure and some understanding of the Chinese.

In another aspect of life, Victorian British and the Chinese had something in common - the thirst for education. The fitful, faltering, muddled process by which Hong Kong's children were accorded an education reflected with fair accuracy the condition of a society more dependent than most, indeed outrageously so in this conte xt, on conditions and influences from other lands. Piecemeal, the structure of the educational system in the colony accommodated itse lf to the complicated social, racial, and trans-cultural facts of life the re. The meeting of an evolving British nineteenth-century social, religious, and educational scene, vocife rously conveye d to Hong Kong, with its static Chinese counterpart inlaid in a Hong Kong commercial society of Westerners far from home, resulted in an educational dilemma. The story

112 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

of education in the colony reflected (and to some extent still reflects) these facts.

The movement in Britain which culminated in the passing of the Education Act in r 870 was reflected in Hong Kong in the growing emphasis placed by all religious bodies on teaching, along with the faith, simple literate skills to the Chinese. For their part the Chinese were far from unwilling pupils, accustomed as they were to consider that only through education was it possible to reach high rank in the old system. If this meant, in the new one in Hong Kong, that a certain amount of foreign religion had to be imbibed, it was no great matter.

Seen in perspective, the nineteenth-century expansion of education in Hong Kong has to be set against a background of British evangelical fervour which insisted on the depravity of unregenerate human nature and the necessity of Christian conversion. Applied to the Chinese, this tended to elicit from them the response of selecting from the process only what they wanted. This pragmatism meant in practice that the educational aspect of missionary endeavour was sifted out and utilized, while Christianity was often politely, even usually, set aside.

There were numerous differences between traditional Chinese education and that in the West. Chinese characters and their correct pronunciation have to be laboriously learned, each new word a new character, a process which takes much longer than learning to read in a language composed of a limited alphabet. Chinese teaching was mostly on an individual master and pupil basis, not in classes, and was paid for by the paterfamilias or a patron. The reason for attending a Western school is implied in an account by a Chinese of being sent to Mrs Gutzlaff 's school in Macau in 183 5. Yung Wing was seven when his family sent him.



As foreign intercourse with China was just beginning to grow, my parents, anticip­ ating that it might soon assume the proportions of a tidal wave, [took] time by the forelock and put one of their sons to learning English that he might become one of the . . . interpreters and . . . make his way into the business and diplomatic world. 8



But other responses more in line with missionary intent were not un­ common. In an essay headed 'Why do you wish to get an education?' set by a teacher in the Morrison Education Society School, a pupil wrote: 'If you convey a heathen boy to a place filled by Christian and delightful boys, he will soon be like one of them; and if you transmit a Christian boy to a heathen village . . . he will soon work the same deeds as they. '9 The Christian message has not been understood, but the English language has been learned.

In early Hong Kong, Christian schools, and also colleges and seminaries for training Chinese youths for the ministry, were a feature. But there was also a genuine interest in all these institutions in education for its own sake. Oddly

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems r r 3

enough the first government grants were paid to Chinese schools, not to those of the missionary bodies.

After sketching the beginnings of schooling in Hong Kong - the nine Confucian Chinese schools, and others started by missionary societies in the 1 840s - Eitel remarks that Sir John Davis



devised early in 1 847, in imitation of the English religious education grants then hotly discussed in Parliament, a government Grant-in-Aid scheme to provide non­ compulsory religious education in Chinese schools under the direction of the Educational Committee . . . That . . . Davis was to some extent a religious visionary, may be inferred from a dispatch . . . to the Colonial Office . . . 'If these schools were eventually placed in charge of native Christian teachers, bred up by the Protestant Missionaries, it would afford the most rational prospect of converting the native population of the Island.' Sancta simplicitas! 10



The government-assisted schools were brought under Bishop Smith, chairman of the Educational Committee, and acted as feeders for St Paul's College. The college produced not a single



native minister or any official interpreter, [but] many of the best educated native residents . . . received their training there. The same may be said for Dr Legge's Anglo-Chinese College which also failed to produce a native preacher or teacher but trained some eminent English-speaking Chinese.



There were detractions, it seems, to this educational process. Scholars of the colleges



gained . . . an unenviable notoriety in Police Court cases. Hence the public drew the inference that, in the case of Chinese youths, an English education, even when conducted on a religious basis, fails to effect any moral reform, and rather tends to draw out the vicious elements inherent in the Chinese character. II



The mercantile community then began to withdraw support from missionary schools.

Several schools closed in the late 1 840s, but the Roman Catholic missions opened others which gave Portuguese youth an English education, thus beginning the process which 'eventually filled commercial and government offices with Portuguese clerks', a situation which continued until the third quarter of the twentieth century. 'The paralysis which came over education' disappeared by r 859 when Bishop Smith's wife started the Diocesan Native Training School. St Paul's College took on a new lease of life under Dr J. Fryer and prospered while he was in charge.

Then there was Miss Baxter who, 'besides much Samaritan activity among

114 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

all classes of the community . . . commenced to labour for the education of the Eurasian children of the Colony'. 12 Previously she had set up schools in Mosque Street and in Staunton Street, and these were eventually amalgamated in Bonham Road in Baxter House. Miss Sophia Harriet Baxter's Diocesan Native Female School used English as the medium of instruction and went well until, to her horror, she discovered that most of her Chinese pupils once they left school became the mistresses of the many European bachelors in Hong Kong. Harriet Baxter inspired both directly and indirectly a string of schools which outlasted her death in 186 5 as the Baxter Vernacular Schools,



•



Pupils and masters at Queen's College. Only one boy is dressed in European style (at the right, second row from the front) .



J.

some later taken over by the Church Missionary Society. She was not alone in her work of educating girls in Hong Kong. There were the Daughters of . Charity, the Misses Legge of the London Missionary Society, and Miss Eaton who arrived in 1 862, later to marry E. Eitel.

The Morrison Education Society, first granted land by Pottinger, had existed in various guises, supported latterly by funds from mercantile houses. And this was to be its undoing. In 1 867, Dent and Company failed, depriving it of its principal source of revenue.

The Chinese were equally early in setting up their schools on traditional lines. Gutzlaff, the Chinese Secretary, stated that in 1845 there were eight such schools, two 'supported by foreigners' and all housed in hovels. He proposed each should have a government grant of $10 per month. He also

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems rr5

asked for free schools to be set up for the Chinese. But the Colonial Office wanted more information - curricula, teaching methods, staffing - before it acted; and in the end it came to the conclusion that the 'most effective, almost indispensible auxiliaries' in colonial education were the missionary societies. At this time the controversy raging in Britain over establishing a national system of education led to great caution being exercised in the granting of public funds for the support of sectarian education there. Grants for Hong Kong were refused for British children's education, but for Chinese schools 'where the contribution required is moderate' and 'no religious differences can arise', and for three schools in Aberdeen, Stanley, and Victoria town, grants of $ ro were allowed as requested. Thus, in 1847, the small beginnings

of a public education system were put in place.

Further progress towards a rational comprehensive system was marred by



� � �I''

I \ I

I ,



A Chinese artist's pamtmg of the Last Supper. A delightful amalgam of Chinese setting and reminiscences of Western paintings of the event.

116 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

the indecision of the authorities in London and in Hong Kong on the relative merits of secular and religious society schools and teaching, and about the weight given to various subjects (Chinese Classics, other secular subjects, and Christian instruction), in schools for Chinese pupils. In detail the story is one of begrudged money, miserable teachers dominating the scene, followed by 'native Christian' teachers and the dominance of the Christian ethic in instruction. Yet another fact leading to conflict was the difference in aims of men such as Legge, Smith, and the Revd Vincent Staunton, all active in the scho9ls question. The Bishop decreed that half the pupils' days should be devoted to the Scriptures and to 'books composed under the superintendence of foreigners', and the other half to the Chinese Classics. He wanted the schools to act as feeders to his own St Paul's College. The College prepared its students for the Anglican ministry, received financial help from the Foreign Office to assist in turning out interpreters for the consular service, and appears to have offered some sort of general education as w�ll. Its popularity with the Chinese lay in the economic advantages accruing from a knowledge of English.

The policy of the Education Committee was to encourage the study of English not only for its own sake, but 'to act as a bond of union between the many thousands of Chinese who have made this place their residence and the handful of Europeans by whom they are governed'. Progress was naturally slow, school buildings 'confined, dirty and altogether unsuitable'. Attendance at all schools was sporadic. Aberdeen and Stanley pupils went off fishing with their parents for days, even weeks, and at a quite tender age left school to work. The 1 85 o education report remarks on this problem that much as the Chinese wanted education 'this was secondary to his attachment to gain'. The fact that poor fisher-folk had first to make a,_ livelihood, and that their children had to take part from an early age, was ignored.

Under Bowring with his liberal thrust and non-Anglican outlook the attempt 'to wean the natives from their religious opinions and practices' was opposed. He thought that Chinese schools should be run by laymen. He wrote to London in 1 85 4: 'It is quite monstrous to see a charge of £8, 260 for police . . . contrasted with an expenditure of £1 20 for the instruction of the . people. '1 3 That, of course, depended on one's outlook on state subsidies for education. But in fact the existing schools in 1 854 had places for only 150 of the estimated 8, 800 Hong Kong Chinese children of school age. This was possibly not out of step with the situation in Britain. The Education Com­ mittee, however, offered four proposals: suitable school buildings ought to be provided; a system of apprentice teachers ought to be introduced; all schools capable of enlargement should have assistant masters able to teach English; an Inspector of Schools should be appointed to make weekly inspections of all government schools.

In May 1 856 a German missionary, the Revd W. Lobscheid, was made

Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 117

Inspector. A programme of expansion began, and in Bowring's time the number of schools receivi�g grants more than trebled to 19, while the number of children attending greatly increased. The annual cost of education rose from 1854 to 1859 from a paltry £120 to £1, 200. Now there were three schools for Hakka children, and Victoria had five for others. Most other schools were tiny backward places in villages, difficult to supervise. After 1 85 8 girls had a school of their own in Victoria. Bowring complained that while only the missionaries gave active assistance to his schemes, 'yet they have special objects that unfit them for general and popular education'. Bishop Smith remained at the helm but Bowring's secular ideas had made a dent in the religion-dominated scheme of things. His successor, Robinson, brought back the 1860 Education Committee as the Board of Education, although still under Bishop Smith.

This and similar conflations of Chinese and English educational basics

were to remain the model for Chinese education for long enough, although in schools entirely controlled by the Chinese the education followed traditional Chinese lines and pupils for the most part learned individually from a master, classes being the exception.

Legge now suggested that the government schools in Victoria should close and their pupils join a new central school under a European headmaster. In a large and specially designed building, and with a trained master to do the actual teaching, Legge hoped to raise standards. Teaching in English would be given more prominence, the demand for it permitting a fee to be charged, leaving Chinese education free. The headmaster was to take over the in­ spection of outlying schools.

This scheme virtually sacrificed what education there was in village schools

in favour of a (possibly) efficient central academy in town. It may be that this was the sole choice that offered at the time - there is not enough information to tell. Frederick Stewart was appointed headmaster and the Central School opened on 1 January 1862. Legge seems to have edged Lobscheid out in 1860. Within two years the new school had 1 40 pupils and had to build a new wing for 90 more. The difficulty of supervising village schools remained and some were closed. Headmaster Stewart believed in secular education, and after Bishop Smith retired the Board of Education was abolished (186 5 ), its encouragement of teaching the Scriptures becoming one of his targets. But his hopes that secular government schools would attract more Chinese pupils away from the purely Chinese schools were not fulfilled. The Chinese who could afford to pay for education did not want their children taught alongside those of the poorer classes. They showed their preference for traditional Chinese education free from government supervision and free from Western tendencies. Christian instruction seemed not to be the obstacle since more Chinese atteii.ded mission schools than private Chinese ones, and their policies were similar to those of the former Board of Education schools -



A Chinese merchant and his son photographed in r86r. The boy has a pocket watch attached to his belt.



equal doses of Chinese Classics and Christianity. They were also non-fee­ paying and could experiment in methodology. Schools of several kinds developed to serve a variety of requirements.

The real fillip to education, at least as regards numbers in the mission schools, came after the Treaty of Tianjin and the Taiping troubles, which sent missionaries to China and floods of refugees to Hong Kong. By the mid­ I 86os there were fifteen or sixteen schools O( groups of schools run by missions, as well as Miss Baxter's establishment which, after its inadvertent training for concubinage, concentrated on boys and Eurasians. By r86 5 it was estimated that of the approximately fourteen thousand children of school age, something slightly under two thousand were attending schools of one kind and another. But the whole question of education for the Chinese was far from settled, reflecting to some extent the unsettled state of thought on the subject of education in Britain.

Given the nature of the obstacles in the way of education for the Chinese population - illiteracy among parents, poverty, the need to employ children to augment the family income, Christian teachers whose heart was mainly in evangelism and little in Chinese scholarship, government hesitation on every­ thing from finance to curricula - it was hardly surprising that the chaos of those years continued. Yet, slowly, the Chinese learned how to place their children to best advantage in the institutions most likely to provide them with the required fluency in English and understanding of Western business methods.

I I. Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depot)



SIR Richard Graves Macdonnell took over as Governor of Hong Kong in March I 866. Once again it was to prove true that the character of a Governor had a profound effect on the development of the colony during his term. Macdonnell was to require all his administrative skills, all his expertise in argument both within the colony and in the corridors of power in London in order to make his mark.

Successive Colonial Office civil servants and successive Governors of Hong Kong are on monotonous record as having verbally thrown up their hands in despair at the unique situation of the colony. Macdonnell was no exception.



ti �

Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell, Governor from 1866 to 1872.

r 20 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Just a year after his arrival he wrote to the Secretary of State in London: 'There is no parallel between this and any other British settlement. It is a mere depot . . . '. 1 By this time he ought to have been in a position to judge. The problems he had to face were very different from those he had dealt with as Governor in Gambia, in the West Indies, in South Australia, and in Nova Scotia. The majority of people whom he was to govern in Hong Kong did not be long there and did not on the whole intend to pass the rest of their days in the colony. Trade recession and financial stringency were to limit some of his efforts. Piracy, police corruption and ineffectiveness were matters requiring urgent attention - as was finding means to curb the obsessive gambling of the Chinese. And in these matters he was hampered by the almost hysterical mood of evange lism in England at the time which inspired (if that is the apt word) the counsels of Parliament. Fortunately Macdonnell was not a Bowring or the colony might have come to a dead stop in the late sixties.

The several problem areas with which the Governor haa to deal were in their own ways separate entities, but as frequently happened in Hong Kong all were closely tangled in what must have seemed at times an unrave llable skein. Macdonnell, unlike Bowring, was dogged in his approach and prag­ matic and forceful in his methods. This gained him criticism and abuse from London, but a measure of respect in Hong Kong. The colony itself was the eventual benefactor, and he left it after six difficult years in marginally better shape than that in which he had found it.



The Duke of Edinburgh, the first member of the royal family to visit Hong Kong, arrived on 2

November 1869 aboard HMS Galatea.

Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depa( 1 21

The r2 months prior to his arrival had seen the colony administered by

W. T. Mercer, whose dearest wish had been to be appointed Governor when Robinson left. Unfairly, for he had served Hong Kong well, that wish was not granted. Even when he had attempted to leave Hong Kong he had been thwarted and refused a pension. It was said of him at the time that 'gentle­ manly and scholarly person' as he was, 'he seems discontented and used up'. 2 The dark extent of his disillusionment became apparent when the incoming Governor, Macdonnell, and his family discovered that Government House had been left by Mercer unprovided with even the commonest household necessities. The passion of his bitterness was then abundantly demonstrated.

Mercer continued in office for another year but the Governor studiously ignored him. Thus departed the last of the old brigade.

Macdonnell's first reaction to the 'depot' was to institute enquiries into every department of government. He found plenty of material to criticize. 'The police are the most ineffective . . . that I ever came in contact with.' So much so that 'literally nothing is known of the haunts of pirates who frequent Hong Kong'. Piracy at the time was one of the main topics of public concern. He lambasted the state of sanitation, the prison system, the inadequate water supply, and concluded that the colony, consequent on Mercer's administra­ tion, was headed straight for bankruptcy.

None of this was mere expostulation. Nor was the Governor's response half-hearted. After only four months in the colony he had mapped out reform measures covering many aspects - increased taxation, control of Chinese vessels, registration of dwellings and servants, methods of controlling piracy and eventually eliminating it, branding and deportation of criminals, moves to improve public order a_nd cleanliness. Such a package added up to a fresh policy intended to be viewed as a whole, as a mosaic rather than as the tesserae of which it was composed.

The Colonial Office, apparently convinced that the Governor intended to usurp its authority, responded by accusing Macdonnell of an 'entire pre­ occupation with his own views'. Macdonnell's was certainly a dominant personality, buttressed by 20 years' experience in colonial government. He deserved more understanding than that.

The corner-stone on which all these measures depended was finance. Beginning in r866 the great recession had set in. Many a company, under­ capitalized and vulnerable, failed to weather the slump. The spectacular crash of Dent and Company with debts of over $ 5 million brought down others in shock waves that spread up the China coast. Among the dozen or so foreign banks only six survived to the end of the year. Surprisingly, despite Dent's crash, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank stood firm. But a decade of uncertainty in trade and banking followed.

The influx' of Chinese virtually ceased. Revenue from land sales dried up. That rather airily conceived scheme, the Hong Kong Mint, proved, even in its

r22 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

construction, a drag on the economy; and when it opened in May r866 it failed to pay its way - as Macdonnell had foreseen. To cover expenses the Mint had to coin at least $ 27,ooo a day, but output seldom reached $ r5 ,ooo. The Governor estimated it would take the next two and a half years to turn the deposited silver bullion into coin. The banks soon began to withdraw their silver, fearing losses if they held on. Macdonnell's enquiry brought to light a sorry picture: not only had the flow of silver to the Mint ceased, but the very machinery was inadequate; worst of all, it was now impossible to buy silver bullion on terms that would make the minting of coins profitable. With. expenses calculated at between $5 0,000 and $ 60,000 a year, all work came to a stop. The Mint closed in April r868, its machinery bringing

$ 60,000 from the buyer - the Japanese government.

Macdonnell appears to have been misinformed by the Colonial Office before he left London on the financial state of Hong Kong. He arrived with the idea that it was good. But during Mercer's housekeeping' interregnum the situation had changed. Whereas in January r863 there was a balance of

$47 5 ,ooo, by r86 5 it had · declined to $ 5 5 ,ooo. Macdonnell had perforce to seek immediate ways and means to rectify the situation. He began by putting a stop to all but urgently needed public works and delaying payment of the colony's contribution to military expenditure. Then he borrowed $ 80,000 from the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank to meet unavoidable expenses. Sens­ ibly he sought means of increasing taxation by means of a Stamp Ordinance. From October r867 all official documents (banknotes included) were to pay stamp duties calculated in toto to cover the estimated deficit of $1 20,000 each year. The result was almost immediate: expenditure for that year re­ mained within revenue, and in r868, despite paying off arrears in the military contribution, a surplus of $140,000 was posted. 1:he total revenue in that year stood at what Eitel calls 'an astounding sum' of $ r,r34, ro5, with expenditure at $99 r,8rr. Eitel continues:



Instead of rejoicing over this result, the mercantile community, engulfed in a slough of despond . . . pointed with groans . . . to the Stamp Ordinance which had taken

$101,000 [out of their pockets in one year.] Sir Richard could boast of having so . regulated the finances, that, during a period of unexampled commercial disasters in China, the Colony emerged from a state of insolvency to one of assured financial stability. 3



It was now said that Macdonnell would never have had to introduce the measure had he been allowed a free hand in dealing with the gambling problem. There was some basis for this opinion.

The suppression of gambling was the Governor's next cross. He bore it with flexibility, verve, and inventiveness in the face of narrow-minded, obdurate civil servants in London. To be fair, the mood in Britain at this time

Macdonnell and the Lawless cDepot' r 23

was one of resolute piety, abhorrence of all gambling, and stiffening of national (or at least notional) morality. In Hong Kong Macdonnell hardly breathed the same air. The Chin�se passion for all forms of gambling was a fact of life; and it was also part and parcel of the question of law and order and of the police corruption he had noticed on arrival. The problem was how to regulate gambling (or legislate against it altogether? ), how to end police corruption, and at the same time restore the force of law.

Having said that nothing was known of the haunts of pirates infesting Hong Kong waters, Macdonnell shrewdly suspected the involvement of local interests - 'the parties that fit them out'. But dealing with them had to fit into the grand strategy of eliminating other evils. An increase in police efficiency, a special piracy court, close supervision of Chinese ashore and afloat, a prohibi­ tion on carrying arms and ammunition aboard Chinese junks - these were the mainstays of action, along with an attempt at closer contact with the Chinese elite.

Macdonnell's ordinance calling for the registration of houses and servants also made the Registrar-General responsible for issuing summonses to Chinese. All householders were to be held responsible for the unlawful acts of members and for payment of fines - a system not unlike the traditional doctrine of collective responsibility which had the force of law in China.

More directly aimed at piracy, another ordinance instituted the registration and control of all junks so that, in theory, no vessel could enter or leave harbour without clearance. Anti-piracy measures, directed against Chinese, required the assent of the Colonial Office, given despite their protests. The effect was immediate. Every junk in the harbour hoisted sail and left, together with 2,000 Chinese. But the exodus did not last long. Reassurances brought them back. Soon over two thousand junks had applied for licences and permits. Strengthening of the marine police was to be supplemented by the presence of a steamer which was being built. Until it could be brought into service the Governor fitted out a junk as substitute. Its name, Preposterous, sparked off numerous quips among the wits of whom Hong Kong has always had a good supply. But the piracy court came to nothing in a tangle of legal n1eet1es.

The times were such in the waters of the South China Sea that Chinese and

other vessels of all kinds armed themselves in self defence. The result was that it was hard to separate what were peaceable junks from those with offensive intent. By July r 868 proclamations went out in both Guangzhou and Hong Kong under which Chinese fishing vessels were to be disarmed. The Viceroy took no action, whereupon Macdonnell cancelled the proclamation in the colony and refused to disarm junks as planned. A Colonial Office reprimand followed.

Thus, by 'greater and smaller means, in the face of a reluctant home

government, piracy was tackled piecemeal and the incidence gradually

r24 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

declined. Involvement of the police in all this brought into focus the corrup­ tion in the force centring on illegal gambling houses. This led to Macdonnell's most controversial campaign. Starting from the fact that 'more than half the [police] inspectors were in receipt of monthly allowances' from brothels and gaming houses, the Governor's reasoning told him he must rigidly confine gambling to licensed premises, or give up hope of real police reform.

The public turning point came when a policeman was accused of taking a bribe but was acquitted because there was no ordinance under which he could be charged. Gambling was then seen by those in control of it as an almost legal activity since they could bribe the police with impunity. Macdonnell determined, therefore, to license a small number of places, and in September r867 the crucial ordinance on Order and Cleanliness appeared. This ap­ parently innocuous document contained in clause r7 words that allowed Macdonnell 'to p ass such rules, regulations, and conditions as may be deemed expedient for the total suppression or in the meanwhile for the better limitation and control of gambling in the colony'. This clause covered the decision already taken to license gambling, an action which had been refused to Bowring and Robinson.

Macdonnell had thereby nailed his colours to the mast. He was against the evils of gambling but he knew that his first priority was reform of the police and the eradication of corruption within it. With his usual oratorical skill he defended his actions to the Legislative Council, and in written dispatches to London. In July r867, rr gaming houses were opened under the Registrar­ General's control. (Prior to this, owners of gaming houses had offered between $ 200,000 and $3 65 ,000 per annum for a licence - an indication of the profits to be made.) The Colonial Office had grudgingly agreed to the licensing but with the fatal proviso that the fees \i\(ere not to be considered as part of general revenue but to be used strictly for police purposes.

Macdonnell bent his efforts towards getting round this - to him - unreasonable condition; not, as Eitel confirms,



because revenue was his real object but because the Chinese [holders] of the gaming licence would, if paying a heavy fee [for it] , be compelled by their own interests to - form a detective police for the suppression of unlicenced gambling, and these detectives would then co-operate with the Police Force for the arrest and detention of dangerous characters who flock to gaming houses as moths to light.



So the Governor informed the Colonial Office in January r867 that farming out the licences was the sole means to establish permitted gaming houses, and that with an income from this source of approximately $200,000 per annum the colony might be able to resume paying the 'Military Contribution'.

The Order and Cleanliness Ordinance received royal assent. Macdonnell was informed by telegraph and disclosed it to the public on ro July r867.

Macdonnell and the Lawless cDepo( r 2 5

(The Governor was the first to be at the receiving end of the new electric telegraph which connected the colony with London via the submarine cable to Shanghai and thence via the Danish Trans-Siberian line. Both he and some of his successors were somewhat reluctant admirers of this facility, which deprived them of the freer rein they had enjoyed when formerly separated from London by a couple of months.)

At first all seemed to go well with the scheme, its sole opponents the 'moral six' clergymen who took their objections as far as Parliament, accusing the Governor of acting in 'an underhand and unenglish way' and of 'barefaced hypocrisy' in thinking that licensing led to suppression. Macdonnell's enquiries revealed a daily total of 14,630 Chinese and 204 European gamblers (before he forbade the latter to gamble). But by the end of the year abuses had come to light. Some licensees were illegally trading their licences at high prices. And, acting in concert, licensees had taken on an agent in the person of Mr Caldwell, paying him the 'monstrous salary of $ 20,000 per annum'. Caldwell, trading on former government connections and his long liaison with the more dubious elements in Chinese society, had found a lucrative post. The Colonial Secretary, the D uke of Buckingham, expressed his 'entire disapproval of those proceedings which your dispatch discloses'.

The incoming Liberal government in Britain in December r868 was strongly Nonconformist. Lord Granville as Colonial Secretary took the view that the whole exercise in Hong Kong in regard to gambling was only to be countenanced as a step to total elimination. Money derived therefrom must be used solely for the suppression of gambling. The Governor counter­ claimed that licensing had aided in crime detection, and that no fewer than 50 criminals had been arreste.d on the information of licensees. He was nothing if

not persistent, feeling that he knew more about how to deal with gambling

than did the Colonial Secretary. He was probably right; but he underestimated the strength of the Nonconformist lobby in London.

Granville complained of the tone of the Governor's replies to him and detailed the exact obj ects for which revenues from gambling could properly be spent. A dispute between them followed, only ending when Granville wrote bluntly: 'You will take these instructions for your guidance.' Granville was in something of a quandary. The only tenable stance in the face of Parlia­ mentary criticism was that Hong Kong should not be the recipient of money from licensed vice.

The Governor's numerous reasoned arguments were eventually to no avail against Parliament's new-found godliness, and Macdonnell's final appeal in March 1870 was denied. Granville ordered him to repay $129,701 to the special fund, and to give up the steamer Victoria which he had commissioned for police work (it was sold to the Chinese government). But his last im­ passioned plea is worth recording. Of the money from licensed gaming he wrote: 'let the money be thrown into the sea as soon as it is paid, but do not

126 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

let the hold which it gives the Government over the licensees be abandoned'. Brave words.

At this point Macdonnell decided to take home leave. Opinion in Hong Kong was slightly turning against the licensing scheme, and in the Governor's absence the Acting Governor, Major-General Whitfield, with the concurrence of the Legislative Council, issued on 1 January 1871 a proclamation closing the gaming houses and withdrawing licences. Granville immediately counter­ manded it, allowing no change in the Governor's absence. The Chief Justice put out a statement that in the years 1867- 8 almost one million dollars had been staked and lost in government gaming houses. The public, he said, had been the losers.

Chinese opinion now turned against licensing. A Chinese-inspired petition wanted to know why foreigners were excluded from gambling while Chinese were allowed to 'engulf themselves'. Returning from leave in December 1871, Macdonnell cancelled licences as from 20 January 1 872. But he refused to permit the suppression of gambling to fall into the hands of the police, making the Registrar-General and the Captain Superintendent of Police personally responsible. The Governor's basic conflict was with the irrelevance of the Nonconformist British conscience as expressed in Parliament. The problem was neither ameliorated nor solved. It was now simply ignored. A Nonconformist home government had achieved precisely what it aimed to eliminate.

Having failed to root out police corruption in this way, Macdonnell tackled it in another. Finding the Police Captain Superintendent incompetent, he replaced him by a cadet officer, W. M. Deane. He brought in 100 Sikhs as policemen. The Governor thought so highly of these men that he ordered another 100. Sikhs remained for long in the police force and form a significant element in the population even today. Eight Britisb police officers were either dismissed or allowed to resign in a further effort to clean the Augean stables. But the whole matter, fraught with problems and hampered by lack of money, appeared insoluble.

In a slightly impr9ved financial climate before he left, Macdonnell was able to recruit in January 1 872 an extra 22 Scottish police, introducing thereby a . body of men as yet untainted by the colony's depraved ways. He thought that the rising crime rate was also due to a 'living wave of crime' washed down from China by disturbed conditions there, and frustrating all his efforts to make Hong Kong 'more habitable'. His efforts were virtually in vain.

A policy of deterrence seemed the most efficient way to deal with cri­ minality. But the impeccable logic of flogging and branding (with a small broad arrow on the ear-lobe, inflicted on criminals who opted for deporta­ tion, thus making identification easier if they returned) was not approved by the Secretary of State. Yet only six months after Macdonnell arrived the convict population had diminished by 1 62 and by September 1867 stood at

Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depa( r27

3 63 - 3 5 r fewer still. The idea of deterring criminal persons from entering the colony was naturally approved by all, but the home government frowned on the means, which stood in contrast to the more humane treatment in Britain. The error of the Colonial Office, repeated frequently in Hong Kong history, was to take as the basis of its stance on various issues the approved opinion and moral climate of Britain at any given time, and to apply it in Hong Kong. Soon, the deportation of criminals was abolished on orders from London, and banishment could only be enforced on non-British subjects if they were regarded as dangerous to the peace. Thus, after r870, crime and criminal violence seriously rose, so much so that the Justices of the Peace demanded an enquiry. In their view life and property had never before been at such risk. Eventually, in the face of the extreme reluctance of the home authorities, Macdonnell was permitted to bring back flogging and branding. And he buttressed these measures by building several new police stations and by ordering that all the police stations in the colony should be connected by telegraph.

The Reform Act of r867 in Britain, extending the franchise, was reflected

in Hong Kong in renewed local demand for changes in the constitution of the Legislative Council. A Reform Association belatedly came into being in r869, said later by Macdonnell to have 'died out through sheer inanition'.4 Con­ stitutional reform, however, had gone ahead when Macdonnell received instructions on this subject in October r 86 5. The old balance of six govern­ ment and three non-government members of the Council was to be retained. The Chief Justice, Colonial Secretary, Attorney-General, Treasurer, and Auditor-General were to be official members ex officio; while four others - one government official and three private individuals - were nominated as unofficial members, with the official members having precedence. The official members' right to vote as they saw fit was ended.



HM Government have the right to consider opposition by official members of the Legislative Council to its settled policy as incompatible with retention of office . . . I am equally of opinion that they are, if required to do so, to support by their vote and not to oppose by any public act, a policy which may originate with the Governor.5



The Governor had both an ordinary and a casting vote.

The unwillingness of the merchant community to act with a sense of civic responsibility rather than from sheer selfishness resulted in another area of frustration for Macdonnell and the community. One of the more than usually numerous typhoons which hit Hong Kong in this period had almost destroyed the Central Praya in August 1867 (see Appendix 2). Macdonnell notified the lot holders on the affected portions that they would have to contribute a reasonable sum towards the cost of rebuilding. They refused. He called a conference with the Colonial Secretary (C. C. Smith who had been one of the

128 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

first cadets to have Chinese language training under Dr Legge), who told them the Attorney-General had ruled that each of them had a legal liability under the terms of their leases for maintenance of the sea wall. The lot holders, armed with other legal opinion, claimed that the terms referred to drains, roads, and the like, but not to sea walls. The conference broke up in confusion. In a test case (popularly termed 'the Great Praya case'), the jury gave a verdict for the defendant in February 1868. And the Governor had to be content from then on to agree that the sea wall was a public responsibility. The need, identified by Eitel six long years back as Sir Richard Macdonnell arrived, had been for 'a Caesar'. At his departure in April 1872, the same writer summed up the Governor's term of office, misquoting Shakespeare's line: 'Here was a Caesar ! Whence comes such another?'6 Macdonnell's struggles with the 'depot' and equally with a Colonial Office which often enough failed to appreciate the problems and their sources in Hong Kong, had been valiant indeed. That he had failed in several attempts cannot be attributed to lack of energy, effort, or forethought. There are some problems confronting governments · which, at a given time, seem not susceptible of

solution, and have to await a more propitious moment.

I2. Colonial Appeasement



TH ERE was no great need for another Caesar. An experienced civil servant was what was required in Hong Kong to continue where Macdonnell left off.

' Sir Arthur Kennedy was all that. He arrived in April r872, his background army and then four governorships - two in Africa, one in Canada, a fourth

in Australia. It seemed that Whitehall had again made a reasonable choice. Sensibly, Kennedy's first concern was law and order. The Police Commis­ sion set up by Macdonnell reported a few months after he arrived in Hong Kong. Its findings were not unanimously agreed, but it recommended an Anglo-Chinese force with more strength and better pay and conditions. This chimed well with the views of Dr Legge who was all for Chinese police as the best means of gaining the confidence of leading Chinese and of the com­ munity at large. But Charles May, resident in the colony since r844 and closely associated with the police, was strongly against this, dismissing the

Chinese police in Hong Kong as 'useless, physically and morally'.

Kennedy sat on the report for a year, withholding comment. Gradually he was coming to the conclusion that a Chinese force was the right answer. He raised the pay scales of constables and set Chinese-speaking cadet officers over them. 'We shall learn to rely on them more than at present', he said. While the Colonial Office protested over the expense, Kennedy stood firm. He kept the Sikhs as gaol guards, but thought the Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Whitfield's idea of recruiting West Indian police 'little short of insanity' since it would be taken as an affront to the whole Chinese com­ munity. Improvement in the efficiency of the force could not be an overnight matter. The number of Chinese police was balanced by an equal number of Indian police until well into the twentieth century. The introduction of Chinese officers in the twentieth century, when gradually they became more numerous than British officers, completed the transformation to a pre­ dominantly Chinese force.

Kennedy was far from being a violent or harsh man, yet in his attempts to

deal with the _high crime rate he evidently felt that branding and deportation were essential; and doubtless the Colonial Secretary would have vetoed their removal since it was he who had forced their reintroduction on Macdonnell.

130 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Kennedy explained in 1873 , perhaps in an effort to soften the impact of such procedures, that 'the miscalled system of branding which is merely tattooing with Indian ink, is seldom resorted to, but works well'. The gaol population fell in 1873 to 33 1, and on Stonecutters island only the chapel was now in use, functioning as a hospital for infectious diseases, predominantly smallpox.

The solution or partial solution of one problem in Hong Kong generally led to, or was at least closely followed by, the appearance of another. While gambling had been more or less suppressed within Hong Kong boundaries, it now _grew large in the Kowloon peninsula north of the boundary dividing the British area from the Chinese. In reality this gambling was merely open gambling; in clubs and unlicensed resorts the practice had not been stamped out in Hong Kong, merely hidden from view. An officially closed eye was trained on it.

An upsurge in crime occurred in 1876 from another soui:ce. The lowering of fares in a cut-throat price war between the operators of various river steamers plying between Guangzhou and the colony resulted in an influx of undesirables. In three weeks the gaol population rose from 3 86 to 5 19. Kennedy reacted by reinforcing the deportation law and by appointing a commission of enquiry. But he also revised outdated gaol regulations. Extra food for prisoners was to be ordered much more sparingly.

The disastrous consequences of 'the most destructive typhoon in the history of the Colony' of 24 September 1874, focused attention on the whole



The disastrous typhoon of 1 874 played havoc with the colonial cemetery at Happy Valley.

Colonial Appeasement r3 r question of public works. The civil hospital was virtually destroyed, as were

200 houses and three miles of the praya. The central area was left without a

praya, to all intents and purposes, and when the wind and water receded the appalling devastation shocked the colony. It was evident that the praya had been of faulty construction, and now that it had been agreed in the wake of the r867 typhoon damage that repairs were the j ob of the government, Kennedy was faced with the extremely tricky task of obtaining agreement on details of reconstruction from all those with lots on the waterfront, of finding the money for rebuilding, and of achieving a greatly improved structure. These factors meshed with another - a decision on the extent of reclamation that might conveniently be carried out at this time. The Chinese lot holders at the western end of the town were keen to reclaim land and increase their holdings; but their expectations were frustrated by the r875 board of enquiry which decided against reclamation in the Sai Ying Pun and Sheung Wan areas. Kennedy himself thought that in the central area 'no reclamations were likely ever to be made' because of the howl of protest from lot holders that would attend any such proposal. The marine lots were by now very valuable, and any reclamation would distance them from the shore. He determined to rebuild the sea wall so that it would be proof against further typhoon damage.

The crucial section as regards town planning was that part lying in front of

J.

the naval and military areas. Obviously, for both, access to the harbour was vital. The two cantonments covered much of the hillside descending to the harbour just east of Central District. Queen's Road, running parallel to the water here, was the sole link with Wan Chai to the east, now a growing suburb. Victoria, viewed as a whole, was, as the Surveyor-General M. Price said, effectively 'strangled at its waist'. The only other link betvveen the two parts of the town was to be constructed later some distance up the hill and named Kennedy Road. For the moment Queen's Road had no rival (and, although much widened, in terms of through traffic still has none). One other important aspect was the fact that the sea-bed was silting up in front of the naval base, leaving the pier high and dry at low tide.

The natural, indeed the only intelligent scheme was that advocated by Price

- to extend the Praya in front of the naval base and military area so as to link the eastern and central prayas and 'ease the unceasing native and foreign traffic through the Queen's Road Central'. Deep water would adjoin such a new sea wall and the planned curve at that point would, because of the currents, have a scouring action and prevent renewed silting. Through the wall there would be entries for smaller craft, and a mechanical swing bridge would permit the passage of larger vessels for refitting in the dock. The military were against this good plan because of the expense. Kennedy strongly advocated its 'adoption hoping, as nearly all Governors have had to hope, for financial assistance from home - in this case from both the Admiralty and

132 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

the War Office. The authorities in London agreed to the plan only on the understanding that the colony would bear the expense. The Executive Council and unofficials of the Legislative Council accepted the proviso, but in the face of the colony's having to foot the total bill, it was agreed to abandon the scheme and merely to reconstruct the central Praya to resist natural hazards. Even this the home government wanted to postpone. Kennedy however, had wisely already gone ahead in order to keep the water out of the town, the record enshrining his opinion that the larger scheme would have to be undertaken some time in the future.

A contributory factor in the failure of the Praya development was the use of the telegraph and the shortened transit time for goods from Europe after the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1 869. In combination, these two new facilities meant that merchants no longer had to warehouse large stocks in order to take advantage of price changes, for stocks could now be received much more expeditiously. A whole train of events followed from this: the large godowns in Eastern District became superfluous, and as a result the labour force moved from ·Eastern to Western District seeking other employ­ ment; and this in turn prompted the laying out of Kennedy Town, partly on reclaimed land. Further, rental values in Eastern District fell steeply because of the labour migration - by 40 to 50 per cent - and those who paid Crown rents sought a reduction, which Kennedy refused. This in turn forced the con­ sideration of an alternative east-west route skirting the southern boundary of the military area - uphill from the shore - which was first proposed by Kennedy and taken up by his successor.

In public works Kennedy was fortunate in that the inept L. H. Moorsom, Surveyor-General, happened to retire as he arrived, and was replaced by the admirable Price, to whose attention the Governor recommended the sadly inadequate water supply position. Because of appalling miscalculations, the Pok Fu Lam scheme generated only about one-third of the predicted volume. Price now constructed a conduit along the 5 00-foot contour (today's Conduit Road) to bring an adequate supply to Central and Western Districts, and this came into operation in 1 877. Eastern District was however inadequately provided for, and Price then proposed to bring water from the Tai Tam area_ via a tunnel through the hills - a scheme that looked both neat and efficient until it was calculated that the cost would be in the region of £ 3 5 0,000. The scheme was referred to a consultant in England who produced a scaled-down version at an estimated cost of £13 6,000. Government revenues being good but not abundant, this idea was whittled down to one that would cost

£5 0,000, and which could be enlarged in the future.

The destruction of the civil hospital by the 1 874 typhoon meant that a replacement had to be set up quickly. Temporary arrangements were made. But even before the typhoon, when the new Colonial Surgeon, Dr Phineas Ayres, first arrived in November 1 873 he had attempted to hasten the

Colonial Appeasement r3 3

building of a new one. By now the matter was urgent. Once more the Colonial Office intervened, insisting that the plans for the new building be prepared in London. And when, after considerable delay, these arrived they turned out to be quite unsuited to Hong Kong. Kennedy pressed for leave to start the building at once but was smartly informed by telegraph (how he must have hated the invention!) not to incur avoidable expense. The building of the hospital started in 1874. With the Pok Fu Lam waterworks, a new Harbourmaster's office ( r 872), and the Central School, it was one of several major public works initiated by Kennedy. The construction of the school was



The old Harbour Office seen from Wing Lok Street, c. 1880.



delayed because of some doubt about the structure, which was to cost

$5 2,000. It was built after Kennedy had left. His major memorial must be the Grant-in-Aid scheme through which voluntary schools were financed. In constitutional matters some important changes were made in Kennedy's time. From London his instructions relating to Legislative Council pro­ ceedings were amended to give it the power to debate any question if duly proposed and sec9nded - not just on the Governor's initiative, which was now limited to matters of finance. In r 872 a Finance Committee composed of all members of the Council, presided over by the senior member, was set up, to which the Governor was to submit financial business for consideration. This meant that unofficial members had more chance of taking an inde­ pendent line ' - something they immediately did. After the typhoon they recorded their displeasure with W. M. Deane, Superintendent of Police, for

r34 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

keeping the police in their barracks during the storm. They wanted to reduce his salary and, dissatisfied with the way it was organized, to cut the vote for the fire brigade - intemperate demands, and short-sighted, given the c1rcumstances.

Membership of the Executive Council was increased to five: the ex-officio members were the Commander-in-Chief, the Colonial Secretary, and the

Attorney-General; J. P. Price, the Surveyor-General, and C. C. Smith (one of the first three cadets recruited in England in r862), who was now Registrar­ General, were made members but not by virtue of the offices they held. The office of Acting Governor, whose occupant stood in for the Governor in his absence or incapacity, had been held since the time of Caine in 1 854 by the chief military officer of the colony. The exception was Mercer who, after Caine left in r8 5 9, deputized for him as Colonial Secretary until Macdonnell arrived; at which time the Major-General commanding the troops became again Acting Governor. In Kennedy's time the change was ·made back to the Colonial Secretary administering as Acting Governor. The argument from London was that senior executives should be able to look forward to exercising responsibility in that capacity, and that in any case they were better suited to deal with the administration than was the chief military man. The trigger that activated all this was doubtless the absurd Major-General Whitfield's conduct in Macdonnell's absence. At that time, in the role of Major-General, Whitfield was in the habit of addressing letters to himself in his capacity as Acting Governor - 'a whimsical proceeding', as one Colonial Office official charitably put it. The War Office was informed that the senior army officer in the colony must not act as Acting Governor.

At this point Kennedy, his wife seriously ill in England, was invited to come home for consultations, the Colonial Secretary to administer the government as Acting Governor in his absence. Kennedy co�mented on this change of policy. The news, he said 'has nearly caused General Colborne [the military incumbent at the time] a fit. He has fairly exploded, and judging from the effect . . . he must have had an enormous stock of explosive matter stored up'. Colborne wrote in protest to the War Office, and refused to attend meetings of the Executive Council, something which Kennedy opined, 'was. not attended by any ill-effects for the Colony'. 1 Not at least until, because of a shortage of qualified members, and the absence of others on leave, a quorum of the Council could not be mustered.

Price was then appointed to the Council as deputy to the Colonial Secretary, and Colborne resumed his uncooperative posture. It was pointed out to him that when he had been absent from Hong Kong, he had made his own military secretary take his place on the Council, and had therefore no leg to stand on in his refusal to acquiesce in the Governor's appointing a deputy for the Colonial Secretary. Civil and military relations were for a time strained, a fact remarked on in the Colonial Office: 'There is always a row between the

Colonial Appeasement 1 3 5

Government and the General in Hong Kong . . . and I conclude that it is one of the local occupations. '2 While official London was often perspicacious in such pettyfogging disputes, the Colonial Office's grasp of the essentials of more grave situations in the colony was patchy, as many a governor dis­ covered while he wrestled with intractable local problems. In the days of sea transport, even after the opening of the Suez Canal took weeks off the journey, no Colonial Office official in office ever visited Hong Kong.

On his way to England the Governor was informed of his wife's death, and from Singapore he returned to Hong Kong, where he was to remain for several more years.

Two of the obscure but important practical problems that troubled the commercial community in the years 1 872 -6 had to do with certain sub­ stances added to grey shirting exported from England, and to tea leaves both in China and in England. What was known as the 'sizing question' was related to the fact that the addition of size (a substance to stiffen the fabric) to the shirting material appeared to cause mildew during its transport to Hong Kong. During the Crimean War with Russia, tallow for sizing became too expensive, and the cheaper China clay was used as a substitute. This required the use of certain deliquescent salts to decrease the damaging effect of the clay on the fabric. These salts were the culprit, causing mildew in transit. The matter was complicated by several factors, the most dramatic of which was that the badly mildewed cloth arriving in Hong Kong, when condemned and returned to England was, miraculously, found to be in perfect condition and free of mildew. It evidently dried out in the less humid northern climate. Serious losses to Hong Kong merchants occurred, and no feasible solution seemed available.

Likewise with tea. In 1 874 import duties on tea in England fell by about 50

per cent. At once complaints were voiced by the tea-drinking public on the adulteration of tea by strange leaves and a greater proportion of tea dust. As in the mildew question, each side accused the other. The mildewed shirting caused Chinese buyers to start buying cloth from India; the adulteration of China tea caused the British consumer to turn to Indian teas. India reaped the benefit in both controversies.

Kennedy was the first Governor to invite Chinese guests to Government House receptions and other social gatherings. Most of these were com­ pradors of the big foreign firms. The practice was said by Westerners to be 'distasteful to most English merchants, but Sir Arthur stoutly ;idhered to it'. His outlook on the Chinese was even-handed. Soon after he arrived a Chinese delegation called on him, and he informed them that the Chinese could always have access to him when they had things of substance to say. They had only to give him notice and bring an interpreter. The directors, both ingoing and outgoing, of the Tung Wah Hospital came to pay their respects once a year. On their first visit in December r 872 they requested the Governor to

13 6 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

pass an ordinance punishing adultery in Chinese women. This was a some­ what odd request considering that every one of the deputation had several wives and was, in English law, a bigamist and liable to punishment as such. The request seems to have been designed to deter one or other concubine from flight, perhaps to the bosom of another member of the deputation. The following year the directors requested some form of municipal government for the Chinese community, and the authorization of elections among them for a Chinese Municipal Board to assist the Registrar-General with advice on all Chinese matters - an apparently worthwhile idea. In 1 874 they wanted compulsory registration of all active and sleeping partners in Chinese shops and firms. Later they asked for an improved bankruptcy law, the building of a typhoon shelter for small craft, a town hall, and a lepers' asylum on some small island. These, it would seem, were mostly reasonable requests made by responsible, forward-looking men. The Governor, however, found himself able to accede to only one - granting a site for a public meeting place. It is possible that his wife's death had a more profound influence on Kennedy than is on record, and his mind turned away from the liberality of the early years of his office. Later, he introduced an order 'couched in language of the most extraordinary circumlocution'3 which in effect gave Chinese with any petition or grievance leave to communicate with the government only through the Registrar-General. Great caution had supervened.

The extent of the administration's lack of understanding of the Chinese,

and its faltering control, were demonstrated in August 1872 when a small tax was levied on Chinese coolie rooming-houses in an attempt to control insanitary conditions. A strike of all the carrying coolies broke out at once. Considering the minuscule wages of these men, their solidarity was remark­ able, indicating genuine grievance. They ended the strike only on condition that the government would repeal the tax. The government repealed it.

Some reorganization was introduced in the judiciary. Judge Ball of the Summary Court, suffering from epilepsy, retired in 1872, and this court was abolished. J. Paunceforte, Attorney-General since 1866, became Puisne Judge but left the same year to become Chief Justice of the Leeward Islands, and was succeeded by F. Snowdon. The post of Attorney-General was filled for

two years by John Bramston, and on his appointment to a Colonial Office·

position he was followed by G. Phillippo.

Sir Arthur Kennedy was perhaps as good a Governor as any in the colony's history. His approach to his task was determined, generally fair, and un­ clouded by personal idiosyncrasies. When a situation arose which had no obvious solution, or when no precise mode of action presented itself, he appointed a committee to look at it from more than one man's point of view; and he did this more often than any of his predecessors and than many of his successors in the nineteenth century. It was typical of his administration that the Gardens and Afforestation Department was very active and that the

Colonial Appeasement 13 7

systematic planting of trees in the city moved forward. Kennedy's was a friendly approach, both administratively and personally, and while he with­ drew from his initial openness with the Chinese he was still regarded by them as understanding of their attitudes. He fought doggedly against the difficult problem posed by the 'blockade' but failed to master it any more than had Macdonnell (see Chapter 1 4). His one major failure was his disregard of the appallingly insanitary condition of the colony. From reading the reports of the Surveyor- General and the Colonial Surgeon he could not possibly have been unaware of it. Perhaps, as his retreat from closer contacts with the Chinese may indicate, he was in greater distress at the loss of his wife than history relates. Eitel hints at it when he writes of Lady Kennedy's death that she was 'highly revered by Hong Kong residents as she had always given a tone of gentleness to the sterner rule of even the least severe Governor of Hong Kong'.

The appreciation of residents was seen at Kennedy's departure in March

1877. Later, on the news of his death in the Red Sea in June 1 883 , on the return voyage to England from his appointment as Governor of Queensland, a public meeting determined to set up a statue to him, appropriately enough in the Botanical Gardens, where it remained until removed by the Japanese during the Second World War. Eitel calls him 'one of those few men who deserve a statue because they do not need one'.



'

Sir Arthur Kennedy's statue stood in the Botanical Gardens until the Japanese removed it during the occupation in World War II.

I3 . Mr Hennessy's Proceedings



G. R. SAY ER introduces the next Governor of Hong Kong, who arrived in April 1877, in a paragraph of gentle irony:



Under the appeasing influence of Kennedy . . . an unusual calm had fallen upon the colony and British and Chinese had settled down side by side to make hay while the sun shone. In these circumstances one might have expected the continuance of so happy a state of affairs would have been assured, at any rate by sending a second Sir Arthur to succeed the first. But, if the Secretary of State frowned on exuberance, he was no less fearful of stagnation and accordingly . . . cast about for one who could be depended upon to keep things moving. There is no doubt that he was entirely successful.



Mr (later Sir) John Pope Hennessy was then near the end of his tour as Governor of the Windward Islands, and on him the choice fell. Having planted the scion of these islands in the soil of Ho(lg Kong, both the Colonial Office and the colony were to reap a predictable - but apparently unforeseen

- crop. The driving force behind the actions of the new Governor lay in the nature of the man himself. There were two factors or conditions. The first is best defined by quoting from a brief given to the Secretary of State by a leading civil servant. Commenting on the turmoil in Hong Kong during Hennessy's term there, in which the British community had ceased to accept.

invitations to Government House, he wrote:



To my mind the history of all this trouble is a simple one. Mr Hennessy observes on arriving that long residence among Chinese, & familiarity with the Chinese character, has led the residents of Hong Kong to believe that a Chinaman is not to be dealt with as an Englishman or even as an Indian or Malay might be. He thinks this inhuman, and determines to set to work vigorously to reform what he believes to be a grave abuse. But, having no political wisdom, he proceeds in such a manner as to alienate from him all public sympatny and support, & ultimately to cause a sort of panic as to his intentions & their probable results. 1

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 13 9

The second factor lay in precisely what the official defined as the English attitude to the Chinese. His characterization of it was undeniably right, as any reading of the relevant documents demonstrates.

Both forces in the upheaval that took place in the colony may be seen at work in the comparatively trivial matter of the use of the Hong Kong Museum in the City Hall. The Chairman of the Museum Committee was William Keswick of Jardine's. The museum enjoyed a small government grant but was substantially supported by subscription from the leading merchant houses, and from the rates which were paid by all who owned property, Chinese and foreigners alike. Hennessy discovered that Chinese were ad­ mitted to the museum and library in the mornings only. At lunch the museum was closed and cleaned, and in the afternoon it was reserved exclusively for foreigners. At a meeting in the museum in r876, both Keswick and the Governor agreed to sound out prominent Chinese business men for funds for an extension which would make the museum 'a place of amusement and instruction to the Chinese'. The meeting noted that in the previous week 14 , 000 Chinese had visited it and the library, and only 3 00 Europeans. Hennessy found it all the more reprehensible, in view of the figures, that the Chinese should be confined to morning visiting. He wanted to open the museum to all during normal hours. Keswick expressed his view that the Chinese use of the museum was already excessive, and their presence un­ savoury. Hennessy thereupon cut off the government grant. The Colonial Office upheld him, Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State, commenting dryly that 'garlic-eating ratepayers must be endured by those who use their money'. The attitude of Lord Kimberley was at base the same as that implicit in the colonial attitude which attempted segregation by race, but British principles of imperial policy had to be seen to be practised, and the Secretary-of State to be seen to uphold them. Apartheid could not be officially condoned, even if it was a fact.

The dispute might have died away in time had not the Governor's anger at

what he correctly saw as the community's racist stance got the better of his sense. He proceeded to stop the sale of liquor at all functions in the City Hall on the legitimate ground that a licence had never been applied for. But, as the Secretary of State wrote testily, 'a little tact might usefully have replaced these impassioned harangues'.

And there in a nutshell lay both the nub and the rub. Hennessy's endow­ ment of liberal and progressive ideas, sincerely held, was hardly balanced by a store of political or even ordinary tactful sense. The visit of the King of Hawaii to Hong Kong in r88 r once more demonstrated the proposition. Keswick, honorary Hawaiian Consul in the colony, went out to the King's ship when it apchored in the harbour to invite him to stay at Jardine House. It was tactless of him too, no doubt. Hennessy, getting word of this, and while Keswick was still on board with the King, sent his official r 2-oar barge

140 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

bearing 'an invitation from the Governor in the name of the Queen, to be his guest'. The King, protocol having been thrust under his nose, could scarcely do other than comply, much to the ire of William Keswick. Hennessy, as usual, informed the Secretary of State of events. Lord Kim­ berley, wisely, dismissed it as a 'miserable squabble'.

One more example of Hennessy's capacity to put his foot in things occurred during a luncheon given a day or two after the barge incident. The host was Paul Catchick Chater, a wealthy business man and later philan­ thropist. Hennessy made a speech in which, apparently intending jest, he referred to 'trifling incidents . . . in past years, such as the killing of Captain Cook by His Majesty's predecessor'. Either the prandial level of inebriation was rather high or the King was a forbearing monarch, for he did not leave the table.

Hennessy, like the two governors before and one after h_im, was an Irish­

man. Men of very different temperaments, both Macdonnell and Kennedy were, when it came to major decisions, realists. Hennessy was not. For him the standard concept of the colony as a place where 'an Englishman could not only careen his ship without interference, but also dwell in peace and security ashore', as Kennedy had put it, was not enough. Hennessy was a man of lively human sympathy which, untypically for his time, he extended to all races. Mere toleration was not in his book. The consensus of opinion among Westerners was that the Chinese were a necessary adjunct to commerce, and that when one or other of them transgressed, the effective correctional methods were flogging, branding, expulsion. Apart from the question of humane sentiments, the Chinese, as Hennessy pointed out, were in many cases large taxpayers and as such had claim to a say on the body which dispensed the taxpayers' money. In the debate in_ Britain at the time on the question of the management of criminals, the swing was towards reform, prisoners' aid societies, and re-education. It is doubtful if anyone regarded this as applicable to Chinese criminals in Hong Kong. Hennessy was in a minority of one in merchant and governing circles. His isolation seemed to fuel the flames of his temperament. Encouraged by the abolition of convict transportation 20 years previously in Britain, he penned a series of dispatches - home very soon after arriving, condemning Hong Kong's whole penal system. Pointing out that much crime was of a petty nature, mendicancy, unlicensed hawking, and being out at night without a pass, he mentioned that in the past year only two in five were not first offenders. He criticized the gaol system which made no attempt to separate first from habitual offenders, and failed to apply any moral or other educational procedures. He found the habit of voluntary branding and deportation in return for full or partial remission of a sentence entirely inequitable, since under it good and bad, short- and long­ term prisoners received the same treatment. He objected to the sentence of deportation on other grounds - that it was used for criminals but also to

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 141

remove Chinese women who in many cases had lived in Hong Kong for years but at the age of seventy or eighty were too old to work. Under the existing law, he said, he had 'with pain and reluctance' deported them.

On the subject of the gaol, Hennessy thundered against the foreign turnkeys who were often in trouble for drunkenness, brutalized by admin­ istering numberless floggings, and yet were retained in their positions. Hennessy dismissed the worst of them and began the recruitment and training of men brought out from England. He refused to free any prisoner before he had served at least two-thirds of his sentence, and announced his aim was to abolish branding - then, for some reason, carried out on the neck rather than on the ear lobe. There was nothing in all those opinions and suggested alterations in practice which would have caused even the twitch of an eyebrow in Britain at that time. Hennessy's problem was that he was not in Britain but in Hong Kong. Public opinion (from mostly ill-educated, morally self-righteous instant experts) was set in dead opposition to the increasingly liberal climate in Britain - because the subjects were Chinese, not British. It must remain in doubt whether, even by the exercise of that tact which Hennessy lacked, any governor at the time could have carried into practice, without antagonizing the foreign community, the kind of reforms Hennessy on the whole justifiably wanted.

The usual nostrum for the easement of social conflict in Hong Kong, a public meeting to express indignation and to formulate a petition to the Colonial Office, was applied by the residents on the cricket ground in October 1 878 - prompted by the previous year's rise in crime, said to be the result of the Governor's lenient policies. The meeting demanded the return of public flogging and deportation. The petition also requested an enquiry into the administration of the criminal law, and into relations between the Governor and officials.

The leading light in this was William Keswick, an unofficial member of the Legislative Council. Against this petition the Chinese submitted their own address to the Governor, signed by a large number of leading figures, sup­ porting his policies. The Secretary of State (who must have been a sorely tried official at this time), in response to both documents, upheld the Governor in most aspects but feared the effects of his policies. Hennessy was asked to prepare plans for the reform of penal legislation, the conduct of the gaol, and methods of implementing his policies.

His proposals included the siting of a new gaol on Stonecutters island, its design suited to the segregation of prisoners in various categories. But the Secretary of State in London disagreed, preferring a site on Hong Kong island. Hennessy then constructed 40 cells in the basement of Victoria gaol as a tentative bfginning to reform, and abolished flogging except in cases of violent crime. Perhaps the most significant revision of the penal laws was the dropping of legislation specifically directed against the Chinese - measures

142 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

dating from the panic months of 185 7 in the wake of the Arrow incident. The Banishment Ordinance of 1882 was altered and banishment retained at the discretion of the Governor, and to be for not more than five years, and not to be applied only to Chinese but to all.

Generally speaking, Hennessy's policies in these matters were effective. Yet

most Westerners in Hong Kong persisted in clinging to the short-term view, accusing him of encouraging crime and intending to abolish deportation and flogging altogether - something he had never suggested.

In a society in which numerous female children constituted a threat to the economic security of Chinese families, a society moreover in which con­ cubinage and the mui tsai system were approved by most, and which was physically removed from the constraints inherent in village life over the border, the problem of kidnapping was bound to arise. We have seen in Chapter 10 the stance of Hong Kong's Chinese community in relation to kidnapping and mui tsai in the formation of the Po Leung Kuk, and also the opinion of the Chief Justice that the system was repugnant to British law. The situation worsened in the· wake of rising numbers of cases of kidnapping. Women and girls were lured on false pretences to the colony from where they were sent overseas to satisfy South-east Asian demand; or they were disposed of in Hong Kong itself. The price might be as high as $345 for the former and $45 for Hong Kong. Women were treated exactly as if they were commodities.

To the protests of the Chief Justice, the cautious Attorney-General sug­

gested he confine his remarks to the cases of kidnapping which came to his court, leaving aside the question of mui tsai itself which was to be construed as a form of adoption. The Chinese themselves were clear on the difference between it and kidnapping. But the liberal Hen9:essy found his conscience troubled. On the one hand he was firmly against traffic in human beings: on the other he wished to respect Chinese customs permissible within the framework of British law in its colonial setting. In the end he refused action on the mui tsai question, preferring wisely to leave more or less well alone. There had been a marked increase in the Chinese population between 1 872 and 1876, amounting to 15 ,ooo in a total colonial population of about .

122,000. But the figure for British males fell in the same period by 86, a figure

representing perhaps as much as a quarter of the total in Hong Kong. This would have been an absolute fall but for an influx of Portuguese, consequent on the ravages of the 1874 typhoon. Chinese businesses were increasing in number and prosperity causing, it seemed, a corresponding shrinkage in the foreign business sector. The Chinese by now had gained a certain expertise in marketing Western goods and, being Chinese, were in a better position to deal directly with their compatriots in China. Responding to this changing pattern, Hennessy reported in 1878: 'One sees warehouses that a few years ago were in the midst of a European district . . . now in occupation of the

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 143

Chinese.' In the business district of the colony at least, the segregation of the races was breaking down a little. Formerly Chinese had clustered together in the east and to the vvest of Central District, and a clause in the leases of Central District properties restricted construction to Western-style buildings. Hennessy, in 1877, took the Chinese side.



There being no legal impediment in the way, and it being a matter of principal importance that no obstruction should be put in the way of the natural course of trade . . . permits [may] be freely granted for native structures along any part of the Queen's Road, and business streets immediately adjoining



a line drawn between Upper Wyndham Street, Hollywood Road, and Aberdeen Street. 2

Hennessy thought this was the minimum area into which the Chinese should be allowed to infiltrate. The Registrar-General, C. C. Smith, however, opposed the whole idea. Lord Carnarvon upheld the Governor, but another serious obj ection was put forward by the Commander-in-Chief, General Donovan. An irascible figure, chronically at odds with the Governor, he protested, pointing to the insanitary condition of most Chinese housing which might introduce a health hazard. This resulted, benignly for once, even salutarily, in the sending out from London of Osbert Chadwick to report on the sanitary conditions in Hong Kong (see Chapter 14).

The other, less welcome, consequence of granting the Chinese permission to spread out from their former ghettos, led to what is nowadays termed a hiccup in the economy. The new census of 1881 revealed a population of 160,402 - the increase in Chinese amounting to almost 21,000, and of Europeans to 273. The liberalization of the law, together with the pressure of Chinese entrepreneurs indicated by the figures, brought about an unexpected and very considerable speculation in land by the Chinese. Between January 1880 and May 1881 they bought land and property worth $ r.7 million from foreign owners and a further $17,705 worth from the government. The frenzy of speculative purchases and opportunist selling drove up the price of land and property during 1881 to an extravagantly unrealistic degree. The bubble burst, as financial bubbles always have done - to the eternal astonish­ ment of the speculators - in the autumn of 1881, the principal sufferers being the leading lights of the Chinese business community. The inevitable bankruptcies reflected a price fall of about 45 per cent, and were followed by vigorous litigation, the property market for the time being 'encumbered by the estates of the embarrassed owners', as Eitel puts it.

The old problem of securing adequate supplies of a suitable silver currency turned up again at this juncture, and various suggestions were advanced. The Chamber of Commerce wanted to introduce the American trade dollar and Hennessy suggested the legalization of Japanese yen in the light of increasing

144 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

trade with that country. Local business men presented a petition proposing that as there seemed no hope of having a Hong Kong dollar coined in Britain the Mint (of unhappy memory) should be revived. A note of high comedy, in the light of the debacle over the original Mint, was sounded by the discovery that some enterprising Chinese were manufacturing, 'in the village of Tokwawan' on the Kowloon peninsula, immense quantities of cash for export to Annam and Tongking (now in North Vietnam) where no facilities for minting existed. In court no conviction could be secured since there appe.ared to be no law forbidding the manufacture of coins. Whereupon the colony was flooded with these cash until the Gazette published a warning in October 1879 that they were not legal tender. The speculation can hardly be resisted that had the operation of the Mint in Hong Kong been put in private Chinese hands, the coinage problem might have been solved to the satisfaction of all. Hennessy, as so often, did nothing at all,.

When he did take action it generally caused a flurry in the colony, and often in London too. A member of the Legislative Council, H. B. Gibb, departed from Hong Kong on leave in January 1880. Hennessy at once appointed a Chinese, Ng Choy, in his place. On the face of it, Ng Choy was an eligible appointee - a British subject born in Singapore, educated in England, the first Chinese to be called to the English Bar and the first to practise at the Hong Kong Bar. Giving his reasons, the Governor offered the information that he had consulted the 'wealthy and better Chinese', who had supported Ng Choy. A Chinese memorial sent to London in 1879 had claimed that as they out­ numbered the foreigners 10 to one 'it would be fair to allow the Chinese community a share in the management of the affairs of the colony'. And Hennessy had previously, in Labuan (a British island possession off Borneo) when he governed there, made such a Chinese appointment; and Singapore had a Chinese on its Legislative Council. So there was precedent enough.

The Governor's proposal of 18 80 was for a reorganization of the Council to contain six official memhers all holding named offices, and five unofficials, of whom four were to be British and one Chinese. But the Colonial Secretary demurred, deciding that Ng Choy's appointment was temporary, either until Gibb's return or at most for three years. His argument was that in the event of.

strained relations with China, and the Governor's need to consult the Council, the presence of a Chinese would raise difficulty. He also felt that a Chinese merchant would be better than a barrister. Doubtless he mistrusted the trained wits of a lawyer. At the root of the matter lay suspicion of Hennessy. As a former Secretary of State, Lord Carnarvon, had said : 'I am afraid that a watchful eye is necessary over Mr Hennessy's proceedings.' In this case, however, the suspicion was probably incorrect and also unjust. In July 1880 when Gibb finally resigned from the Council, Hennessy had come out strongly in favour of a permanen't Chinese member, bearing in mind that the Chinese were the largest owners of property, contributing 90 per cent of the

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 145

revenue, as well as being at the root of Hong Kong's prosperity. Later, in August 1 881, the Governor appointed the Indian E. R. Belilios, one of the two leading opium merchants and a Director of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, to the Council. This was regarded locally as unexceptional.

The story of Eitel, however, another non-British citizen, turned out rather curiously. Ernest Johann Eitel came from Wiirttemberg in Germany and became a missionary with the Lutherans in Guangzhou, and later with the London Missionary Society. He married an English missionary, Mary Eaton, but the Lutherans would not accept her because she was English. Later still, with a family to support, he moved to Hong Kong in r 870. Eitel gained a reputation for his Chinese Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect and other publications. In r87 5 he had been appointed honorary Director of Chinese Studies by Kennedy. Hennessy elevated him to the paid position of Inspector of Schools and Chinese Secretary at a salary of £1 ,000 a year, and later still as Head of the Interpretation Department his salary doubled. He remained Hennessy's Private Secretary and confidant.



E. J. Eitel, the first historian of Hong Kong. This photograph appears to be the only likeness of him.

Hennessy's marriage to Kitty Low, daughter of the Colonial Treasurer in Labuan, was not a particularly happy one. His brooding temperament and his wife's rather child-like outlook (she was only r7 when they married) did not agree well,. In Hong Kong the Governor became friendly with the colony's leading Queen's Counsel, Thomas Hayllar, and his wife. Hayllar had a re­ putation as a womanizer. Hennessy's favoured form of relaxation from the

146 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

cares of office was to spend weekends on a steam yacht; whereas Kitty disliked the sea. He was often accompanied by Hayllar, but the latter began to cry off - often at the last moment. On one such occasion, as the Governor was about to cast off, a note from Hayllar arrived begging to be excused. Hennessy at once made all hast� to Mountain Lodge, his official summer residence on the Peak, and in his wife's boudoir, he said, he found her with Hayllar engrosse d in a book which the latter attempted to hide under a cushion. The book - a catalogue of the Museo Boronico in Naples - contained illustrations of classical male and female figures which Hennessy said were indecent. He turned the amorous QC out of the house.

The affair might have ended in stalemate had it not been for an encounter between the Governor and Hayllar on a quiet path near Mountain Lodge. Hennessy claimed Hayllar insulted him and that he struck the reprobate with his umbrella. Hayllar said this was unprovoked and that t�e Governor had attacked him in a frenzy. He retrieved the weapon and mounted its handle with a silver plaque in his house with the legend 'A memento of the battle of Mountain Lodge.' The stoty is told amusingly, and more fully, by Hennessy's grandson, James Pope-Hennessy, in his book, Verandah.

Two accounts of the affair reached London - Hayllar's and a covering

letter from the Governor. The former made no mention of Hennessy's wife. And for once the Gove rnor had been discreet. No action was taken. But, when the Hennessys were leaving for Beijing, the Governor, with infinite indiscretion, instructed Eitel to show his dispatches on the affair to all members of the Legislative Council who might be interested. Hayllar, when he heard of this, set a trap. He sent a friendly member of the Council to see Eitel, who showed him the correspondence and argued the Governor's case. The visitor then made a sworn statement to Hayllar's lawyer and a writ was issued against Eitel for $25 ,000 damages.

Hennessy's grandson in his book Verandah avers that the Governor 'vowed to make the lawsuit his own', but the case never came to court. After a period of intrigue and negotiation by those concerned, Eitel was forced to write two letters of apology to Hayllar, and Hennessy himself was obliged to compose a conciliatory statement. He now looked rathe r askance at his • former confidant, and when Eitel offered to resign, the resignation was accepted.

Eitel was never popular in Hong Kong, perhaps because of his Teutonic outlook (and later because of his confidential relationship with the Governor), but in the Colonial Office there was sympathy for him. When the Governor went on leave and was prevented by London from returning, Eitel continued on as Inspector of Schools until he retired in r 897. In his book Europe in China, he gives what is mostly a fair estimate of the quality of Hennessy's administration.

On many an occasion Hennessy discomposed the members of the admin-

Mr Hennessy 's Proceedings 147

istration; now and then he crossed swords with one or other of them. When he discovered that a Chinese woman had had to sell her son to pay a fine imposed by C. C. Smith, the Registrar-General, he set up a commission to enquire into the workings of that department. He accused Smith of illegal and immoral practices and put a stop to the system of informers used to incrim­ inate prostitutes. No two men ever differed more essentially over policy towards the Chinese. Smith, who had every reason to think that on the retiral of the Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong (J. Gardiner Austin) in 1878, he would be appointed to that position, discovered that the Governor had secured a new man for the job - W. H. Marsh - and Smith had to look elsewhere for such an appointment.

Hennessy now attempted a wide reorganization of administrative arrange­

ments in relation to the Chinese. His intention was to reduce the powers of the Registrar- General by setting up a new Department of Interpretation under a senior civil servant responsible for translation in the courts, and acting as Chinese Secretary as well. He had in mind for the job none other than Eitel. But here the Colonial Office jibbed. Hennessy was reminded that the purpose of the cadet scheme was to supply men qualified to occupy the highest posts without the need of an interpreter, and that the Registrar­ General's job was to act as the official channel of communication between the Chinese and the government. In fact Hennessy's proposed scheme might have worked better than the existing arrangements, but the whole idea was shelved.

Having got rid of one potential Colonial Secretary, C. C. Smith, Hennessy now quarrelled with his own appointee in the position. Marsh found his job no job at all, for Hennessy _handled all the business himself. Another casualty was Frederick Stewart, headmaster of the Central School, who had on one occasion refused the post of Registrar-General and accepted that of Police Magistrate where he thought he would be less under the thumb of the Governor. Hennessy also accused the Harbourmaster of laxity in examining shiploads of emigrants. Relations between the Governor and his officials were rapidly turning into the farce which had blemished the reign of Davis. General Donovan had ceased to attend the meetings of the Executive Council or to send his deputy. But worse was to come. There was but one military band in Hong Kong, and it was under the General's command. Whether maliciously or not, he had ordered the band to play at a dinner party organized by him on the Qu.een's birthday in May 18 80. Hennessy had organized his own, official, birthday party, only to discover the essential musicians were otherwise engaged. Local communication being what it was, an appeal was sent to the War Office in London and brought a telegraphed order to the General to abandon his party and send the band to Government House. In terms of protocol the General was clearly in the wrong. Presumably he failed to grace Government House on the occasion.

148 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Given the circumstances, the acrimony and the dumb insolence which was the reaction of the officers of government towards the Governor - it is surprising that the finances of the colony remained good, even advancing into modest prosperity. Part of this was directly attributable to the influx of Chinese and the steady expansion of trade. But to give Hennessy his due, the remainder of the increase in revenues was the result of the stamp-selling agency which he had set up on a commission basis. The revenue from opium also increased, from $13 2,000 to $205 ,ooo, when he broke the opium licence ring. The Governor also wished to reduce the incidence of taxation on the Chin·ese, especially the junk owners; but the Legislative Council made the counter-suggestion of reducing the municipal rates by 2 per cent. The Secretary of State refused this measure in view of the urgency of the public works to be undertaken. The revenue of the colony, without added taxation, rose from $947,637 in 1878 to almost $1.25 million in 1882.

The state of public works and the successive delays in their' implementation, demonstrate Hennessy's inefficiency and the disarray which his governorship induced in the administration. Virtually the sole project which went ahead was the rebuilding of the Praya, begun under Kennedy. The Central School, urgently needed in 1876, was at the end of Hennessy's term not yet in being. The Civil Hospital, wrecked in the 1 874 typhoon, its tem­ porary premises gutted by fire, then took over the Lock Hospital and a new school building at Sai Ying Pun. It had been Kennedy's suggestion that the Lock Hospital be converted to a general hospital, and when the Civil Hospital was established in those premises Hennessy appeared to believe that this had been accomplished; and he so reported to London. His assumption of almost all the work of his administrators obviously placed an intolerable load on him, and such confusions were the inevitable result. Having suggested a new gaol, not one stone of it was �ver put in place. Muddled thinking on the Tai Tam water supply scheme effectively held it up. The Governor appeared to be under the delusion that to provide water tanks for fire-fighting would do much to solve the water problem, apparently oblivious of the point that people must drink and also wash and cook. Other inde­

fensible ideas of his on sanitation (which fall more appropriately in Chapter . 14) were bound up with his unsound opinions on water supply.

More appropriate to Hong Kong was Hennessy's interest in the budding science of meteorology. Weather prediction was obviously something worth pursuing in the context of the Hong Kong climate. The Governor proposed an observatory for Mount Elgin in Kowloon. Later, in 1881, he charged his Aide de Camp, Major Palmer of the Royal Engineers, to draw up a much more elaborate plan of what he proposed to call the Kangxi Observatory after the Chinese emperor whose interest in astronomy was fired by the scholar-Jesuits at his court in the late seventeenth century. Palmer's scheme was to cost an initial $33 ,000, with an annual maintenance of $10,000. This

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 1 49

was put to the Legislative Council in August r 88 r, with the colonial estimates for r882 which included $ 20,000 for the observatory and time-ball. Hennessy reminded the Council:

The experience of the last few years will be enough to convince us of the importance of meteorological observations for the China Sea. I received within the last few days two telegrams from the government of Manila and the Council are aware that they indicated the full force of the gale we have recently experienced . . . In the same way we shall be able to make observations that will not only be useful to ourselves, but to all parts of the China Sea.

The expensive project was strongly championed by the Hong Kong Telegraph, but the Colonial Office was sceptical. The Governor was told to go no further pending consultations in London. The Surveyor-General, John Price, took another look at the project in May r8 8 2 and suggested a different scheme, the cost of which was about half of the previous one. London con­ sidered this 'sufficient for the requirements of the colony'.

Qualified men were sent out from England and the building was begun. A note of restraint was introduced by the Colonial Office when the Secretary of State wrote, commenting on Hennessy's suggestion for naming the obser­ vatory: 'As to [this] perhaps "The Hong Kong Observatory" will be enough for the present modest proposal.'3 And a notation on the correspondence about the scheme adds a laconic touch: 'Pass over in silence Sir J. P. Hennessy's proposal to name it after Kong Hi [Kangxi] , and the idea will probably drop into oblivion/4 The Observatory was completed after Hennessy left Hong Kong.

Characteristically, having in mind the severe loss of life among the boat people in the r874 typhoon, Hennessy proposed to construct a breakwater at Causeway Bay as a refuge for junks in future storms. London insisted that the plans be scrutinized by a specialist consulting engineer, Sir John Goode, and allowed the cost of the work to come out of the special gambling fund. But by the end of r8 8 r nothing had been done and no plans for the breakwater had reached London. On being asked, Hennessy merely complained of the in­ efficiency of Price. But, as with most of the other lapsed schemes, the reasons lay in the Governor himself, whose energies were consumed by the crime problem, the huge load of work he shouldered, and in altercations with his officials on almost every topic that arose. 'For excellent reasons, convincingly expressed,' writes �ndacott, 'the programme of urgently needed public works was held up during the whole of his governorship. '5 Those 'excellent reasons' in fact covered Hennessy's administrative ineptitude.

Almost the only success of Hennessy's term of office was the reform of the Grant-in-Aid scheme in r879. By a few alterations in the wording of the official code, which was approved by the Colonial Office, the secular system of education was confined to government schools, and the Grant-in-Aid

150 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

schools were set free to devote their whole curricula to education, whether secular or religious, in both primary and secondary subjects. This was a giant step forward. On Hennessy's arrival in 1 877 there were 41 schools in the colony with 2,9 22 pupils; when he left in 1 882 there were 80 schools with an enrolment of 5,1 82 pupils - all under government supervision. No credit was ever accorded him by the Europeans in Hong Kong for this considerable achievement.



Governor Hennessy (wearing top hat) with members of the Legislative Council and others, photographed with the King of the Sandwich Islands (today's Hawaii) when the latter visited Hong Kong.



However miserable his overall record, Hennessy's enlightened policie� towards the Chinese were far in advance of the times - so far, indeed, that in attempting to put the theory of racial equality into governmental practice, he deeply antagonized the ultra-conservative Westerners, so that by the time of his going they were not on speaking terms with him except on official business. Hennessy was an ineffectual administrator, inefficient, unable to delegate. The Colonial Office viewed him and all his deeds with extreme reserve; the colony with something approaching derision.

There is a brief glimpse of Hennessy in the description of the great fire that raged on Christmas night 1 878, which destroyed a large amount of property on Queen's Road. Three hundred and sixty-eight houses were razed before it

Mr Hennessy's Proceedings r5 r

was extinguished on Boxing Day. Miss Isabella Bird arrived by sea at the height of the blaze.



Streets choked with household goods and the costly contents of shops, treasured books and nicknacks lying on the . . . pavements . . . Chinamen dragging their possessions to the hills ; Chinawomen . . . carrying their children on their backs . . . officers black with smoke working at the hose like firemen . . . and Mr Pope Hennessy, the Governor, ubiquitous in a chair with four scarlet bearers . . . 6

Later he was to quit his sedan and lend a hand with the hoses.

There is a glimpse of another aspect, in a photograph taken of the official party on the visit of the King of Hawaii. A stuffy, lumpish group of men, his officials, sit and stand in untidy rows. Amid them, the King on his right, sits Hennessy, a pale top hat perched forward rakishly over his eyes, elegant, singular as an actor in a football crowd. He did not and could not belong.

A question poses itself: why was Hennessy ever sent out to Hong Kong when, as one civil servant in London noted, 'he has muddled the finances of every colony he has governed'? The Secretary of State once sent Hennessy copies of 39 dispatches which he had left unanswered, and was finally driven to having _those on which he most urgently required action printed and published in Hong Kong for the populace to examine.

In March 18 8 2, this dandified, emotional, well-intentioned, and by then hopelessly isolated figure at last left Hong Kong. The Chinese were hyper­ bolical in their praise, the British equally cutting in their disdain. The praise was genuine enough, recording Chinese recognition that at least one foreign man, and a Governor at that, considered them to be equals in an appallingly unegalitarian place. Perhaps that thought, as he left the colony, formed a small island of comfort in the bitter sea of ostracism.

I4 . Public HealthJ and the Blockade



AMONG the problems affecting nineteenth-century Hong Kong were several which seemed down the years to be more intractable than others - water supply, sanitation, and public health. One more, affecting the terms of three successive governors, came to be known as 'the blockade'.

There was really no excuse for the continuing saga of Hong Kong's inad­ equate water supply, given the relative smallness of the population and the state of Western hydraulic engineering expertise. And the history of China's own very ancient water supply facilities in the cities of the mainland point an accusatory finger at nineteenth-century Hong Kong administrators' inertia. The problem lay not with mechanics but in part with a failure to tackle the question seriously; and in part with the chronic stinginess of the Colonial Office. Yet another factor was the fact that the ruling classes in the colony lived in virtually total isolation from the Chinese maj ority, unaware of conditions. Furthermore, successive administrations were chary of interfering with Chinese custom in this and other matters. There seemed to be no answers to the situation until the Chinese could be co-opted somehow into the workings of the administration. And there was little or no will towards achieving that.

By 1881 the Chinese population had reached almost 200,000 - a rise of. 3 2 per cent in 15 years. Dr I. Murray, the Colonial Surgeon who had arrived in 18 59, in his 18 70 report complained that it was 'not creditable . . . that after the unhealthy condition [of the drains] had been pointed out by myself and the Sanitary Commission, they should remain as they are, a source of disease and death'. :i: He castigated the government for doing nothing when approached by the owners of marine lots complaining of untreated sewage fouling the shores, and pointed out that lack of funds was no excuse in the face of 'the most dangerous nuisance'. He also called for better hospitals, the registration of all deaths, for tree-planting, and the liberal use of that Victorian kill-all, carbolic, in every drain, as palliative measures.

Public Health, and the Blockade 15 3

Governor Macdonnell made a stab at that sort of improvement when he started paving Taipingshan and installing surface drainage, but his energies were soon deflected to what appeared to him more urgent tasks in the suppression of gambling and piracy. Still, he was a carbolic enthusiast and made sure a good supply of it was available.