The fourth monument is an Egyptian-looking obelisk erected in 1853 by the captain, officers and crew of HMS Cleopatra [17/1/4]. This vessel was dispatched to Borneo from Singapore in 1852 after a letter had been received from Lord Palmerston, demanding that retribution should be exacted from the Borneo pirates of the Tunku River for killing a Scottish trader and explorer, Robert Burns, grandson of the Bard. The monument, erected by the officers and crew of the HMS Winchester [9/1/5], has six sections covering the years from 1852 to 1857 with a total number of 108 names of men who died in Eastern waters. The Winchester caused much scandal in naval circles by staging a mutiny soon after its arrival in Hong Kong. Admiral Pellew seems to have provoked the mutiny, when he refused to allow shore leave to sailors who had not been ashore for eighteen months and were anchored in full sight of the delights of Hong Kong. ��A year and a half on board was even too much for Jack to endure��. 25 When the crew did not answer the summons to quarters, the admiral sent the captain and officers down with drawn swords to clear the lower deck, wounding five sailors. The excuse put forward in Pellew��s defence in England was that the health of the sailors was put into peril by the existence of the:
most horrid collection of low, filthy grog shops, samshoe that makes men not
drunk but mad, and exposes them to crimps that entice them when drunk to
desert and to the most filthy, low class of Chinese women who infect seamen
with the very worst of that horror of horror so horrid that it can only be expressed by...26
The mutiny was partly due to the system in the Royal Navy of that era whereby men bought their ranks and there was no stated age for retirement. Admiral Pellew, aged well over sixty, had last been to sea in 1813, over forty years earlier and on that occasion too had provoked a mutiny.27 In February 1853, the Winchester took part in an engagement against a notorious Burmese pirate in an
action that went tragically wrong. Captain Loch, whose name is among those on
the monument, had landed with 185 seamen and 62 marines intending to march
against the pirate camp. They were ambushed on the way and lost twelve men
including the captain, who was killed by his pocket-watch. ��He exposed himself
with reckless daring, and was calling on his men to try the bayonet when a ball
struck his watch and carried the casing and works into his body��. 28 The sailors and in particular the officers were well rewarded for their raids
on pirates. In 1849, the amount of prize money, claimed and paid out for just
one engagement in Borneo amounted to �G20,700 to be divided among the
commanders, officers and men of the Albatross, Royalist and Nemesis. Twenty
pounds a head had been claimed on the heads of the five hundred pirates killed.29
It was noted in the local newspapers that when the Admiralty discontinued the bounty system due to its expense, the ships of the Royal Navy were much less keen to engage with pirates. The officers also augmented their pay by going to the rescue of merchant ships in trouble and then claiming huge amounts of money in salvage to be divided among the crew according to rank. This did not add to the popularity of the senior service among the ship-owning fraternity in the East.
The monuments erected in the second half of the period, between 1856 and 1861, and the number of sailors lost from HM ships are: Calcutta [11B/9/3]: 50, Sybille [12/6/19]: 22, Bittern [9/2/4]: 11, Tribune [9/3/6]: 24, Sans Pareil [20/16/6]: 31 and Sampson [15/2/14]: 20. Besides these, there are two other monuments, one to the Nankin [20/8/4], where the numbers of those lost have been obliterated by age and weather, and a second memorial to the dead of one unknown ship [9/3/8], where even its name has now become illegible. The losses were caused by disease, accidents and pirates, besides those killed in action in the Second Opium War. Captain Harry Edgell, for example, commander of HMS Tribune [9/3/6], erected an impressive monument topped by an urn in memory of twenty-three men. Of these, five were killed in action in the Second Opium War, sixteen died from disease, one fell from aloft, and two were drowned. The Tribune took part in the battle of Fatshan Creek where she was credited with the destruction of more than eighty Chinese war junks. In this encounter, the ship lost five men including a midshipman, Henry L. Barker [10/5/5] and Lieutenant Patrick Trell [10/5/4]. In 1856, the brig HMS Bittern [9/2/4] commemorated the death of eleven men whose carved names on the impressive capstan are now barely legible. The ship had engaged in several encounters with pirate fleets. In September 1855, it attacked twenty-three heavily armed junks killing 1200 pirates but losing its commanding officer, Charles Turner. 30 Nineteen wounded men were brought back to Hong Kong where at least three died. The largest monument in the Cemetery is to those who died while serving on HMS Calcutta [11B/9/3]. She was the flagship of the fleet and commanded by Admiral
Sir Michael Seymour during the Second Opium War. Because of her size and
draught, she was unable to sail far up the Canton River and therefore took a limited part in the fighting. The Times correspondent, G.W. Cooke, reported in 1859 that: ��She is now anchored off Tiger Island and is occupied in throwing
shells with marvellous precision into three targets��. 31
Other ships including Sybille, Nankin and Sampson took part in the capture of Canton in 1857. One marine, Private Charles Bennett from the Sybille was beheaded by the Chinese and his companion, Seaman Richard Winter, jumped into a river and was drowned. The pair were said to have strayed from their post contrary to orders and been attacked by villagers. The Sampson was attacked by a large fleet of Chinese war junks and sustained casualties, but of the twenty men whose names have been inscribed on the monument only one was killed in action, and ironically his name is Chinese. Ashing was probably the pilot employed to guide the ship up the river. The rest died of illnesses or in drowning incidents. Few sailors at this time learnt to swim. In all, for the years 1845 to 1860, a total of thirty-three ships have memorials in the Cemetery to members of their crew.
Naval Officers
Of the thirty-eight naval personnel found in the Cemetery during this period,
twenty-eight were officers, ranging in rank from Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Collier [13/8/3], commander in chief of the East India Station, down to Vincent Edward Eyre [20/16/5], a naval cadet from HMS Calcutta, who died in February 1858 aged only fourteen years. They include eight commanders, captains or masters,
five lieutenants or mates, three surgeons, one engineer and one naval chaplain.32
Admiral Collier was living at the time of his death with Chief Justice Hulme and had retired to bed as usual. The next morning his servant found him dead in bed.
He had earlier suffered from a paralytic stroke and gout. Collier was sixty-three at
the time of his death. He had served as a midshipman under Admiral Nelson in HMS Vanguard at the Battle of the Nile. His funeral procession was one of the longest ever seen in Hong Kong.
Like army officers, naval officers were often the younger sons of the landed gentry or aristocratic families. Sometimes the landed gentry backgrounds of the naval officers are shown in the inscriptions. Eighteen-year-old midshipman Charles Goddard, whose name is inscribed on the monument to HMS Columbine [11B/1/4], is described as from The Lawn, Swindon in Wiltshire.
Goddard lost his life in the fight against the pirate fleet of Shap-ng-tsai. After he
had boarded a pirate junk, one of the pirates set light to a fuse connected to the explosives on board and the blast from the explosion killed him and one sailor. Lieutenant H. Bacon [10/2/2] is shown on his headstone to be the fourth son of Charles Basil Bacon Esq. of Moor Park and Culverlands, Surrey.
The headstone of acting mate Frederick R. Hardinge [9/6/1] proudly announced that he was ��the nephew of the late Lord Hardinge��, a general of Indian fame. There also existed a number of naval families where son followed father into the navy for generation after generation. Captain Troubridge [13/6/2], who died of heatstroke in September 1850, was from such a family. His obituary proclaimed him:
The descendent of a family of naval heroes, he was a fine specimen of the
British sailor; one of those gallant gentlemen who with a fine frigate like the Amazon might be depended on to uphold the honour of the English flag in
any part of the world.
He had entered the service aged thirteen years and become a captain by the young age of twenty-three and soon after in 1841 set sail for Hong Kong as captain of HMS Clio. He had remained in the Far East surveying various coastlines ever since. He was described as of a ��social joyous disposition�� with correct religious principles shown by his regular attendance at the cathedral.
Naval commanders wielded very real power at a time when it was impossible to consult the home authorities quickly. Those with decisions to make had to rely on their own acumen. The slowness of transport, even from India, meant that in event of emergencies there was no prospect that reinforcements could be
drafted in quickly. Captain Troubridge was faced with such a decision. When on 25 August 1849, the one-armed governor of Macau, Captain Ferriera do Amaral, was pulled from his horse and beheaded by five Chinese, there was a fear that the
Chinese inhabitants would overrun the Portuguese colony:
It is said that a considerable number of Chinese have returned to Macao expressing a desire to place themselves under Portuguese protection. If true this is suspicious; at present not a single stranger should be permitted to enter the city. In war, the Chinese tactics are cunning and deceit; once introduce a large body of armed men and they could take the town at any time.33
Troubridge, aged just thirty, set sail immediately in the gunboat Amazon to offer assistance. As the editor of the Friend of China reported:
Captain Troubridge acts entirely on his own responsibility �X the Governor of Hong Kong can advise but not control his actions. He, as an experienced,
prudent officer, knows the power with which he is intrusted [sic] and how
far naval officers on remote stations are left to their own judgement when
placed in novel and difficult positions. If he decides upon active co-operation,
he carries the sympathies of his countrymen with him, �X but if otherwise, few if any will blame him; under any circumstance we feel assured that he will not turn a deaf ear to the voice of humanity, nor permit the slaughter of the inhabitants by infuriated Chinese should they take possession of the city.34
Even junior naval officers merited a good send-off when they passed away. When Robert T. Raynes [9/1/3], paymaster of HMS Adventure, died in 1859 aged thirty, the procession which accompanied him to his grave was made up of the following: marines, seamen and the band from HMS Calcutta, the bier with
six senior paymasters as pall bearers, officers of the army and navy, officers of the
American, French and Dutch men-of-war in port. Perhaps Raynes was special. He had distinguished himself in several court martials and it was suggested that his fatal disease may have been aggravated by over-work.
Although the majority of naval officers
seem to have conducted themselves in a
gentlemanly way, some junior naval officers
in spite of their backgrounds were quite capable of rough or even violent behaviour towards the Chinese. Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, who was one of the Russian
naval officers interned in Hong Kong at the time of the Crimean War, later wrote an
article about his stay. He reported:
On more than one occasion a poor coolie received a beating from a
12.14. Headstone in memory of Robert
passing dandy for not moving out of T. Raynes, late paymaster of HMS Adventure, d. 21.1.1859.
the way in time or simply because the latter wanted to make use of his cane�K. During my stay here a small scene took place on Queen��s Road. The main role was played by a young officer of the Frigate, HMS Nanking. It seems that the young man, being in high spirits, decided to eat some fruit from the basket of a hawker and the Chinese, not appreciating the joke, demanded payment and not receiving it grabbed the gentleman by the coat. Apparently, this insult to his attire was too much to take, even if the citizen of the Celestial Empire was
right, and that is why H.M. Mr. Officer dealt
the ��peasant�� a mighty blow which cut his face��. 35
The officer was taken before the magistrate but
let off with a caution and the suggestion that he pay compensation. Some ships
acquired a bad reputation due to the undisciplined behaviour of their crew. For example, a collective sigh of relief followed the final departure of HMS Hastings. Ships going to sea at this time had to be entirely self-sufficient. They carried on
board not only surgeons and clergymen but also a number of skilled workers considered necessary such as carpenters, sail-makers, armourers, and painters, who were all paid more than the sailors.
Sailors
In this period, the headstones of just five sailors have survived in the Cemetery.
They include two, George Bevans [16/8/3] and Henry Gill [21/3/10] from the little sloop, HMS Beagle, made famous by the voyages of Charles Darwin, which must have visited Hong Kong around 1860. Thomas Harris [11A/10/3], who died in January 1856, is named on his headstone as captain of the long boat of HMS Pique. Henry Wright [7/5/16] is memorialized by the men of HMS Fearless as a seaman who was killed by falling from aloft in April 1848 at the incredibly old age (for those days) of fifty. Next to Wright lies Henry Magee [7/5/17], who died on 6 October 1847 aged twenty-five. The families of naval personnel never
accompanied them abroad, so there are no graves in the Cemetery dedicated to wives or children. There is however one intriguing headstone dedicated to Walter Scott Burn [13/7/3] aged ten months, who died aboard HMS Hercules on 18
April 1857 at the height of the Second Opium War. The question arises as to what
an obviously Scottish baby was doing on a warship at such a time. The Royal Navy was considered the senior service and all ranks were regarded with slightly more respect than those in the army, although they were
recruited from much the same backgrounds. In December 1849, the Friend of China said of them:
No class has benefited more by the marked progress of civilisation since the
beginning of the present century than seamen serving on board ships of war. As a body, the men are more respectable �X more manageable. The Navy is no longer burdened with the outcasts of society who can only be kept in
subjection by the constant use of the lash �K he [the sailor] is vastly superior
to the men who gained for England her greatest naval conquests. He is not contaminated by associating for years with felons turned over to his ship from the hulks.36
Sailors elicited more sympathy in their drunken sprees than the soldiers did perhaps because they were not such a continual presence ashore, since their ships came and went as they patrolled the eastern seas. However, shore-going sailors known as liberty men often caused trouble to the authorities:
Seamen are the most reckless people in the world and, when relieved from the wholesome restraints of discipline for a few hours, with the exuberant spirit of schoolboys, they hunt after amusement without thinking of the consequences. Yesterday we noticed a party in a ��happy state of excitement��
perambulating the streets with colours flying and drums beating. We hear that a few days ago, a party of these liberty men made a rather serious attack upon the police, and that it was with great difficulty they were
ultimately captured and carried to the ��watch house�� only after help had been
obtained from the 98th Regiment.37
The low status of sailors was demonstrated by the fact that in death they hardly merited even a funeral service let alone a plot of land in the Cemetery. In a letter to the Friend of China, Shooks asked:
Are the bodies of seamen dying on board H.M. Vessels lowered from the bow ports into a boat which is then rowed a short distance and the body cast into the deep IN THE HARBOUR OF HONG KONG ITSELF?
[sic] If so, is it in accordance with, or in direct breach of the naval
regulations? And is the funeral service read over the dead, and if so, does
the Chaplain officiate?38
The editor commented below the letter that the situation was even worse than the correspondent represented. H.S. then wrote in reply:
It is not the fault of the navy; they have applied (at least I have been told so from good authority) for ground, but have been refused on account of want of room�K. A dead body sewed up in a hammock and sunk with four shot naturally rests on the bottom, but is rapidly destroyed by the vermin that live in the deposit; the shot falls out of the sacking and the body highly decomposed rises to the surface, perhaps in sight of the ship he belonged to. No less than four bodies in that state partially exposed have been seen in the harbour this week, a harrowing and disgusting spectacle to a class of men who may probably share their fate.39
The correspondence continued with a letter from A Man before the Mast:
About the burial of dead bodies, the ships certainly send a sort of person who reads a sort of service and the corpse goes to the deep in a sort of way but this we before the mast think is not all square and I shall give you proof�K. A dead body was buried a few days ago within four hundred yards astern of a merchantman vessel and immediately afterwards another three
hundred yards ahead�K. When the crew of another merchant vessel in this
harbour were about to have their dinner, a few days ago a dead body came
floating past the ship and because the dinner was fish the men would not eat it. I could give plenty more cases�K.. The best proof [of this practice] is that sharks have come to clear off the dead but it is a shame that men who have
risked their lives to come to this tropical climate, should be treated like dogs when they die. The stokers of the Vixen acted like men when they had their comrade buried ashore.40
The harbour may have been even more polluted than now. Samuel Guerney Cresswell, a midshipman, reported in a letter to his parents written in July 1844 that a French frigate with four men in the sick bay piped all hands to bathe in the sea after dinner at about two p.m. and next day there were 124 men on their sick list.41
The ordinary sailors were, like the soldiers, subjected at this time to merciless corporal punishment in the form of the cat o�� nine tails which was used more than it should have been by bad officers. Dr. Edward Cree had an entry in his diary for 14 January 1843 to note that: ��our Lieutenant Downes�� was superseded in his command, and wanted to leave the ship and go home: ��I shan��t be sorry if he goes as he is an ill-tempered man and too fond of flogging. Not many days pass but I have to attend a corporal punishment. The ship��s company will rejoice when Downes goes��. 42 The editor of the book added a note that it was not uncommon for an unpopular officer to be assaulted by his crew after the ship had been paid off. This happened to the captain of the HMS Cornwallis [11A/3/1], the flagship on which the Treaty of Nanking was signed, when it returned to Portsmouth from the Far East in 1844. A more horrific case of cruelty and oppression by a commander occurred on HMS Childers. Ralph Milbanke [11A/3/4], first lieutenant on that sloop, who died in 1843, may have been a witness to some of those cruelties. Eleven commissioned officers quit the ship, two commissioned officers deserted, one marine and one midshipman��s steward committed suicide, one marine became insane, and one sailor was beaten to death while the ship was under the command of Captain Pitman. In this particular case very unusually the captain was court-martialled, found guilty and dismissed the service. The scenes of oppression and tyranny had extended over a period of four years.
During a greater portion of the time Captain Pitman was to be found night after night smiling at the dinner table of his hospitable countrymen in China. The man, who left his ship (and he was there but little whilst in harbour) in the fore part of the day after committing shocking act of cruelty, in the evening was whispering sentiment in the Drawing Room.43
Chapter 13
Women
and Children
The average age of death of the fifty-four women, including the four army wives,
found in the Cemetery for this period is just over thirty-one years. Twenty of
the fifty-four died in their twenties, four were under forty, and six died between
the ages of forty and fifty-seven, the fifty-seven-year-old being Sarah Murphy [9/8/13], the tough wife of a colour sergeant. The pattern of young deaths points to the vulnerability of women living in Hong Kong, whatever their social ranking. This was demonstrated to all in 1852 when Bishop Smith preached the Sunday sermon on the uncertainty of life.1 Three wives had died within four days of each other. Rosalia Clarincia Gordon [9/10/6], the wife of Robert Gordon, who was one of the original ninety-nine volunteers and probably a manager at the Hong Kong Club, died of dysentery on 1 February 1852. Sarah Ann Markwick, wife of the auctioneer, Charles Markwick and daughter of another auctioneer,
J.B. Watson, succumbed aged thirty-three
on the same day.2 The third of the trio was Caroline Preston [9/9/7], the wife of Dr.
William Preston, one of the dispensers at the
Hong Kong Dispensary. She was the daughter of a solicitor from Southsea near Portsmouth, She had arrived in January and survived in Hong Kong less than one month, dying on 3 February aged thirty-one years.
It is easy these days to forget to what an extent women were slaves to their reproductive systems. In this period, giving birth so far from home, in unhygienic conditions and without the help of trusted mothers or midwives, must have been a risky, frightening and lonely event.
Yet some European women in Hong Kong gave birth almost yearly. Isabella Dundas Cay [40/3/1] arrived in July 1845 with three sons and a daughter and two female servants, a year after her husband, Robert, the Scottish registrar general. She then proceeded to add to her family year by year. Albert arrived in 1846, George in 1848,
Margaret in 1849, Isabella in
1850 and Dundas in 1851. Isabella died in 1851 aged forty-one years, having given birth to nine children. She is buried together with her youngest son in the centre of the largest plot in the entire cemetery. The wide granite railings enclose such a
large area that the flat ledger stone in the centre looks quite insignificant.
There are numerous examples in the Cemetery of women succumbing to childbirth, or becoming weakened in health due to childbirth. A sad epitaph records the death in September 1860 of Mrs. Hotson [9/3/9], the wife of a sergeant in the Royal Regiment. She was born in Gibraltar, and was only twenty-four years
old when she died ��leaving an infant fifty-eight days old to lament her irretrievable
loss��. 3 The father was in North China on his way to the sacking of the Summer Palace. When Mary Federica Irwin [16Ci/4/9], wife of the colonial chaplain, died in July 1857, it was said in her obituary:
Mrs Irwin was far from strong at any time after the birth of her last child some fifteen months ago; though the immediate cause of her disease was
dysentery, labouring under which she was confined to her room for ten days only. When two or three Sundays ago, it was remarked of the upper notes in
the chant of the Te Deum that they were given with a force and thrill through the holy pile never before heard, little thought those who then attended St John��s Cathedral that so soon the voice of the singer would be hushed in the gloom of the grave.4
Rev. James J. Irwin soon married again and his second wife, Emma Maria [16Ci/4/10], died in January 1861, aged only twenty-one years. The two wives are buried in a joint family plot.
The deaths of a number of the husbands of women living in Hong Kong led to a trend towards quick remarriages. There would have been few opportunities to work or openings for governesses or lady��s maids even if the widows were qualified. It would have been little short of impossible for a lone female to remain single in Hong Kong with children to care for. Poor Mary Roe Goodings, after coping with the deaths of her husband Robert, the head gaoler of Victoria prison, and her newborn baby, was left looking after a six-year-old daughter from her first marriage and the four remaining Goodings stepchildren on a salary of $5 a month which she earned as matron of the gaol. It is not surprising that, three months after Robert Goodings�� death, Mary married for the third time to the new keeper of the prison, Robert Edward Mackenzie, an ex-policeman later to become a tavern keeper.5 In an attempt by a European woman to make an independent living, a widow advertised her services in 1854 at the time of the strike of the Chinese washermen: ��The widow, Macdonald, living at West Point Police Station on the hill, will be glad to undertake the washing and getting up of fine Linen, at English prices �X say four pence per Shirt��.6 History does not relate if she was successful in her enterprise.
The only women who managed to run businesses were the redoubtable wives of shopkeepers, or hotel managers who, supported by their husbands, opened dressmaking and millinery enterprises along Queen��s Road to cater for the wealthier wives of the colony. These included Mrs. Lemon, wife of the bookbinder John Lemon; Mrs. Marsh, wife of a farrier and dealer in products relating to horses; Mrs. Winibeg, married to the owner of the British Hotel; and a Miss Garrett. In 1856, John Lemon was suing the P. & O. shipping line for the non-arrival of $2,000 worth of millinery goods. In that year Miss Garrett was advertising Paris bonnets, lace mantles, flowers, ribbons, gloves and parasols, lace and muslin curtains, children��s clothes, haberdashery and perfumery.7 If a poem in the China Mail is anything to go by, the demands of the small number of wealthy women in the colony must have been substantial:
Bonnets, mantillas, crepes, collars and shawls;
Dresses for breakfasts and dinners and balls,
Dresses to sit in and stand in and walk in;
Dresses to dance in and flirt in and talk in;
�K
Dresses for winter, spring, summer and fall
All of them different in colour and pattern;
Silk, muslin and lace, crape velvet and satin, Brocade and broadcloth and other materials, Quite as expensive and much more ethereal.8
The dressmaking business was not without risks. The dangers from fire in a town largely built of wood and without a professional fire service are brought home when one learns that Mrs. Marsh and Mrs. Rickomartz lost their stock in a fire in 1859 and another fire in 1861 totally destroyed Mrs. Winnibeg��s stock of goods.
Another group of women calling for sympathy and respect are those married to sea captains who lived, gave birth to and brought up children on board their husband��s ships never knowing whether in times of emergency they would be within reach of medical help. One such woman was the American, Thankful Lucas [9/14/13], the daughter of Horace Bacon Esq. of Barnstable, Massachusetts and wife of Captain Lucas of the Mary Adam. She died in September 1850, aged twenty-nine, shortly before reaching the Hong Kong harbour. According to her obituary: ��Her death was that of the righteous, calm and resigned in view of the hope she entertained of blissful immortality: her only earthly wish being that her remains might receive the rights of sepulchre in Christian ground��. One hopes her husband never knew that the grounds of the Hong Kong Cemetery had not been consecrated. Mary Ann Ives [9/17/8] arrived with her husband, Captain Ives on the ��splendid London river-built brig Berkeley��, which was carrying among other goods pressed hay to feed the horses of Hong Kong.9 Mary Ann succumbed on 14 December 1851, aged twenty-seven, just two weeks after the death of her twenty-month-old baby, W.J.F. Ives, and the two were buried together. Looking after a tiny baby on board a barque at sea must have been fraught with difficulties, especially when the baby became sick.
One particular story lies behind the insignificant square slab that marks the
grave of a baby, Wilhelmina de Castilla [7/12/15], which encapsulates the trials and hardships endured by the women who accompanied husbands and fathers across the seas to live and raise families in alien surroundings. The grandfather of
Wilhelmina, who died in 1862 aged one year, was John Couper, ship��s carpenter for the P. & O. at Whampoa. There on 6 December 1856, his daughter married the
dashing American river boat captain mentioned earlier, Henry de Castilla. Only weeks later, the family were caught up in the wider events of the Second Opium
War. The foreign factories had been burnt to the ground and a price of thirty
silver dollars placed on the head of every foreigner delivered to the viceroy at his yamen in Canton. A little before sunset on 20 December, a man presented himself with a note to be placed in the hands of Couper himself. On being called for by his daughter, Couper came down to the entrance of the chop-boat. There he was seized by six men who tried to drag him into their boat. His daughter held him by the coat and would have succeeded in rescuing him had he not slipped overboard and fallen into the water and then been lifted into the sampan. He struggled manfully with the six Chinese in the boat and jumped into the water again but was
again dragged back into the sampan, which took off at speed. His son in a gig and a
boat from HMS Sybille left in pursuit in the gathering dusk, but Couper was never seen again. Meanwhile poor Mrs. Couper had fallen down in a faint and was found lying senseless when the boats returned.
Eighteen months later at the end of the Second Opium War, the Couper
family, headed now by the son, John Cardew Couper, were back on their chop-
boat in Whampoa and the docks were open once again for business. The widowed
Mrs. Couper and her daughter, Mrs. Castilla, were faced with further threats. In
January 1857,
13.4. Whampoa Dockyard showing what is thought to be the Couper family houseboat. (By courtesy of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.)
Two drunken men-of-war��s men, but not so drunk as to be insensible of what they were about, attempted violently to force their way on board Mr. Couper��s chop, in the absence of the master and to the terror of the female members of the family.10
On his way back from Canton to Hong Kong, Albert Smith, the impresario, breakfasted on their boat. Old Mrs. Couper and her daughter joined the party. It was hardly surprising that ��The old lady was very weary of China and longed to be home again��. She was not however destined to see Aberdeen again, dying about a month after this meeting.
Children
In the text accompanying the sketch of children and their amahs shown in Figure 13.5, the correspondent wrote that British children were overdressed and taught to wear crinolines at an early age. But raising children at this time in Hong Kong was a worrying and all-too-often heartbreaking undertaking. The number of infants found in the Hong Kong Cemetery demonstrates the great amount of
suffering and sadness that visited all classes of women.
Of the sixty-four children buried in the Cemetery in this period, the average age of death is only 1.8 years. Babies were at huge risk at the time of weaning, when neither the milk nor the water they drank could be sterilized. In the survey
13.5. Western children and their amahs at the parade ground. (Illustrated London News, 17 October 1857.)
of Hong Kong, d. 1856 aged two years and on the right the memorials to Charlotte and William Blackhead or Schwarzkopf, children of Frederick Schwarzkopf, German ships�� chandler. They died in 1857 and 1854 respectively, both aged six months.
of children in the Cemetery, those of fifteen or over have been excluded. At a time when boys went to sea or became apprentices at around twelve years old, a fifteen-
year-old would hardly have been considered as a child. Only one girl, Mary Ann Hoey [9/5/10], reached the age of eleven years, two others surviving to reach eight years, Fanny Augusta Soames [13/7/1] and Mary Boyland [11A/11/7]. One unfortunate private of the 59th Regiment lost his wife Catherine Robert [16Cii/8/22] in 1851 and then his three children. This headstone is one of the few from this period belonging to the family of a private. Perhaps it was raised in pity for the poor man��s great loss.
The Life and Position of European Women in Hong Kong
The trend to look for a European wife rather than a Chinese ��protected�� mistress was strengthened by the missionary zeal of the churches, which were at this time spreading the Victorian moral code. Liaisons between men and Chinese women, and resorting to brothels, were increasingly looked on as depraved and immoral. As housing and other facilities in Hong Kong improved and men became more settled, they began to seek out wives who could accompany them back to Hong Kong and live with them there. But when the women arrived from Europe to live in Hong Kong, they found that their lives were perhaps even more restricted than back home. It was considered at this time that women as the weaker sex could only survive the vicissitudes of life under the protection of a father, husband or brother. In Hong Kong, as in Europe and America:
Wives �K were classed with minors and idiots and had no responsibility under
the law�K. Property, liberty, earnings, even a wife��s conscience, all belonged to her husband, as did the children she might bear. She could sign no contract,
make no will, cast no vote�K. Until 1857 no divorce was obtainable except by
special Act of Parliament.11
The epitaph on the headstone of Anna Johnson [9/16/12], the wife of the American Baptist missionary, echoes this idea. ��Thou no more hast need of man��s protective arm for thou mayst lean on His unchanging throne��. Anna died in 1848 aged twenty-six.
Women needed to be protected from all the more sordid aspects of their
society. A letter from A.B. deplored the reporting of the recent trial of a female brothel keeper who was alleged to have been framed by policemen:
This is a paper which lies on our tables and which our wives and daughters read; and I put it to any man who has the slightest purity of mind left, whether he would not be ashamed to knowingly permit any virtuous woman to read the disgusting details which compose the leading article of more than two columns.12
13.7.a and b. Headstone in memory of Anna Johnson, wife of Rev. John Johnson of the American Baptist Union, d. 9.6.1848.
During the long, hot, monotonous days while their husbands were at work, the women were obliged to remain indoors: ��As the ladies have not much to do
and cannot stir out of their houses in the daytime, they fill up their time by sending
out chits on every possible pretext and occasion��.13 At home they were deprived of their natural occupations as the work of the house was taken care of by servants. As Dr. B.L. Ball, the visiting American dentist, remarked:
A lady seems very dependent when she is obliged to send for a servant to call two others for the purpose of moving a rocking chair�K. I could have done it while she was giving directions to the servant although I might have lost caste with so menial a service.14
Even the care of her children was denied to a wife residing in Hong Kong. It was the custom to send children back to England by the age of six to be cared for by relations or educated in boarding schools. For boys, the attainment of a
firm grounding in Latin and Greek, in an atmosphere of ��regimented manliness��,
was considered necessary because it conferred gentlemanly status. The high cost of over one hundred pounds sterling a year ensured that only the elite could afford this kind of education. Girls needed ��moral training and genteel
accomplishments�� in order to find a husband in the right stratum of society. It
was considered that both boys and girls needed to be removed from the heathen environment in which their parents laboured so they could be brought up to learn true Christian principles:
Thus in the pursuit of gentility, small children were dispatched on dangerous journeys half way round the world to be received by relations and guardians they had never met not knowing when (or whether) they would see their parents again.15
The education of the children of the poorer Europeans was largely neglected
in the early years by the government in Hong Kong because the influential sectors
of society saw no need for schools as their children were almost without exception shipped back to England for their education. The position of women in early Hong Kong is summed up in an article:
No one is more to be pitied than a lady in Hong Kong, living like a choice exotic, to be seen, admired and live far away from friends and home, and
utterly separated from all the amusements and affairs that make a lady��s life
agreeable in other lands. Living in a home in which she is prevented from
performing any domestic duties, dependent for requisites on ruffianly China boys or timber-headed amahs, she finally sinks into a kind of automaton to
be carried to church on Sundays and home again and occasionally to be seen borne on men��s shoulders on the upper road when the sun is down.16
Single women would have found it very difficult to survive in early Hong Kong with their reputations intact. John Wright described how in August 1851,
a Miss Hester Coates from Blessington, Dublin, brought out by ��Smith of the
Engineers��, was abandoned by her fiance: ��When she called on him, he refused
to have anything to do with her and threatened to call the police if she did not leave. He then sought escape by boarding HMS Sphynx where his brother was a midshipman��. 17 George Duddell, the same man who so terrorized Queen��s Road with his galloping horses, took pity on Miss Coates and invited her into his
home. By October of the same year, John Wright was noting with disapproval,
��On dit she is in keeping with Mr. Duddell and not married as was given out at the time��. 18 However to do him justice, Duddell did marry her on 1 November 1851. She gave birth to a son in August of the following year and then died at Victoria in September 1853. Hers is one of those whose memorials have not survived in the Cemetery.
Women could find little outlet or intellectual stimulation in the societies and
clubs of Hong Kong from which they were generally barred. In 1855, a motion was presented at a meeting of the Victoria Library and Reading Room Club:
which the secretary has thought not fit to report, viz: that wives of members
be elected honorary members of the Reading room but its gallant proposer, a bachelor of course, found no-one to second the motion.19
Only one occasion has been found in the early years, when the Asiatic Society opened its meeting to ladies.20 Then just three ladies were daring enough to avail themselves of the invitation. Up to 1860, only two letters appeared in the newspapers written by women and one, it is suggested, was actually written by a man. In June 1851, a portion of a letter appeared in the Friend of China signed
Jemima Augusta Walker. The editor snidely commented:
We have received a letter signed or purported to be signed by one of those much to be pitied members of society, an ��unprotected�� female. We have not
printed it all and must apologize to the good lady (gentleman in disguise) for
not having done so but to tell the truth the writing is so ��beautifully fine�� we
cannot make it all out.21
Jemima Walker wrote questioning the suggested use of the parade ground as a
cricket pitch for which ��noble game�� she and the other ladies did not ��care a straw��. She asked that some part of the ground be given over to ��recreative pastimes more congenial and becoming to the female taste��. She wrote that she belonged to ��that unfortunate section of the community who are forbidden to exhibit as speakers on public occasions and whose claims do not seem to have been presented by the gallantry of any gentleman��. Needless to say her views received no consideration. In one letter, a husband sent in some verses written by his wife, some of which are quoted below. He wrote that his wife, ��unfortunately for my peace of mind derives her views of Hong Kong politics from the Friend of China��.
Was the colony ever at such a bad pass
I really can��t fancy what next it will come to,
What with poison, bad mutton, oil dearer than gas,
�K The taxes increasing, such a state the police in And coolies refusing to carry our chairs; If you��d know why this was it was simply because
That horrid Sir John��s at the head of affairs! [Sir John Bowring, governor]
�K If the boys at the school of St Andrews are lousy
Or the 59th band play unpopular airs;
If officials are idle or parsons are drowsy,
It��s all the old man at the head of affairs!
But as was usual in those days the husband has the last word in Maritus loquitur
[the husband speaks]:
And now if you��ve done, pray let me have a word too,
I would have you remember it��s very absurd to
Talk about things that you don��t understand.22
Chinese Protected Women and Women in Brothels
In the early days in Hong Kong there were very few women in comparison to the number of men. Neither the Europeans nor the Chinese considered it a suitable place to bring up a family. Many European men delayed marrying or left their wives at home. The Chinese kept their families in their ancestral clan villages where they would visit them during major festivals. In 1846, there were a mere 180 European women to 287 men. 23 Brothels proliferated to a degree almost unheard of except in the newly opened gold mining centres in California and Australia. In 1853, government sources listed 84 brothels as opposed to 103 family houses.24
While the lower classes of Europeans had recourse to brothels, those who could
afford it preferred to keep ��protected women��, as their Chinese mistresses were called. David Jardine��s Chinese girl, A Choy, even left him for his rival, John Dent,
deepening the rivalry between the two firms. Certainly Jardine, Matheson & Co.
had a well-documented arrangement for dispensing money to ��protected girls�� left behind in Hong Kong.25 As early as 1844, it was regretted that:
a system of slavery degrading to the British name has been permitted to spring up at Hong Kong�K. Female children have been kidnapped at Canton and from villages adjacent and brought to our island and sold�K. Our countrymen are implicated in the nefarious transactions alluded to.26
Again in 1851, a note at the foot of an article claimed: ��Hong Kong is a notorious slave market for all it is a British Colony where slavery is banned��.27 The dilemma facing the administration was how to allow the Chinese in Hong Kong to live according to Chinese custom, as had been promised by Sir Henry Pottinger, and at the same time keep Hong Kong free from slavery, which since 1833 had
been made illegal throughout British territories. Women in Chinese eyes were
chattels and from time immemorial had been sold into serfdom by poor families
to raise capital or pay off debts. They were then raised in richer families as servant
girls or mui tsai and then, if custom was followed, a suitable match would be found for them when they reached marriageable age. The actual outcome of such arrangement in a number of cases was spelled out in the China Mail which
claimed that in 1859, ��Five-sixths of the Chinese females in Hong Kong are slaves
�X regularly sold, purchased and worked in various ways for the pecuniary benefit
of their possessors��. The article continued with a portrait of the life of one typical Chinese girl of this class who is given the pseudonym of Attai by the author and of one typical European, ��Benjamin Rogers��, said to be involved with a Chinese girl.
1. Attai. Born 1831 in Toon-koon. Sold at the age of 11 to Akeu, a Chinese woman resident in Hong Kong. Employed by Akeu in house-work till 1846
when a partner in the firm of Burley, Burner & Co. purchased her for $100 to clean his boots, also paying Akeu $25 per mensem to show his estimate of her philanthropy. Returned to Akeu in 1848 and hired out at $30 per mensem to a law officer of the Crown, Akeu receiving the money. Sold in 1853, to Assai, a Chinese comprador, for $80. Hired out by Assai in 1858 as amah to the Hon Mrs. �X. Died, 1859, after having consumed $200 worth of food, received $200 worth of clothes, $100 of gold ornaments and brought in about $3,000 to the
slave-traders who possessed her.
2. Benjamin Rogers Esq. Partner in the firm of Burley, Burner & Co. Came out to China as an articled clerk on $50 per mensem and extras in 1849. Hired
a slave to clean his boots from Akeu in 1851; dismissed her in 1853. Purchased
a slave from Californian Attai in 1854 for $250 down. We must drop the veil!28
According to a follow-up article, the Attai��s remained by day in the brothels or in private houses leased for them by their European protector, and only visited their protector by night. The editor of the Friend of China in 1851 described the kind of situation that arose.
The husband �K tiring of his wife or wanting money to indulge in the vice of opium smoking (of this we are cognizant of a particular instance) sells her to one of the hags continually on the lookout for victims for the Hong Kong market. She is brought here and sold first to a brothel keeper and then to some foreigner for his concubine. At the expiration of a few years the foreigner returns to his native country and the girl receives her liberty
with perhaps a good round sum as a present besides�K. We have known the
husband return and claim his wife that he may sell her again.29
The buying and selling of mui tsai remained legal in Hong Kong up to 1932 and until recently a few former mui tsai were still living quiet lives as second wives.
As can be seen by the number of brothels, brothel keeping was a sizeable industry in early Hong Kong. Ironically it was the only industry run almost entirely by women. All the brothel keepers were female. At the upper end, the brothels were run as very high class businesses comparable to the geisha girl establishments of Japan. The girls would play host to rich clients at sumptuous banquets in gilded restaurants. The impresario, Albert Smith, was invited to one such establishment by the comprador of the P. & O., A Chung, who according to Smith was worth thirty to forty thousand pounds sterling:
There were sixteen courses which included shark��s fin, goose tendons, deer meat and rose leaf soup. A woman sat beside each guest filling glasses. Three
grown girls and an eleven year old child were introduced to entertain us as professional singers.30
These singers were known to the expatriates as ��sing sing girls�� and visiting them was a popular form of entertainment. The ten o��clock curfew imposed by the police brought forth an irate letter from one expatriate who complained that by the time dinner was over, it was already ten o��clock and he and many others were deprived of their fun. The brothels ranged down in status from the very best, which only catered to the rich Chinese, to those at the very bottom of the scale, which catered to the soldiers of the garrison. It was often in the brothels that liaisons were formed and the girls bought out to become ��protected�� women.
By the end of the first period, ��that institution, that bane of society, which has obtained the cognomen of ��Attaism���� so vehemently preached against by the incoming Bishop Alford, was coming under increasing attack. But according to the China Mail of 14 June 1860, it still had so strong a hold on the respectable portion of the community that an open assault could not be successfully made. The paper recommended that the ��evil�� must be approached carefully by an improvement in the tone of society. The marriage bond should be made fashionable and heads of commercial houses should encourage it among their
employees. It went on to say: ��We pity bachelor life here, well knowing what it
is, but we blame the married portion of the community, as much as we pity the unmarried, for their close and exclusive hospitality��.31 With the gradual decrease in the number of Chinese ��protected women�� and the increased secrecy under which they were kept, yet another bridge to understanding between the races was being whittled away. The subject of protected women was always sensitive and few details have survived of the kind of lives they led. Two protected women, about whom more is known, demand a special place in this chapter: Ng Akew, who was acquired by James Bridges Endicott (11B/1/1) and Mary Ayou Chan [23/4/1], the wife of Daniel Caldwell.
Ng Akew
A scandal erupted in 1849 concerning the affairs of Akew, allowing us a glimpse
into this hidden area of Hong Kong society. James Bridges Endicott after settling down at Cap-sing-mun as captain of the opium-receiving hulk, Ruparell, bought himself a Tanka girl called Ng Akew. Judging by her familiarity with the pirate chief and his haunts, it is probable that Endicott bought her from the pirates. She lived with him and gave birth to five of his children on board the Ruparell. Akew was described as ��a shrewd intelligent woman without any of those feelings of degradation which Europeans attach to females in her condition��. 32 The scandal began when Endicott and the captain of another receiving ship contracted divers to raise the cargo of the Isabella Roberts which had sunk in a typhoon. Of the 153 cases of opium raised, Endicott offered eight to his mistress who proceeded to trade them in her own right along the coast. But her ship carrying the opium was seized by pirates. Akew then went in person to visit the pirate chief, Shap-ng-tsai,
to demand her property back. She was palmed off with some betel-nut which did
not represent the value of her opium. In the absence of Endicott and against his advice, she returned to the pirates�� base at Tien Pahk where ��this Jezebel�� appears to have been involved in a plan to entrap the Royal Navy ship, Medea. Captain Lockyer on a visit to Tien Pahk had himself rowed in the gig to the inner harbour
where he found fifty large war junks among a crowd of shipping. Boarding one of the largest (possibly that of Shap-ng-tsai himself) the naval officers were regaled
with tea:
After leaving the junk, the Macao heroine presented herself stating that these were all pirates and from what is known of this damsel��s career and transactions, it is more than probable that she was acting under orders from Shap-ng-tsai; that wily chief knew that if he could induce Captain Lockyer to enter the harbour with his boats, not a man would escape.33
However, realizing that he was outnumbered, the captain left the bay. Akew, having successfully negotiated with the pirates over her lost opium, sailed back to Cum-sing-moon with her two ships laden with cloth, sugar, pepper and rice, escorted by six heavily armed Chinese junks. Her ships were arrested on suspicion of involvement with the pirates and the case taken to the American consul in Macau. It was handed over to the British authorities by the Americans but, although the goods on board her ships were almost certainly pirated, neither the British nor the Americans wanted to take the case further. This strange tale of Akew and her opium points to the probability of murky and usually hidden trading liaisons existing between some European merchants and the pirates who provided channels for the smuggling and distribution of goods, particularly opium, up the coasts of China in order to bypass the customs taxes that should have been paid.34
When Endicott moved to Macau and contemplated marrying a Western
woman, he secured Akew��s future by a deed of trust, which conferred on her two inland lots. The two men named as trustees both had protected women of their
own, William Scott, a merchant and Douglas Lapraik. Akew acquired additional
real estate in the tavern area of Queen��s Road. In 1868, she was the principal of ten single women who bought a section of Inland Lot 450 to build a house. It would be nice to think that they established a club house there for other women in
the same situation as themselves. In 1878, Akew was bankrupted. Her properties
were sold and her furniture auctioned off. She must have been living in some luxury judging by the description of her furniture which included custom-made blackwood chairs and stools, marble-topped tables, carpets, clocks, pictures, bookcases, crockery and glass. However, she still kept her residence, which had been put in trust and secured by Endicott, where she probably continued to live
until her death. The trust was only dissolved in 1914 and the property then vested
in Robert Endicott of New York.35
Mary Ayou Caldwell
Mary Ayou Caldwell [23/4/1], who died in 1895, was among the first Chinese
women to be buried in Happy Valley. Her early life is shrouded. In the Enquiry into Civil Service Abuses, Charles May, superintendent of the police, testified that
he knew her well from the time she was living in the police station in Central and that she had been bought from a brothel. A Chinese lady, brought as witness by
Daniel Caldwell, testified that she knew Ayou, when she was twelve or thirteen,
and, at that time, she was living at the house of a Chinese undertaker though in
what capacity was not made clear. Wherever the truth lies, there is no doubt that
in 1845, she married Daniel Caldwell in a Chinese wedding ceremony. In 1850 she converted to Christianity and in the next year the Caldwells married again in a Christian ceremony in St. John��s Cathedral.
Life cannot have been simple for Mary Ayou trying to manage her large household in an increasingly racially divided society while giving birth to ten children. The London Missionary Society registered some twenty-four members connected with the Caldwell household as part of its congregation.36 In 1851 Mary Ayou was looking for a wet nurse according to Chinese customs. This brought unwelcome publicity to the family. A pregnant Chinese female was sold by her husband to a brothel keeper who sold her on again ��or rather allowed a female wanting a wet nurse to redeem her from bondage for the price which had been paid��. 37 The mother of the wet nurse-to-be complained to the police magistrates about the girl��s husband, who had parted from his pregnant wife so that he might cohabit with another girl to whom he gave the proceeds of the sale. Mary Ayou was called to give testimony in the case, but pleaded sickness and produced a note
from Dr. William Harland saying that she was too unwell to appear.
Although speaking Chinese at home, her children grew up as part of the English community. One wonders how Mary Ayou felt when her sons were sent away to public school in England. The eldest son, Daniel, who became a lawyer, married the daughter of the postmaster general, Francis W. Mitchell. The missionary James Legge noted that Mitchell was not pleased and had planned a trip away to coincide with the wedding. Mary Ayou must have been a clever woman. It is said that she did much of the work of translating Chinese documents for her brother-in-law, Henry Caldwell, to help him in his law practice. She was a devout and committed Christian and employed a young man from Fatshan to act as private chaplain to the household. She also contributed generously to good causes. The To Tsai Church and the Alice Memorial Hospital Appeal both benefited from her generosity. The $250, which she gave towards the founding of the hospital, was matched only by one other donation and that was from the mother of Sir Kai Ho Kai [8/4/4].
Chapter 14 The Chinese and Their Position in Relation to the Europeans
When in 1840, Dr. William Jardine was leaving China, at his farewell dinner he
praised the Chinese and their country in the following words:
Here we find our persons more efficiently protected by laws than in many other parts of the East, or of the world; in China, a foreigner can go to sleep with his windows open without being in dread of either his life or property, which are well-guarded by a most watchful and excellent police; �K Business is conducted with unexampled facility and in general with singular good faith; �K. Neither would I omit the general courtesy of the Chinese in all their intercourse and transactions with foreigners: These and some other considerations are the reasons that so many of us so oft re-visit this country and stay in it so long.1
Yet, the effect of trying to govern the little island of Hong Kong since 1842 seems
to have severely shaken this way of thinking. A newer and more stereotypical view of the Chinese character was attacking the formation of bonds based on mutual trust. The waves of religious fervour that had swept Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries had led many
people from the West to associate ignorance of the Christian God with moral
degradation. Heathens were automatically considered ��wretched�� and ��benighted��. The Chinese, according to Rev. John Nevius:
are so generally spoken of as ��a nation of thieves and liars��, that a person who is not disposed to adopt or sanction these and similar stereotyped expressions, is in danger of being regarded as either ignorant or prejudiced.2
No longer were the Chinese seen as protective of the persons and goods of
the foreigners, honest in their commercial dealings and courteous. By the 1860s,
the commonly accepted view of the Chinese people was appalling. Nevius had
spent ten years in China as a missionary and in 1869 published a book, China and
the Chinese. He felt the need to begin his Chapter XIX, ��General Estimate of the Chinese Character and Civilization��, with these words:
��The Chinaman�� has almost become a synonym for stupidity, and his habits
and peculiarities afford abundant occasion for pleasantry and ridicule. This
impression has become so fixed and so general, that correspondents and editors of newspapers who wish to make their articles on China and the Chinese readable and interesting, gladly seize upon and exaggerate anything which can be made to appear grotesque and ridiculous. In speaking of this people, their pig-tails, shaven pates, thick-soled shoes, assumptions of dignity and superiority, and the great ignorance of many subjects with which we are familiar, make up the unfailing material upon which the newspapers generally draw.3
From the Chinese point of view, the Europeans had, in the last century,
inflicted two humiliating defeats on the Chinese Empire and forced the Chinese
to sign much disliked treaties. Stories of killing, plunder and looting had
circulated after the battles of the Opium Wars, which included the destruction of
the Summer Palace at Peking and the desecration of the sacred imperial sites in the capital city. The arrogant and overbearing character of some foreigners and their sometimes over-hasty resort to physical violence in their dealings with the Chinese did not endear them to the more disciplined Chinese. Nor did the well-known excesses of the lower levels of European society, particularly with regards to alcohol, enhance the standing of the foreigner in the eyes of the Chinese. It is therefore hardly surprising that Freeman Mitford, when describing Hong Kong as he passed through in April 1865 on his way to taking up his post at the British legation in Peking, could write: ��The Europeans hate the Chinese and the latter return the compliment with interest��.4
A number of further factors were at work including the prevailing ignorance of each other��s language and culture which made rapprochement almost impossible. The pidgin English, ��an uncouth and ridiculous jargon�� that had grown up as a means of communication between the merchants and their Chinese business partners in Canton, could only be used for practical purposes, being so
simplified in grammar and vocabulary that it was incapable of being a medium for
higher levels of communication. The use of this jargon led to a mutual disdain. The Chinese despised the Europeans for their woeful ignorance of Chinese language and manners and the Europeans in turn despised the Chinese for their simplified and puerile English. G.W. Cooke, the Times correspondent, gave an example of this ��grotesque caricature of the language of the nursery��. A friend asked his comprador to find Cooke two servants in the following manner: ��You see gentleman, �X you tawkee one piecey coolie one piecey boy �X larnt pigeon, you savey, no number one foolo �X you make see this gentleman �X you make him house pigeon��. 5 Translated, this means: ��You see this gentleman, �X you must engage for him a coolie and a boy �X people who understand their business not stupid fellows; you will bring them to him and then get him a lodging and furnish it��. To this the polite comprador replied, ��Hab got. I catchee one piecey coolie, catchee one piecey boy. House pigeon number one dearo, no hab got. Soger man hab catchee house pigeon��. Housing at the beginning of the Second Opium
War was extremely difficult to find because of the number of soldiers looking for
lodgings.
The second factor was the fear of the Chinese majority in Hong Kong. It is all too easy to forget the reality of and reasons for the fear that motivated Europeans to keep the ��dangerous classes�� which congregated in Victoria under strict control. The fear may have partly had its origins back in Europe fuelled by the distrust of the mobs which congregated in the slums of major European cities and at times came together with devastating effectiveness in the various revolutionary movements that shook Europe from the French Revolution onwards. Most Europeans in Hong Kong had met with or heard about mob violence back in Europe and were determined not to allow such ��dangerous�� behaviour by the ��overboiling cauldron��, as they collectively called the Chinese masses, to take a hold in Hong Kong.
H.T. Ellis, writing in 1856, spoke of ��the unscrupulous treachery and hostility of the Chinese�� and the fear of them that kept the greater part of the European population bottled up in Victoria only able to confidently proceed one mile or so to the east and the west. Beyond those bounds,
foreigners felt the necessity of going in groups: ��well armed against predatory bands and such excursions were seldom attempted��. 6 These fearsome Chinese were for the most part lower class Hakka or Cantonese and desperately poor.
The language and cultural barriers meant that the foreigners had very little idea of what was happening in the Chinese community and even less control. By
1845 Europeans were outnumbered by thirty to one and by 1855 by fifty-five to one
and the ratio was still rising.7 The beleaguered Europeans felt threatened by a number of habitual and long-term criminals, beggars and destitute Chinese who were attracted to Hong Kong from the surrounding countryside. Small groups of scoundrels would waylay them in outlying areas or at night. Retired assistant
general Alfred Weatherhead, in his London lecture, described such an encounter:
I was assaulted by a gang of six ill-looking natives�K. One of the rascals threw his arms round me. After a brief struggle I extricated myself and ran but slipped. In a moment the whole half dozen were upon me. They perched themselves on my legs. Two took charge of my arms, one examined my pockets and carefully stowed away my watch while the remaining one
amused himself by banging my unlucky head on the dirt and stuffing dirt and
sand into my nose mouth and ears. After clearing the pockets, they tried to
get my boots off but gave up.
They tried to carry him off but finally to his great relief dropped him.
Many of the coolies and boat people were known to be triad members. As
early as 1847, it was suspected that Hong Kong had become the headquarters of
the triad societies in Guangdong with perhaps as many as three-quarters of its workers having been enrolled as members:
Anyone wishing to join their body and become entitled to the benefits of a participation in the protection and assistance afforded by the ��Brotherhood��
can do so here with every facility. A candidate for membership is introduced by a ��brother�� of the Society to the ��Headman�� to whom he pays a dollar�K. The ��Headmen�� are understood to reside in the Tai-ping-shan, at Sei-ying-poon and at East Point.
These organizations made it difficult for the police to secure convictions.
With the police not only ignorant of the habits and haunts of the most active
and dangerous portion of its members, but also unable to converse with those who do know them, it is not at all wonderful that crime should be on the increase and that detection becomes every day more difficult. Any member aiding in the conviction of a member exposed himself to the vengeance of the whole body.8
The Chinese were afraid to identify the thieves or pirates who could intimidate them or even turn the tables on them by denouncing innocent men to the authorities, leaving the British to do their dirty work by convicting and jailing or transporting across the seas the enemies of triad organizations, ��a fact which has been repeatedly proved��.9
The pirates were also feared by the Europeans with good reason. They may well have been part of the same organizations as the triads, answering to the same heads. The Overland Mail put forward the interesting theory that Shap-ng-tsai, supposedly the name of the pirate chief, was actually the name of the
triad organization under which the pirate fleets worked. By combining the three companies or Saam Ho Wuy of pirates ��with the holy number of five of the Hung Tze or triad society they came up with the name of three times five which equals fifteen boys or in Cantonese Shap-ng-tsai��. 10 Each pirate chief had a well-appointed fleet of not less than fifty junks, each carrying eight to twelve canons, and they dominated the coastline from Hainan to the entrance of the Pearl River and up the coast. According to the Friend of China it was well known that a large portion of the boatmen living in Hong Kong harbour or the surrounding islands were more or less connected with the pirates, but it took time for the extent of the piratical organization to dawn on the European population in Hong Kong:
That a fleet had been organized carrying its distinctive flag, changing cruising grounds according to the instructions of a recognized chief, holding meetings at certain stations fixed upon, where the result of the past cruise was ascertained and property disposed of; that all this is taking place within a day��s sailing of Hong Kong nobody dreamt of.11
It is likely that the organizers of the pirate fleets used Hong Kong as their base
since it gave them a refuge safe from the long arm of the Chinese law and was an excellent source of intelligence as to which ships carried valuable cargo. It also gave the pirates a place where they could dispose of their plunder and restock their vessels:
Many of the shops and houses which to the passer-by appear empty are the receptacles of desperadoes, who keep close all day and issue forth at night. Even when any of them has been traced to his lair, he has in general contrived to baffle the police; for besides other precautions adopted, most of the houses are constructed with sliding panels, opening communication with the adjoining tenements, and in many cases those built on piles project into the harbour, and are provided with trap doors having sampans underneath so that should an alarm be given, escape is almost certain.12
Thus the Europeans felt assailed from two fronts. On land, nobody was safe from attack and robbery. At sea no-one could take ship without putting his life at risk. The third factor which fed into the stereotypical view of the Chinese was the
problems incurred by the British authorities in their efforts to administer justice
according to the Common Law.13 The accusations of untrustworthiness rested on an issue that had long taxed the legal establishment: how could they rely on evidence given by Chinese men, since they were not Christians and could not be made to swear on the Bible. The editor of the Friend of China described this dilemma in terms contemporary to the period:
Like other heathens they have very loose notions of the obligations of an oath
and in the everyday affairs of life they tell an untruth without hesitation nor
are they ashamed if detected�K. Their system of morality �X which in China is religion �X does not enforce upon them the importance of Truth; and an oath sits very lightly upon the conscience of those who have no conception of the Deity and care little for the future.14
Six months later, the paper reiterated its view:
The invariable mendacity of the witnesses, who say just what suits their views of the case �X and their atheism, and consequent indifference to swear to anything, renders the most scrutinizing examination absolutely necessary.15
This picture of Chinese mendacity was spread to London by, for example, lectures
such as the one given by Alfred Weatherhead on the subject of life in Hong Kong:
I may remark that great difficulty is experienced in applying the machinery
of our legal proceedings to a people so utterly destitute of all ideas of veracity as the Chinese. They have no conception of anything morally wrong in falsehood.16
The impossibility of guaranteeing that justice was dispensed in the Hong Kong courts was highlighted by the China Mail when it questioned the use of the unsupported testimony of one pirate-turned�Vpolice informer called Too-apo to sentence his alleged associates to death, in a case known as the Chimmo Bay Piracy. The newspapers acknowledged that innocent men may have been put to death or deported but said:
Such instruments (as informers) may be considered necessary where total ignorance of the language and very partial acquaintance with the habits of a lawless population, render it impossible for Europeans to detect criminals well known to their countrymen.17
There was much discussion about how to ensure that witnesses in court kept to the true facts of the case. Various attempts were made to administer oaths with relevance to those swearing. The killing of a cock, to symbolize the sanctity of the oath taken, was soon abandoned as a method since it was not taken seriously by
the Chinese and only benefited the court officials, who were able to make a good meal off the slaughtered fowl. Later attempts included the breaking of rice bowls
and the burning of inscribed papers, none of which were considered satisfactory answers to the problem. Thus the ever-present doubts of the courts as to whether they had arrived at the true facts of the cases they were trying fed into the myth that the Chinese had no respect for truth. Further problems arose concerning, for
example, cases of mistaken identity. As Weatherhead said:
The remarkable resemblance among the Chinese partly owing to their uniformity of costume, partly to the similarity of features continually gives rise to awkward mistakes of identity especially in our courts of Law where
the witnesses are perpetually mistaken for one another and the plaintiffs and
defendants blundered together in hopeless confusion.
In one case the judge drew the attention of the jury to the fact that Ningpo and Chapoo were not present among the prisoners. It was pointed out that they were place names, not people.18 These kinds of problem made a mockery of the intentions of the colonists to introduce to the Chinese the superior concepts of British justice and they led to talk of ��the inherent inapplicability to Asiatics of British laws��.19
Needless to say, cases where the law had been misapplied and where harsh treatment had been meted out by rough uneducated policemen led to deep discontent among the Chinese who heard stories of innocent men transported to far-off places or subjected to the miseries of the chain gangs working on the roads of Hong Kong. Things were not likely to have improved during the run up to and the course of the Second Opium War when strict measures and curfews were enforced to ring-fence and control the Chinese.
To the Europeans, the coolies and poorer Chinese posed a dilemma. They feared their massed strength on the one hand. Yet on the other hand, they needed the cheap labour they provided. The Chinese poor had the appearance of a mob to the ignorant foreigner looking on from outside but in fact they seem to have been tightly organized and regulated by their own leaders. Coolies were recruited from particular villages as members of work gangs and the recruiters stood surety for their good behaviour. In September 1850, a youth, Chang Ayee, was charged with doing nothing: ��The prisoner, a simple, honest-looking youth admitted the charge but pleaded that it was no fault of his��. He gave the telling explanation that he had no clansmen here and could get no surety, so no-one dared employ him. He was ordered to be sent back to the mainland. The trial of two brothers threw light on the question of surety and its link with particular villages. The brothers, from the village of Namping in the district of Heang Shan, were accused of conspiring with pirates. They had been some eighteen years working as ��first rate horse keepers�� for Robert Jardine:
From this village and others adjacent nearly all our most respectable compradors and house servants are, and for years past, have been obtained.
To be a Namping or a Choey-mee man has been in fact known as of an honourable lineage and a passport in itself to the most trustworthy situations obtainable.20
The craftsmen and artisans were, from very early on, organized into guilds. Even the lowly washermen were as highly organized as any trade union in Britain. Their guild called a strike in September 1854. One man was committed to gaol for
refusing to wash under $2.50 per hundred. (The nature of the articles for which $2.50 per hundred was charged is not specified.) Merman wrote to the paper:
The washer-men have struck and a clean shirt cannot be had for love or money. It is all very well for people to say that the increased cost of charcoal
is not sufficient warranty for a conspiracy not to work. There are strikes in
plenty in England but we do not hear of any such decisions as these from
the bench. And why are Chinese to be treated differently from other of Her
Majesty��s subjects?21
14.3. Street hawkers; note the lack of shoes. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.)
In August 1857, 245 tailors and shoemakers were apprehended by the police and fined $5 each for illegal assemblage. According to the editorial:
The police have had some trouble of late with Trades Unions �X secret associations that have long existed among the Chinese in the colony, and which are not confined to the artizans but extend to every species of employment. The books of more than one of these societies are now in the hands of the government and display a system of private intimidation by means of fines, of the existence of which those best acquainted with Chinese had no previous conception�K. In some instances the better classes are enrolled compulsorily among the members of these societies�K. Besides the affair of the washermen, forty-five of whom were apprehended at the
Joss-house by the police and fined $5 each by the Magistrate, two hundred
and forty-three Tailors and Shoemakers have since been taken in charge for illegal assemblage. They had applied to the Protector of Chinese for permission; but he being aware some time before, from papers in the hands of the Government, of the real object of the meeting, refused to sanction it. In
defiance however of his warning, they did assemble on Friday last, and were all taken into custody and have likewise had to pay a fine of $5 each.22
China Mail obtained a copy of the rules of the Tailor��s Trade Union set up in
1842 and revised in 1848. The tariffs for each item right down to making a seaman��s
mattress were set out and the rules of apprenticeship were also set out in detail. The leaders from among the Chinese organized the collection of fees from stall holders for religious festivals. Two men had been deputed by the Central Market stall holders to raise money to erect and decorate a mat-shed for the autumn
festival in November 1851. One Taiping Shan fish seller who refused to contribute
was dragged out of bed and kicked, rupturing his spleen and causing his death.23 An alternate government was taking shape in which the Chinese elite ruled over those under them, organizing them into groups under the management of kai-fongs based on districts, guilds based on skills or work groups based mainly on where in China the workers had come from. During the administration of Sir George Bonham, 1848�V54, E.J Eitel recorded that:
Public spirit among the Chinese vented itself in guild meetings, processions and temple-committees. Among the latter, the committee of the Man-moo
temple �K now rose into eminence as a sort of unrecognized and unofficial
local-government board (principally made up of Nam-pak-hong or export merchants). This Committee secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbitrators, arranged for the reception of mandarins passing through the Colony, negotiated the sale of official titles and formed an unofficial link between the Chinese residents of Hong Kong and the Canton authorities.24
This largely unrecognized parallel government was growing up alongside the colonial administration. Hong Kong in this period did not lag behind where racial prejudice was
concerned. When Yung Wing, a scholar from the Morrison Educational Society School, a Christian and the first Chinese to graduate from Yale College, U.S.A.,
returned to work in Hong Kong, he became an interpreter at the Supreme Court and embarked on a study of British law. However in a remarkably short time, he was hounded out of the colony. His articles of apprenticeship were cancelled and when he applied to become a Freemason, he was blackballed.25 Apart from the deepening prejudice against a Chinese practising law on an equal footing alongside his European colleagues, the other lawyers feared the competition from
a Westernized and well-educated Chinese whom they considered an interloper.
To sum up, between the two communities in this period there were little communication and less trust. Both sides were developing their own sets of guidelines and rules for administering to the needs of those they considered their people. The only person who seems to have been capable of acting as go-between was Daniel Caldwell and his position was seriously damaged by the two government enquiries into his conduct. Other colonies found means of bridging the gap by, for instance in Malaya, the use of the kings of local native states to act as intermediaries. In Hong Kong, such bridges still had to be built and a working
relationship found between the wealthy and influential of the two communities on
which the later prosperity of the colony could be built.
Section III
YEARS OF CONSOLIDATION, 1861�V1875
Chapter 15
Victoria City and Its European Inhabitants
In the previous section, only those who died within the specified dates have been
included. In this section, those who lived and made their mark in Hong Kong
between the years 1861 to 1875 have been included, even if they died outside the
period. Too many headstones exist in the Cemetery from these years for as many
of the denizens to be introduced to the reader as was attempted in the first period.
Only those names that are well known or useful as evidence in particular cases will
be included. The figures for this period of people buried in the Cemetery are set
out in the tables below:
Table of Civilians Who Died 1861�V75 and Are Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Men Women Children Total Merchants 17 7 6 30
Professionals, clerks 15 4 2 21 Missionaries 0 1 2 3
Technicians, managers 16 6 5 27 Merchant Seamen 84 10 3 97 Tradesmen 8 7 3 18
Hotel and tavern keepers 11 1 0 12
Passers through the port 9 0 0 9
Totals 160 36 21 217
Table of Military Personnel of the Same Period Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Army 55 10 13 78
Navy 23 0 0 23
Support staff 8 7 0 15
American Navy 11 0 0 11
Totals 97 17 13 127
The huge importance of the port in its contributions to the economy of the
island can be seen from the number of officers of the merchant navy who died while
passing through Hong Kong. During these years much was achieved that allowed a later leap into the prosperity and growth which brought Hong Kong into prominence as a major port and city. Among the achievements that are discussed in more detail later are the founding of the Central School in 1861; the introduction of gas lighting in 1865; the establishment of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank; the
founding of the first City Hall, public gardens and large modern hotel in the city;
the new measures taken by the government to improve the civil service, such as the introduction of the cadets who were given the opportunity to make themselves
fluent in Chinese; and the reform of the police force.
Hong Kong and Its Reputation
However, the decade began on a low note. After the Second Opium War and
through the 1860s, Hong Kong was saddled with a dubious reputation back in Britain:
The praise of old, bestowed on it for its hospitality, is now changed to blame on its extravagance; its ��celebrated�� races are spoken of as mere betting and gambling; its enterprise as only reckless speculation�K. In truth our reputation at home is not enviable at the present time and a man who has returned from China scarcely dares to open his mouth concerning the place where it is popularly believed life consists of ��cocktails�� tempered by business.1
Hong Kong had been designed to become a model colony, ��to exhibit before the view of the benighted, so-called semi-civilized pagans of China, the bright example of a Christian Government and a civilized community��.2 This dream, as expressed by the ex-Basel missionary, E.J Eitel, had not yet materialized. In 1864, the China Mail found that Hong Kong��s institutions compared badly with those in China:
It is not that green oasis which some people had hoped it might become and which was to bring to the very doors of a vast Empire, the model of English manners, institutions, and laws. For social order it cannot compare with Canton city. For administration of business it cannot be set up as a model to any Chinese town of equal size; in the detection of crime every China city is superior; while no Celestial port contains, we should say, so many pirates and piratical agents, whom few or no attempts are made to look for. If Hong Kong can in any way be upheld as a model, it is the style of her dwelling houses and in her sanitary aspirations, partly realized in the waterworks and partly unrealized in the drains.3
European architecture and a reservoir at Pokfulam, which piped water into the town, were a far cry from what had been lauded as British intentions for their new city fifteen years earlier. Neither had British justice turned out to be the model it was supposed to be:
In Hong Kong the Chinese man in theory would, ��taste the sweet delights of trial by jury; that palladium of English freedom��. He would learn what it is to
be an English subject, and know for the first time in his life, the dignity which belongs to the man who can proudly utter, ��Ego sum civis Romanus�� [I am a citizen of Rome].4
Yet, in practice, as the article had already said:
The failures of Justice in this colony, through bad detective machinery, doubtful interpretation and difficulty in obtaining corroborative circumstantial evidence in the case of Chinese witnesses, has been a disgrace.5
Lawyers�� fees were high, extortion common and the police force deemed ��useless except for the sake of appearance on the streets��. 6 Yet, during the years leading up to this decade, justice as dispensed in court had won for itself some degree of acceptance among all races. The acquittal of Ah-lum in the case of the arsenic in the bread in spite of strong pressure for a conviction and the conviction of the American pirate, Eli Bloggs, in 1858 had made both an impression of greater even-handedness. In 1862 the Chinese merchants sent Chief Justice Adams a congratulatory address on his retirement.
A new desire to educate the British in Hong Kong about the Chinese way of life began to manifest itself, for example, in Jottings about the Chinese, a series of ninety-five letters detailing the social customs of the Chinese on a wide range of subjects including birth, death, marriage and religion. The letters often filled three columns of the China Mail and continued over a period of three years. The China Mail even confessed to its pro-Chinese stance: ��We have never shared the feeling that England must be right and have certainly felt that China had much to complain of in our conduct; uttering these sentiments at a time when they were very unfashionable��. 7 The paper also hailed the appearance of the first volume of Chinese classics, translated by Rev. James Legge and published by the London Mission Printing House in April 1861, at the expense of Robert Jardine: ��Nothing could exceed the noble nature of this proffer��. 8 And some days later the editor wrote at more length:
The days are gone by when it was fashionable to say that it was immaterial to
us what the Chinese thought on ethical subjects. We can no longer afford to be indifferent to the opinions of one-third of the human race on such topics
�X opinions held, let us add, that have been held in reverence by them for
thousands of years. We venture to think therefore that to consuls, interpreters
and government servants in this country, whether residing in Hong Kong or the different ports of China, the work under notice is an indispensable adjunct to their library.9
It was considered that perhaps the government of Hong Kong had lessons to learn from the Chinese as well as lessons to teach them. But it is questionable how much this appearance of interest in ��Things Chinese�� was a general trend and how far it was part of a crusade orchestrated by one man, James Kemp [10/2/4], proprietor and editor of the China Mail. This strapping, parochial schoolmaster from Edinburgh, who ��astonished the Chinese by diving into deep mountain pools and threatening never to come up again��, had been brought to Hong Kong in 1860 to teach at St. Andrew��s School. When the school folded as a result of competition from the Central School, he switched his energies to the newspaper where according to his obituary he ��discharged himself with singular ability��. 10 Sadly this rapprochement with things Chinese did not last. The death of Kemp in
November 1866 aged only thirty-four years, together with the downturn of the economy
from 1866 to 1869, seemed to have swung
the public mood away from rapprochement and once again towards the separation of the races.
It is difficult now to conceive how distant and unimportant Hong Kong then seemed in the general scheme of things to people in Britain. The feeling persisted in Hong Kong that colonies were considered by the home authorities to be more trouble than they were worth. In July 1868, the editor of the Daily Press wrote:
The feeling has been very strong in England since 1832 that colonies are of little use to a country, and that the colonies possessed by Great Britain are far more expense to her than they are worth. The exponents of this feeling are almost entirely the leaders and chief men of the present democratic movement, and if the leaders entertain such opinions and adopt such theories,
and have had such influence even under the existing regime, as to force these
theories on the country to some extent and give them practical application, what may we not fear from a Parliament elected by the ignorant followers of such leaders.11
This statement was provoked by the unhappiness caused by the military levy raised to pay in part for the garrison stationed in Hong Kong and the lack of response to the petition to Parliament to have the levy rescinded. Feelings of anger had been sparked because little notice had been taken of the depressed state in which the
colony found itself during the years 1866 to 1872. Hong Kong was struggling for
recognition that it was an asset rather than a liability to the Crown.
Victoria City
The infrastructure of the town, particularly its drainage system, was still rudimentary. In the chapter on Hong Kong in The Treaty Ports of China and Japan published in 1867 by Mayer and Dennys, the authors talk of the necessity
15.3. Hong Kong from the Northwest, c. 1875, Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 77, p. 77.)
of employing an outside coolie ��to carry away the slops etc. there being no arrangement for underground sewage in connexion with the houses��. 12 Hong Kong was both unsanitary and dirty. In 1866, it was reported that:
A lady cannot walk out during any time of the day without fear of soiling her dress by contact with the abominations which render the upper roads of Hong Kong a disgrace to those whose duty it is to supervise them.13
The article continued by asking why stable manure was allowed to be cast into the public roads of Hong Kong. Another report in China Mail of November 1870 showed that Hong Kong was still in some respects a rural town. The crowing of cocks still disturbed early morning slumbers. Pak Kee was brought before the magistrates as being:
one of those rascally milk-men who persist in driving their cows along
the West Road just at
the time of exercise, to the great terror of ladies and children. He was charged with allowing one of his cows, well known to be vicious, to
15.4. Hong Kong and its harbour, c. 1875, Chinese artist. be so driven whereby a (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory.)
constable was attacked and gored. The driver of the cow admitted she was dangerous and had attacked several people before.14
The man was fined 50 cents with the alternative of one day��s imprisonment. The Chinese quarters suffered much more as far as sanitation was concerned,
as they were more crowded and no adequate attempt had been made to provide
the necessary water supplies or drainage. When traversing Wan Chai, according
to the China Mail,
The stench is so intolerable that early risers who desire to ��eat�� a few mouthfuls of fresh air on the Race Course �K are obliged to canter or drive past at top speed holding their noses for fear of being sickened.15
The papers railed again and again against the inadequacy of the drainage system which,
should it continue in their present state is disgustingly offensive to the olfactory organs and will probably go far to encourage cholera, fever and other diseases to take residence during the summer.16
In one respect, Hong Kong changed for the better during this period. In December 1865, for the first time the streets were lit by gas lighting and those
businesses and houses willing to pay to be connected up, benefited from a bright
and constant source of light. Now there was no reason to insist that the Chinese carry lanterns. The fact that they were still required by law to do so was seen by both races as controlling and suppressive. The pass laws seem to have been put
into effect in a way that caused the maximum inconvenience to those applying for
evening passes that allowed them to be out after dark. A letter from A Passholder to the Daily Press in August 1870, for example, showed that he had good reason for his annoyance:
For the last several days, a great crowd of Chinese was seen assembled within
the precincts of the police compound from 7 am to 4 pm. Many Chinese
complain that they have been waiting successively for two days�K. and yet could not obtain a chance to renew their passes. I know this for a fact and am prepared to prove it.17
Noise from building sites was also a continual source of complaint. Stone masons squatting in the street cut and dressed the granite building blocks on site. The editor of the China Mail complained: ��The din is ceaseless and overpowering rendering anything like steady thinking entirely out of the question��. 18 Others complained bitterly to the press that their sleep was being curtailed. Noise from building sites was not the only kind. A writer to the Daily Press in a letter entitled Hong Kong Noises in April 1870 complained that:
Night after night our streets are invaded by bands of sailors who make the night hideous and regale the ears of respectable citizens with sound which could not
with reason be effected this side of Pandemonium�K. Long before he appears,
his singing or swearing has indicated his species and the agile policeman seeks shelter behind some friendly lamp-post until the danger has passed.19
And then before daybreak, noisy young men woke the babies and disturbed the poor invalids with their ��witching melodies�� played on trumpets as they rode, probably too fast, out to the racecourse.20
Illness
The city was not a healthy place to live. Disease and death could descend on a household very suddenly and many diseases were as yet incurable. Men still died of cholera, dysentery, smallpox and malaria among other diseases. The suddenness with which death could strike is illustrated by the demise of the architect, Frank Darvall Wakeford [16Ci/4/12]. Matilda Sharp [11B/4/10] wrote to her mother-in-law about their friend in July 1865:
You will be shocked to hear of the death of poor Mr. Wakeford. He had
been poorly for some days �K on Monday I sent him soup and jelly. At 2 am his landlord heard a strange noise above and went upstairs and found poor
Wakeford on the floor groping for his bed. He saw he was unconscious and
at once sent off for two doctors. At five Edmund was summoned and he arrived just ten minutes before he died. Poor fellow, he came to see us on Sunday week and was in such good health.
Law and Order in the Colony
In the 1860, the European settlers in Hong Kong still feared for the safety of their lives and property. Just one year previously, the editor of the China Mail suggested
the formation of a Rifle Club, giving the following as his reason:
The riots at Singapore in 1854, the rising of the Chinese against Sir James Brooke, the horrors of the Indian Massacre at Jiddah have abundantly shown that no European Community in the East can ever consider itself entirely free from danger and that apparent security may prove the very source of riot and bloodshed.21
Rumours proliferated of Chinese plots to take revenge for their defeat in the
Second Opium War: ��A real or supposed plot to massacre the Europeans and loot
the foreign houses on the island�� was unearthed in November 1866.22 It involved a force of thirty thousand men that was said to be about to descend upon the island. One rumour involved re-enacting the gunpowder plot by means of a tunnel under the cathedral by which the governor, the bishop and the congregation could all be blown up. 23 The massacres in Tientsin in July 1870 further alarmed the small European minority, making it increasingly fearful for its own safety.
The police in Hong Kong took no responsibility for what happened outside
the narrow confines of Central Victoria and Queen��s Road and, when venturing further than Wan Chai, men went in fear of robbers. The two highest roads, Caine
Road and Robinson Road, were still considered unsafe and a European could not walk easily alone in the Chinese parts of Victoria: ��The coolies in the street are the most ruffianly looking lot not pleasant to meet in a by-road, alone and unarmed�K. It is still downright dangerous to venture on the hills alone without the moral influence of a revolver��. 24 Expatriates carried loaded pistols by day and slept with them under their pillows by night. Lucilla Sharp described in a letter home how she had learned to load the pistol belonging to her sister, Matilda Sharp:
I see that she carries her pistol with her whenever we go out for a walk or ride, quite as a matter of course. The other Sunday
15.5. Headstone in memory of Matilda and evening, as we were starting for Granville Sharp, d. 1893 and 1899.
Chapel, I was amused to find myself asking her ��Have you got the pistol?�� as
cheerfully as if I had said, ��Have you got the hymn book��.25
Neither were the expatriates nor the police at all reticent about using these
weapons. In May 1869 a poor coolie was caught by a police constable in a state of
undress bathing in a stream on Robinson Road. The man caught up his clothes
and made a bolt for it, throwing a stone at the police constable as he ran off. The
defendant made straight for the Peak, passing Granville Sharp��s bungalow. ��The excitement must have been considerably heightened inasmuch as the runner
for ��bare�� life was more than once fired at by the Surveyor General [Wilberforce Wilson] and by Mr E. Sharp [11B/4/11] as he scampered up the hill��. 26 Ernest Sharp was a solicitor and a nephew of Granville Sharp [11B/4/10], the well-known businessman and husband of Matilda quoted earlier. This incident happened on Sunday afternoon at about three o��clock. The pursued man was finally caught near the Flagstaff, having by then ��put on his inexpressibles��. He
was taken to court and fined $2 or seven days�� hard labour. To us, it would be
unthinkable for two senior Englishmen to take pot shots at some poor fleeing Chinese miscreant. The light-hearted approach to the topic in the China Mail also
intimates that shooting at a Chinese was considered an affair of minor importance.
But then, shooting guns seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. The Portuguese living in Mosque Gardens were said to have been in the habit of ��amusing themselves at the unseasonable hour of 11 p.m. by discharging their revolvers out of their windows��.27
Even a trip to Pokfulam was considered an unsafe undertaking, ��unless a tolerably strong party of foreigners are together, while those who spend the night in Kowloon are looked upon as more venturesome than wise��. 28 In January 1866, the China Mail railed against ��the disgraceful state of public insecurity to which the lives and property of the inhabitants of Hong Kong are now reduced. Within the last three few weeks, personal assaults sufficient in number to cause a panic in most other colonies have occurred��. 29 Two of the victims of these attacks lie in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Wilmot Wadesdon Holworthy [13/1/7], deputy assistant superintendent of the military stores, was brutally murdered and robbed of his watch on the Peak near the Gap on 24 January 1869. A second victim,
G.W. Yanceystone [37/7/30], confronted a party of burglars numbering twelve to twenty men armed with spears and swords, and furnished with torches at his bungalow in Kowloon. Yancey, as he was called, was an American from Danville,
308 Forgotten Souls
Tennessee employed by the Union Dock Company. According to the account in the China Mail of the inquest, ��He was a great fool to have stayed and fought as he did and had it not been that he was afraid they would
run off with his girl, he could have made his escape��.30 His Hakka girl successfully fled via a back window. A third victim was a brave policeman, James Mahoney, whose resting place in the Cemetery has disappeared. He lost his life when a small army of fifty to sixty armed Chinese desperadoes bent on robbery descended on the house of a rich
Chinese in Shau Kei Wan close to the police
station. Mahoney, who went to investigate,
was speared through heart and the two Sikh policemen who went with him were badly wounded. The robber band escaped undetected.
These kinds of incidents did nothing to allay the fears of the ��dangerous classes��, and helped to provide justification for the fact that the concepts of individual rights enshrined in the English Common Law were being given less consideration in Hong Kong than back in Britain. For example, six coolies brought before the magistrate, Charles May, were charged with being suspicious persons, one having been previously branded and deported.31 May, finding no ordinance which provided for the punishment of those harbouring branded men, discharged the coolies. His action was very unfavourably compared to Mr. Goodlake��s conduct of a similar case. The four men brought before him ��were all properly punished without any preliminary dissertation upon the rights of the subject. And which
course, we would ask, is likely to have the most effect with the dangerous classes?��32
Further, it was clear to all that court proceedings did not present a level playing field. As the China Mail pointed out, the arrangements concerning where the accused should stand highlighted the fact that the Europeans were of higher status. European defendants did not appear in the dock, described as a ��wooden trough��, but remained seated beside the magistrate on the bench. The editor of the China Mail drew the line at Europeans being asked to stand in the trough, but asked why they should not at least be required to stand in the body of the court.33
Victoria City and Its European Inhabitants 309
Safety at Sea
The sea was no safer than the land. During these years, a number of ships fell prey to pirates. On 23 April 1862, Captain Thomas Browne [11B/4/2] died defending his schooner, Eagle, from a piratical attack near Green Island in the harbour. He is described in his epitaph as: ��Brave in spirit, gentle in manners, amiable and benevolent in disposition, and upright and manly in character��. The unlucky captain, from Plymouth, Devonshire, had only assumed command of the Eagle the day before. The man at the wheel was shot dead by the boarding pirates and
Captain Browne mortally wounded. The first mate escaped by jumping overboard
and concealing himself under water near the chains until the pirates had departed, taking with them everything of value they could lay their hands on. The brave mate then brought the schooner back to Hong Kong. Among the pirates was a British man dressed as a Chinese who was recognized as Fokey Bill, well known in the low grog-houses of Tai Ping Shan.34 He was not the only sailor who ��helped out�� on pirate ships. According to the Illustrated London News of January 1867, many of the river pirates were said to be Europeans in disguise.35 In 1863, the
government offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the capture of
English and American sailors on board piratical vessels but there were no takers.
Another tragedy occurred when an American ship, one day out from Hong Kong on the way to Japan, was boarded by pirates in light winds. Captain Benjamin P. Howes [37/2/14] of the schooner Lubra was shot dead in his cabin, where he was seated with his arms round his wife and two children, one only two months old. The children��s amah was also badly wounded and she died in hospital soon after. A barrel of gunpowder was opened by the pirates and a fuse leading into the barrel set alight. It was hoped that the ensuing explosion would leave no trace of the ship or its crew. Luckily the fuse burnt out before making contact with the gunpowder and the vessel was brought back to Hong Kong. In the subsequent trial, poor Mrs. Howes, whose baby, Genevieve, had by then also died, gave evidence ��notwithstanding her evident weakness��.36
To a Chinese spectator from the mainland, Hong Kong had never appeared in any other light than as ��a refuge for bad characters by land and sea, �K where they can divide the spoils of many a piracy and repair their vessels for fresh exploits��. 37 Many precautions had to be taken against vessels being seized by gangs of pirates posing as passengers. When Isabella Bird embarked on the SS Kin Kiang for Canton in 1878 she described how the noisy mass of Chinese humanity was:
practically imprisoned below, for there is a heavy iron grating securely padlocked over each exit, and a European, ��armed to the teeth��, stands by each
ready to shoot the first man who attempts to force it. In this saloon there is a stand of six rifles, and, as we started, a man carefully took the sheaths off the bayonets and loaded the firearms with ball cartridges.38
Piracy in South China was a family affair. The whole family, probably of Tanka or Hoklo origins, lived on board like ordinary fishermen but, when the occasion presented itself, would combine together under a chief to loot some ship reported to be carrying rich pickings. All members of the family would be involved and the grandmother, if necessary, would lend a hand with throwing stinkpots. In
fact pirates were undistinguishable from the ordinary fishermen who could pass
with ease from one occupation to the other. This made their capture much more difficult. According to a story in an article in the China Mail, some British sailors were in pursuit of pirates who had taken to the hills. Mistakenly, they picked up the first person they met, an honest farmer. The sailors took him back to the ship, cut off the poor man��s queue, rope-ended him, and then pitched him into the sea. After this treatment he felt he had nothing to lose and took to piracy.39 In China, only criminals who had been found guilty of a crime were deprived of their queue, so its lack would mark him out among his peers as a criminal. The same article described how
Chui Apak may come into the harbour of Victoria red-handed with his decks
cumbered with heavy guns and his hold filled with spoil that he had pirated
not twenty miles off; he may go ashore, dispose of his goods, purchase ammunition, lay in provisions and make sail on a new piratical cruise.
In July 1866, for example, Lane Crawford was advertising for sale in its weekly auction among other things salad oil, two hundred boxes of Windsor soap, twelve Enfield rifles, one hundred other rifles, two hundred muskets and twenty-seven long swords for sale. There was nothing to stop the agents of the pirates from buying lots of guns like this one and handing them over. The fear of piracy led in this period to the increased regulation of visiting native shipping.
But the pirates were not the only danger to be feared at sea. Poor navigation, lack of reliable charts and ferocious typhoons made the outcome of any journey undertaken to or from Hong Kong uncertain. Matilda Sharp and her amah accompanied her husband, Granville, to Tourane, now known as Da Nang in Vietnam. He had been sent there on business by his bank. The Thebes, which was carrying them, struck an uncharted reef and was shipwrecked off the coast of Hainan Island. Matilda and her husband took to the lifeboats. Matilda had to abandon her trunk, with the blue flounced silk dress and seven other muslin dresses, to the waiting crowds of locals, not to mention gloves, mantles and collars she had brought to impress the French admiral at their destination. However she was determined to be properly dressed even when shipwrecked:
I hesitated about putting on my hoop skirt [crinoline] �X it seemed absurd
to think of such a thing in a shipwreck, but I had been looking like a closed umbrella all day, so with amah��s help, I popped it on and felt myself once more a presentable object.40
They were lucky to be within one long night��s row of a port, where they took a passage in a very uncomfortable local junk back to Hong Kong. All the survivors of the shipwreck slept together in one knot, with Matilda in the middle, on the
deck floor with their swords drawn and laid beside each man, for they had no trust
in the character of their new Chinese captain. It took them eight days to reach Hong Kong.
Poor Elizabeth Abbe [20/3/1] was the wife of a doctor from Boston, Massachusetts. She undertook a sea voyage for health reasons after a long illness, but died from exposure on the 4 April 1863. She had been saved from the wreck of the Hotspur on 19 February, but had endured twenty-seven days in an open boat.41 Again, a typhoon in June 1869 engulfed two steamers on their way to Hong Kong from Swatow, the P. & O. steamer, Corea, and one of Douglas Lapraik��s fleet of vessels, Chanticleer. They both disappeared leaving no trace behind. Lapraik had an imposing monument built of Peterhead marble to the memory of the commander, George Lungley Sargant, and another of his captains, Hugh Cowan, who happened to be on board, as well as to the officers and crew of the ship [37/2/5]. Matilda Sharp wrote about the disaster:
Last Thursday week, Mr. Noble went on board the ��Corea�� for a three-day trip to Foochow. That night there was a typhoon, trees uprooted, verandahs blown in, gardens decimated and since that night the ��Corea�� and the ��Chanticleer��, both steamers bound for Foochow have not been heard of. I know intimately the Captain of the ��Corea�� and his wife. She was a newly
married young creature and was taking her first China trip.42
It seemed that there was still no safe escape route for the thousand odd expatriates who made up Hong Kong��s society.
Some things seem not to have changed. The furious driving and riding continued to arouse the ire of letter writers: ��I have noticed with regret the impropriety, not to say utter recklessness of certain fast young men in driving furiously through the crowded and narrow streets without the slightest regard for the lives of the citizens��. The writer deplores the fact that ��persons forget themselves so far as not only endanger the lives of their fellow creatures but also while doing so make fun of using their whips rather freely on the backs of the inoffensive and helpless natives��. He continued: ��Even worse he had seen a decently dressed young man who, without any cause or reason, inflict with his whip a severe cut on a Chinese female with a very decent appearance��. 43 Furious driving was the cause of at least one death. George Mather Neill [20/17/6] from
Edinburgh was a clerk aged twenty-five working for the German firm of Pustau & Co. In November 1867, he was killed in a nasty carriage accident when his untried
horse refused to obey instructions and, losing his temper, Neill began whipping it, causing it to bolt. The carriage came to rest against the trunk of a tree and he
was thrown out and died soon after from his injuries. It was puzzling to find the
inscription on his headstone in German until it was discovered that Pustau & Co. had taken care of the funeral arrangements and the headstone.
The abuse of alcohol still plagued society at most levels of society. The
China Mail, in January 1871, described the kind of drunken behaviour that so
embarrassed the expatriates:
We observed a little knot of interested Celestials gathered round a sedan
chair this morning, not many yards from the Central Police Station, and were
astonished to find the object of their amusement to be an intoxicated bobby [policeman]. He was of course European, and was cutting a variety of capers
which would have done credit to a circus troupe �X getting into the chair nose foremost, landing in a straddling position on the chair poles, �K raising a row generally and elevating the respect for foreign rule in the minds of the Chinese onlookers.44
Indulgence in alcohol was not confined to the lower levels. A poem published in the Hong Kong Punch in 1872 made fun of an encounter between a member of the new Scottish contingent of policemen and a party of young revellers coming out of the new Hong Kong Club late at night.
The Constable upon his beat His round was going thro��. He gains the Club and crosses o��er
Unflinchingly and slow.
The tipsy song comes nearer now One moment more and there before The Scot��s expectant sight, A noisy crew came full in view Of youngsters clad in white.
Which spectacle so grieved our friend
That thus he spake outright.
��Whaur gang ye at sic times o�� nicht,
Awakin a�� the toon. Dinna ye ken it��s Sabbath morn; Folk��ll be risin soon. Gae hame an if ye wull hae songs, Pick oot a Sunday tune.
A Temperance Society was begun in October 1867 and met at the rear of the
yard of the government plumber, Andrew Millar. Although attendance was rather meagre, the meetings were reported on at length in a way to cause maximum amusement to the newspaper��s audience and the efforts of Rev. Pearson, the Scottish minister who presided, were not taken seriously.45
The Relationships between the Expatriates and the Chinese in Hong Kong
An extraordinary degree of prejudice and lack of consideration towards the needs of the Chinese majority continued to exist and even deepen in Hong Kong during these years and this was met by deep dislike on the Chinese side. Bishop Raimondi, the founder of St. Joseph��s College who is buried in the Catholic Cemetery, was reported by the Daily Press as saying in 1870 that it was his belief that the Chinese hated, perhaps even more than ever, whatever was European. The editor continued by saying that this assertion was backed by others whose opinions were equally worthy of respect.46 When A.B. Freeman-Mitford was passing through Hong Kong in April 1865 on his way to become an attache in Peking, he described the racial mix in Victoria as he saw it:
Hong Kong presents perhaps one of the oddest jumbles in the whole world. It is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. The Government and principal people are English �X the population are Chinese �X the police are Indians �X the language is bastard English mixed with Cantonese �X the currency is the Mexican dollar, and the elements no more amalgamate than the oil and vinegar in a salad. The Europeans hate the Chinese and the latter return the compliment with interest. In the streets, Chinamen, Indian policemen, Malays, Parsees and half-castes jostle up against
Europeans, naval and military officers, Jack-tars, soldiers, and loafers of all
denominations. Constantinople, Smyrna and Cairo show more picturesque and varied crowds, but nothing can be more grotesque than the street life of Hong Kong.47
��Grotesque�� seems a strange choice of word to use when describing street life. It is
defined in the dictionary as ��shockingly incongruous or inappropriate��. But perhaps
it describes the feelings of the Europeans towards the bustling crowded streets of Victoria where there was a strong likelihood of being jostled by locals going about their business. Rev. James Legge, in his lecture on the colony of Hong
Kong given in the City Hall in November 1872, also talked of the Chinese hatred
of foreigners. He contrasted the feelings of the Japanese and the Chinese towards
the Europeans: ��We have given the Japanese little reason to do anything but love
us, while we have given China much reason to fear us and hate us��. Legge put the
difference down to opium: ��The one thing which has embittered and fettered our
intercourse with China and will continue to do so, so long as it exists, has no place in our intercourse with Japan��.48
An article in the China Mail in May 1866 shows something of the more extreme of the prevailing attitudes ��on the question of the ��rights�� as possessed by Asiatics��. This was a question, according to the editor, ��on which most men have practically made up their minds but which they dislike to discuss��. The article began with the assertion that ��One human being is as good as another before the
law. We make it our boast that we do not have one law for the rich and another for
the poor��. But it goes on to say:
Assuming that the Chinaman was socially and intellectually the equal of the European, there are still many reasons for refusing him that legal equality which his admirers would claim for him. Brought up in a school which ignores truth as a virtue; belonging to a race which has ever shown itself nationally untrustworthy in its intercourse with Europeans; possessing ideas
respecting human life which remove one of the most efficient checks on crime
which our code of belief imposes, cruel in disposition to a scarcely credible extent, and moreover in the case of Hong Kong natives, sprung from a class
so low, that the very Chinese themselves regard them as the offscourings of
the country, we cannot see why the word of one of these (for oaths are not even binding on his conscience) should be accepted as of equal value with the
assertions of an educated and respectable European�K. We do not advocate
inhumanity or injustice but we do say ��rule an Asiatic race on principles which it understands��, �K we do not hesitate to ascribe the past lawlessness of Hong Kong to the principle ��equality��.49
This sounds like a classic statement of the ��us�� and ��them�� mentality discussed by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism. Nevertheless, some articles found in the local papers, bewailing the current prejudices, do show the beginnings of a change in attitude.
The period from 1861 to 1875 saw a further drawing apart of the Europeans
and the Chinese. This division was happening literally in the separating of European and Chinese living space. For example, in March 1866 a petition was
sent to William Mercer, the acting governor, asking that the Chinese village of
Shek Tong Tsui (formerly spelled Shek Dong Dsui) situated immediately above Mosque Terrace be ��destroyed or removed to some more suitable portion of the island��. The petition gave as a reason that ��numerous attacks made on adjacent houses occupied by foreigners were known to have been perpetrated by villagers��. 50 Further reasons were that the neighbourhood was disturbed by the noise of quarrelling, and of their pigs and barking dogs, and that the village was entirely
without drainage or toilets and filthy beyond description causing a stench of the
foulest kind to pervade the air. The environment was not improved by the only ostensible occupation of the people of the village, which was the raising of pigs and the collection and preparation of manure, both of the human and pig variety to be sent to the mainland as fertilizer. The manure was spread in the open air near the houses to dry. Finally, the petition pointed out the fact that the village would form a strategically dangerous vantage ground for the Chinese, if they should one day rise up against the foreigners. This point illustrates once again the fear of the Chinese masses, or ��the dangerous class�� as they were termed, which stood in the way of trust developing between the races. The petition, published in the China Mail with the strong approval of the editor, was signed by 140 foreigners from all walks of life. Most of the minority groups had added signatures. There were twenty Portuguese signatories, nine Parsees including Dorabjee Nowrojeee and D. Ruttonjee, four Jews including the Cohens, Belilios and Arthur Sassoon.
Eleven Germans also signed including Maximilian Fischer, Woldemar Nissen,
G. Overbeck, the Austrian consul who worked for Dent & Co. Six Americans
signed including W.C. Hunt and James Bridges Endicott. Besides these, William
Soames, head of the P. & O., and C. Bertrand, the head of the French shipping line Messageries Maritimes, whose daughter, Alice Bertrand [40/4/4] is buried in the Cemetery, were also signatories, as were Francis Lane and D.R. Crawford of Lane Crawford. The signatories ranged in occupation from the top-flight
merchants through bank managers to army officers, doctors and lawyers, and on
down to shopkeepers and auctioneers. The list included many well-known names and gave the feeling that the expatriate opinion was, on this occasion, unanimous. The editor urged action in the strongest terms. The village disappeared soon after and was presumably moved to where the modern Shek Tong Tsui is to be found, far to the west of the area above the mosque. During these same years,
some well-off businessmen like Granville Sharp and Emmanuel Raphael Belilios
were beginning to put even more distance between themselves and the masses by building bungalows in the cooler Peak District.
The Chinese seem to have had to bear a good deal of petty annoyance. In a letter to the China Mail written in September 1870, for example, R. asked why the Chinese were being chased out of the public gardens when there was no legislation to forbid them access:
A group of four or five respectable-looking Chinese was standing quietly to
hear the dulcet strains of music, when a European policeman seeing them,
cried out ��Weilo!�� whereupon the poor Chinese retired slowly without a word
of remonstrance, followed closely by the energetic constable down to the gates�K. The Police Authorities ought to know their duty better, and must take care not to treat respectable Chinese with insolence indiscriminately.51
It was claimed that the Chinese community during these years was regulated rather than governed. They were left almost entirely to their own devices in the Chinatowns to find what solutions they could find to the problems of water, sanitation, personal protection, and health, all of which would now be considered the concern of the government. A letter in the Daily Press from W. referred to yet another ordinance for the regulation of the Chinese. He professed himself to be astonished at the nature of government he saw existing. He asked ��whether it might not be as well if, after a number of years during which we have been endeavouring very futilely to regulate the Chinese, we at last made some bona
fide attempt at governing them��. W. attempted to define the difference between
governing and regulating:
the former being open, plain and distinct; the latter hidden, confused and
undefined �X a kind of shoving, a disagreeable element out of sight instead
of a simple and fair endeavour to meet the exigencies and responsibilities of ruling over 100,000 of our fellow men. If we are to commence making distinctions of class in Government, I should like to know where we are to end. Perhaps bye and bye an ordinance will be passed for ��regulating�� the Americans, the Prussians, the French or other foreigners in the Colony. It would be quite as logical and probably less pernicious than an ordinance for ��regulating�� the Chinese.52
The accepted dictum of these years that the Chinese were liars precluded the bond of trust and friendship forming between the races. This cliched belief was repeated so often in books and newspapers that it had assumed the weightiness of a ��truth�� in the minds of the later Victorians. For example, the Daily Press could
write the following in an editorial on the subject of craft guilds in July 1871:
The striking and melancholy feature in the existing condition of Chinese life is to be found in its predominant characteristic of untruth�K. The masses live a grand falsehood from day to day: the educated classes prove their superior culture by complicating and interweaving falsehoods in a judicious manner.
That is all the difference. Of verbal truth there is none to be relied on. Indeed,
even where there is honesty of purpose, the customary untruth seems to be the only possible mode of expressing it. It is no exaggeration to say that a
Chinaman always has a fixed lie with which to tell the truth.53
This kind of dictum deepened the wedge which held the two races apart and was even used as a reason for the desire to keep the distance between the two races. When Dolly made her Plea for European Schools at Hong Kong, for example, she asked what parents could trust their young to a school: ��Where children might
imbibe / The morals of the Orient / And at truth and honour gibe?��54 The often repeated disbelief in the ability of the Chinese to act with truth and honour seems doubly strange when at the same time every firm of any size happily trusted its comprador to the extent of using him as the company banker, with remarkably few instances of compradors absconding with the company��s cash.
For whatever reasons, the prejudice and aggressive feelings against the majority living in Hong Kong turned on too many occasions into violent behaviour against those Chinese the Europeans came into contact with. The most common crime committed by Europeans, after being drunk and disorderly and refusing to pay the chair coolies, was assaulting a Chinese. That this kind of physical violence
was largely condoned is seen by the derisory amounts which the offenders were fined, often as low as fifty cents, about the same amount that chair coolies were fined for carrying passengers without licence or for similar misdemeanours. Yet
the discrepancy in income between the two groups was huge.
William Lowndes [23/12/2], who was listed in 1867 as assistant secretary at
the Hong Kong Club, was a keen member of the Victoria Regatta Club and also
one of the best shots in the colony, usually managing to come fourth or fifth in the Rifle Association shooting matches. He was summoned by Lum Aping for assault.
He admitted to punching the club servant in the right eye for no reason and was fined $1.55 Alexander Levy [23/10/11] came to Hong Kong to work for the Jewish firm of C.C. Cohen & Co, but must have been a Christian as he was married and buried by the Protestant Church. In 1869, Levy, who was staying at the house of Charles Cohen, founder member of the firm, was summoned to court on charges
of assault by Cohen��s boy. The boy had answered back when told to clean the verandah: ��Suppose you no likee my, more better you catchee another boy��. This reply to an order got him four blows to the face. The boy was labelled ��saucy�� by the magistrate who threatened that he would remember the boy��s face if he ever
came before the magistrate again. Levy was fined a mere 25 cents.56 N.B. Dennys [18/8/10], editor of China Mail at that time, was summoned for illegally entering
a house in Wellington Street and smashing their chatties, the earthenware crocks
that held the charcoal on which the Chinese cooked soups and stews. The cook house faced the China Mail offices and Dennys complained that, from the doors and windows of the houses opposite, there constantly issued dense volumes of smoke accompanied by a strong smell of garlic, and that his family who lived over
the office had been made sick more than once. He was fined $1. He countered
by saying: ��At the moment of writing this, three of the smoke-houses �K are still in
full blast. We confess to an inability to suggest a remedy except by force which
is illegal.��57 Another case involved the clerk of Andrew Millar, the government plumber. The clerk, Jose Senna, refused to pay his grocery bill. According to the Chinese shopkeeper, the sum had been asked for over and over again. The irate shopkeeper called him ��a dammed rogue��. He was taken to court by Senna for
using strong language and fined $5, the same amount as Millar had paid earlier for assaulting his chair coolie.58 In March 1869, Thomas R. McBean [23/9/7], bailiff at the Summary Court and interpreter in Hindi, Portuguese and Japanese, was summoned by an elderly Chinese lady whom he had beaten and pushed down the stairs of the courthouse. She had been so forcefully ejected from court because she had prompted a witness.59
There seem to have been at this time not only a continuing prejudice against the Chinese but also a lack of concern in their welfare as part of the community. Rather than being governed in the accepted sense, they were regulated in such a way as ensured an increasing distance between them and the expatriates. In February 1868, the editor of Daily Press wrote:
There are the mass of foreign residents who consider the ��natives�� and all appertaining thereto, entirely unworthy of a moment��s attention. The reproduction of a European life in China, so far as that is feasible, is avowedly their object while they are here, and, when they go away, the people amongst whom they have spent the best years of their life and out of whom directly or indirectly they have made their fortunes, pass from their minds as completely as the waves of a sea through which they have sailed.
He goes on to ask: ��Are they blind to the beauty of habits and customs superior to their own, because of mental narrowness and the mist of prejudice through which they view the world?��60 In some ways the lack of governance and isolation from
the expatriate life benefited the now substantial group of wealthy and respectable
Chinese merchants that headed their community. It allowed the merchant elite to build up their own institutions to oversee the care of their community. For
example, the District Watch was founded in 1869 to give a level of security to
respectable Chinese and their property which the police force of the time had
failed to provide. Even more noteworthy was the founding of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1870 to oversee the care of the sick and destitute among the Chinese population. This was followed in 1873 by the first Chinese newspaper and in 1878
by the founding of the Po Leung Kuk to take over the care of women and orphans.
Chapter 16 Hong Kong Society in This Period
Cultural and Leisure Activities
By the 1870s, there had been some attempts to ��form combinations for the purpose
of affording amusement of an intellectual and refined nature��. The Daily Press wrote with enthusiasm about the delightful choral concerts, the amateur theatrical performances, the establishment of a croquet club and the rumoured revival of the Debating Society. The Royal Italian Opera was giving concerts in Macau
and Hong Kong around 1866�V67 and proving very popular. Madame Bouche,
the soprano who played Violetta in Verdi��s La Traviata, ��was as usual hailed with rapturous applause when she appeared��. Edward Marsden Martin [38/6/1] from New York, the chief engineer of the Hong Kong, Canton and Macao Steam boat Fire Dart, had married Madame Bouche in 1866. Their second baby, Stella Bouche Martin [7/30/7], was born in 1869 but like her brother only survived her
birth by a few hours. Edward himself died of consumption at the Hotel d��Europe where the family had been staying. Signor Hugo Pellico, from the same Italian
opera company, settled in Wyndham Street as a teacher of vocal and instrumental
music, and won much esteem as director of the Choral Society. The China Mail reported in December 1868 that his rich and powerful baritone thrilled the audiences. But all too soon,
in March 1871, he succumbed to smallpox aged
only twenty-eight and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery. He must have had many admirers as his monument is one of the largest in the Catholic Cemetery. The Daily Press highlighted what it saw as the importance of such cultural endeavours, writing:
All amusement of a rational nature is an important element in any community as a means of bringing together in friendly intercourse and thereby dissipating the prejudices and asperities which must necessarily arise where opportunities to meet on a common footing are of a limited nature.1
But such was the nature of Hong Kong��s society that these efforts were seldom well supported or long-lasting. In January 1868 the Daily Press reported on proposals to start a philosophical society while lamenting:
It is not exactly creditable to this colony that no society here of any sort disconnected from that side of life, which may be described metaphorically as the fleshpots of Egypt, is able to keep the breath in its body. The Asiatic Society has a branch at Shanghai, but none in Hong Kong. In the Northern settlement until very recently a debating society has lived and flourished. Here to the shame of the people who have let it die, our society is dead. The only public library in the town
has long suffered in a decline and has now retired to hospital, so as to speak
and the most intellectual society formed for the purposes of pleasure, and now existing in Hong Kong, is devoted to the representation of farces and burlesques on the stage of the Lusitano Theatre.2
In fact, Hong Kong still had the feeling of a hick cowboy town with little respect for the arts. The editor of the Daily Press could write in 1866: ��There is probably no place on earth��s surface inhabited by any manner of civilized men, which lives so utterly without fine arts as the Colony of Hong Kong��. 3 In a place where the members of one coterie could not be seen at the same gathering as those of another, it was very difficult to keep the broader-based societies and associations going. The Hong Kong Association, which was supposed to exert pressure on the home authorities to take more notice of Hong Kong��s point of view, failed for lack of support. Theophilus Gee Linstead must have felt depressed when it fell to his lot to disband both the Volunteer movement and the Hong Kong Association of which he was secretary, for lack of support. Only seventeen men out of a membership of seventy could be bothered to attend the final meeting and even that small number could not agree among themselves on the steps to take. Inclusive events like the St. Andrew��s Day dinner, to which any Scot in the territory had right of entry, came under fire. An article dated from November 1863 stated that: ��Many who join in the annual festival will never speak to each other throughout the year, and there is altogether an atmosphere of sham and silliness about St. Andrew��s dinners��. The article continued: ��The sooner this yearly sham is abolished the better��.4 The dinner was in fact one of the few democratic events which continued to survive. In April 1870, the Daily Press painted a very dull picture of life in Hong Kong:
A trying climate, limited resources for amusement, absence of home associations, a listless half life, where the greatest happiness of the greatest number consists, during many months of the year, in going to sleep and forgetting their weariness and the numerous vexations with which we are beset.5
The disinterest in culture seems to have continued unchanged at least through to 1902. The poem written by Dolly entitled Degenerate Hong Kong could equally well have applied to this earlier period:
Away with books! Let Sport and Dollars rule;
What need of Culture? We, who went to school, Learned all required of us to fill a place,
In bank or business on the office stool.
��Degenerate��? Why use so harsh a word?
From gaining dollars who would be deterred By wish for knowledge, yielding no return For time and trouble uselessly incurred.6
Culture then appears to have played a small part in the life of the colony where according to the editor of China Mail, ��stunning races, jolly picnics and A1 theatricals �K seem to form the only relief from the one object most men have in view �X money-making��.7 One such picnic given by Dr. Cane and C.H. Whyte, the magistrate whose wife is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, was described by Matilda Sharp in a letter home:
It was an immense affair, over eighty guests and three hundred coolies, so
you can fancy the imposing show we all made as we wound our way up the sides of the Peak. The dinner was set up by the French Hotel and was all tasteful and elegant. It was great fun for the long table was set out in the open air and completely encircled by fanciful Chinese lanterns �K
We adjourned to the sanatorium,
a large building close by that had been built and intended for our sick soldiers, �K now it is only used at picnics. There we had some merry dancing to the music of the band.8
One��s place in society was still to a large extent dictated by the size of one��s income. The rich still led very comfortable lives. Dinners were luxurious even at home. Matilda wrote in a letter:
You would have smiled to see us sit down to dinner at seven, Granville at one end of the table
and I at the other; a servant behind each.�K First soup, then fish, then six dishes, then various puddings, then dessert dishes and wine.
One or two boys would accompany their master out to dinner parties and stand behind his chair and replenish his plate as course followed course. The Sharps�� No. 1 boy wore the following livery:
black satin shoes with soles one inch thick, blue hose tied at the knee,
breeches very large of black or blue stuff, tied ditto and a blue kind of smock.
Pigtail ornamented with silk at the end and his head crowned by a black silk cap with a red tassel.9
Sport consisted mainly of cricket, shooting, rowing and swimming and of course, exceeding all others in pleasure and excitement, the annual winter horseracing at Happy Valley. A little of the excitement of the race meeting is captured in this description of road to the racecourse on a race meeting day:
In the beautiful valley of Wong-nei-chong is gathered a crowd which is truly
cosmopolitan, and for this element alone will compare with any assembly in the world gathered to witness an English Race Meeting�K. The three
16.6. Horseracing at Happy Valley, 1860s. (By courtesy of Wattis Fine Arts.)
days�� grand pic-nic, which is participated in by high and low, great and small, European and Chinese, is a ��Derby��, which only such places as Hong Kong can afford. Early on Tuesday morning, the holiday dresses begin to make their appearance upon the streets and by twelve the stream of anxious pleasure-seekers flowing along Queen��s Road, was a sight indeed. Every imaginable conveyance man has invented, ... is today pressed into service: sedan chairs of every build and shape, with two bearers, three bearers and four bearers; some in the dirtiest and most ragged of coolie attire, others in clean uniforms; basket traps of the most rickety appearance drawn by mere frames of horseflesh and crowded with three or four passengers; dog carts and phaetons with horses of the neatest and most attractive appearance; handsome waggonettes with their stylish pair and coachmen and footmen in livery; horse-boys and grooms, foot passengers and coolies heavily laden with
boxes and baskets which in appearance are suggestive of tiffin; all shouting
for a clear way, all crowding and nudging and pushing�Kall steadily making their way towards the Happy Valley �X happy this day indeed!10
The end of the race meeting was celebrated with a grand ball to which those who had made it in society were invited.
In Victorian England, Sundays were marked with ritual solemnity and regular attendance at church conveyed the stamp of respectability on a family. But in Hong Kong, churchgoing appears to have been treated with a certain levity. On those occasions when they attended church, some people took their dogs with them. A letter to the Daily Press asked pointedly whether St. John��s Cathedral was a house of God or a house of dogs and suggested that the owners only attended the service ��for the purpose of exhibiting their canine pets��.11 In 1865, even the staid, chapel-going Matilda Sharp saw nothing untoward in taking her dog, Frisk, to her sister��s wedding in the Union Chapel. In a letter describing her wedding, Lucilla wrote home:
I must not forget to mention that Frisk went to church as third best man with a bright pink ribbon around his neck and his woolly coat washed to the last
degree of fleecy whiteness. Mrs. Brown told me it quite upset her gravity to
see him come walking in the marriage procession just behind Matty, and so grave and staid in his pace as if to be evidently fully aware of his position.12
Social Distinctions
The class distinctions that made fraternizing for the sake of culture so difficult appear now to be accepted as a fait accompli. The distinction in particular between merchants and tradesmen was more rigidly set. The status of each individual who attended St. John��s Cathedral was made plain by the seating
arrangements. When in 1865, the seating committee asked the harbour master,
Captain H.G. Thomsett, to exchange his seat with A.E. Vaucher, a merchant who was a much older resident, he objected strenuously because of the loss of social precedence it involved. The whole question of the power of the seating committee to compel parishioners to change their seats went first to the attorney general who, perhaps wisely, considering the climate of opinion of those times, refused to commit himself. It was then referred by appeal to England, where it was ruled that: ��Parishioners have a claim to be seated according to their rank and station��. This finally led to the transference of seats numbered twenty-nine and thirty in the sixth pew from the pulpit to Vaucher to the intense discomfort of Captain Thomsett.13 When Edward Bowra passed briefly through Hong Kong on his way to his first post in the Tientsin Customs, he was upset to see the sign: ��Bowra &
Co., Ships�� Chandlers and Sailmakers��, remarking that: ��the Bowra who was there had made a good deal of money at this trade, but was a low common sort of man suited for his business and no merchant at all��.14 In fact the earlier Bowra had not
been low and common, but an ex-army officer who was well respected as a leader
among the tradesmen. Edward Bowra was merely echoing the prejudices of the time against the class labelled ��shopkeepers��.
A set of unspoken rules now existed that defined relationships between expatriates of different social status. According to W.K. Chan��s The Making of Hong Kong��s Society, these rules and relationships bound the community together rather than split it apart.15 They may have bound it together vis-a-vis the Chinese majority, but it seems quite possible that the governor or his officers could, and probably did, use their knowledge of the way the gossipy, enclosed society worked to split it apart or to isolate a troublesome member when it suited their purpose. In an article entitled ��Social Verdicts��, the China Mail talked about the effects of gossip on such a small community:
Just enough is known of a man in China to enable him to be misrepresented by those who are adverse to him �X but very few really know anything of his
true character; hence a vast amount of misconception, misrepresentation, silly and pernicious prejudice.16
In an article entitled ��Table of Degrees�� the comment was made that the table of degrees given in Blackstones�� Commentaries, which ran to seventy-one classes, ��does not seem to be quite long enough to suit the minute subdivisions and social rivalries of modern times��. 17 Isabella Bird arrived in Hong Kong on Christmas Eve
1878 in time to watch the last hours of the great fire. She summed up the social
scene in Hong Kong when she said:
Victoria is, or should be, well known, so I will not describe its cliques, its boundless hospitalities, its extravagances in living, its quarrels, its gaieties, its picnics, balls, regattas, races, dinner parties, lawn tennis parties, amateur theatricals, afternoon teas, and all its other modes of creating a whirl which passes for pleasure or occupation. Hong Kong is not single in this respect; �K. Perhaps there is nowhere in the world a place where people care more for social reputation, and where it is in reality of less value.18
Social exclusion, a powerful and divisive weapon, was still a commonly used tool. In a letter signed Anti Snobbery in the China Mail, the writer complained that a thoroughly respectable member of the community, who had resided in Hong Kong for many years, had had his comprador��s order returned with an intimation from the committee of the newly opened bath house that he would not be permitted to use it:
Surely Sir, if jelly fish and other floating material are admitted, the introduction of a respectable man with nothing to distinguish him from the aristocratic frequenters �K but the possible difference in the colour of his bathing drawers, might be tolerated.19
The Hong Kong Punch, picking up on the story, showed ��de Browne��, when asked
why he had not taken the plunge, answering: ��Why, my dear fellow, you see I can��t. There��s a Wetail Twadah [retail trader] in the watah��. Punch continued in the same vein of humour with the ��Knights of the Bath��:
A new order made under this title has been instituted at Hong Kong which is going on swimmingly. Recipients are decorated with a spangled pair of bathing drawers and are requested to wear white kid gloves and bell-toppers
when they visit the water. Vulgar people are required to fit themselves with
new skins before being admitted.20
In 1872, this swimming bath was amalgamated with the gymnasium and the boat
club to form the Victoria Recreation Club which still exists.
When these same gentlemen went back to England, they in their turn faced social exclusion. James Kemp in his satirical series, Voices from the Verandah, summed up their dilemma. He maintained that many of the merchants were too young when they left home to have had any real experience of life in Britain:
So their tone has been formed in the Hong Kong mould �K When they go
home with fortunes, they are stared at. Men whose manners are the pink of
Hong Kong affability, who are adored by the ingenuous youths at the Clubs and sworn by on the race-course, go to England rich, and find all their Hong
Kong high breeding mysteriously useless.21
An example of the low regard in which Hong Kong merchants were held in England was all too clearly given during the by-election for the parliamentary seat of Totnes in Devonshire in February 1863. Edward Dent, who with the Jardine
Matheson taipans reigned supreme in Hong Kong, could only garner five votes
when he tried to secure the seat and came face to face with a real aristocrat, the Duke of Somerset.
In a letter entitled ��On Snobs�� in the China Mail of 3 August 1867, An Enemy to Snobs described how:
�X Esquire who two years ago was employed in a menial capacity in England �X is lucky �X falls on his feet and gets sent to China, where he all at once becomes a heavy swell and refuses to associate with, or be seen in conversation with, any one who is not a member of the Club and feels proud to tell his brother swells that he has cut the old Folks in England and does not mean to correspond any more with low [sic] people.
The writer continued by saying that in a place like Hong Kong there must be different stations and positions in society. He does not advocate ��Liberty and Equality�� but he abhors the ��horrid snobbishness which one meets at every turn��.
A few men continued to operate outside confines of the prevailing class boundaries. One such was Douglas Lapraik. In 1864, a number of merchants formed a committee for the purpose of honouring Lapraik before his departure on retirement to England. Lapraik refused their invitation to a public dinner because a large number of his friends would be excluded for social reasons. The editor of China Mail commented:
Mr. Douglas Lapraik has never been a party man and has consequently paid no attention to the fact that China society is divided into small cliques and coteries. He has respected everybody who has the smallest claim to respect, and this feeling on his part has been felt by everyone to be perfectly sincere and genuine�K. Although he is wealthy, he never measures himself by the amount of his wealth.�K Mr. Lapraik��s conduct and general bearing has been at once a public rebuke and a public example. Unfortunately, no man has had
genius enough to imitate him, or sufficient daring to ape him.22
These divisions among the community led at times to the delay or even
abandonment of schemes that had been agreed to be beneficial to all. In 1861 fire
consumed Mrs. Hurst��s millinery establishment in Stanley Street,
with the usual amount of mismanagement, for want of an efficient head to direct the fire-brigade and the many willing hands standing by in helpless longing to render assistance if only they knew how�K. The soldiers especially got liquor somehow, and were speedily in such a state that they would neither work themselves nor let others work but were quite an obstruction, and some
of them had to be carried off dead drunk by the guards.23
The fire was prevented from spreading by the police brigade under Superintendent James Jarman and Sergeant da Silva. It was obvious that there
was a pressing need for an organized and trained fire brigade. Various gentlemen,
both officials and non-officials, expressed their willingness to enter the ranks of
such a new brigade, but no plan could be put into effect because the choice of a
gentleman to head the brigade proved impossible due to questions of who would
or would not serve under whom. When in 1867 another destructive fire led to
the death of Thomas Boulden [20/2/1], a young boatswain from HMS Perseus, nothing had changed. His epitaph draws a clear picture of his death: ��A journey, like Elijah��s, swift and bright / Caught gently upwards to an early crown / In
Heaven��s own chariot of all-blazing light / With death untasted and the grave
unknown��. This left Hong Kong for yet more years without adequate protection
against the devastating fires that ravaged the town.
The importance of the social ladder in Hong Kong led men to strive to climb it and at the same time led others to strive equally urgently to retain the exclusiveness of its upper rungs. Attempting to bring this kind of society together in any kind of action for the public good could prove a fruitless task. As the China Mail expressed it:
One does not live long in Hong Kong in order to become aware that combined public action in almost any direction is a thing altogether unknown�K. Cricket, regattas and racing constitute the nearest approach to public action that we know of in this colony and it cannot be said that these things have always been managed in a thoroughly catholic spirit.
Where position in society was so important, men would sacrifice ��ease, comfort
and health �K and that too, even in places where the highest positions attainable are only of very small account�� for small superficial advantages such as the best seats at public entertainments and the right-hand place at the dinner table.24 Again later the editor of the Daily Press objected to the tendency particularly among the
civil servants to elevate trifling distinctions into considerations of great moment. He warned that men of position should be above being affected by ��the numberless
petty annoyances that must always fret and worry those who �X in small places above all others �X set their whole hearts upon social distinctions which are often arbitrary and always trivial��.25
In this social climate, etiquette assumed an importance that the modern
world finds strange and unnatural. It was used as a means of separating the sheep
from the goats among the various social circles and was felt to be important enough for there to be an article in the China Mail strongly disapproving of Singapore��s governor for his want of official courtesy in not returning calls
personally. Admiral Penhoat of the Indian Navy, a survivor of the Crimean War
and a Companion of the Bath, called on the Singaporean governor and the call was only returned by the aide-de-camp, a mere lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, bearing a card:
Now mark the difference in the reception of the same gallant admiral at
Hong Kong. A guard of honour awaited him, and a salute was fired on his
landing �X the Governor��s carriage took him up to Government House; moreover Sir R. McDonnell returned the visit in person the next day.26
Hong Kong took the dictates of etiquette seriously. The forms of address were also still given an importance that in our more
democratic age is difficult to comprehend. In 1861, for example, the China Mail
struck a blow for a more democratic style of address in its agony column. All were to be called by their Christian names plus surnames without the addition of ��Esquire�� or ��Mister��. The editor spelled out his policy of dispensing with the titles: Both publican and sinner and merchant of high degree will be for once placed on equal footings and, should they rail at us for so doing, we must endeavour to bear their bitter words and still more bitter looks as best we may.
He had arrived at this policy because:
In this out-of-the-way corner of the globe, people so often occupy false positions which they only reach by some queer freak of Dame Fortune and
which neither nature nor education seems to have fitted them for.
Friends had suggested the use of ��Mister�� as a sop to the offended users of the agony column but the editor countered:
Our friends, who hint at such a thing as a solution of our difficulty, have little
conception of the overweening pride and vanity of the present generation. The term in our opinion is too good �X too honourable, and would be misapplied in many cases; but that is only our opinion, and several of our upstart mercantile gents and jacks-in-office would, we know, be mortally
affronted by being addressed as Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith.27
Needless to say the policy engendered angry letters and even the withdrawal of birth and death notices and was hastily overturned by the next editor who demanded payment for insertions in the agony column, but allowed freedom for the inserters to choose the titles by which they wished to be known.
Meanwhile a new distinction had crept into the language between the meaning of ��gent�� and that of ��gentleman��. A letter to the China Mail posed the
question, ��What is a gent?�� The writer then summed up the distinction as follows:
Gentleman �X all that is modest, open, kind, gentle, noble, manly and true;
Gent �X the reverse of these terms �X all that is pert, silly, affected, cunning, slavish, tyrannical, gangling, mean and selfish.
The distinction arose when in Peking, some touring English ��gents�� aroused bitter feelings among the Chinese inhabitants. Certain members of the ��gents�� class had acted with an insolence of manner and a lack of judgement concerning what line
of conduct was fit and becoming to the local population. True gentlemen, it was
said, would have entered Peking with the respectful feelings of guests rather than with the buoyant demeanour of conquerors:
A gentleman is never unbecoming but takes the trouble to consider what is
the fittest behaviour in any given circumstances whereas a gent has neither
the inclination nor the power to adapt himself to new cases�K. He prefers allowing the people of Peking to adapt themselves to him; if they don��t like his conduct, they may ��lump it��.28
The distinction was soon applied to certain members of the Hong Kong society. The gents of Hong Kong were, for example, reprimanded and compared to the scum of San Francisco in an editorial and letters to the Daily Press when they demonstrated their disorderly and antisocial manners. They took a dog into the Lusitano Theatre during a performance and induced it to bark and further disrupted the performance by their concerted and orchestrated ��stamping and knocking�� which continued at intervals throughout the performance.29 The China Mail took the distinction further when it criticized Sir Hercules Robinson. During the course of the inquiry into the affairs of Daniel Caldwell, an elderly Chinese witness was not allowed to sit in the presence of the governor:
Our own Governor was a gent when he denied an aged and rheumatic mandarin and Chinese interpreter, �X as good a man as himself �X the
privilege of sitting in his presence in the course of a five hour��s examination;
and we are not sure that he was ever anything else.30
This press comment seems to show that there was now a growing awareness that relationships between the races were in need of improvement.
The Hong Kong Club
The Hong Kong Club claimed to represent the cream of society and guarded its doors jealously. It seems that in the early 1860s the ��gents�� were to the fore in the task of excluding those who applied for membership but were thought by this group not to be quite ��up to the mark��. The club��s fees precluded all but the wealthy joining: ��Forty dollars down, thirteen a quarter and a little bill every month for the buns and glasses of noyau��. Candidates with deep pockets but without what were considered the right credentials were faced with the blackball:
The task of blackballing those who do not approach the Club with a sufficient affectation of awe is so disagreeable to the men of sense who constitute the
majority of its members that they do not as a rule soil their fingers with balls
of a sable hue; that duty is tacitly left to a mischievous clique of ten.31
Tensions rose when eligible would-be members found they had been denied entry and their status in society was in this way publicly denied.
Things came to a head in an incident which involved the lately re-constituted volunteers and occurred on the club steps in September 1864. The volunteers had been re-formed in 1862 under the leadership of the redoubtable Captain Brine of the Royal Engineers who had himself suffered the indignity of being blackballed. He was ably assisted by two of the volunteers, belonging to that new breed of men who had made Hong Kong their home, Lieutenant Theophilus Gee Linstead, and Second Lieutenant Francis Innes Hazeland. All seemed to be progressing in a spirit of unity and brotherhood. The volunteer movement was labelled
One of the healthiest and most useful movements �K that was ever inaugurated in Hong Kong. Classes of young men who had not previously seen their way to coming into contact with each other now met together and
acted in concert for the first time and what is more, they broke up and parted
with no intention that it should be the last.32
However, with the exception of one partner who ��refreshed the corps with beer and cigars one afternoon as they marched out��, the big merchant houses never really gave their support or encouraged their younger employees to join.
In September 1864, serious rioting broke out over three consecutive nights and involved English sailors, a number of Malay seamen, some policemen and
companies of 99th Regiment. It originated when sailors entering a boarding house
were confronted by Malays with knives. Three or four sailors and one soldier from
the 99th were mortally wounded. A body of soldiers from the regiment intent
on revenge ran into a posse of policemen and a second soldier was shot dead by
a policemen. The 99th Regiment had to be hastily withdrawn to Kowloon and the police confined to barracks before worse could happen. There being no-one
else left to police the town, the Volunteers were called out by the governor and patrolled the streets for four hours:
Having mustered hurriedly, they had not dined when they ��fell out�� at 9 p.m.
opposite the Club; and consequently those Volunteers who were members of the Club wished to get the non-members some refreshment. But to Club rules there are no exceptions and those who were not members were not only turned out and refused any refreshment but were vigorously hooted as they left the premises.33
Public opinion was summed up by James Kemp in Voices from the Veranda. Young Hyson, one of the regular voices, was made to say:
When men wearing Her Majesty��s uniform, and on duty by command of
Her Majesty��s representative in Hong Kong are subjected to such vulgar expressions of contempt from gentlemen standing at the door of the principal Club in China, there must be something rotten in the state of Denmark.34
Drink was put forward as an excuse. The younger element at the Hong Kong Club was prone to rowdiness in its cups. The Volunteers, unable to sustain the facade of brotherhood, stopped attending and the movement went into a decline. It folded in May 1866.
The Visit to Hong Kong of Prince Alfred
In 1869, a great fillip was given to Hong Kong society by the visit of Prince Alfred,
Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria and captain of the Galatea. Hong Kong felt that this occasion would enable it to claw back the position that it
had lost in regard to British public opinion at the time of the Second Opium War and every effort was made to ��put on a splendid show��. The City Hall, the pride and joy of the expatriate society, was finished in time for the duke to open it. It
incorporated a museum, a theatre, a library and ballrooms. Matilda and Granville Sharp revelled in the occasion. Hong Kong was decorated and lit up as never before. Matilda wrote home to her sisters:
The best treat of all that has taken place, I think, was on Saturday night when cards were issued to all the principal inhabitants of Hong Kong for a
theatrical presentation to be given by the officers of ��Galatea��.�K The officers
were the performers, the band was comprised of the Marines, and the Duke
was the conductor �X and a most admirable one too. We shall never have
such an entertainment again, given by some of the best blood in England and conducted by a prince of Blood Royal.35
16.8. The arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh at Pedder��s Wharf, from a drawing by John Thompson. (Illustrated London News, 29 January 1870.)
With their background of shopkeeping and law, Matilda and Granville Sharp
would not have been seen dining with aristocrats or hobnobbing with royalty back in England. Background and blood lines were important, but in Hong Kong in reality money counted for more than breeding.
Nevertheless the extraordinary degree of veneration and trust given to a supposedly ��true blue-blooded�� nobleman of rank can be seen from a case of deception a few years outside this period, but relevant and worth quoting. In March 1882 a female adventurer named Mary Jane Furneaux successfully fleeced the locals by impersonating the dissolute Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, one of whose ancestors, Lord Richard Pelham Clinton [11A/3/14], lies in the Cemetery. As the Overland Mail said, ��To bamboozle a number of apparently sane and sensible people to the tune of something like 20,000 pounds sterling is a feat which is given to few to perform��.36
The importance of ranking in society gave the governor, as the representative of the Queen in the colony, both an unassailable position in this limited society and a number of subtle social mechanisms if he wanted to elevate a favourite or ��put down�� a gentleman who had displeased him in some way. The choice of the special jurors or justices of the peace was entirely in his hands. The position had become a way of rewarding support and elevating a person��s standing and was awarded by the governor as he thought fit. One change strengthened the privileged position of these special jurors. In 1868 they were exempted from doing their duties in court as jurors. The Daily Press said of them:
It is clear however that J.P.��s cannot stand for Justices of the Peace, because there is one thing that persons decorated with that distinction never do, namely sit on any magistrate��s bench for the purpose of dispensing justice.38
The only task undertaken by justices of the peace, beyond the vague idea that they
might act as buffers between the administration and the general public, was the
bi-annual meeting held in order to dispense licences to sell spirits in the hotels and taverns of the town. It would seem that it was easier in Hong Kong, where social status mattered so much, for the governor to maintain his very real power than it
would have been in a more populated, more far flung and less cliquish colony.
Changes in the Social Set-Up
The Taipans
At the beginning of the second period, the old-style merchant princes seemed in danger of losing the esteem they had once been accorded. ��All sorts of disreputable things had been laid at their door from petty acts of oppression up to the instigation of war��.38 Britain was determined at least that future wars with China should not arise out of mercantile embroilments where it was difficult to affirm positively who was most in the wrong:
She is determined too, that if the British nation is, to its loss, represented in China by a class who do not scruple to carry on a very large and lucrative trade in smuggled goods, it shall also be represented by those who will endeavour to turn the national revenues into their legitimate channel and see that treaties are observed and our countrymen controlled.39
The old buccaneering days had passed. In August 1861 the expatriate-run Imperial Chinese Customs Service was set up with its clearly set out regulations and fleet of revenue boats to ensure compliance. The editor of China Mail was able to write:
16.9. East Point. A detailed painting of the godowns and residences of Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1870, by a Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 85, p. 85.)
It would appear that the merchants have had their day of power�K. The chief
power and influence in the Far East has passed into the hands of the Foreign
Customs Collectorate. It is at their door we must now all knock if we expect any favours; it is to them we must tell young friends coming to China to bring letters of introduction.40
The Imperial Customs Service was organized first by Horatio Nelson Lay, whose son William George Lay [45/11/4] married Rev. James Legge��s daughter and died in November 1921 while he was working as commissioner of customs in Kowloon. The second head of the service was Sir Robert Hart, who could not easily be flouted. In response, the merchants joined forces in May 1861 to establish the Chamber of Commerce enabling influential men in Hong Kong to present a united front. Members of the old houses still held the positions of power. James Perceval, head of Jardine, Matheson & Co., and William Walkinshaw, taipan of Turners & Co. whose son, Constantine Walkinshaw [9/9/16] is buried in the Cemetery, were elected president and vice president of the new chamber. The China Mail said hopefully: ��In the Chamber of Commerce we desire to recognise a distinct body, having a common interest in the maintenance of commercial respectability and sound commercial views��. 41 But for reasons to do with competition and social status, the merchants found it difficult to agree among themselves on measures they might take. The Chamber of Commerce failed to make its mark and seems later to have become, to a great extent, the tool of the up-and-coming business class.
The British merchants continued through the 1860s to live lives of generous open-door luxury. They were generous not only to those they entertained but also to those in trouble. When cases of hardship were brought to their notice, it was well known that they would quietly put their hands in their pockets to provide the necessary medical treatment or the fare back to the U.K. to prevent suffering or destitution. Joseph and Robert Jardine can be specially cited as examples of merchant generosity. When Rev. Legge��s third volume of translations of the Chinese classics was published in 1864, the late Joseph Jardine was much praised for the way he had counselled Legge to continue his life-work without troubling himself with regard to the expenses. It was said of Joseph: ��A better means of immortalizing himself could not have been found��. 42 In 1863, Robert Jardine donated $30,000 towards building of a City Hall. As the editor of China Mail said:
When a public boon is wanted, the Merchants are ready with their money
and the thing is carried out; there are the Sailors�� Home and the clock-tower
as examples of this kind of private beneficence.
But in the same article the praise is qualified by what the paper perceived as their
lack of public spirit:
That lively watchfulness over the general conduct of affairs and the tendency
of legislative measures which marks a public-spirited man has almost no existence among the individuals in Hong Kong. Its absence is accounted for by the fact that few individuals there look upon Hong Kong as their permanent residence and on that account few feel any particular interest in
anything not affecting the immediate requirements of the moment.43
The luxury that the merchants could buy was seen by them as an antidote to
the exhausting effects of a tropical climate and as a way of maintaining health and
vitality. The size of their homes was by modern standards spectacularly large. For
example, when Woodlands was for sale in 1867, it was advertised as possessing
��a croquet lawn, stabling for six horses, a double coach house, a hayloft, a double cow house besides hen houses etc��. Another house situated on Robinson Road for
sale in the same year advertised stabling for five horses with an enclosed grazing
paddock adjoining. The merchants continued to enjoy food and drink which was
of the finest quality that money could buy and the care of a numerous household of
well-trained servants. By the end of the sixties decade, the era of merchant dominance was coming
to an end. The authors of The Treaty Ports of Japan and China reported that:
Men of smaller means now embark in trade and, though individually they do
not much affect the interests of the great houses, they materially interfere with
them taken as an aggregate and much of the business heretofore exclusively in the hands of a few men has been diverted into other channels.44
The closing stages of the era of merchant power arrived with awful suddenness. The folding of the bank of Overend and Guerney in London in 1866 spelled ruin for the house of Dent. Others like Lyall & Still followed Dent & Co. into bankruptcy. Close to fifty-six firms failed in the depression years of 1866 to
1869: ��The extent to which trade has decreased is enormous and unless it revives,
the prosperity of this place can never be again what it was before��.45 One of the few major merchant houses to remain after the debacle was Jardine, Matheson & Co. It only escaped the same fate by quick footwork and luck. By 1868, the Daily Press could write:
The fall of such houses as Dent and Co., Fletcher & Co., Lindsay & Co. and others and the growth of a number of smaller houses to supply the places left vacant by the defunct giants helped bring down the Taipans to the level of
humanity�K. For the first time in the history of the Colony, the Governor was not overshadowed by the heads of the big mercantile firms and the Queen��s
Representative held his proper place.46
The number of merchants around this time seems to have declined. Although
the jury list had increased from 270 names in 1860, to 523 in 1875, the number of
merchants listed had decreased from 85 merchants in 1860, 38 of whom were
marked as special jurors, to 55 merchants in 1875. Thirty-nine of these had special
status and of the sixteen left in the ordinary category, only two were English.
The New-Style Businessmen
A new breed of businessman was arriving in the colony and beginning to make
his presence felt. They differed from the merchants of old in that their interests
were more closely concentrated in Hong Kong. A number regarded the island as their home and were prepared to live and die there. Among the newcomers whose names featured on the list of Chamber of Commerce members, were such names as Granville Sharp [11B/4/10], Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6] and the accountant Theophilus Gee Linstead [8/12/1]. Sharp was laying the basis for a property empire. In the land sales of 30 June 1862 he bought eleven lots in
Morrison Hill and Wan Chai, comprising more than 76,000 square feet costing just over $7,500.
Perhaps the most influential of the new-style businessmen was the taipan of Turners & Co., the Scotsman, Phineas Ryrie. ��When he died in 1892 aged sixty-three, his headstone proudly proclaimed, ��He was for over forty years a resident in Canton and Hong Kong and for twenty-six years a member of the Legislative Council of this Colony��.
For many years, he acted as auditor for the young Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. This was the kind of specialized job that the old-style merchants would not have undertaken. Ryrie had a finger in many pies. He helped A.F. Smith raise the
funds needed to build the Peak Tram, and was on the board of directors of the
Hong Kong Hotel, the H.K., Canton & Macao Steam Boats Ltd, China Fire
Insurance, and Dairy Farm among many other companies. He was a member of
commissions to examine the opium monopoly, and to report on the rebuilding of the Praya wall after it was destroyed in the typhoon of 1874. He was president of the Humane Society and official starter at the Hong Kong Races. Ryrie was also a keen shot and is said to have released rabbits on Stonecutters Island in an attempt to provide more sport to the colony. Luckily the rabbits did not thrive or spread. Theophilus Gee Linstead [8/12/1] was a member of Hogg & Co. until 1876, when the partnership was dissolved. He continued on his own, building up the firm that was to become the forerunner of the
Hong Kong branch of Peat Marwick, the accountancy firm. He was also a keen
sportsman and was behind the revival of the Victoria regatta. Linstead was also
the most senior officer of the reconstituted Volunteer Corps and a keen Freemason becoming district grand master. In 1874, he also became consul for Italy.
Henry Liston Dalrymple [37/3/34] arrived in the colony in 1865 as a tea inspector for Birley & Co. but again grew into the new type of businessman. In 1875, when Birley closed down unable to meet the challenge of the black tea from India, Dalrymple established his own company. He was also a founding member of the Hong Kong Golf Club and on his death, his headstone was specially ordered from London and erected by members of the club as a mark of their esteem and respect. In these ways a number of men, who were more likely to act as accountants than as merchants, began business ventures in Hong Kong, made it their long-term home and took a keen interest in its life and its sports. It is significant that these four early members of the new style of business died in Hong Kong.
The Increased Importance of Bankers and Brokers
The bankers in Hong Kong were extending their influence and their strength.
One of the most noteworthy changes to the structure of the local economy was the founding of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. This was launched when the
16.12. The first Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from a drawing by Palmer &
Turner, architects.
merchants of Bombay turned their attention to China and tried to set up a Bank of China with Indian capital. The Hong Kong merchants were determined to forestall their efforts. They had earlier suffered the indignity of the Hong Kong Gas Company having been founded in London. The anger among the
merchants was palpable when London offered only seventy shares to the local
market. So, when India-based merchants suggested that a Bank of China should
be founded, and only set aside five thousand of the thirty thousand shares of two
hundred rupees each to be offered locally, the Hong Kong Daily Press stirred public opinion with a violent denunciation of the local lack of public spirit. The lead was taken by the Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland, manager in Hong Kong of the P. & O. Steam Shipping Line. A prospectus for a China-based bank was
drawn up and a provisional committee formed. Within less than a week of the
prospectus being sent out, the whole of the capital allotted to Hong Kong had
been taken up. When the envoys of the Bombay merchants arrived a week later,
cap in hand, they found that no-one was interested in their shares and they soon dropped their scheme. In 1865, the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation commenced
business with a share capital $5 million in premises rented from D. Sassoon &
Co. The first general manager was a German, Victor Kresser, whose wife was
buried in 1870 in the Roman Catholic Cemetery though the exact spot has not
been found. The Hongkong & Shanghai Bank later bought the site which it still occupies to this day. The Provisional Committee of the bank included in its numbers all the larger merchant houses with the exception of Jardine, Matheson & Co., who refused to join because the Hon. F. Chomley of Dent & Co. had taken the chair. The old animosities were still at work. Jardine Matheson held out
until 1877, when William Keswick was elected a member of the committee.47
A job in banking was well paid and well regarded. Judging by the list of horses and carriages for auction drawn up by Lane Crawford on behalf of the heirs of John McDouall [9/11/12], manager of the Oriental Bank, when he
died in October 1873, bankers must have been among the best-paid employees
in the territory. The list included a first class phaeton with a handsome pair of black carriage horses of Black Hawk stock imported from California, a four-wheeled American buggy, a fast-trotting Japanese pony with buggy and harness, a Cantonese fast-trotting pony with an English dog cart and a Macassar pony with carriage. As well as these, he also kept a donkey and carriage suitable for children and two racing ponies. Thus in total the McDouall stables cared for eight horses
and a donkey beside the six carriages.48 McDouall was first listed for jury service in 1857 as a banker��s clerk. By 1861 he had risen to the rank of sub-manager and in
1863 he became a special juror.
Brokers
A new and to some a puzzling category of employment was making its presence felt in the colony. In the pages of Hong Kong Punch of August 1867, two military swells were shown watching a small man driving past in a basket carriage. The conversation went as follows:
Military Swell No.1., ��Rum little chap, Muggins, isn��t he?��
M.S.2., ��What does he call himself?��
M.S.1., ��Muggins, Oh, he��s a broker��.
M.S.2., ��And what the deuce is a broker?��
M.S.1., ��Well, I don��t exactly know but I believe a broker is a fellah that drives
a small trap and hangs about the Club doing nothing all day��.49
Those two ignorant swells would have been very surprised if they could see how far brokering would take Sir Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1] and Granville Sharp, who both left their jobs in banking in the early 1860s to set up as independent brokers. In the jury list of 1865 twelve brokers are listed. By
November 1870 the standing of brokers was high enough for a cricket match to
be arranged in which the bankers and brokers challenged the merchants. Chater, playing for the brokers, was wicket keeper. The merchants won by fourteen runs.50
By 1875 the number of brokers in the jury list had swelled to thirty-two and
there was some agitation from the aristocracy of the profession, ��the carriage brokers��, that their position was being jeopardized by the ��indefinite number of natives of both India and China who transact a large amount of brokerage business without assuming the title or reputation of regular brokers��. Demands were being made for an ordinance to protect the status of brokers.51 One of the first of the brokers was Thomas Cranmer Piccope [16Cii/9/4], an old-time clerk from Canton and the son of a clergyman. He had moved to Hong Kong in 1851. In 1861 he set up as a broker in Aberdeen Street, dying soon after aged forty-four
years and leaving a fortune of over $22,500.
Clerks and Assistants
The striving for upward mobility among the European community in Hong Kong perhaps accounts for the disappearance of clerks and the equivalent explosion in the number of assistants during this period. To be called an assistant denoted a higher status, the prospect of advancement to partner and the possibility of entering the Hong Kong Club. It is not surprising that many decided, when providing job descriptions for the jury list, that they preferred to describe themselves as assistants
rather than clerks. In the 1860 Jury List, out of the 270 names listed, there were 45 clerks. In the 1875 Jury List of 523 names, no less than 291 or approximately 58
percent of the total number of entries claimed to be assistants. The number of clerks listed in that year had dropped to just one solitary name, Edward Alford working for Jardine, Matheson & Co. Clerkships perhaps had been reserved for the raw youths, whose rowdy behaviour made them appear too immature to be considered for jury service, or for the Portuguese who were not listed for jury service for language reasons or due to the debased status of clerks. The position and pretensions of the clerk/assistant class of Hong Kong, ��which is becoming a daily increasing one��, was summed up in a letter to the China Mail, from A.B.C.:
I hardly think money-worship is the peculiar failing of the Hong Kong clerk, and to remind him of the lowness of his station at home, is hardly the way to
reduce that complacent, self-satisfied estimate of his aristocratic lineage and
dignity, which he is too apt to cherish in the colonies, where there are few
who find it worth their while to dispute the point �K. The large proportion
look forward in vain to the pleasures of partnership, ultimate position and
affluence. Clerks as a rule are not troubled with large balances at the bank,
and the price which they pay for their supposed wealth is the temptation to
be envious rather than selfish.52
Ten years or so later, when John Thompson was photographing his way round China, he has much the same to say about this group of assistants/clerks:
Nothing surprised me more in Hong Kong than the expensive way in which English assistants were housed, and the luxuries with which they were indulged. Indeed few more luxurious quarters were anywhere to be found than the ��junior messes�� of the wealthy British firms. There the unfledged youth, coming out from the simplicity of some rural home, was apt to develop into a man of epicurean tastes, a connoisseur in wines, and to become lavish in his expenditure; proud of his birthright, as a Briton; honest, hospitable, extravagant; despising meanness and, alas, thrift.53
Three assistants from this period found in the Cemetery are Henry Roberts [20/10/2], Richard Brewster Slate [5/3/35] and George Macalister [10/3/2]. Roberts died in 1868 aged twenty-nine and was the son of a London tax inspector
and an assistant at Gilman & Co. Slate, who died in 1867 aged twenty-six, was an
American, probably from the well-known New York family of boat builders. He was listed as assistant to Gassett & Co. Macalister is an example of the trusted assistants employed by Jardine Matheson who, almost without exception, came from the Highlands of Scotland. Macalister was probably from Stornoway, capital of the Hebrides Islands, as he left his estate to a brother living there. By 1848 Macalister was working as a clerk on the Bomanjee Hormusjee, Jardine��s opium-receiving ship. By 1855, he had established himself ashore in Jardine��s main
office. On New Year��s Eve 1856 he thwarted a daring attack carried out by a gang of about forty ruffians on the shops of an opium dealer and a silversmith at East
Point. A gingall or Chinese cannon had been trained on the door of Jardine��s
establishment. When the Indian sepoy guards burst out, it was fired, killing one
of the sepoys and wounding two others, thus preventing the other sepoys from coming to the rescue. Reinforcements, however, in the form of Macalister��s Manila boatmen turned the tide, forcing the thieves to beat an orderly retreat carrying with them their plunder and their dead and wounded.54 Macalister died
in September 1868, aged thirty-five years.
Chapter 17 Hong Kong Becomes Cosmopolitan
The British no longer had the monopoly of influence in China. The French, German, Russian and American nationals were taking advantage of the weakness of the Chinese Empire to set up their own concessionary areas and trading outposts in various treaty ports. Hong Kong no longer occupied the premier position on the China Coast. Other treaty ports were growing in importance
with Shanghai rapidly outstripping Hong Kong in wealth and power. With the
appointment of Sir Frederick Elgin as consular representative in Peking, the governor of Hong Kong lost his remaining influence over events in the treaty ports. By 1865, the Supreme Court for trying cases that originated in China or Japan had been moved to Shanghai. Hong Kong was no longer in the same sense the gateway to China.
Hong Kong had always possessed a wide mix of nationalities, with men from Macau, Malaya and India living side by side with those from Manila and of course the large majority from China. But the British had always kept political and economic power in their own hands. As regards economic power, this was set to change. A multi-national, multi-cultural band of talented and enterprising men found that Hong Kong offered them good business opportunities and decided to stay. They united in giving to Hong Kong something it had seldom previously found, commitment to its interests and its future. They regarded Hong Kong as home for themselves and their heirs. To them, Hong Kong��s needs were important and they were ready to donate time and money to their adopted home, particularly
in the fields of health and education.
These men included among their numbers, Germans, Armenians from Macedonia, Jews from Baghdad, Indians and Parsees from Calcutta, Bombay and Isfahan, as well as the Portuguese from Macau. The Portuguese were numerous and wealthy enough to open the new Club Lusitano in December 1866 with a grand ball. The club boasted the best theatre in the territory and was used by drama groups and touring opera companies for many years to come. This group were joined by an increasing number of wealthy Chinese businessmen,