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and debtors from Australia, as well as mercenaries and American deserters. The luckless ones became in time indistinguishable from beachcombers, the poor whites of the Colony.
At a rough estimate, about a third of the total European population (excluding soldiers, sailors, and seamen) would have been classified as working or lower class by the resident European middle class of merchants and government officials, and were treated as such by those implacably class-conscious Britons. In Hong Kong, the 'two nations'—of rich and poor Europeans—were not driven into social amalgamation by the fear of a common fate as aliens on the shores of far-away Cathay. A government clerk, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1850s, complained that:
the exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of 'caste' that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain more luxuriant growth in China. The little community, far from being a band of brothers, is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their immediate circle... Even here (England) one sees a somewhat similar state of society in many of our small country towns, where everyone knows everybody, and the minutest details of your neighbours' daily lives, manners and conversation, are noted with watchful assiduity. Anyone who has had the happiness to spend some time in one of these rural paradises can form a pretty good notion of the state of matters in an English colony, only that things are much worse.16
In 1885, an American found the same conditions prevailing, though possibly in a more exaggerated form:
To an American, it seems extremely silly for wholesale merchants and their clerks to hold themselves, socially, above the retail merchants and their clerks, regardless of the amount of business they do, and their moral and intellectual standing... Distance from Britain, far from loosening ties that bound Britons into a rigid world of class distinctions, tended to tighten them.17 The effects of these divisions will be discussed in a later section.
SOCIAL LIFE OF THE EUROPEAN LOWER CLASS.
Until the cession of the Kowloon peninsula in 1860, most lower-class Europeans lived in the city of Victoria, especially in the streets
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and debtors from Australia, as well as mercenaries and American deserters. The luckless ones became in time indistinguishable from beachcombers, the poor whites of the Colony.
At a rough estimate, about a third of the total European popu- lation (excluding soldiers, sailors, and seamen) would have been classified as working or lower class by the resident European mid- dle class of merchants and government officials, and were treated as such by those implacably class conscious Britons. In Hong Kong, the 'two nations'—of rich and poor Europeans were not driven into social amalgamation by the fear of a common fate as aliens on the shores of far-away Cathay. A government clerk, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1850s, complained that:
the exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of 'caste' that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain more luxuriant growth in China. The little community, far from being a band of brothers, is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their immediate circle... Even here (England) one sees a some- what similar state of society in many of our small country towns, where every one knows every body, and the minutest details of your neighbours' daily lives, manners and conversation, are noted with watchful assiduity. Anyone who has had the hap- piness to spend some time in one of these rural paradises can form a pretty good notion of the state of matters in an English colony, only that things are much worse.16
In 1885, an American found the same conditions prevailing. though possibly in a more exaggerated form:
To an American, it seems extremely silly for wholesale mer- chants and their clerks to hold themselves, socially, above the retail merchants and their clerks, regardless of the amount of business they do, and their moral and intellectual standing ... Distance from Britain, far from loosening ties that bound Britons into a rigid world of class distinctions, tended to tighten them."7 The effects of these divisions will be discussed in a later section.
SOCIAL LIFE OF THE EUROPEAN LOWER CLASS.
Until the cession of the Kowloon peninsula in 1860, most lower class Europeans lived in the city of Victoria, especially in the streets
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