There is no trade of any noticeable extent in Hong Kong ...cThe principal mercantile firms are those engaged in the opium trade ... which they frankly admit is the only trade Hong Kong will ever possess ... There is scarcely a firm in the island but would ... be glad to get back half the money they have expended in the colony, and retire from the place ... There does not appear the slightest probability that, under any circumstances, Hong Kong will ever become a place of trade ... it is worse than folly to persist in a course begun in error, and which, if continued, must eventually end in disappointment and in national loss and degradation.
THE DAVIS RAID
Martin laid the blame for this at Pottinger's.feet, for his encourage-ment of 'absurd and ruinous projects', which 'none but the wildest theorists could have projected or entertained'.6
Probably not too distressed by this trenchant criticism of his prede-cessor, which would prove a useful justification if things went badly, Davis forwarded Martin's report to the Colonial Office on 20 August 1844 with only the mildest of disclaimers: 'It is fair, however, to Mr Martin to observe that his remarks were written after only a few weeks' residence ... I could easily point out errors in regard to facts and conclusions (did I deem it necessary to dwell upon the subject) ... I cannot give the sanction of my opinion of its general tenor.'
This put the cat among the pigeons in Whitehall. Aberdeen had never been happy about the colony, and was, in the climate of financial stringency obtaining in London, very willing to consider its sup-pression. It would be easy enough, and not without political attractions, to blame the Whigs for having foisted Hong Kong upon the British Empire, and to negotiate its return to China -with appropriate com-pensation. And to a government committed to reducing taxation, and at the same time achieving large budget surpluses, any suggestion of waste was anathema. A justification from Davis was therefore demanded, which, if Hong Kong were to survive as a British colony, had better be a good one. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Stanley (later Prime Minister, as the Earl of Derby), accordingly wrote to Davis on 17 December 1844: 'It is evident that unless that gentleman's [Martin's] views be altogether incorrect, they afford ample motive for deliberation before Her Majesty's Government authorize incurring the very large civil and military expenditure which has been proposed in contemplation of Hong Kong becoming a permanentBritish settlement, the resort of a large population, both European and Asiatic, and the centre and principal seat of an extensive and valuable commerce.'
Once more the colony's future hung in the balance, but, by the time Stanley's dispatch reached Hong Kong, Davis was able to reply in a more optimistic tone, demolishing Martin's case in a skilfully worded dispatch: 'Mr Martin wrote under a feeling of strong prejudice,founded in apprehensions for his personal health, regarding which he is remarkably sensitive, and on account of which he has had more leave of absence than any individual in the service.' Mortality, although still a cause for serious concern, had decreased somewhat: of over 350 government employees and prisoners on the sick list, only nine had
A HISTORY OF HO.NG KONG
died in the previous six months, one of these by violence. A programme of building barracks had been put in hand, and was already proving beneficial to the l]ealth of the military -although a mortality of over 15 per cent from illness was still no advertisement for the colony's salubrity, however strongly Davis defended it. The climate of Hong Kong was 'precisely that of Macao ... where for many years I and a number of others enjoyed as good health as in England'. As for Chu-san, which Martin assiduously canvassed as an alternative settlement, 'if the Chinese fulfil their engagements, I do not see how this is now to be done'. In conclusion, nothing was so bad that an able and experi-enced administrator -such as Davis -could not put it right: 'Time alone is required for the development of this colony, and for the correc-tion of some evils which may have hindered its early progress.'
Lord Aberdeen was not entirely convinced by the Governor's argu-ments, especially when it was rumoured that the French intended to take Chusan. Many would have agreed with Martin's description of that island's superior qualities, which made the rumour 'particularly irritating since the Government were well aware that they would have done better to have obtained Chusan, rather than Hong Kong'. Aber-deen complained on 21 October 1845g: 'Anything would be better than ridicule so overwhelming' that would result if the French succeeded.Davis's assurances were therefore accepted by London only with sev-7
eral pinches of salt, and when Martin's attacks continued, sufficient concern was aroused to make a House of Commons inquiry necessary.
However unsatisfactory some of Davis's aides might be, the task of constructing a colonial administration had to be attempted, since the simplistic direct rule adopted by Pottinger could not be allowed to continue (in fact, owing to lack of a quorum, neither the Legislative nor the Executive Council met before the arrival of Davis). The intention of the Colonial Office was that a pattern for Crown Colony government already developed in such colonies as Ceylon should be adapted for use in Hong Kong. According to this model the Governor was assisted by an Executive Council, acting as a Privy Council or cabinet, composed of his own departmental heads. It had only consultative powers, and was subordinate to the Governor: its only power was to have requests recorded in the minutes, and to oblige the Governor to explain himself to London if he should act against the advice of a majority of the Council.
The other arm of government, the Legislative Council, was initially responsible for issuing regulations not only for the colony but for 'all
THE DAVIS RAID
British subjects with in the Dominions of the. Emperor of China and within any ship or vessel . . . not more than Ioo miles from the coast of China'. Only after 1853 was the Legislative Council's responsibility confined to Hong Kong.' The British community in the colony expected to be allowed an active participation in the Legislative Council, as was the custom in those settlement colonies where the white population soon became a majority, such as New Zealand and the Canadian and Australian states, or where the non-whites could be simply ignored, as in South Africa. There was never any prospect in Hong Kong of the Europeans -under pressure the Hong Kong British were prepared to extend representation to Indians and to other Europeans -beinganything but a tiny minority; and no British government was willing to rely upon the disinterestPdness of that community towards the Chinese majority. The alternative of allowing the Chinese to participate was not even considered: the reins of power were to be kept in Whitehall's hands, and delegated only to the Governor and his colleagues; it was not until 185 o that any non-officials were allowed Legislative Council membership -and then they were, and so remained until very recently, extremely carefully selected. Hong Kong was to continue as authori-tarian an administration as any Chinese government, but the final authority was to be the law, rather than individual whim.
The dreadful sight of an Englishman being hanged
Martin doubtless exaggerated the hardships of life in the colony, but some disillusionment on the part of the merchants in Hong Kong was justified. The possibility of trading at the newly opened treaty ports was, initially, more seductive, and it soon became apparent that Shang-hai was considerably the most likely to warrant a diversification of effort. (One benefit of the Treaty of Nanking for the Chinese govern-ment was the regular collection of customs, the records of which afford a measure for determining the flow of trade. In 1844-5 Shanghai was already the largest of the new ports, but was collecting only 5 per cent of the revenues of Canton: within six years this had risen to 80 per cent.) Both silk and tea sold better there than in Hong Kong, while the import trade rose from forty-four foreign vessels in 1844 to over four hundred ten years later. Tea, which had been the mainstay of the Canton export trade, failed to come to Hong Kong, either remaining at Canton or moving to those northern ports nearer the growing areas.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
At Hong Kong the provisions of Article XIII of the Bogue Treaty, which discouraged the junk trade, were biting, and imports remained sluggish: 189,25, of tonnage entering in 1844, rising to only 229,465 three years later.8
Conditions at the time were described in the gloomiest terms:
This remote and completely unimportant settlement ... derives its importance only from its being a Diplomatic and Military Station ... mercantile houses now reduced to ten or twelve ...sbuildings unoccupied ... Canton and Shanghai are the principal (almost the exclusive) Marts in China for Imports from Europe and India, as well as for Exports from China ... the sad mistake committed by Sir Henry Pottinger in choosing for a British Settle-ment an island as barren as HongKong.9
Gutzlaff was instructed to enquire into the reasons for the unsatisfac-tory growth rate, and identified piracy as the most important. Certainly pirates were numerous and daring: in 1844 a military convoy was ambushed at Stanley and members of the British Army escort killed in a successful payroll robbery. Intelligence of such likely hauls was easily available since pirates, many of whom doubled as fishermen and traders, were able to pick up information, at a modest price, from government servants in the port. The Royal Navy was at that time disinclined to seek out pirates (this policy later .hanged, partly at least due to generous arrangements in respect of prize money), citing lack of suitable craft, the difficulty of distinguishing potential pirates from marginally more lawful traders, and the subsequent possibility of clashes with mandarin boats. Davis commissioned an armed ship to control piracy, which did some useful work, although only scratching at the surface of the problem. When pirates were caught they were sternly dealt with; James Legge, who came to the colony in 1843, found 'the most wretched experience' of his life was 'visiting pirates and other murderers under sentence of death' .10
Nor had things much improved in Victoria, which Legge found with 'next to no police guardianship'. All the traders set armed guards in their premises, and Europeans went about at night carrying pistols. Reporting later to a Select Committee of the House of Commons Alexander Matheson described the situation as it then was: 'I have seen thirty, forty, or even fifty men come armed; I have seen two men shot at our own premises. We shot two men one night there.'11 At a
THE DAVIS RAID
more domestic level one Mary Anne Le Foy had a narrow escape when she found 'fifty Chinamen in her bedroom. She jumped out of bed and without dressing ran down ... to fetch the guard. But before she got back the robbers had decamped ... Poor Mary Anne lost the clothes she was going to put on -but they had a great fright. These affairs are constantly occurring at Hong Kong where the Chinese are most expert and daring robbers.'12
Robert Montgomery Martin is not the most reliable of witnesses, but his description of the Chinese community is supported from more unbiased sources: 'It is literally true, that after three years and a half of uninterrupted settlement, there is not one respectable Chinese inhabitant ... There is in fact, a continual shifting of a Bedouin sort of population, whose migratory, predatory; gambling, and dissolute habits, utterly unfit them for continuous industry, and render them not only useless but highly injurious subjects in the attempt to form a new colony. There are no other inhabitants.' Gutzlaff concurred: 'The most numerous class are from Whampoa: many of them are of the worst characters, and ready to commit any atrocity ... It is very natural that depraved, idle and bad characters ... should flock to the colony where money can be made ... The moral standard of the people ...is of the lowest description.'13 Bishop George Smith, asked whether'the population of Hong Kong [was] much lower in character than the population upon the Coast', answered, 'Yes. They are the refuse of the population.'14 The reliable and knowledgeable Samuel Fearon15explained: 'The shelter and protection afforded by the presence of our fleet soon made our shores the resort of outlaws, opium smugglers, and, indeed, of all persons who had made themselves obnoxious to the Chinese laws.'
In an attempt to counteract this Davis attempted to attract 'more respectable Chinese', and granted some East Point lots to 'men of substance' from Fukien. On mature consideration of the potential of Hong Kong these gentlemen declined. Fearon blamed the Hakkas, immigrants from the north (the name has the same meaning as the German Fremde -both visitor and foreigner), for the crimes: they wandered, 'unrespected, wherever gain may call them. The unsettled state of the colony, and the vast amount of crime during its infancy afford abundant proofs of the demoralizing effects of their presence.' He added that 'Hong Kong has been invested by numbers of the Triad Society, the members of which ... perpetrate the grossest enor-
mities.'16
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
A distinct atmosphere of the Wild West prevailed during the forma-tive years of the colony. One Chinese shot after dark, presumably engaged in some.II,lalfeasance, was laconically noted as 'dead of a pistol shot': case closed. And in 1845 the census showed that there were twenty-six brothels compared to only twenty-five families. Major -now promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel -Caine, wh9 had been given the post of Colonial Secretary when Frederick Bruce left in 1846, was succeeded as Magistrate by Charles Batten Hillier, previously mate of a merchant ship, whom Caine 'treated like a son'. Hillier was, as Caine had been, 'a noted flogger', but a British administration faced real difficulties in dealing with Chinese crime. Davis was able to recruit a Inspector of the Metropolitan police, Charles May, to organize a Hong Kong police, but the shortage of funds resulted in an under-strength force of very dubious quality. Since most of the police were either European or Indian, Chinese being recruited only in 1847, and tli.en in small numbers, the language difficulty made effective policing even more problematical. Those few interpreters available had now to be spread among the treaty ports -Thom, for example, went to Amoy. Fearon only spent a few months as Registrar-General before being appointed Professor of Chinese at King's College, London, at the very early age of twenty-six. Gutzlaff was the only experienced Chinese interpreter in Hong Kong, although from 1844 he was joined by Daniel Caldwell, the Assistant Superintendent of Police. And Gutzlaff was not the most reliable of men: when he eventually did leave China, Forth Rouen, the French Consul at Macao, wrote to the Quai d'Orsay to warn that he was bound for Paris, where it was hoped that he would not be taken seriously, since he, 'in enumerating his many evangelical works in China, and requesting pecuniary assistance ... is a man of considerable inventiveness, who has always sought to enrich himself ... I regret to say that there is not a word of truth in the tales of this Sinologue.'17
In his initial proclamation Charles Elliot had announced that the Chinese in Hong Kong would be governed by the laws and customs of China. At Nanking Pottinger had, in principle, agreed both to this and to the Hong Kong Chinese coming under the jurisdiction of a district magistrate in Kowloon. This was not a policy to which London would assent: Hong Kong having been ceded to Britain, its inhabitants could not be allowed to remain under the jurisdiction of China. It was however acknowledged that English laws and customs should not immediately be imposed upon the Chinese inhabitants. Similar diffi-
THE DAVIS RAID
culties had been experienced in India, wher. it had taken decades to abolish even such objectionable practices as suttee. In minor matters it was at least tacitly agreed to let the Chinese manage things them-selves, with some attempts at formalization. Within quite broad limits, legislation was therefore left to the men on the spot, and specifically to the Governor.
Suitable selection of punishments presented a particular problem.
Incarceration, with regular meals and without torture, was thought to be no discouragement to Chinese malefactors. Ordinance No. 10 of
1844 therefore provided that the courts 'may sentence anyone of Chinese origin to undergo such punishment in conformity with the usages of China as has hitherto been usually inflicted on natives�P of China committing offences in the colony'. These traditional punish-ments were generally a fine of $ 15 or twenty strokes with the rattan, also, admitted Mr Hawes, defending the ordinance on behalf of the Foreign Office in the House of Commons on 25 January 1847, 'the loss of their tails' -considered a great humiliation. But 'the most ingenious barbarities that could be devised', characteristic of Chinese law, were not allowed. In other colonies such punishments, which were not in accordance with the laws of England and which were carried out in public, would not have been permitted, but the Colonial Office had reluctantly conceded that this was a special case, 'one of those insoluble problems that flow out of the anomalous position of Hong Kong' to which 'no sagacity can discover a path to which plausible and well-founded objections may not be raised'.18
The foreign community hardly presented a good example to the Chinese population: 'A Resident', commenting on the calm of Hong Kong evenings in 1845, wrote: 'probably also the nature of the pursuits of most, have a tendency to encourage seclusion. Our military gentle-men are the same all over the world.' Bishop Smith was more forth-right, and described 'the frequent spectacle of European irreligion ...cscenes frequently occur in the public streets, and in the interior of houses, which are calculated to place the countrymen of Missionaries in an unfavourable aspect before the native mind', but he did not consider that the police treatment of Chinese helped matters. They were 'treated as a degraded race of people . . . not permitted to go out into the public streets after a certain hour in the evening, without a lantern and a written note from their European employer'. Insensitivity amounting sometimes to brutality towards the Chinese population remained common in Hong Kong, but the rule of law prevailed to an
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
extent unknown elsewhere in Asia. In capital cases the laws and the penalties were equal for all. Europeans were tried, flogged and even hanged, in public:, in the same way and for the same offences as Chinese. The first such execution to provide 'the dreadful sight of an Englishman being hanged in Hongkong' was carried out on Charles Ingwood, a seaman from H.M.S. Driver, on 3July 1845, for the murder of a baker named Wilkinson. To make matters worse, lngwood suffered 'the further indignity of being hanged with the Chinaman Chun Afoon', which did not, however, seem to worry lngwood unduly. American observers were particularly impressed by the even-handedness of colonial law in capital cases, which was stronglyin contrast to the habits particularly of the Southern states of the Union: 'It is only in the colonies of Hong Kong and Macao that a European would be executed for the murder of a Chinese,' one
commented.19
It was the less serious cases that caused the problems. Davis's pre-vious experience on the Select Committee at Canton had amply proved to him the difficulty of controlling the European private merchants there, and things were now further complicated by the dispersion of the merchants throughout the treaty ports. Under the terms of the colonial constitution such persons were equally subject to the jurisdic-tion of the courts of Hong Kong and bound by the ordinances issued by the Governor in his capacity as Superintendent of Trade; but no police were available at the treaty ports to enforce such regulations. The most obstreperous troublemakers were naturally the crews of the opium-smuggling ships. Temple Layton, the Consul at Amoy,described their ships as 'the resort of Thieves, Robbers, Pimps and Prostitutes with few exceptions ... there is a close connection between the vilest of the vile Chinese population and our opium ships'.20
The threat of misbehaving British subjects was taken so seriouslythat Pottinger, not a nervous man, had a warship stationed at each of the ports. This was not to protect British interests, but in order that 'evil disposed subjects of her Majesty shall be effectively restrained from riotous and disorderly conduct'.21 The system was not generally effective, but what the presence of the warships did provide, however, was a something-more-than-moral force to the arguments of the consuls with the local Chinese authorities. The lightly armed gunboats enabled consular officers both to coerce the mandarins and to off er them substantial support in suppressing disorders. These compara-tively pacific local settlements were the origin of the unduly maligned
THE DAVIS RAID
'mgunboat diplomacy', which was often suc_cessful in preventing far worse troubles. Gunboats were however no substitute for regular polic-ing, as the Compton case (pp. 178-9) proved. Lord Aberdeen had piously trusted that the normal British respect for law would go at least some way to remedy this deficiency, but 'nothing but the extreme hazard of exempting our fellow subjects in China from an effective local control would justify such an innovation'.22
Sulphur, pitch; beer or porter -and opium
Far more worrying to Lord Aberdeen's colleagues was the likely cost of their new colony, estimated by Mr Martin, whose views as Colonial Treasurer had to be taken reasonably seriously however intemperately expressed, at upwards of half a million pounds a year -an alarmingfigure, though it proved to be grossly exaggerated. While some allow-ance might be made for the colony's serving as a depot and centre for support of trade throughout China, the greater part of its costs must be matched by local revenue, and any attempt to do this was certain to encounter bitter resistance. Davis had admitted the difficulties of raising income in his April 1845 dispatch, citing piracy and Article XIII of the Bogue Treaty ('an injury that nothing but a fresh convention can remedy'). He had been able to contradict Martin's prediction 'in his peculiar province of treasurer' only by instancing a rise from his estimate of �G5,000 to an actual sum of �Gr3,ooo -hardly significant in the context of Martin's figures -in that most important source of revenue, the sale of land. Although Sir John believed the prospects of the colony to be good ('The progress made during the last winter is quite striking . . . the capabilities of the place, with all its natural difficulties, will altogether surpass the first expectation'), the income from land had shrunk as the general disillusionment had grown.
The merchants did not share their Governor's optimism, being thoroughly discontented. They had come to Hong Kong for one reason only, to make money, and they were not doing sc,. A deputationinformed the Colonial Secretary on 29 August 1845: 'Hong Kong has no trade at all and is the mere place of residence of the Government and its officers with a few British merchants and a very scanty poor population.' The Economist of 8 August 1846 agreed: 'Hong Kong is nothing but a depot for a few opium smugglers, soldiers, officers and men-of-war's men.' Piracy and crime might contribute to the poor
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
level of profitability, but the root cause was the overblown expectations of the merchants themselves.
When at last China was opened for trade by the Treaty of Nanking, enthusiastic exporters, primarily in Britain, but also in America and Australia, began flooding the market with their products, not all of which succeeded in finding ready buyers. Mr John Ford, of Holyrood Glassworks in Edinburgh, sent out a large speculative.consignment of glassware, which languished in Jardine's godown for years. It would eventually be sold, Alexander Matheson assured Mr Ford, but 'The total absence of demand arising from the smallness of the community and the custom of sending home for supplies' would make it a slow business. Boulcotts of Wellington, early New Zealand exporters, fared no better: 'We are sorry the slates and soap are still on hand, the former being quite unsuitable for Eastern houses, which are so much exposed to Hurricanes, and the stock of the latter in this place being much greater than can be used for years!' Oddly enough, considering the accusations of drunkenness that were to be thrown around, wines and spirits were in only moderate demand. There was some success with sherry, but Marsala was, as it were, a drug on the market: even the military refused it. Mr Jameson Hunter of Fenchurch Street had to be advised that 'Everything in our power�Phas been done to get rid of it [the wine], even so much as tendering it to the commissariat, but all in vain ... We have for years past urged on our friends the impolicy of sending out large quantities of Wines and such articles to a country like this, where no demand exists for them beyond the few hundred individuals composing the foreign community ... These remarks will prepare you for our dissuading you in the strongest terms from sending out here such goods as Brandy, Currants, Macaroni, Sulphur, Pitch, Beer or Porter.'23
Those traders, like Matheson, who had bought land at the first sales on the assumption that it was to be on either a long lease or freehold, had spent large sums on building, and when leases were fixed at only seventy-five years they found themselves left with an expensive invest-ment. They had paid what were considered full prices for the land: one firm of merchants at the Select Committee of 1847 testified that they had sent a partner from Macao to the first sale advertised byCaptain Elliott: 'We thought that for a sea lot 50 or 60 $ ground rent would be quite ample: but when it went up to the price that it did, we gave up all notion of having land there' (Item 1352). Alexander Mathe-son suggested that they would be satisfied with the present rent if a
THE DAVIS RAID
999-year lease were granted, but 'no British merchant would spendc�Gio,ooo on a house if the ground lease was .mly for seventy-five years'c(Item 2175). It was true that large sums of private money had beencdisbursed: Lieutenant Bernard Collinson of the Sappers, who in 1845cproduced the first, very fine, map of Hong Kong, and probably didcmost of the work in designing Flagstaff House, wrote to his parentscin England on 26 January of that year: 'If you leave Hong Kong for acmonth, where you left a rock you find a drawing room in the heightcof Indian luxury -and a road where there was 20 feet of water.'24 Captain Arthur Cunynghame wrote at the same time: 'The town itselfcis long and straggling ... It would be difficult to state its limits, as itcis daily increasing in a most surprising manner; what, on my firstcarrival, was scarcely more than a crowd of bamboo huts, has nowcbecome a substantially built town ... The buildings, which cannot failcto attract the attention of the most casual observer, as being far morecmagnificent ... are the ... "godowns" of Messrs Matheson and Jar-dine, the merchant princes of the Far East. Immediately above themcare two handsome bungalows, or summer residences, belonging to thecsame proprietors.'25
As well as making maps, the Royal Engineers had been busy on roads, drains, harbour facilities and public buildings, not to everyone's pleasure: 'The innovators ... dig drains, lay out streets and give names to places, establish London[?] from A-Z, keep lamplighters and lamps to light, and won't look at the old warriors at all [who vow] that every-thing was perfect before the "Queen's people", as they call them, came.'26�E But facilities were still few by comparison with those of Canton and Macao, and Cunynghame did not much like the colony: 'The climate of Hong Kong for nine months of the year, is hot and oppressive . . . the want of substantial buildings, libraries, billiard rooms, or other places of resort, render a residence there, to a person who has not constant employment, an extremely monotonous existence.'
Until the dissatisfaction with the leases could be remedied, which it eventually was in 1848, there was little likelihood of a buoyant income from land rents or auctions. Local unhappiness was increased by the high cost of living: the Canton, now the Hong Kong, Register reported that the only British hotel in Victoria 'is conducted on a small but respectable scale ... prices are necessarily high: board and lodging for a single person without wines or beer is $2 per diem'. Cunynghame complained that 'the rent of a house of four rooms is there constantly
1270 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
known to be 60 or 70 $ per month ... and the price of anything like luxuries equally high'. He instanced an advertisement: 'The gentry of Hong Kong ... can, be furnished with fine English mutton (at one half dollar per pound), by sending their orders to "The Briton's Boast".'
Nothing in John Davis's character or experience helped him concili-ate the disappointed colonists: cool and aloof, short, and personally undistinguished, he lacked Pottinger's bravura. His interest in Chinese literature, and his ability to write passably good Latin verse ('Hie, in remotis sol ubi rupibus Frondes per altas mollius incidit .. .'), did little to commend him to so raw a community, which 'considered Rupees and dollars of a great deal more consequence'. Alexander Matheson complained of cronyism: 'I am disgusted beyond measure just now at finding from Cleverly that Davis has named all the streets in Victoria after his personal friends ... and not even a lane has been named after a merchant ... Just fancy "Shelley St.'' named after a swindler etc. etc. How much more natural Jardine St., Dent St., Gibbs St., etc. would have sounded. No! the devil of a dollar shall I lay out in Hong Kong except for the sake of a profitable investment.'27
Sir John began his term inauspiciously by having 'a row with every-one and is therefore not generally popular'.28 In an effort to establish some degree of control in the colony, Davis, using the wide powers he had been given, issued an ordinance which was announced (in October 1844) only a fortnight before it was due to go into effect, prescribing compulsory registration for all residents -even the British. This was immediately the object of furious attack: 'a poll tax was to be levied not only on Chinese vagabonds but on all the' inhabitants without exception ... The only distinction between a British merchant and a Chinese coolie was the enactment that the former should pay five dollars and the latter one dollar a year.' If Eitel, forty years later, still found the suggestion horrifying, the reaction of the Europeans at the time was hysterical: 'They rose up like one man in wrathful indig-nation, feeling their self-respect, their national honour, the liberty of the subject trampled underfoot.'29
Remonstrances against 'a measure unexampled in modem British legislation, fraught with great and certain mischief ... which, if forced into operation, will reduce apparently the Island of Hong Kong to the level of a Penal Settlement'30 poured in upon the Governor, to be answered by accusations that the merchants had 'by unworthy prac-tices, tampered with an ignorant and unfortunate Chinese population by instigating them to passive resistance'. It might be that this was
THE DAVIS RAID
true, since notices were posted by the compradores of the European Hongs urging resistance to the proposal, but the Chinese needed little persuasion. In the first action of a sort that was later to prove most effective, they simply downed tools and went on strike, some three thousand actually leaving the colony.
These reactions proved that although the Governor's authority was in theory unlimited, the European and Chinese communities had itin their power to prevent .his taking any measure of which they disapproved sufficiently strongly. The ordinance was accordingly amended, exempting everyone from registration who might complain ('all civil, military and naval employees, all members of the learned professions, merchants, shopkeepers, householders, tenants of Crown Property and persons having an income of $500 a year' -which can have left few Europeans exposed), and cancelling the tax on the Chinese. This was not enough to satisfy the editor of the Friend of China, who wrote on 25 January 1845, when the worst of the tumult was over: 'Whatever may be the opinion of His Excellency on the point, we fear that the registration ordinance will call forth a rebuke from the colonial office, which, from a proud man, will at once demand an immediate resignation.'
In an attempt to make up for the disappointing returns from land, Davis had to scratch around for other taxes of almost any kind, which eventually included duties on auctions, marriages, funerals, carriages, billiard tables, alcohol and tobacco and domestic rates. These, especi-ally the last, drove the colonists to complain to the Secretary of State, William Gladstone, of 'harassing taxation' being 'arbitrarily' levied without representation -a time-honoured cry. They demanded a municipal council, which Gladstone refused on the grounds that 'the English minority could hardly be entrusted' with the powers that this would give them over the Chinese. The Hong Kong residents argued that Britain had taken the place as a strategic base, and the Services ought therefore to pay the expenses of running it; Gladstone rejected that too, insisting, not quite accurately, that Hong Kong had been acquired 'solely and exclusively with a view to commercial interest'.31
The subjects of registration and taxation refused to go away, and remained persistent bones of contention between the merchants and the home government. The merchants had better success with their objection to Davis's proposed duty on imported wines and spirits, which was unanimously opposed by the Legislative Council (all officials), who persisted in carrying their opposition to the Colonial
A HISTORY OF HO"NG KONG
Secretary. Gladstone upheld their objections, and the Governor had to withdraw the proposal.
A similar row fullowed Davis's decision to subcontract the right to deal in opium for consumption in Hong Kong, the 'opium farm' which Montgomery Martin was bitterly opposed to and made a resigning issue. Davis had overcome the distaste for the drug he had shown to the Select Committee ten years previously, and raised money first by selling the sole right to distribute opium in the colony, and later by a system of licensing premises and retailers. Whitehall on this occasion supported him, but the experiment was only moderately successful, and aroused the particular ire of the drug importers. Opium sales in the rest of China, however, were rising rapidly.
Immediately upon his arrival Davis had been introduced by Pottinger to Ch'i-ying, and had at once raised 'the important and at the same time delicate question of legalizing the opium trade, repeating that such a wise and happy measure would remove every existing chance of unpleasant discussion ... provide an ample revenue for the Empire, and check to the same eJ1.tent the consumption of a commodity which at present was absolutely untaxed'. He appealed to psychology: 'The disposition of men attaches value to what is difficult of attainment ...cIn China, since opium was prohibited, it has greedily been purchased . . . In England, where it has always been lawful . . . men generally dislike it.' But arguments were in vain; it was not that Ch'i-ying was averse to finding a solution, since he had earlier suggested a lump payment in lieu of duty on the drug, which Pottinger had found imprac-ticable. Ch'i-ying now had to turn down Davis's proposals flat, saying that 'he dared not originate such a discussion'. Reporting this to Lord Aberdeen on 13 June 1844, Davis expressed the hope that he might yet succeed: 'Were it my good fortune at some future period to announce to your Lordship that the trade had been legalized, I should consider myself amply repaid for my present residence in this country.'32 But some arrangement had to be made. An understanding was accordingly reached, which although informal was none the less well understood.
The campaign against the use of opium had always been patchy, with very occasional savage sorties punctuating peaceful periods of blind-eye-turning. The latter now became the rule, and prosecutions 'a pretense'.33 Throughout the whole of China in 1843 only twenty-four drug offenders -mostly users -were remanded for trial; in 1845 sixty were convicted, but sentencing was held over; in 1846 nine cases
THE DAVIS RAID
were held for trial: in 1848 eight, of which seven were from Peking. Confiscations, when they were made, were measured in ounces. This was at a time when the opium imports from India alone, according to
W.H. Mitchell, who reported on the trade in December 1850, averaged over forty thousand chests a year -between three and four thousand tons, to which must be added the Turkish and the home-grown opium, about which only guesses can be made.
Needless to say there was therefore no attempt on the part of the Chinese authorities to suppress imports; this was actually agreed in writing by Ch'i-ying in 1842: 'Whether the merchant vessels of the various countries bring opium or not, China will not need to enquire, or to take any proceedings with regard to it'34 -than which it is difficult to get closer to legalizltion. Thoughtful Chinese were saddened by what they appreciated was a condemnation of their own society:
For the past several years, we have wanted to stop the people from smoking opium. But the people have not complied. This is an age in which servants adamantly squat on their haunches ...swhile descendants beat their grandfathers. Even if the English neither encroached upon nor rebelled against us, but rather anxiously sought to submit and pay tribute, China would still be disgraced and miserable.35
For his part, Pottinger had agreed to ban British ships from all but the ports opened by the Treaty, and from sailing beyond latitude 32 degrees North (just north of Shanghai). In order to reinforce his proclamation the Foreign Office secured an Order in Council to this effect. Pottinger believed that this was no less than what was 'due to the China government to enforce the prohibition', but the cynicalJames Matheson wrote that the ban was not intended to be taken seriously, but was considered 'a great joke', something to keep 'the Saints' at home content.
But the Royal Navy did not 'for a moment suppose that a British Minister would issue proclamations without the intention to act upon them', and in April 1843 Captain Charles Hope, commanding at Chusan, arrested a Jardine Matheson ship, Vixen. The opium traders remonstrated vigorously to Pottinger in a most extraordinary communi-cation, graciously conceding that 'they would be always ready to obey, as far as their duty to their constituents and they themselves will admit [my italics] any legal regulations that may be laid down'.36 If ever mercantile
1 74 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
arrogance deserved one of Sir Henrye's fizzers, this surely did, but nothing of the sort ensued. He knew too well the value of the opium income to India, and the implications of the agreement with Ch'i-ying. The unfortunate Captain Hope was therefore disowned and sent back to England. The Services protested, but even Wellington's backing could not alter matters: the opium interest was too strong for any government, British or Chinese, to oppose. Pottinger did feel that Hope was entitled to an explanation, and wrote a revealing letter (secret and confidential) to Admiral Parker, copied to Hope. The Plenipotenti-ary explained that he had 'constantly' raised the opium question with 'His Excellency the Viceroy [of Fukien] who roundly admitted I wasquite right, but said, as it pleased the Emperor to disallow the traffic', he could do no more than promise 'that the Chinese Authorities should not trouble themselves to inquire what Vessels brought opium or which did not: and that their business would be to see that the Soldiery, andthe People of China, did not purchase the drug'.37
After this hiccup things settled down. No officials, British or Chinese, would interfere with the opium traders, but neither would the smugglers benefit from official protection. Their ships were banned from entry into the ports under consular control, which only incom-moded them insofar as they were therefore more exposed to pirate attacks. Their habitual mooring stations were however openly recog-nized, described in sailing directions, and even occasionally moved to comply with the advice of the local mandarins. The legal traders and the smugglers were strictly separated; different vessels had to be used for legitimate and contraband cargoes, since a ship carrying even a small quantity of opium would not be allowed into a treaty port.
One effect of this was to give added strength to the richer merchants, of whom there were by I8geffectually only two, Jardine Matheson
44
and Dent. For them Hong Kong was invaluable. Opium could be imported and left in store under British protection until one of the clippers was ready to take it up the coast. If smaller fry attempted to muscle in, the duopoly would simply combine to undercut them. The previous rivalry was shelved, Jardine Matheson and Dent opium ships operating in pairs at all of the most important of the unofficially recog-nized clearing anchorages. This did not help the economy of Hong Kong, since if Jardine Matheson and Dent kept the opium in their own hands, selling only up the coast, there was no incentive for anyone else to come to Hong Kong. The 1850 Mitchell Report described the situation thus:
THE DAVIS RAID 1 75
Really it is a matter of immense surprise to me how Hong Kong has any trade of any kind whatever. Here we have these two powerful Houses making heavy pecuniary sacrifices every other month, to beat back to the Coast, any trade which may try to force its way down to this Colony, and thereby utterly shutting out the sugars and coarse drugs, such as Camphor and Alum and similar stuffs, which the native coasters would otherwise bring down to us. This in itself would be hard enough for any young Colony to contend with. But, when in addition to this, our Treaty with China limits all Junk traffic with this port to Junks clearing out of the Five Ports, and places ev.n these under the most vexatious restric-tions -my repeated wonder is that the Colony has any trade at
11m38
If they attack our people, they will be shot
Many writers have assumed that the Chinese government, smarting under the humiliation of the Treaty of Nanking, had no intention of observing its provisions any longer than necessary, and of taking the first opportunity of revenge. Quite apart from the fact that Chinese governments, Imperial, Republican, or Communist, have a rather better record of fulfilling international obligations than those of many Western nations, the evidence of the Historical Archives in Beijing is that the Emperor Tao-kuang ratified the Treaty in the best of faith, and personally went to some lengths to ensure that his subordinates followed its provisions. In April 1844 Ch'i-ying advised the Emperor that French and American ships were now coming to Canton, and that the populace there had been warned to behave themselves. Acknowl-edging this, the Emperor commented in the same month in response to a memorandum from Liu Yun-k'o, Governor of Fukien, that the treaty arrangements were 'just, practical, strict and clear'. Four months later this was reinforced by a vermilion note ordering that 'everything in relation to the foreigners should be done well and carefully, so as not to lose face for the state and make trouble for ourselves. This point must be recognized.'39
A corps of officials who made a real effort to accommodate them-selves to the British, without losing sight of the interests of the Empire, emerged. The most distinguished of these was Hsii Chi-yii (Xu Jiyu),
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Financial Commissioner and subsequently Governor of Fukien, later member of the Tsungli (Zongli) Yamen, the bureau for foreign affairs established in 1861 at Peking, and author of the world survey published in 1850 that 'was destined to become the leading world atlas for a whole generation of Chinese literati'.40 The Hsii family have been at the forefront of modem Chinese history: Hsii's grandson was the famous civil war general Xu Xiangqian, early colleague of Mao and Commander-in-Chief of the Fourth Front Red Army, who later sided with Chou En-lai in attempting to halt the Cultural Revolution. 'We want more people like Hsii,' wrote his superior, Liu Yun-k'o, 'flexible, knowing their business, capable of weighing the pros and cons and acquainted with the manners of the foreigners.' Again the Emperor approved -'Very sincere: let it be so.'41
Although Pottinger's communications were also described by the Emperor as 'very sincere', his brand of bluster was not appreciated by the Chinese with whom he had to deal. 'Impolite, demanding, knitting his brows -I had to argue till my moutli was burning,' complained Ch'i-ying to the Emperor when reporting the negotiations at the Bogue: 'low taxes, light punishments, permission to buy books, to run Hong Kong freely, build houses, churches and cemeteries, free access for missionaries -all were demanded'.42 At first the bland Davis made a welcome change from his brusquer predecessor. On his visit of inspection to the treaty ports he omitted the customary gun salutes, which always worried the Chinese. Hsii was pleased to find the new barbarian head 'subservient, removing his hat, always polite'.43 For his part Davis enjoyed making use of his considerable knowledge of the Chinese language and customs to smooth relations.
Inspite ofglmperial support, Davis's experience and the considerable good will that Ch'i-ying invariably extended, the city of Canton con-tinued to be a focus of trouble for the British. It might have been that the population of Canton was more hostile to foreigners than that of other ports, where relations developed satisfactorily, or that the stir-rings of unrest that were to lead to the Taiping revolt were becoming apparent.
This complex and fascinating movement began in a similar way and at much the same time as that of the Mormons in the United States. A partly-educated young man, Hung Hsiu-ch'uan (Hong Xiuqan), was granted a heavenly vision, as a result of which an idiosyncratic version of Christianity developed, leading in turn to the foundation of a theoc-racy, the Heavenly Kingdom ofgEternal Peace, the T'ai-ping t'ien-kuo.
RIGHT: The French were in no doubt of the
malevolent intentions of the Royal Navy in
forcing opium upon the Chinese.
BELOW: The Dent schooner-rigged clipper Eamont. A 64-lb long gun was carried between the masts, together with smaller ordnance. The Dent house flag is also flown on the brigantine-rigged vessel in the background, probably Eamont herself, differently sparred.
FOOT: The first part of a scroll, probably printed in London from sketches made on the spot, purports to show Pottinger's first expedition leaving Hong Kong in August 1842. The artist may have had some guidance as to the hills above Victoria, but the buildings, and the quay, are entirely imaginary.
Jardine Matheson 's establishment at East Point, c.e1845. The original shoreline has Ion g been lost under
successive reclamation
schemes.
Chief Justice Hulme, 'any-thing but grave, flinging his long skinny legs, encased in breeches and black silk stockings, in all directions ... having anything but a judge-like appearance', sketched by Surgeon Edward Cree oancing a hornpipe with Tung, 'a Manchu Tartar'.
Ch'i-ying's formal reception in Hong Kong, November 1845. The portly Gutzlaff is inter-preting before Ch'i-ying and Si John Davis, who is dwarfed by the substantial Commissioner. Frederick Bruce is on the left,
with Caine in front. General D'Aguilar is on Ch'i-ying's rigl and the naval officer to the left of Davis is Admiral Sir Thoma Cochrane, who succeeded Park, in command. Appointed Captai at the age of seventeen, Cochrane had benefited by one of the most flagrant examples c naval nepotism.
RIGHT: The always-soldierly Colonel Caine, towards the end of his career.
BELOW: A satirical comment on the loans raised to fund the Greek War of Independence in 1826. Bowring, as Secretary to the London Committee, was involved in some very dubious personal transactions connected with the loan.
Left to right: Joseph Hume M.P., Bowring, Edward Ellice M.P., Sir Francis Burdett M.P.,
John Cam Hobhouse M.P., and Alexander Galloway, the incompetent engineer whose steam vessels never managed to reach the new Greek navy.
j')atriotic, i7-Cu,mh1.1dJ.-or-GreeJC .Machfoery !!!
ABOVE: Chinese merchants' lorchas. The BELow: This Punchcartoon of August 18-t8 Arrow was one of these interesting vessels, shows Thomas Chisholm Anstey, then M.P. for the forerunners of modern junk-rigged yachts. Youghal, as father of innumerable parliamentary
bills, motions and amendments which stood little chance of success.
THE DAVIS RAID
Hung came from a peasant family ofsHakka descent (the Hakkas being seventeenth-century, and later immigrants from further north, whose dialect and customs differentiated them from the Cantonese). Begin-ning his missionary work in I 843, within six years he had attracted some ten thousand followers. In 1852 an anti-Confucian, anti-gentry, anti-Manchu crusade was launched. By March of the following year the Tai-pings, as.they were known, had marched 1,300 miles to capture Nanking, which was to be their capital for eleven years. Canton itself was held for the Manchus against the rebels only by violent repression, assisted by the dislike of many Cantonese for what seemed a Hakka enterprise, and one with unpleasant connotations ofWestern influence.
Bishop George Smith, who travelled extensively in China in the 1840s, had noted 'a wide and marked difference between the friendly and peaceable demeanour of the people in the more northerly cities, and the arrogant turbulence of spirit which still forms the discriminat-ing characteristic of the Canton mob'. Defiant wall-newspapers took 'the place of the press, and being anonymous, their language is un-restrained, generally provocative, and often scurrilous'. These were deployed to incite the populace to discontent: 'The wild barbarians must be destroyed,' and the people must determine 'first to decapitate and exterminate the odious race and then burn and destroy their habi-tations' .44
Ch'i-)'ing, in his capacity as Imperial Commissioner, endeavoured to keep relations on a friendly basis, but never succeeded in estab-lishing the same close friendship with Davis that he had so successfully forged with Pottinger. He did pay a state visit to Hong Kong, which Collinson described (23 November 1845) as three days of 'reviews, dances, balls and levees, all in honour of Sir Henry Pottinger's friend Keying, Governor General of the Two Quangs, Imperial Com-missioner, Member of the Royal Family etc. etc. He came down in the Vixen from Canton on Thursday and whatever his special business may be he has had very little time for it, for he has been eating and drinking with very little intermission ever since he landed ... He is however a very intelligent Chinaman, but as fat as a pig.'
Attacks on foreigners were severely discouraged and appropriately punished by Ch'i-ying, but the arrogant behaviour of some of the British exacerbated matters. British officials, since the days of the Select Committee, had deplored the manners of their compatriots, which had not apparently improved. It was one of the much-distrusted private traders who sparked off the worst disturbances, with the most
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
serious effects. On 4 April I 846 one Charles Compton, a British merchant based in ,Canton and said to be known as 'a hectoring sort of man, noted for his repeated acts of violence towards the Chinese', became annoyed with a Chinese fruit vendor, whom he thought too noisy, and knocked over his stall. Three days later .he attacked the man, dragging him into the foreign quarter and beating him. There was an immediate riot. Placards appeared demanding the death of the British: 'It is only you English, who, to gratify your wolf-like hearts, unbridled and without fear ... are truly detestable.' The merchants appealed for the protection of a warship; Francis Macgregor, the British Consul, tried his best to smooth things over, and had the case brought before the consular court.
Davis, acting as Chief Superintendent of Trade, anxious to preserve good relations with Ch'i-ying and seeing in Compton another Innes up to his tricks, found Compton guilty, and fined him $200. Compton appealed to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Hulme found that 'the whole proceedings were so irregular as to render all that had occurred a perfect nullity', accompanying his judgement with some severe reflections on the Governor's actions, which were 'unjust, excessive and illegal ... evincing a total disregard for all forms of law and for the law itself'. Davis, taking the decision as a direct insult and a challenge to his authority, appealed to London.45
Back in Whitehall, the government had changed once more, and with the Whigs back in power, different attitudes towards the colonies emerged. Sir Robert Peel's Tory government had grasped the nettle of Com Law repeal, but in doing so had bitterly alienated the right wing of the party. After a defeat -again over Ireland -Lord John Russell was given his opportunity, in July 1846, to form a Whig admin-istration, with Palmerston back at the Foreign Office and Lord Grey, son of the Reform Bill Earl, as Secretary of State for the Colonies. Grey did not approve of Palmerston, and needed to be cajoled into sitting in the same Cabinet as him, so Davis had to report to difficult masters. Palmerston, very much in charge of matters insofar as they affected relations with China, vigorously set about all concerned. Compton was sent a departmental dispatch on II March 1847, regret-ting that 'in consequence of the irregular manner in which those pro-ceedings were conducted, you have escaped the penalty you would otherwise have incurred'. This was accompanied by a letter from Palmerston himself, of the same date, warning Compton that he could be prosecuted for murder under British law if any deaths resulted from
THE DAVIS RAID
his actions in China: 'Her Majesty's Government are determined ...cthat no injury shall arise to peace and good order in China from the concession which has�P been made to Her Majesty of exclusive jurisdic-tion over British subjects in China.'
But already the Compton case had been succeeded by another, in which the Chinese seemed to be the aggressors. Two British sailors had been badly injured in a disturbance in Canton, and Davis had dealt with the case by fining their captain for allowing them to enter the city. Palmerston, when he heard of this, was furious, and took Davis to task on 12 January 1847: the obligation to behave properly was reciprocal, and British subjects must be guaranteed 'freedom from molestation': 'I have to instruct you to demand the punishment of the parties guilty of this outrage ... and that, if the Chinese Authorities will not by the exercise of their own authority punish and prevent such outrages, the British Government will be obliged to take the matter into their own hands.' Rather more civilly, but spelling out the facts of life as seen by the Foreign Secretary, he added: 'We shall lose all vantage ground we have gained ... if we take a low tone ... Of course we ought, and by we I mean all the English in China, to abstain from giving the Chinese any ground for complaint, and much more from anything like provocation and affront; but ... we must make them all clearly understand, though in the civillest terms, that our Treaty rights must be respected ... The Chinese must learn and be convinced that if they attack our people and our factories, they will be shot.'
It was probably the receipt of Palmerston's sharp note that spurred Davis to take the precipitate action that he did, and his official corre-spondence shows signs of rising hysteria. A minor incident on 12 March 1847, when some visitors to Fatshan, near Canton, had stones thrown at them, led to increasingly high-pitched letters from Davis to Ch'i-ying: 'It is my duty to inform you that you will bring down calamity upon the Chinese people . . . there is no remedy but to proceed to Canton with a force and demand reparation on the spot.' The force then available was commanded by Major-General Charles D'Aguilar. Originally a rifleman, commissioned into the 86th (Royal Irish Rifles) in 1799, he had seen a good deal of action with his regiment in India, but since 1810 had been a successful staff officer, mainly in the Adju-tant-Generals' departments, although including one mission to the famous Ali Pasha of Janina. A cultivated and humane man, although prone to tetchiness, D' Aguilar had been horrified by the illness he found among the army in Hong Kong: 'The 4th Madras Sepoys are
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
destroyed and quite useless ... so many walking skeletons.' Acting on his own responsibility, he took the initiative of sending an entire regi-ment back to India in a successful effort to halt the spread of disease. He threw himself into the task of building healthier barracks, and had the satisfaction of seeing the health of the troops rapidly improve.
When the agitated Davis approached him, suitably enough on 1 April 184 7, with the prospect of a punitive expedition to Canton, D' Aguilar could call upon less than a thousand available men, but he enthusiastically agreed to the proposal. Both Pottinger and Davis had previously been forced to restrain the General's lust for action:
D'Aguilar had written in his diary in September 1845: 'I have no diplomatic or political authority and they must settle it their way,' but added prophetically: 'It will be strange if they don't want my assistance later.'46 Now it appeared 'they' did, and the following day Governor and General set off with their forces, comprising some men of the 18th Foot, the Royal Irish, and sepoys of the 42nd Madras, in four steamships. It was these small vessels that made the adventure possible, being of shallow enough draft to penetrate right up to the city. Some-how, against all sensible expectations, they managed to sail right through the defences of the Bogue. D' Aguilar was able to report that 'in a sudden promenade' he had 'assaulted and taken all the principal forts at the Bogue, and in the Canton river, and, after destroying the gateways and blowing up the magazines, spiked 827 pieces of cannon'.47 Having suffered no casualties worth mentioning, the tiny force was confidently preparing to storm the city, when Ch'i-ying, luckily for all concerned, smoothed things over. Foreigners, he promised, would indeed be allowed access to Canton, but only in two years' time, when he was sure popular unrest would have subsided (and by which time neither he nor Davis expected to be in their respect-ive posts). The foreign community, who had been flabbergasted by Davis's sudden eruption, were relieved but unconvinced. The old Canton hand Gideon Nye wrote: 'His Excellency's action in 1847 was restrained by two influences: one, a want of force; the other the want of unanimity among the leading merchants.' It was also, he rightly observed, completely ineffective, since the point at issue, the immediate right of entry to Canton, had not been conceded: 'And thus his admin-istration of affairs, like that of Sir Henry Pottinger, left Canton without its suffering chastisement for accumulated wrongs.'48
Nevertheless, Lord Palmerston found this bit of bloodless sabre-rattling, generally known as the 'buccaneering expedition', very much
THE DAVIS RAID
to his taste, and congratulated all concerned. But the already dis-gruntled Chinese population's fury was exacerbated, and only a few months later six young Englishmen were murdered in a village outside Canton, in the worst incident so far experienced.
By then Davis had shot his bolt, and could do nothing but expostu-late to Ch'i-ying: 'You either cannot or will not protect the lives of British subjects . . . It is now time for the British Government to require not only satisfaction for the past, but security for the future.' He demanded that the whole village should be punished if the culprits could not be identified and executed, and received in return a dignified remonstrance on 17 December 1847: 'as in any debt there is a debtor, so in all wrongs there are chief culprits. Now, the number of people in the village in question is great, and if a whole village is destroyed without distinction of good and bad ... how could the azure heaven above ... possibly endure such an excessive implication of the inno-cent? In the whole world there is no such principle of reason as this, and your Excellency's country mQst itself have no such punishment.' Ch'i-ying did succeed in bringing those chiefly concerned in the mur-ders to justice, but no further progress was made on the immediate question of admitting foreigners within the city.
Davis had already decided to go, thoroughly disgusted by the atmos-phere of the colony. Although payment was eventually, in 1846, made by the Treasury for the opium commandeered by Captain Elliot, this had not appeased the more extreme among the merchants, who pressed for the conquest of whole provinces of China, so that 'the degenerate natives would be supplanted by Saxon races transplanted, mature and fresh'. General D'Aguilar contributed to the fractiousness, for being a gentleman of sometimes uneven temper he had offended the civilians. Not only did he object to 'furious riding', but a jollification in one Mr Welch's house had been interrupted by a sergeant sent on behalf of the General, 'to whose gentle ear the rude sound of civilian hilarity was particularly obnoxious'. Welch offered to throw the General out if he came himself, and the local press, attempting to explain this 'eccentric conduct' of the General's, 'supposed he had passed his life among Helots and knew little of the manly independence of a British community'."9
Sir John embroiled himself in a spot of bother with more drastic consequences -this time in his capacity as Governor rather than as Plenipotentiary. Relations with Hulme, the Chief Justice, culminating in his s.nging criticisms of the Governor over the Compton case, had
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
deteriorated to the point where, in a desperate effort to get rid of him, Davis had written to Lord Grey asking for his removal on the grounds that he was habitually drunk in public. Hulme was certainly a jovial and sociable creature, whose conduct at a ball given by Admiral Cochrane is sympathetically described by the surgeon E.H. Cree: 'Tung ['a merryfellow ... husband of an Imperial Princess'] spoils a quadrille by dancing a hornpipe with the Chief Justice, both having partaken too freely of simkin. It was a laughable exhibition; Tung fat ... and caper-ing about like an elephant, and the Judge anything but grave, flinging his long skinny legs, encased in breeches and black silk stockings, in all directions, his long visage and protuberant nose, his bushy head and broad grin, having anything but a judge-like appearance.'50 An accusation of habitual drunkenness, however, made in a letter from the Governor to the Secretary of State, was a serious matter -more serious than Davis, who had dashed off the letter in a fit of exasperation with the world in general, and with Hulme in particular (there had been a dispute as to whether Hulme could properly be addressed as 'His Lordship'), hadc-expected. An inquiry was held by the Executive Council, against the opposition of General D'Aguilar, who could well see whither the affair would lead. Evidence was given that while the Chief Justice had certainly been seen the better for drink, a condition not entirely unknown even among the highest ranks of the judiciary, he was by no means a habitual drunkard, unfit for his post. Davis had however painted himself into a comer and, in the face of the evidence, suspended Hulme from his functions and sent him back to England. Hong Kong society, unanimously supporting Hulme, was furious against the Governor, and was immensely satisfied when London eventually decided that the whole proceedings had been wrongly con-ducted, and the Chief Justice was reinstated. It was also felt in White-hall that troubles in Hong Kong were becoming too frequent, and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investi-gate the affairs of the colony and to recommend on its future.
By then it was too late for Davis, who had already resigned, and was to leave the colony in March 1848 for forty-seven years of retire-ment. As on the previous occasion, his departure from the China Coast was not lamented. Eitel recorded: 'the community, with stolid apathy, watched from a distance the salutes fired, the faint cheer of a few devoted friends ... there was no public address, no banquet, no popu-lar farewell. The leading paper of the colony gave voice to the feelings of the public by stating that Sir John "was ... unfit for a Colonial
THE DAVIS RAID
Government by his personal demeanour and disposition".'51 The more generous Legge wrot.: 'How it came about, I hardly know; but of all our governors he left his office under the greatest cloud of popular dissatisfaction. '52
7
RETRENCHi\1ENT
Houses of bad fame, billiard rooms and boats
Montgomery Martin's attacks, the squabble between Hulme and Davis and the complaints of the residents had made an investigation into the affairs of Hong Kong and the China trade essential, and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was accordingly appointed to do this in March 1847. Its senior figure was Francis Baring, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the previous Whig administration. Commercial experience was provided by the old China hands James Matheson, now Member for Ashburton in succession to Jardine, together with his banker John Abel Smith and Sir George Staunton: Among the other members were Edward Cardwell, William Ewart and Benjamin Hawes, all sensible ceformers; and Dr John Bowring, a radical reformer of varied experience, but often seen as something of a figure of fun by reason of his immense learning and singular lack of tact.
The Committee offered the Hong Kong traders who had clamoured for it an opportunity to present their points of view, and the most telling evidence came from Alexander Matheson. Hong Kong, he sub-mitted, had begun well enough:
Hong Kong possesses one of the best harbours in China ...cWhen the first Europeans settled at Hong Kong, the Chinese showed every disposition to frequent the place, and there was a fair prospect of its becoming a place of considerable trade ...cThere were no restrictions of any kind, people went and came as they chose ... Had the same unrestricted freedom of trade gone
RETRENCHMENT
on, Hong Kong would in.vitably have become a place of great trade. It would have been in time the emporium of China.
But the rot had set in with Davis -although Matheson was careful not to condemn the Governor personally.
In 1843 however, peace was proclaimed; Hong Kong was regu-larly ceded to us. A formal government was established, great expenses were incurred, and it became almost the exclusive study of the government to raise as large a revenue as possible, to meet the expenses of the place ... From this time may be dated the reverses of Hong Kong.
The junk trade had, under the supplementary provisions of the Treaty of Nanking, been 'exterminated'. The iniquities of the police ('com-posed of Chinese of the most abandoned character') and the opium farmers had 'completely extinguished the trade of Hong Kong', which had taken itself off to Cumsingmoon, where
since I 844 a considerable native town has sprung up, with a population of from 3,000 to 4,000 composed entirely of petty traders and junk-men, who have deserted Hong Kong. They have built houses, and pay almost no ground rent. There is an Euro-pean hotel and billiard room [containing what was formerly the East India Company's billiard table] on shore ... The place is rapidly increasing under Chinese rule, while Hong Kong, under British sway, is entirely without trade, and daily abandoned by some portion of its population.
But Matheson's highest indignation was reserved for the exorbitant demands of the government for land sales and rents. Short leases and high ground rents, he insisted, must be abandoned, and replaced by perpetual leases at moderate prices. If this were done, together with the
abolition of all the farms now in existence, as well as the discon-tinuance of all the wretched taxes now levied; such as on houses of bad fame, billiard rooms, boats &c. Also the registration of Chinese, which is extremely repugnant to their feelings ... I feel convinced that in the course of a few years, Hong Kong will take
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
a new turn, and become one of our most flourishing, as well as valuable possessions.'
Alexander Matheson's views were reinforced by a more independent witness, Colonel Malcolm, who had acted as Potlinger's aide. The initiative in questioning Colonel Malcolm was taken by Dr John Bowring, who asked some leading questions:
Bowring: Then are the committee to understand that your opinion is that a revenue from the sales of land, and a police rate, for the purposes of protecting persons and property, are the only reasonable and proper sources of revenue in the colony?
Malcolm: I think so. I think a greater revenue would be raised by the land rent, so if the island were perfectly free from all petty taxations, I think that much more land would be let, and that the colony would thrive much better if all those were taken off.
Bowring: The removal of the petty vexations would be a great encouragement to settling in the island?
Malcolm: Yes; the Chinese are a peculiar people, and they do not like being interfered with. They do not understand us; they cannot understand our ways: and when they are told that they are to do first one thing and then another, they get frightened and will not come to us.
Hong Kong's problems received only a moderate degree of attention from the Committee in its brief and sober report. Seven of its ten pages presented arguments for a reduction in the duties on tea, citing the rapid rise in the British consumption of coffee (from something over 7 million pounds in 1821 to over 36 million in 1846, carrying duty of four pence a pound) to show that total government income would not necessarily be decreased by a reduction in the percentage rate of duty. Proving that it was, as always, the British revenues from tea rather than opium that concerned Whitehall, the latter subject was dismissed disapprovingly, and almost out of hand: 'The Opium trade, however, already flourishes at Foochowfoo with its usual demoralizing influences on the population, and embarrassing effects upon the mon-etary condition of the place. The latter would be diminished by the legalization of the traffic; the former, we are afraid, are incontestable, and inseparable from its existence.'
Hong Kong was the final item to be dealt with, in just over a page,
RETRENCHMENTo.
which took account of the complaints of 'a highly respectable body of merchants resident at Hong Kong ... that good faith had not been kept in conveying to purchasers no more than a limited tenure of seventy-five years, in lieu of the more permanent interest which they allege to have been held out'.
The Committee sympathized: 'We think it right that the burden of maintaining that which is rather a post for general influence and the protection of the general trade in the China Seas than a colony in the ordinary sense, should be thrown in any great degree on the merchants
or other persons who may be resident upon it.'
The 'whole system' needed revision, since 'the Establishment of the Settlement ... has been placed on a footing of needless expense.' They pointed out the difficulties of the Governor's position: 'As Governor of a Colony, he is responsible to the Colonial Office; as in a manner representative of the Crown to a Foreign Court and Superintendent of Trade, to the Foreign Office. It would be well if this relation could be simplified.' An effort must be made to improve communications: 'Facilities should also be given in Hong Kong for the acquisition of the Chinese language and encouragement to schools for the Chinese; and the study of the Chinese language should be encouraged in the Consular officers.'
But there was, the Committee felt, every indication that with good
will on both sides, relations should develop peacefully:
The provisions of the Treaties negotiated by Sir H. Pottinger appear to have been honestly carried out by the Chinese authori-ties, except at Canton; and even there the difficulties which have been experienced seem to have arisen more from the turbulent character and hostile disposition of the populace ... than from any ill-will or want of good faith on the part of the ruling power. Indeed any other supposition would be totally inconsistent with the conciliatory course of policy pursued in the other ports, and more especially with the character of that distinguished statesman, Keying, who presides over the Government of Canton, and who has on all occasions shown himself not less the friend of peaceful intercourse than the enlightened supporter of his country's interests.
In Hong Kong the report was welcomed, and the major point of the residents! complaints rectified by the substitution, in the following year,
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
of 999-year leases for those of seventy-five years. In due course land sales would provide a revenue income for future Hong Kong adminis-trations, but such income would take time to develop, and the govern-ment was adamant that subsidies to Hong Kong must stop. It was a time of financial stringency in Britain. The Irish famine and the collapse of railway speculation had brought extra expense and damaged confi-dence: commercial failures multiplied; as a crisis measure the Bank Act had to be suspended. Defence spending increased as tension with France grew, and Peel's income tax, meant as a temporary measure, had to be -with great reluctance -extended.
In such a climate there was little prospect of the home government permitting any increase of colonial expenditure, and if there had been Hong Kong would not have been among the favourites. The new Colonial Secretary, the austere Lord Grey, made this clear in his report to the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell: 'the chief object we had to consider ... was that of the very heavy expenses which [Hong Kong) occasioned'. Very probably the whole venture had been a mistake: 'If the exceedingly large amount of that expense, and the limited use of which the place has proved to our commerce, could have been fore-seen, it may well be doubted whether it would have been thought worthwhile that it should be taken possession of.' That, however, could be blamed on their Tory predecessors: 'This had however been done long prior to the formation of your administration; and there only remained for us to endeavour to reduce the expense of the eitablish-ment.'2 Davis's successor as Governor was therefore to carry through a policy of drastic retrenchment. A necessary corollary was that he must refrain from any trouble with the Chinese which would lead to extra expense. This was to be inade easier by the fact that China was beginning to experience the worst disruption of the dynasty.
When the Emperor Tao-kuang died in 1850, the 'crazy first-rate man-of-war' was left without a 'sufficient' man at the helm, and, as Macartney had forecast, things rapidly went to pieces. The new Emperor, Hsien-feng (Xian Feng), was only twenty, unreliable, way-ward, and much under the influence of his favourite concubine Tz'u-hsi (Ci.xi), later the famous Dowager Empress, who from 1856 to 1908 exercised increasing power within China.3 Hsien-feng's inheritance was in such a terrible state -on the.verge of disintegration, and menaced by famine, flood and war -that it would have daunted a much abler and more experienced man. In 1845 the Yellow River shifted its course to flow north of the Shantung peninsula, causing
RETRENCHMENT 189
widespread death and destitution; three years later the Grand Canal, that engineering masterpiece of the Ming linking the Y angtse with northern China, had been rendered impassable; and within months of Hsien-feng's accession the Taiping revolt, which in the next four-teen years was to claim more victims than the Second World War -twenty million is a moderate estimate -had begun its devastating course.
Marxist historians tend tog. see the Western powers as responsible for much of this, and the Taipings as 'glorious' revolutionaries, whose 'magnificent struggles and historic achievements will always be remembered for propelling i:he forward advance of history and stimu-lating the revolutionary will of the Chinese people'.4 What certainly did occur was that the Chinese people themselves, led by traditionalist Confucian gentry, were organized, not unwillingly, into new model armies, and the Western powers decided that stability was best ensured by supporting the Ch'ing central government. Two important develop-ments eventually resulted; the empire's financial resources were better ordered by the establishment of a professional customs service, and a nucleus of conservative reformers willing to avail themselves of Western methods was encouraged. On the debit side, the expan-sion of the lower gentry and their takeover of local administration, together with the formation of regional armies independent, in some degree, of Peking, led to the phenomena of oppressive landlordism and irresponsible warlords that ruined the prospects of Chinese repub-licanism.
Contemporary events in England were less dramatic than those in China, although more than usually complicated in the years following the fall of Peel's government in 1846. Succeeding governments found themselves permanently on the knife-edge of precarious Parliamentary majorities, often indeed without a majority. Party loyalties were stretched by personal antipathies, and parties themselves shifted between being Whigs, conservative-liberals, liberal-conservatives, con-servative progressives and Peelites before evolving into simply Liberals andg. Conservatives: and on the sidelines stood a permanent block of Irish votes, usually allied with the Whigs as the least unresponsive to Irish demands, but ever on the lookout for tactical opportunities. Lord John Russell's government hung on until February 1852 as a minority administration, surviving an election in 1847 and a Parliamentary defeat in 185g1 simply because no grouping of the opposition could be formed to replace it.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Like Pottinger and Davis, Sir George Bonham, who took post as Governor in March 1848, was an East India Company servant, but one with considerable experience of colonial administration. At the early age of thirty-four he had been appointed Governor of Prince of Wales Island (Penang), Singapore and Malacca, subsequently known as the Straits Settlements. Although this was a considerably larger colony than Hong Kong (with a population of 140,000, compared to Hong Kong's thirty thousand), Bonh.am's new responsibilities were greater. In the Straits he had been responsible to the Bengal Presi-dency, one of three administrative units in India, and was therefore at two removes from London. In Hong Kong, as Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade as well as Governor, he was directly respon-sible to the Cabinet for British relations with the Chinese Empire. This was not a position for which Sir George was well-fitted, since he had become imbued with a deep distrust of the Chinese, to the extent that he refused to countenance the promotion of Chinese-speakers in the Consular Service; the logic was that they were too sympathetic to the Chinese. But, as Governor, Sir George was a good choice. Palmerston commented that Bonham's practical common sense was the chief cause of his appointment, and during the six years of his tenure of office Hong Kong was unprecedentedly sedate. Sir George's attitudes much resembled those of the British merchants, with whom, unlike his predecessors, he maintained civil relations. This was helped by the fact -a sign of the more settled times -that he was accompanied by his pleasant wife. As Governor he placated the merchants by remov-ing most of the annoying small taxes levied by Davis and by ensuring that they were extensively consulted on all domestic issues. Consul-tation was formalized by the admission of two civilians to the Legislative Council in June 1850, in accordance with Grey's policy of ensuring that every colonial legislature was brought 'more under the influence of the opinion of the intelligent and educated inhabitants', and that the councils should become more closely involved with colonial finances. The first civilians -'unofficials' -to become members were David Jardine and John Edger; from that time until after the end of the First World War it was understood that the Legislative Council should include a member of Jardine Matheson 's.
There was not much that could be done about the state of trade. James Legge described it as being 'in a dead-alive state during all
[Bonham's] time', and W.H. Mitchell commented regretfully in his
185 2 report to Bonham: 'It seems a strange result after ten years of
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open trade with this great country ... that China should not consume half so much of our manufactures as Holland.'
The business community believed that trade could be revived only by opening the interior of China to foreign commerce, so avoiding what was thought to be deliberate official obstructionism outside the treaty ports. The London East India and China Association (the East India part of the title was soon dropped, and the reborn 'China Associ-ation' became a powerful lobby representing British business interests in Chinese questions) founci a willing listener in Lord Palmerston, who by 1850 was beginning to cast about for some excuse. to extort more concessions from China.
When his term of office began, Bonham saw no prospect of a serious clash with the Chinese. Legge had asked the new Governor if he was going to insist that the city of Canton should be opened as agreed on 1 April 1849. 'How can I?' Bonham replied. 'My instructions are to keep the peace, and by no means bring on another war with China.' But sentiments in Britain were changing. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 in Europe produced in Britain only a minor spasm, of which the most typical symptom was the presentation of a 'monster' petition to Parliament by the Chartists, but when Palmerston was made to leave the government in December 18 5 1 (he had been prematurely enthusiastic in congratulating Louis Napoleon on his coup d'etat of that month, and Russell had lost patience with the Foreign Secretary's'tracasseries') the government's fall was inevitable. Palmerston was out of office for only three months before he brought down his former colleagues in what he triumphantly called his 'tit-for-tat with John Russell'. The succeeding government of Lord Derby lasted only another nine months before being replaced by a coalition of Peelite conservatives and Whig-liberals with Lord Aberdeen as Prime Minis-ter, Russell as Foreign Secretary and Palmerston, still not trusted with that post, as Home Secretary. When Russell resigned in 1853 he was replaced at the Foreign Office by George Villiers, now Lord Claren-don, who ensured that Palmerston's views were represented there. The misconduct of the Crimean War led to the coalition being defeated and Palmerston, for the first time in his long career, being given the opportunity of forming his own Cabinet in February 1855, with Lord Clarendon continuing as Foreign Secretary. The Colonial Office, never the most popular of posts, had a record number of five incum-bents in a single year: Sir George Grey, Sidney Herbert, Lord John Russell, Sir William Molesworth and Henry Labouchere.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Quack Doaor Bowring
The personalities of Davis and Bonham, as with those of most of their successors, had only limited effects on the development of Hong Kong. Governors had their enthusiasms and dislikes, and these were reflected in their conduct of affairs, but their limited freedom of movement, caught as they were between the upper millstone of Whitehall and the nether of the colonists, together with their relatively short tenure of office, restricted their personal impact. Also, it must be said, few Gov-ernors were men of outstanding capacity. Only Sir Matthew Nathan (1904-7) and Sir Frederick Lugard (1907-10) made any subsequent contribution to British national life (and that of Nathan was less than uniformly successful), and men of notable talent, such as Sir Cecil Clementi (1925-30), were regarded in the colony with some dismay. From the small pool of those wishing to make a career in China the consular service, diplomacy, and the Chinese Maritime Custom Ser-vice attracted many of the more able. But Dr John Bowring was a man of European reputation (even if not an entirely creditable one) when he was appointed to the Consulship of Canton in 1849, and his influ-ence on the future of Hong Kong was to be decisive.
The period of Whig ascendancy naturally brought with it opportuni-ties for party supporters to be rewarded, and one of these beneficiaries was that same Bowring who had questioned witnesses to the Select Committee of 1847, and had been a well-known figure for twenty-five years before that. A radical intellectual of great gifts, enormous energy, but uncertain judgement, Bowring had been the literary executor and close friend of the utilitarian reformer Jeremy Bentham, who died in his arms: in the 1820s, as Secretary of the London Greek Committee, arranging assistance for the Greek War of Independence, he had been involved in somewhat shady dealings in Greek bonds -and incidentally received delivery of the mortal remains of Lord Byron, in a puncheon of rum.5 Various Ministers, from Canning in 1826 onwards, found itaworthwhile to employ this man, who possessed almost every gift but that of common sense, who was at home in almost every European language, and who had manifold connections in Spain, Turkey, Egypt and above all France. In 1827 he had been arrested as a spy by the French and had been lucky to escape; five years later he was negotiating a trade treaty with them. As well as being a radical M.P. (for Bolton and Kilmarnock), Bowring was editor of the Westminster Review, and therefore moved in London's literary circles. He tried his own hand
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at verse, writing at least one hymn that is still sung -'In the cross of Christ I glory/Tow'ring o'er the wrecks of time', and translated poetry from the Hungarian.
Some exalted personages had low opinions of Bowring. Melbourne detested him: 'Bowring, damn him, why, he collared a Prime Minister!' (Bowring had, in fact, so treated Thiers, the French Prime Minister, but this was at least partly in fun); and Palmerston, while willing to use his talents, sneered at the 'Quack Doctor Bowring' (he was an honorary Doctor of Letters of Groningen University in Holland); but he received honours from the monarchs of Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Siam, Austria, Sweden, Russia and Holland, and was not without powerful supporters at home. Of these the most influential was Lord Clarendon, Whig and Liberal Colonial Secretary and Foreign Secre-tary, a considerable figure in national politics for many years. Bowring and Villiers had produced the First Report on Commercial Relations between France and Great Britain, presented to Parliament in 1834. This was the weightiest of the commercial investigations made by Bowring, and Villiers afterwards retained a sincere admiration for the multi-talented radical.
Emily Eden, the sister of Lord Auckland, Governor General of India, provided the best character sketch of Bowring in one of her lively letters to Lord Clarendon:
I think you will allow that the first beginning -le premier abord -the rudiments of an acquaintance with Bowring -are hard to get over. He began by flinging himself at full length upon the sofa, saying -'Well! What have you been doing in the sketching line?' I was actually awed by his audacity into giving him my book. 'Ah -very good -very good. Well now, this is the result of travelling.sI like a result. Always look for the result!' ... I behaved no worsesto Bowring than by contradicting every assertion he made -onssubjects of which I knew nothing. I actually argued myself blacksin the face about Spanish proverbs, Dutch fisheries and Belgianstariffs, knowing nothing about the language or the fish or thestrade. I do not think our acquaintance was long enough for himsto detect my ignorance, because he argued to the last just as if I were a reasonable creature, and, thank Heaven, after two days' wrangling I had the last word. He most politely saw us on board our steamboat at Antwerp, and did everything to make us comfort-able, and, just as he left the deck, I contradicted him flat on a
1 94 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
point of geography. You know that my geography is -worse than nothing -so that he must have been right, which made it the more necessary to take the contrary opinion. However, I must say that, barring his detestable manner ... there is a great deal to like in him. He is so intelligent and quick; and then, with such a fund of vanity that it must be mortified ten times a day, he never lets the mortification fall on his temper, but is always good-humoured and obliging.6
In his capacity as a Member of Parliament Bowring had already evinced an interest in Hong Kong when in 1846 he had drawn the attention of the House to the 'frequent application of flogging for petty offences ... no less than fifty-four persons [were] so punished on Saturday 25 April last for not having obtained tickets of registration'. The flogging debate continued for years, with a division between the middle-class Hong Kong population (in favour) and the home government (cau-tiously against), with most governors, except Sir John Pope-Hennessy (1877-82), backing the floggers.
As economic experts often do, Bowring handled his own affairs badly: after the Greek episode an investment in an ironworks went awry, and in 1847 he was forced to look for paid employment. Since this occurred when his friends were in power, some provision for him was found in the Consulship at Canton. The office of China Consul was no plum -it was the least profitable of those that Dickens in Little Dorrit imagined the Barnacle family disposing of, and was usually reserved for younger sons and cousins of moderately important people. 7 Bowring, in spite of his financial embarrassments, would have been reluctant to accept it unless the prospect of something better was held out. Before leaving to take up his post the new Consul had a personal interview with the Foreign Secretary -an unusual privilege -in which he was given some moderate encouragement.
Palmerston clearly expected developments in Bowring's new sphere,
since he wrote on 29 September 1850:
I clearly see that the Time is fast coming when we shall be obliged to strike another Blow in China ... These half civilized Govern-ments, such as those of China Portugal Spanish America require a Dressing every eight or Ten years to keep them in ord::r. Their Minds are too shallow to receive an Impression that will last longer than some such Period, and warning is of little use. They care
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little for words and they must not only see the Stick but actually feel it on their Shoulders before they yield to that only argument which to them brings conviction, the argumentum Baculinum.8
A former President of the Peace Society might not have seemed the ideal man to administer a taste of the rod, but Bowring accepted the task with some alacrity. It was entirely typical that as soon as he assumed his appointment, Bowring took it upon himself on 17 April 1849 to send a bumptious autograph letter to Louis Napoleon, the President of France, in oddly }mperf ect French for a famous linguist:
Mon cher President,
Je m'attendait a l'honneur de vous voir, avant mon depart pour la Chine. Le depart a ete precipite, car le gouveme-ment voulut que j'arrivais ici dans la Cite de Canton suivant a la Traite de 184 7. Cette question a ete tranche tres nette-ment par les Chinois. Ils ne veulent pas reconnaitre les stipulations du Traite. C'est un Casus belli ... Je ne vois q'un avenir pour nous -pour vous -pour tout le monde ... Ni vous -ni nous -nous ne pouvons accepter la position humiliante ou on nous place. Le traite obtenu par M. Lag-rene [the Franco-Chinese Treaty of Whampoa] est une lettre morte.9
This hitherto unpublished letter, as well as indicating Bowring's capacity for pushiness, shows that from the start of his career in China he was assuming that a conflict would inevitably occur. It is possible, although with Bowring's capacity for self-dramatization nothing is ever very clear, that the next seven years were spent waiting for a colourable pretext for beginning a second, decisive, conflict.
Canton was recognized as the potential flashpoint of any such out-break, and April 1849, when Bowring arrived there, was the date that had been agreed between Ch'i-ying and Davis as when the right of foreigners to take up residence in Canton should be exercised. But Davis had been replaced by the more emollient Bonham, and the reliable old Manchu Ch'i-ying's place at Canton had been taken by the Chinese Hsii (Xu) Kuang-chu, Imperial Commissioner for Foreign Affairs from February 1848. When the due date came, and the British began to press their case, Hsii proceeded to score easy points off Sir George Bonham, who was hampered by his instructions to avoic.!
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
causing troubl.. Hsii stalled, as had his predecessors, claiming thatthe hostility of the populace still made it too dangerous for foreignersto be allowed out of their own quarters, and succeeded after somemonths in getting Bonham to drop the matter :-permanently, Hsiiclaimed, a claim which rested on Gutzlaff's translation into Chineseof Bonham's definition of the result of the abortive talks.10
The point hinged around a single phrase: 'the question at issue restswhere it was, and must remain in abeyance'. When he saw this phrasein Bonham's dispatch Palmerston pounced on it, writing on 8 October1850: 'it might, without much straining, be made, by translation intoa foreign language, to bear the meaning which the Chinese haveattached to it; namely, that Her Majesty's Government had entirelyabandoned all discussions connected with their right of entry into thecity of Canton.' The never entirely reliable Gutzlaff was by then touringFrance on his fund-raising exercise, and Bonham had to rely on hisother interpreters to exculpate himself. Their efforts were not impress-ive. The phrasing in English is less than precise, and one of theinterpreters did not succeed in even reproducing the original Englishcorrectly. 'Abeyance' is equivalent to dormancy, and Chinese believein letting sleeping dogs lie. Moreover, an informed recent analyst,J.Y.Wong, has criticized Gutzlaff's translation, claiming that it reads thatthe issue 'must not be discussed' and that therefore Hsii was perfectlycorrect in his assumption that the British had dropped their claim.11
The discussions terminated in the frustrated Bonham attemptingonce more to appeal to Peking over the heads of the Canton officials.By that time he had become convinced of the necessity for a show offorce, which Palmerston was willing enough to sanction, if a convenientpretext could be found. The Foreign Secretary was advised that theright of entry to Canton was the only possibility, but before muchprogress could be made Palmerston had been forced out of office.During these exciting diplomatic manoeuvres Bowring had been lefton a sideline, obliged to content himself with tedious consular work.Finding linle else to occupy his lively mind at Canton, he occupiedhimself in adding Chinese to the score or so languages he alreadypossessed.
Meanwhile Sir George at Hong Kong continued to pare away thecolony's expenses, to the gratification of Earl Grey, who was able toreport that expenditure had been reduced from �G49,000 in 1846 and�G36,900 the following year to only �G1g5,500 in 1851, while the militaryexpenditure had been more than halved, from �G1g15,100 in 1847 to
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�G5s1,900.12 Sir George may have been encouraged in his retrenchment policy by a pamphlet published in 1850 which found the 'present establishment of Hong Kong' was being 'conducted on a much larger and more expensive scale' than justified by what was nothing more than a 'municipal body under the supervision of a very petty mandarin, of the rank of Police Inspector' .13
The Economist took the opportunity to report, in its issue of 8 March 1851, on: 'One of the latest, if not the latest, additions to that huge conglomerate, our Colonial Empire ... the hilly, stony island of Hong Kong with its excellent barb.our.' That feature of the colony was the only one to win unqualified approval: 'So bright were the visions, that Sir Henry Pottinger spoke of Hong Kong as a new Carthage ... ten years have elapsed . . . for four or five years hope was nourished ... but it has gradually become known and avowed that these bright prospects were the delusions of fancy ... few merchants go there to reside.' The only successful houses were those of Jardine Matheson and Dent, pursuing their accustomed trade -of which the Economist thoroughly approved: 'The island is a kind of bonded warehouse ...sfor the opium trade .s.s. the principal part of this trade is carried out by two firms ... to these two firms Hong Kong must be quite a Californian mine.' It was, just, possible that things would improve: 'there is some prospect of Hong Kong becoming a useful settlement. It is, at any rate, a refuge for our China trade .. .'
More lively developments were foreshadowed inJanuary 1852, when Bonham took a year's leave of absence and Bowring was appointed to act as Superintendent and Plenipotentiary in his place. The appoint-ment was made with some hesitation; Gladstone later said that Bowring was given the post in the hope that his Consular experience had fitted him for the responsibility. A severes-and abundantly justified to anyone knowing Bowring -warning came from Lord Granville, who had replaced Palmerston as Foreign Secretary the previous month: '... it is the anxious desire of her Majesty's Government to avoid all irritating discussions with that of China . . . you will not push argument on doubtful points in a manner to fetter the free action of your Govern-ment; and you will not resort to measures of force without previous reference home'. Bowring's appoinnnent had come just in time, before Palmerston's tit-for-tat led to the defeat of the Whigs and their replace-ment by Lord Derby's Conservative government in February 1852. In reply to his letter of appoinnnent Bowring wrote a long dispatch, giving the govem.ent the benefit of the acting Plenipotentiary's advice. He -
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
recommended .that the Chinese shoul. be 'peremptorily urged' to allow entrance to Canton, that negotiations be held to establish an embassy in Peking, and announced his intention of visiting the treaty ports. In reply he received a curt, three-sentence, letter from Lord Derby's new Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury: '... It is tlie intention of Her Majesty's Government that you should strictly adhere to the instruc-tions given to you by Earl Granville ... you will abstain from mooting the question of the right of British subjects to enter into the city of
Canton ... you were enjoined ... to take up your residence at Hong Kong ... consequently you will not be authorized to visit the various
ports of China, as you seem to intimate your intention to do, and you will therefore abstain from so doing.)
Due to the delays in transmitting mail Bowring had not received this stiff letter before he followed his first dispatch with a second, enclosing copies of his correspondence with Hsii; this provoked another bleak missive on 21 July 1852: '... considering that your tenure of office is only temporary, and that it will terminate on Sir George Bonham's return to China at the end of the year ... I haveto repeat to you the injunction ... not to press to be received ... Ihave further to enjoin you not to raise any question as to the admission of British subjects in to the city of Canton ... Any undue interference on your part may be productive of much inconvenience.' This reminder of Bowring's precarious position, and the clear indication that the former radical had nothing to hope for from a Tory government, elicited the humble response on 8 September that 'I beg to assure your Lordship that the instructions therein contained shall be most implicitly obeyed.'
But Bowring's star was in the ascendant. The Conservative govern-ment only lasted a few months before being replaced in December by Lord Aberdeen's coalition, in which Bowring's old friend and sup-porter Lord Clarendon speedily became Foreign Secretary (in Febru-ary 1853). By good fortune Bowring was in London on leave after Bonham's return to Hong Kong, and was able first to make sure that he would indeed succeed Sir George, who was due to retire after completing six years in post, and to have many discussions with the Foreign Office before returning to China. From being the heavily criticized Consul at one of the treaty ports Bowring, now Sir John, with one bound officially became on 13 April 1854 Plenipotentiary,-Superintendent, Governor, 'accredited not to Peking alone, but toJapan, Siam, China and Corea, I believe to a greater number of humang
RETRENCHMENT 1 99
beings (indeed no less than one-third of the human race), than any individual ... before', as �Phe himself characteristically put it.
Bowring's predecessor, although only fifty-one when he left Hong Kong, does not appear to have looked for further employment. Bonham had been fortunate in receiving unusually clear instructions, thanks to the single-minded Lord Grey and the terms of reference outlined in the House of Commons Select Committee Report. These instructions he fulfilled well, and, unlike Davis or Bowring, Bonham succeeded in avoiding trouble either with the Chinese authorities or the Hong Kong merchants.
Chinese 2: Plenipotentiary 1
Whatever his defects of character, Bowring had it in him to be an efficient diplomat, as his trade agreements with France (never the easiest of countries with which to reach an accommodation), negotiated together with George Villiers in the 1830s, had indicated. He proved this in his new capacity by becoming, in 1855, the first Western rep-resentative to conclude a treaty with the kingdom of Siam. Bowring was accompanied there by his secretary, the same young Harry Parkes who had been present at the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. Although only twenty-seven at the time of the embassy to Siam, Parkes was already an experienced China hand, having been sent out in 1 841 as a protege of Gutzlaff, and attached to John Morrison in order to learn Chinese. Within two years he had mastered enough Chinese to serve as chief interpreter to Rutherford Alcock, then Consul at Amoy: 'Mr Alcock came over in a very flash style. Full uniform ... no less than six Spanish orders of knighthood and chivalry.' Parkes became interpreter at Canton, where he worked under Bowring, and was acting Consul there between June 1856 and September 1858.
In Bangkok Bowring confronted a court more arbitrary and less exposed to the modem world than even that of Peking: 'The king was accustomed to see all his courtiers, clothed chiefly in orange paint, crawling on all fours in his august presence, and it took all the doctor's learned eloquence to explain that Ministers' and Naval Officers' swords were just as much part of their dress as the turmeric with which Siamese aristocrats decorated their skins.'14 Both the United States' emissaries and those of the Governor-General of India had been refused aci::ess to the court, and even Sir James Brooke, the 'White
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Rajah' of Sarawak, had been forced out of the country by hostile demonstrations.' Bowring's success, however comic he must have appeared (he donned his Groningen academic robes in order to be more imposing), has to be acknowledged as a personal triumph.
But before going to Siam Bowring had the opportunity of dealing with affairs in China, which he had been itching to set straight for so long. He was at last permitted to make the journey up the coast to the other treaty ports, in the course of which he helped to initiate what was to be the most significant development in relations between China and the outside world, the inauguration of the Imperial Maritime Cus-toms Service. At Shanghai the British Consul was Parkes's 'very flash' Rutherford Alcock, an original and colourful figure, later to become the British Minister at Peking. Shanghai had succumbed to the Taipings in their great sweep north in 1852-3, during which they sacked Nanking, massacring some forty thousand or so of its Manchu inhabitants and establishing the Taiping capital there, where it remained for the next eleven years. Events at Shanghai were less violent, the Chinese town being taken by a well-organized rising on 7 September 1853, in which Canton:-based Triad members played leading parts. Although the foreign settlement remained untouched by the T aipings, the Imperial officials had fled, and in their absence Alcock was left to cope with the question of what should be done about the collection of customs.
The foreign merchants were in no doubt about it; Shanghai, aban-doned by the Chinese government, should be declar.d a free port, with no dues being charged. Alcock took a different view, arguingthat merely because the Chinese government was unable, presumably temporarily, to assert its control locally, it should not therefore be deprived of its rightful dues under the Treaty of Nanking. Almost immediately after the rising Alcock published a notification to foreignmerchants warning them that 'the capture of an isolated sea-port on the coast of a vast Empire can in no sense abrogate a solemn treaty entered into between the two Sovereigns of Britain and China. The obligations continue to exist on either side.' Alcock intended to carry out what he believed to be his duty by collecting the revenues on behalf of the Imperial government during the enforced absence of its officials. He was followed in this, somewhat reluctantly, by the American Com-missioner, one Humphrey Marshall, 'a big, coarse, headstrong man, has never been out of Kentucky before he came here', according to Bonham. Marshall was equally anxious to do justice to the Chinese, but deeply suspicious of British motives.
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Grumbling at not being allowed a free port, and complaining that the disturbed conditions of the country had made trade difficult, most of the merchants nevertheless complied, �Pissuing promissory notes for the customs due. Over a period of six months Alcock succeeded in collecting more than $ I million of such notes, a sum considerably greater than that which the Imperial customs officials would have expected under their own methods (or rather, a sum that would have been greater had it all been paid; when it came to the crunch only some of the Americans and none of the British redeemed their notes).
Sir George Bonham, as Superintendent of Trade, and much influ-enced by local opinion in Hong Kong, had tended to side with the Shanghai merchants, but this changed with Bowring's arrival. He had been champing at the bit during his stay first as Consul in Canton and then as temporary Governor at Hong Kong, forbidden to interfere in diplomatic matters, and saw in the Shanghai situation a chance of making a breakthrough in diplomatic relations. When Alcock produced a formal plan for the establishment in Shanghai of a 'Foreign Inspector of Customs', nominated jointly by the three Treaty powers (Britain, France, and the USA) and the Taotai (senior local mandarin), which 'could scarcely fail to furnish a most effective check upon the venality and supineness of the Custom House Officials', 15 Bowring seized on the suggestion with enthusiasm. He was backed by the new American Minister, Robert McLane, and by Admiral Sir James Stirling, com-manding the East India and China squadron. McLane arranged to see the Provincial Governor-General, 1-liang, and obtained his agreement to talks with the Taotai, Wu Chien-chang. In very short order Wu agreed, and the new service accordingly began on 12 July 1854. It was to develop, under the leadership of Sir Robert Hart, into the Maritime Customs Service, described by Fairbank as 'a chief financial pillar of the Chinese government': the customs commissioners became 'the trusted councillors of Chinese officialdom ... They supplied at first some of the functions of a diplomatic service ... But above all the Customs set a standard of incorrupt public service and of devotion to the central administration which has been of incalculable value to the Chinese government of the twentieth century.'16 It was also to become a source of constant aggravation to the trading community and to the government of Hong Kong.
But the Canton question remained as a perpetual irritation. On his second appointment Bowring, rendered uncharacteristically cautious by Malmesbury's stem memorandum, had taken the precaution of
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
clearing in writing with Lord Clarendon, on 25 April 1854, what poli-cies he was to be expected to follow:
It cannot be denied that we are entitled to demand redress of
grievances that we have suffered from violations and disregard of
Treaty obligations ... as among the most prominent:
Non-admission into Canton city;
Difficulty of obtaining personal intercourse with the Chinese
authorities.
In order to obtain redress Bowring proposed to attempt, if necessary in conjunction with the Americans and the French, a journey to the court of Peking in order to protest against the complete refusal of the Canton Commissioner even to meet him. But: 'As a general rule of conduct in China I intend to demand nothing which I am not prepared to enforce.' Clarendon's reply on 5 July 1854, although approving Bowring's proposals carried the warning: 'you will use every precaution for ascertaining beforehand that you will not meet with any indignity that will require to be avenged, and this more particularly at a moment when the aid of the British naval force in the Chinese Seas might not be available for that purpose'. The unwritten corollary was that an indignity would necessarily require revenge.
An excuse for increasing pressure on the Chinese immediately pre-sented itself, since it could be argued that 1854 was the due date for revising the Treaty of Nanking (the somewhat specious case rested upon applying the most-favoured-nation clause to the terms of the American treaty, which provided for a revision of the treaty after twelve years). Although Clarendon was cautious, Palmerston was not averse to some action, especially after 1855, when he was freed from the restraints imposed by the coalition government. It was hardly a pro-pitious time for diplomacy. Palmerston's previous attempts to reopen negotiations with Peking via Bonham had arrived just as the Emperor Hsien-feng, who was greatly offended by them, had taken over. Even Tao-kuang, perhaps justifiably wrath at Davis's raid on Canton and Palmerston's bluster, had adopted a tougher attitude towards the foreigners in the last years of his reign, and the young Emperor quickly replaced the experienced Manchu negotiators, now habituated to the arts of barbarian management, by more intransigent Chinese. The prudent councillor Mu-chang-a, who had acted almost as Prime Minis-
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ter to Tao-kuang, was dismissed. Ch'i-ying was exiled, and the more extreme of the new m.n were selected to confront the foreigners at Canton: first Hsii Kuang-chu, followed by Yeh Ming-ch'en, who became a particular bete noire of Bowring's. Professor Fairbank charac-terized Yeh as 'a stubborn die-hard xenophobe', 17 but facing down the barbarians was by no means the most important ofYeh's responsibili-ties; the Taiping movement had begun in Kwangtung-Kwangsi, and Yeh was energetically stamping it out there, an operation he achieved by executing tens of thousands of rebels and suspects. His success in so doing won him the full support of the thoroughly frightened young Emperor, so that in the intervals between his exertions in pacification he had little inclination to oblige the British and full authority from Peking to be uncompromising.
Matters began civilly enough. Although Bowring's first letter to Yeh went unanswered, he maintained a diplomatic tone, but with an implied warning: 'Nothing could be more painful to me than irritating and unfriendly discussions, the consequences of which might be deplor-able. Nothing more gratifying than the amicable arrangement of any point of difference, and the establishment of a durable harmony.' Yeh's answer on 25 April 1854 was short but equally polite: ' ... it would gratify me exceedingly to meet your Excellency, that we might demon-strate publicly our friendly sentiments .. .', but he was much occupied with military affairs. The implication was that meeting Bowring was a mere courteous formality, which could be deferred. After that things got crosser: pressed, Yeh proposed a meeting, in a tone which was meant to be insulting, 'at the Jinsin Packhouse on the Canton river'. Bowring could not accept this, and insisted on an official reception at the Governor General's office. Yeh then took to arguing, on 22 May, that there was nothing to settle, since Bonham had already agreed to forgo the right of entry to Canton, having written to Hsii: 'Henceforth, moreover, this matter must not be again discussed.' At this Bowring, who badly wanted to be off on his tour of the treaty ports, gave up for the time being, hoping to do better with the mandarins nearer Peking.
In his discussions with the authorities in Fukien and Nanking he was no more successful, merely being referred back, very urbanely, to Yeh. For a moment it seemed as though Yeh's attitude had changed, as in December Bowring received a request for assistance in 'destroying and seizing' the 'river thieves' who had become so 'strong and troublesome'. Yeh's letter, which must have been prompted by real anxieties on his part, presented Bowring with the opportunity to
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
steam upriver to Canton, accompanied by units of the Royal and United States Navies, to 'demonstrate how useful the Powers might be. But the crisis passed, and Yeh resumed his intransigence: Bowring could do nothing except take his leave, although not without, on 27 December, 'again formally advising your Excellency that the state of our intercourse is most unsatisfactory and intolerable; that many great grievances remain wholly unredressed; and that Her Britannic Maj-esty's Government ... will be further advised ... in order that such measures may be adopted as in its judgment become the dignity of a great nation.'
At this point it seemed that the score was Chinese 2: Bowring 1 -the Plenipotentiary's point being the settlement of customs at Shanghai. In his original self-defined tasks -securing the right of entry into Canton and obtaining personal contact with Chinese officials -Sir John had completely failed. It should not h.ve been the cause for much surprise when, in October 1856, the seizure by Chinese officials of a small coasting schooner, the lorcha Arrow, Chinese-owned but carrying the British flag, was grasped by Bowring as a pretext for action. It was not much of a pretext -the ship and crew were delivered unharmed a few days later, and the ship was not at the time actually entitled to wear British colours -but it was eagerly welcomed by both Parkes and Bowring: their excited correspondence records the escalation day by day and almost hour by hour. Bowring writes from Hong Kong to congratulate Parkes on his obduracy in demanding apologies from Yeh: 'I am very pleased with the manner in which you have done this work . . . I am determined on obtaining redress . . . cannot we use this opportunity to carry the City Question? If so I will come up with the whole Fleet.' Was the legal situation obscure and perhaps not as strong as might be wished? Then 'The delay and annoyance to which the Arrow has been subjected will induce me to look more favourably to his having failed to comply with the conditions' (17 October}. Would the armed forces back the belligerent pair? 'I have just seen the Admiral. It will be necessary to be very cautious as we shall not obtain the aid of the Naval Authorities beyond a certain limit. I do not think the Admiral will make war' (20 October). 'You may well believe that we wait the development of events with extreme anxiety. I doubt not the success of the attack on the Forts if Yeh's obstinacy compel that measure and it is almost to be hoped that he will ... as we are so strong and so right'(21 October}. And if there were still complaints from the navy or from London that the casus be/Ii was trivial, then it
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must be made clear that 'the Anvw affair is a subordinate one in the present state of affairs' (one of three notes dated I November).18
London was of course given only a doctored account of the proceed-ings, but whatever the British government thought of them -and there were many reservations -Clarendon was in no position to complain, since Bowring had hitherto been meticulous in securing the Foreign Secretary's assent to the increasingly severe warnings he had sent to Yeh. The war that developed out of the case of the lorcha Arrow has only limited relevance to Hong Kong, and is dealt with elsewhere.19 It began with a bombard_ment of Canton on 27 October 1856, an action made possible by the navy's new shallow-draught gunboats, and developed into a full-scale conflict in 1858. Immediately, however, the state of hostilities made for tension in Hong Kong, as Yeh replied with fulminations and offers of reward for barbarian heads.
When the news of the Arrow incident and the bombardment of Canton reached London, intense excitement was provoked in Parlia-mentary circles. Once more it seemed that Palmerston's man in China had presented the Tories with. an opportunity. A caucus meeting was held, with Gladstone, at that time still a Tory, raring to condemn British aggression in China, and Lord Derby insisting that all his colleagues fall behind the party line. Disraeli alone was reluctant, 'throwing cold water on the China question',20 believing that although the government might be defeated in Parliament, the electorate would take a different view. He was supported in this, had he known, by the Queen, who wrote to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, when the result of the debate was known: 'The Opposition have played their cards most foolishly, and the result is that all the old Tories say they will certainly not support them; they very truly say Lord Derby's party -that is those who want to get into office coute qui coute -wanted tosget in under false colours' (24 March 1857).21
But the chance to dish the Whigs, after a period of eleven years in which there had only been a few months of Tory government, seemed too good to miss. An odd alliance of the pacifist section of the radicals, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, the Peelites and traditional Tories, with even Lord John Russell taking the opportunity to level scores with Palmerston, attacked the government in debates which continued for four days in the House of Commons and two in the Lords. Poor Bowring was subjected to some quite unjustified personal attacks, constantly being referred to ironically as 'Dr Bowring' -Glad-stone called him a 'metamorphosed consul'; Malmesbury, his former
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
chief, spoke of hjs 'colleague and competitor in folly, Parkes'. Bowring's own side was hardly enthusiastically supportive. Lord Grey, then moving rapidly to the right, condemned the 'unjust war ... waged in China ... carried on with a fearful destruction of the lives and properties of the people'. Lord Granville, the Libe;al leader in the Lords, spoke publicly on Bowring's behalf, but wrote privately on 10 March to his friend and political ally Stratford Canning, Ambassador at Istanbul: 'You will probably think the opposition right in their esti-mate of the Doctor's proceedings at Canton, but you will also judge that they have acted very foolishly, and have contrived to help Palmerston over a very difficult session.' Canning, the most distin-guished British diplomat of his day, replied on 4 May: 'I thought your speech very good indeed. I should not like to have had to make it. The subject would not have been simpatico. I think we [English] were wrong about the lorcha and right about the entrance to Canton, but that Bowring's presumption in swelling the small case to the great on his own hook was indefensible. I quite think that there was nothing to do but uphold him -or rather the war -and that makes the awkward-ness of the question.'22 Behind the scenes at the Colonial Office Under-Secretary Frederic Rogers worried about 'the Chinese War, which seems to me one of the greatest iniquities of our time ... I was half alarmed ... lest I be found responsible for it, by allowing to pass the Colonial Ordinance [concerning the registration of ships] under which Sir John Bowring has made such a fool of himself.'23
The alliance between Tories hungry for office and Manchester reformers deprecating foreign aggression was indeed successful in defeating the government in the House of Commons, but Palmerston, like Disraeli having an accurate feeling for the sentiments of his countrymen, chose then to ask for a dissolution of Parliament and a general election in March 1857. Pointing out, correctly enough, that the China issue had been adopted by the opposition 'as a question on which to try the strength of the parties' rather than a principled stand, he went to the country with a full-blooded appeal to nationalistic senti-ment. His own constituents at Tiverton were told that Yeh was 'an insolent barbarian, who unites in his person all the obstinacy, perfidy and cruelty ever collected in a single man', and that he had violated the British flag. Once again the Tories had miscalculated, and a tri-umph ensued: Yeh had become too much of a bogeyman for the voters to appear to defend him, and the Whigs were returned with an increased majority in what was seen as an unprecedented personal
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triumph for Palmerston (Prince Albert described it as 'an instance in our Parliamentaryg. history without parallel'24). Gladstone was mortified, and 'fully conscious of the new awkwardness of his public position'.25 Cobden, Bright and most of the reformers even lost their seats.
But Bowring was too much discredited to be allowed to continue as Plenipotentiary, and was relegated in July 1857 to the less important post of Governor of Hong Kong, while James Bruce, the 8th Lord Elgin, was appointed in his stead. It is unfortunate that two successive Earls of Elgin should be be.st remembered for having committed what are often regarded as crimes of vandalism. The 7th Earl spent much of the family's assets in, as he saw it, rescuing the Parthenon marbles from Turkish hands: his actions were attacked at the time, and have been ever since. His son's destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace at Peking in 1860 as a reprisal is not so easy to justify; but Elgin himself, however great the act of vandalism he may have ordered (in British terms it might be compared with the destruction of Greenwich or Blenheim), was an almost painfully moral man, much more sensitive than others of his time to the suffering his actions caused. Three years in China, it may be supposed, did something to harden him.
The Elgin family fortunes had been sadly impaired by the 7th Earl, and his son had to make his own way, which he did with great success. A Fellow of Merton College Oxford at twenty-one, he became Member of Parliament for Southampton in 1841, voting with the Tories, and in 1847 was appointed by Peel to the post of Governor General of Canada, where he performed brilliantly in difficult circumstances.
The task now assigned to him, that of pulling Bowring's irons out of the fire and concluding a satisfactory settlement with China, was not one he greatly relished. It was much the same work as that done in the previous decade by Sir Henry Pottinger, but unlike Pottinger, Elgin had no responsibility for Hong Kong, nor did he want to have anything to do with the Colony. He did not trust Bowring; he deplored the power of the merchants ('the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce is run almost as a department of Jardine Matheson and Company'); and he anathematized the expatriate British: 'I did not know what brutes -lying -sanguinary -cheating -oppressive to the weak crouching before the strong ... [were] these smooth-faced country men of ours'. {But Elgin at some time or other loathed almost everyone -Admiral Seymour was 'a perfect driveller', Reid, the American Minis-ter, a 's.eaking scoundrel'.26) He called at Hong Kong as little asg
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
possible, and whe. there preferred to stay on board the flagship in the harbour.
In part because the forces to do more were not available, Canton was dealt with first, although this was not attempted until December 1857. By this time France had decided to join in the enterprise, inspired to do so by the execution in Kwangsi, in gruesome circum-stances, of a French missionary, the Abbe Chapdelaine. After a prelimi-nary bombardment the walls of Canton were taken by an Anglo-French force, at a cost of perhaps six hundred Chinese casualties and ten allied dead. The city itself paid no attention, Yeh continuing to cut off rebel heads -seven hundred of them one morning -until after a week the allies lost patience and entered the hostile town. Harry Parkes was given the satisfaction of doing this at the head of a hundred British sailors, a force that proved quite capable of making its way unharmed into the centre and capturing Yeh. Interestingly enough, in view of all the pre-vious insistence on the hostility of the Canton population, there was little popular resistance and Canton enjoyed what was probably the most tran-quil period of its existence. S. Lane-Poole, the biographer of Sir Harry Parkes, recorded:
A remarkable proof of the feeling that has been maintained between the allied troops and the people may be seen in the fact that during the 3 years and 10 months that the occupation continued, only two instances occurred in which attempts to take life were committed by the Chinese upon our men ... the two off enders in the instances above mentioned were the only Chinese who suffered capital punishment at our hands during the period of the occupation ... the occupation has at least proved that most of the professedly popular opposition which we encountered prior to its capture was the result of official instigation.27
A city of a million inhabitants was policed only by an additional three hundred allied servicemen, and foreigners-including Lord Elgin-were able to walk about the town without molestation. Such calm acceptance of foreign administration proves the wisdom of Elliot's refusal to allow the forcible subjugation of Canton, and must cause those writers who everywhere detect signs of nationalist resistance some hesitation.
Although the conduct of the war is peripheral to the history of Hong Kong, the consequences of the peace were to be important, resulting in the first expansion of the island colony to the mainland. Palmerston's
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government gave place in February 1858 to a Conservative adminis-tration headed by Lord Derby; proving that the previous opposition to the conduct of affairs in China had been essentially a party political manoeuvre, the new government followed exactly the same line as their predecessors. A series of treaties was agreed with Britain, France, Russia and the United States in June 1858 after the Anglo-French forces had moved north and taken the forts at Taku (Dagu) guarding the town of Tientsin and the approaches to Peking. This was made possible by the new classes of gunboats developed during the Crimean War: the 'Clowns', little craft armed with two heavy guns but drawing only four feet of water, and capable therefore of steaming right up the Peiho, were best suited for actions in China.
Lord Elgin, considering his task complete with the treaties signed, left China in August, calling at Japan on his way home to conclude a treaty there. He left the conduct of affairs in China to his brother Frederick Bruce, formerly Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong under Davis, and later to be the first British Minister in Peking. Before he left Shanghai on his way to sign the Treaty ofmTientsin in March 1858, Elgin was presented with an address from Jardine's, Dent's, and the other British merchants in the port which spoke of their trust that 'the elevating influences of a higher civilization . . . might be extended among the Chinese people'. Lord Elgin replied, barely concealing his disdain for such narrowness: 'The Christian civilization of the West will find itself face to face not with barbarism but with an ancient civilization in many respects effete and imperfect but in others not without claims on our sympathy and respect.'27
Much to his annoyance, Elgin was soon back in China. In conjunc-tion with Admiral Hope, Frederick Bruce mismanaged the ratification of the treaty, and involved the British forces in a repulse at Taku. Lord Elgin, by then enjoying a seat in the restored Palmerston Cabinet of June 1859, had to be reluctantly sent out again. At the end of 1860 peace was finalized and the terms of the Treaties of Tientsin ratified by the Convention of Peking. Foreign embassies were at last allowed in the Imperial city and Prince Kung, the abler brother of the Emperor, took charge of foreign relations, with support grudgingly accorded by the more conservative courtiers. The new office, the Tsungli Yamen, developed into the Ch'ing equivalent of the Foreign Office, although the direction of foreign policy continued to be strongly influenced by Tz'u-hsi, Dowager Empress on the death of her husband in 1861, especially after her coup d'etat in November that year.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
With direct inter-government relations now established in Peking, Hong Kong ceased to be the centre of British diplomacy. Governors who attempted direct contact with their Chinese opposites were warned off by the Foreign Office; it was that department's business, through the consular officers, to deal with the Chinese, and the Governors should please get on with the domestic affairs of their little colony. The new diplomatic exchanges developed only slowly, the Tsungli Yamen's task being complicated by the fact that the more chauvinist Chinese regarded all contact with the foreigner as reprehensible, branding those who conducted it as 'traitors'. While this was unhelpful, since the alternative of armed resistance was impracticable, such atti-tudes are understandable. The Convention of Peking was a very differ-ent agreement from those concluded earlier at Nanking and the Bogue. In 1843 the foreigners had retreated to the seclusion of the treaty port settlements and to the island of Hong Kong, but in 1860 they were allowed to travel anywhere in China, to preach Christianity, to establish an embassy in Peking, and to trade up the Yangtse to Hankow, which was, with nine others, designated as a treaty port. Not only were the barbarians now to be very much in evidence, but to the humiliation of the Summer Palace's destruction was added that of an Imperial apol-ogy. In the context of such painful forced concessions, the loss of another scrap of Chinese territory, a few hundred acres of wasteland looking south to Hong Kong, passed almost unnoticed.
8
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
A reckless spirit of hostility
In London the conclusion of the war was unanimously welcomed. It had never been a popular cause, and its ending enabled a penny to be taken off the income tax. In Hong Kong Sir John Bowring, stripped of his more resounding titles as Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade, settled down to the relatively restricted responsibilities of a colonial Governor. It was not a task for which he was well fitted. Some of his social superiors were prepared to be amused by his braggadocio and to admire his intellectual gifts, but to the conservatively inclined, inward-looking and conventional Hong Kong community, officials and businessmen alike, this Governor was incomprehensible. On his first appointment London had been aware that this might be so. The Col-onial Office at that time -during the coalition government led by Lord Aberdeen -was in the charge of the Duke of Newcastle, no fan of Bowring's, who wanted to limit his powers as much as possible. A Lieutenant-Governor, old Colonel William Caine, was therefore to act as chief executive of the colony, and Bowring was instructed to hold aloof from strictly colonial matters, although with the powers to inter-vene in an emergency. This idea of a 'gouvemeur faineant' very quickly fell apart, but in February 1855 the Whigs were back in power, with Palmerston as Prime Minister for the first time. Bowring had no diffi-culty in persuading him and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, that the separation of responsibilities was an 'administrative solecism', and complete powers were immediately restored to him.
Fate did not serve Sir John kindly by sending out as Attorney
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General in 1854 tne appalling Thomas Chisholm Anstey, acknowl-edged as the biggest bore in Britain. Anstey had been a Member of Parliament for only five years, between 1847 and 18 5 2, but had estab-lished himself as the scourge of governments, speaking for up to six hours on topics of not the slightest interest to the rest of the House. Punch's 1848 alphabet began 'A is for ANSTEY, who talks the House blind', and parodied The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
With speech uncheer'd, to benches clear'd, Without a pause or stop He rav'd away, though all did pray He would the subject drop.1
A fanatic Roman Catholic convert, Anstey was violently critical of Palmerston, chicory growers, customs officers and anything else that aroused his fertile disapproval. His posting to Hong Kong is best explained by a strong desire to have him as far away from London as possible.
The move was only moderately successful. Anstey remained in Hong Kong for less than three years before returning to England, to publicize his grievances in what must have been the longest ever letter to The Times -116 pages, when published (for of course The Times declined to print it) as a pamphlet, 'Reasons for an Enquiry, into th,e Disgraces brought on the British Name in China, by the Present Hong Kong Government'.2 Deprived of chicory and Palmerston, Anstey lambasted almost every official in Hong Kong with indiscriminate enthusiasm. The Chief Justice -the reinstated Hulme -the Chief Magistrate Charles Batten Hillier and the Governor were all attacked, but his main target was Daniel Caldwell, Registrar General, responsible for Chinese affairs. Caldwell was married to a Chinese Christian (which fact caused more than a few raised eyebrows: Chinese mistresses were acceptable -the irreproachable Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial Customs, had a long and respectable liaison with a Chinese lady -but a Chinese wife posed almost insuperable social problems), and was an excellent colloquial linguist. He was quickly accused by Anstey of, among many other offences, keeping brothels, consorting with pirates and taking bribes.
At least some of the charges were almost certainly justified, for Caldwell embodied in his own person many of the difficulties which still afflict the maintenance of law and order in Hong Kong. There
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 213
was no doubt that in his previous post as Assistant-Superintendent of Police Caldwell had been very effective in thief-catching, and in assist-ing with the suppression of piracy, having often been commended by the Royal Navy captains with whom he had worked. Bonham himself had reported to Lord Grey on 3 November 1849 that the senior naval officer, Commander Hay, 'speaks in the highest terms of Mr Daniel Richard Caldwell ... states without his services he does not think that he could have succeeded', and asked that some recognition should be given since 'the duties of J\1r Caldwell have been of a most important and responsible nature, and totally unconnected with his ordinary official avocations'. But Caldwell had laid himself open to criticism: he relied for much of his success on the cultivation of a network of informers, which in turn demanded, there being no one to whom he could delegate the task, an absorption in the Hong Kong underworld, to say nothing of a flow of funds which could hardly be officially obtained.
Anstey found Caldwell particularly distasteful, for reasons that tell one much about Anstey: 'Mr Caldwell himself is a native of St Helena, and apparently of mixed blood. His father, a common soldier in a local militia corps, brought him to Pulo Penang, where, and at Singapore, his youth was passed in various inferior occupations ashore and afloat.' As Attorney-General, Anstey was able to amass enough evidence to have Caldwell brought before a committee of inquiry, which found that only four of the nineteen charges pref erred against him, and those the least important, could be proved. But others were shown to be more culpable, including the Acting Colonial Secretary, Dr W.T. Bridges, who almost certainly burnt some papers which would other-wise have implicated Caldwell -'a contemptible, damnable trick', accord-ing to Anstey.
The very violence of Anstey's attacks -'the reckless spirit of hostility . . . gross disrespect', as the Colonial Office described it, made it impossible to take him seriously, however correct his suspicions may have been. And a subsequent inquiry, carried out in 1861 by Bowring's successor, Sir Hercules Robinson, did conclude that Anstey was right, as the Duke of Newcastle admitted himself: 'the truth of the charges, of which you were the principal author, brought against Mr Caldwell ... has been substantially established'.3 But the peaceable members of the Chinese community were supporters of Caldwell to a man, for however shady some of his activities may have been, he was indisrut-ably effective on the side of the law. When finally dismissed in 1862,
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
after the Robinson inquiry, Caldwell still had to be recognized as indispensable, 'the one person on whom the authorities are dependent': he was recalled in 1868 to advise the next Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell, on licensing gaming establishments and establishing a Chinese detective force, at the 'monstrous' salary of $25,000 a year.
Hong Kong needed someone of Caldwell's peculiar talents, for criminal behaviour, which had decreased under Bonham, became more worrying with the influx of refugees from the Taipings. Lieutenant
C.A. Newman of the King's Dragoon Guards described Victoria asc'the fearfullest hole in the world, for I might say it is inhabited by acden of thieves; for instance, if anyone were walking down a street withca medal on his breast they would come and snatch it off ... I nevercwas in such a place before and never wish to go into another like it.'4 Yeh's calls to obliterate the barbarians exacerbated feelings: localcpapers carried 'a daily Chronicle of Chinese atrocities', which included,cin the space of two weeks, the 'shooting of four men with fireballscupon them; temporary stupefaction of three Europeans after eatingcpoisoned soup; discovery of a headless body; firing matsheds incQueen's Road Central'.5
The gravest incident was an alleged attempt at mass poisoning on 15 January 1857, thought to be caused by a bakery putting large quanti-ties of arsenic in the bread: 'the excitement was of course most intense. The medical men of the colony, whilst personally in agonies through the effects of the poison, were hurrying from house to house, interrup-ted at every step by frantic summons . . . Emetics were in urgent request.'6 The symptoms were nausea rather than anything worse, though there were later said to be long-term fatalities, of whom Lady Bowring was one. Public reaction amounted to hysteria: local papers seriously urged the Governor 'to have the whole of the p()isoning crew of E-sing's bakery strung up in front of the shop'. But the rule of law once more took its course; a jury acquitted the bakers, since it could not be determined who poisoned the bread -it was exactly the same strange British system of demanding clear evidence of guilt that had so annoyed Commissioner Lin in 1839 in the Lin Wei-hsi case. Augustus Heard Junior, an American merchant, reflected gloomily that this was what might have been expected of British justice; 'Alum [Cheung Alum, the owner of the bakery] was tried in an English court with the advantages of English technicality, and, as we feared would be the case, he could not be proved to have mixed the arsenic with the bread, and was acquitted.'7
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
This was not quite as praiseworthy as it seemed. In an episode that illustrates the contradictions still inherent in Hong Kong, the whole of the bakery workforce was indeed thrown into jail, and confined, forty-two of them, in a room fifteen feet square. This satisfied indig-nant feelings but provoked quick protests, most noticeably from the very doctors who had been treating the poisoned victims. Charles May, a London policeman who had been brought out in 1845 to take charge of the police force, claimed that 'the door of the room opens on Queen's Road, and as I am informed and credibly believe, this door,was frequently open', as well as offering the conventional excuse of other 'pressing and arduous duties' in the 'peculiar circumstances of
the time', which made it not 'a matter of surprise arrangement was not carried out with the usual regularity'. ... 8that every
Resisting the more absurd proposals from the British inhabitants for persecuting the whole Chinese population, Bowring did introduce emergency measures providing that 'Any Chinaman found at large ...elsewhere than in his own Habitation ... not having a Pass ... shall be summarily punished by any Justice of the Peace by [Fine or Impris-onment] or by Public Whipping, and Public Exposure in the Stocks.' Vigilantes were encouraged: 'Every Person lawfully acting as Sentry or Patrol is hereby authorized ... to fire upon with intent or effect to kill', and 'No Act done or attempted in pursuance of this Ordinance shall be questioned in any Court. 'g9 A delay in issuing the necessary passes to the Chinese led to the morning papers not being delivered in time for breakfast, an inconvenience the locals were quick to resent. The Friend of China talked of 'moonshine anent "security"', and jeered at the prospect of Bowring's 'Tabbies at the next Exeter Hall meeting' (the headquarters of the Peace Society and all similar good causes) when faced with their former hero's lapse into rough justice, 'when no Court may afterwards take cognizance of the act, however Cali-fornia-like the cause of death'.
Outside observers however noticed a marked improvement in life in Hong Kong under Bowring. Lieutenant Henry Ellis, R.N., had described in 1855 'a bleakness of life and prisoner like sensation ...arising in great measure from the difficulty experienced in moving more than a mile or two on either side of the town of Victoria, partly from want of practicable roads and partly from the unscrupulous treachery of the Chinese'. The British community, although 'all more or less rowing the same boat i.e. striving to amass as many dollars as opportunity would admit of ... were absurdly snobbish', displaying
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
'much nonsensical narrow-mindedness and unsociability'. Three years later, Ellis qualified this description: 'This, be it remembered was written as things were in 1855, since which time . : . there has been a vast improvement in every way.'10
Bowring was certainly reluctant to take arbitrary measures, since he remained a convinced democrat and reformer, ready to seize an initiat-ive in any direction that offered prospects of moving Hong Kong towards a more liberal society. His most radical endeavour was an attempt to introduce an element of properly representative government, that would include the Chinese population. Like many of Sir John's efforts it met with failure, partly due to his own lack of tact in not winning the co-operation of his second-in-command, the Colonial Secretary William Mercer, who presented argumentative counter-proposals. More seriously, the ethos of the Whig government of the day was not in favour of electoral reform. The 183 2 Reform Act had left the British franchise very limited; less than one in five of the adult male population had the vote. Lord Palmerston lacked interest in further reform; his own constituency ofTiverton, with a population of 11,143, had a conveniently small electorate of only 508. Only 193 of the 3,432 inhabitants of Ashburton, now almost the proprietary seat of the China interest, were entitled to vote. Lord John Russell, the only enthusiast for reform among the principal Whigs, had resigned his post as Colonial Secretary, so Bowring's proposals, first advanced in his dis-patch no. 110 of 2 August 1855, fell upon deaf ears in Whitehall.
He had suggested that there should be three new unofficial members of the Legislative Council, to be directly elected by all persons, irres-pective of race, in possession of land worth �G10 per annum, to hold office for three years. The new Colonial Secretary, Henry Labouchere, could not agree. Labouchere, later Lord Taunton, wa$ a thoughtful statesman and a humane liberal, not to be confused with his more entertaining and flamboyant nephew of the same name, a politician and journalist who had worked in a circus and lived with Red Indians. In his dispatch no. 82 of 29 July 1856 Labouchere set out his reasons for restricting the representative element in Hong Kong's government. This is a document of great importance to the understanding of all subsequent British governments' attitudes to the question of democ-racy in Hong Kong. The Colonial Secretary wrote:
I believe that the present is the first proposal that has been made for introducing those institutions amongst an Asiatic population,
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 217
containing but a very.small proportion of British or even European residents: I have, therefore, thought it the more necessary to weigh carefully the reasons for and against it.
Elections, he decided, were impossible: the population of Hong Kong was unruly, unbalanced an. transient, and looked unlikely soon to improve:
The testimony of those best acquainted with them represent the Chinese race as endowed with much intelligence, but as very deficient in the most essential elements of morality. The Chinese population of Hongkong is; with perhaps a few honourable excep-tions, admitted to stand very low in this respect.
Nor could there be any question of entrusting power to the small British community, presumably not so 'deficient in the most essential elements of morality':
Few if any of the British residents in Hong Kong are persons who go to establish themselves and their descendants permanently in that place; they merely sojourn there during a limited time, engaged in commercial or professional pursuits, but intending to quit the colony as soon as circumstances will permit.
To whatever extent the control of local affairs might be con-ferred on this class by the partial introduction of representative Government, the effect would be, to give power over the perma-nent population to temporary settlers, differing from them in race, language and religion, and not influenced by their opinions. How-ever respectable the character of the residents may be, I cannot believe that such an arrangement could work satisfactorily.
But the Colonial Secretary held out some hope for the future: 'If you should hereafter be able to select from the Chinese inhabitants persons deserving of confidence, whom you may think fit to hold this or any other administrative office, I should be willing to assent to such appointments.' There was no need for elections to such offices, since 'for the simple purpose of discerning the persons most competent ...cthe judgement of the officer administering the Government seems to me quite as good a test ... as public election.'11
Bowring's first attempt having failed, it was another century and a
218 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
quarter before any element of democracy, and even then a much less radical one, was introduced into the Hong Kong legislature, although slow and hesitant steps were taken to ensure that the Chinese were to have an increasing share of influence and responsibility. Bowring contrived at least some progress in�P improving opportunities for the Chinese inhabitants. Since Labouchere had indicated that Chinese could be made Magistrates, the first step was to allow them access to the legal profession, which Bowring duly did. Finding considerable difficulty in filling consular and other posts with even reasonably suit-able men -most of the early appointments were the result of political patronage, and Bonham's distrust of Chinese-speakers had not helped -Sir John also initiated a recruitment and training scheme for officialposts. This made use of the newly formed Chinese department atKing's College, London, also seeking candidates from Irish universi-ties. The programme was only moderately successful at first -Bowringthought the departmental head at King's, James Summers, formerlyheadmaster of St Paul's College. in Hong Kong, was ignorant andguseless -but later it became more effective.
Bowring also made an effort to control the worst aspects of the Chinese coolie emigration trade. With the opening of the Californian gold fields in 1848, a demand for unskilled labour had rapidly developed. This was a commodity of which China had a large reserve, and coolies were ready to undertake the long voyage for the sake of higher wages. The trade was organized by labour contractors, who engaged the coolies and delivered them to the �gorts to await shipment in barracoons, where the unfortunate emigrants were confined in deplorable conditions, each man allotted only eight square feet. Con-ditions on board ships in the 'Pig Trade' were worse even than those on slavers; on one voyage 128 emigrants out of 332 who embarked committed suicide -this in spite of a bonus to the crew of $400 for every one landed alive. Bowring insisted on minimum standards, which included the provision of hospital accommodation and a surgeon, but he was not helped by the verdict of a Hong Kong court which, having found an Englishman and five Chinese guilty of imprisoning emigrants, sentenced the Chinese to prison but only fined the Englishman $5.Whitehall commented that the sentences did not 'do credit to British authority or increase respect for British justice', but a stricter applica-tion of the Chinese Passengers Act of March 18 55 only had the effect of driving the trade from Hong Kong to more compliant ports.12
During Bowring's term of office, Hong Kong gradually assumed a
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
219
rather more civilized aspe.t than in its earlier, wilder, days, an improve-ment assisted by the practice of Governors bringing their wives to Government House and the arrival of the first bishop in 1850. Until that time the only representative of the Church of England had been the Colonial Chaplain, the Revd. Victor Stanton. Missionary initiative in Hong Kong had been seized by the Non-conformists and the Roman Catholics, based on Singapore and Macao respectively. The American Baptists had opened chapels in both Victoria and Stanley as early as 1842, closely followed by the Catholics. The protean Gutzlaff, acting as a missionary, was instrumental in founding a Basel Missionary Society chapel in 1844. British Protestants were uncomfortably divided between the established Church of England and a group which included the Non-conformist sects and the Church of Scotland. As the state Church, the Church of England naturally became the official Church of Hong Kong as soon as colonial status was defined, but until then it was somewhat hampered. Although the Protestant missionaries often worked together, even extending some toleration to the Catholics -'the professors of a corrupted form of Christianity', according to thefirst Anglican Bishop -their differences were still marked. It hadmbeen suggested that they might share a temporary chapel, but thismecumenical step had been specifically forbidden by Whitehall. A similarrivalry was reflected between the Church Missionary Society, anmAnglican body, and the London Missionary Society, run by Non-conformists. Fortunately most of the early missionaries were men ofmconsiderable ability and generosity of spirit, who, together with theirwives, gave a much needed tincture of civility to Hong Kong society.m
The Stantons were particularly liked, and Victor, who had earlier undergone the uncomfortable experience of being kidnapped by the Chinese, was instrumental in starting both St Paul's College, which began to train Chinese as teachers and clergy in 1849, and the first school for English children. Sir John Davis spoke highly of the 'liberal-ity and absence of sectarian feeling' found in this school, which gives an idea of conditions in other establishments. The first headmaster of St Paul's, James Summers, typified the narrow and prejudiced view too often found. On a visit to Macao in June 1849, Summers was asked to .remove his hat as the Corpus Christi procession passed. As a protest against such papistical extravagance, he refused, and was promptly arrested. Captain Henry Keppel, the senior naval officer, . who happened to be on the spot, peremptorily, but unsuccessfully,demanded his release. Keppel thereupon sent a raiding party which
220
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
stormed the prison, killing a warder, and freed Summers. A full-scale international row ensued, which resulted in Lord Palmerston having to make a formal apology and to censure Keppel. This does not appear to have done the unrepentant Captain any harm, since he died Admiral of the Fleet at the age of ninety-four. Summers went on to the chair of Chinese Literature at King's College, London. 13
Formally established religion arrived with the appointment in 1850 of George Smith as the first Bishop of Victoria. It was at a time when the Church of England was deeply split by the Tractarian movement, which caused vitriolic ill-will between the High and Low elements. Smith, although fervently Low Church, was primarily a missionary,who had spent three years exploring China on behalf on the Church Missionary Society. He returned to England in 1847, believing 'that this country has been honoured by God as the chosen instrument for diffusing the pure light of Protestant Christianity throughout the world'. Such complacent pomposity was entirely typical of the new Bishop, and of the increasing respectability of the colony; the old, more raffish, order lost one of its most picturesque supporters with Gutzlaff's death in 1851. Even then a scandal ensued, since the Bishop's chaplain fell for Gutzlaff's widow, and was sent home for unbecoming conduct.
Some Hong Kong missionary efforts were more successful than others; the Diocesan Native Female Training School was obliged to wind up when it was discovered to be a little too successful. According to Eitel, who can be regarded as an authority since he married one of the teachers, almost all its successful Chinese girls, having been trained in Western ways and being able to speak English, found comfortable situations as the mistresses of resident foreigners.14 However useful a contribution this might have made to the pleasantness of life in Hong Kong, it was not quite what the school's founders had envisaged.Bishop Smith attempted to persuade the British government to finance a college to train 'Native Interpreters' who 'by the efficiency gained from a European education and by the principles of moral integrity instilled during the progress of Christian instruction' might manage to 'repay the debt of gratitude in some subordinate official trust', and help in 'leavening with the influence of Christian loyalty the whole mass of Native Society'. 15 It went without saying, of course, that 'the management of such an institution might be undertaken by the ecclesi-astic representatives of the Church of England in the Colony'. In the inflamed climate of religious opinion in England no government was
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
going to risk the opprobrium of spending public money on such a project. Nor did the sceptical Unitarian Bowring think much to the alumni of St Paul's, none of whom had been of the slightest use in the government service, and he preferred to concentrate on the state sector of education. A beginning had been attempted in 1848 when modest grants ($10 a month -about �G2) were made to the existing Chinese schools, which were then to be supervised by an education committee, but the reforming Governor found it 'quite monstrous' that only �Gi 20 was spent on educating, as against �G8620 on policing, the populace. Of perhaps nine thousand children of school age in the colony only 150 were in government schools (there were also a number of private, unsupervised, Chinese schools). Bowring managed to increase the school population to 873 boys and sixty-four girls, to secure an annual budget of �G1 200, and to appoint an Inspector of Schools, but it was only after Bishop Smith left in 1 864 that it proved possible to establish a well-organized state system.16 But Bowring did have the satisfaction of worsting Smith over a day of fasting and humili-ation, which the Bishop demanded and the Governor, with the backing of the Colonial Office, refused.
Bowring, urbane, cultivated and good-tempered, was like most of his fellow radicals out of touch with the majority opinion of his day, and incapable of mixing easily with persons of different interests -although he did manage to fall off one of Matheson's racehorses, which may have endeared him to the more sporting. He had much need of an even temper for, in addition to domestic upsets (Lady Bowring's poisoning was followed by their daughter's decision to become a nun) and the impossible Anstey, the Governor was inflicted with James Keenan, a Kentucky Colonel who had served in the Mexican War and been given the post of US Consul in Hong Kong as his dubious reward. Keenan was quarrelsome either sober or, as he frequently was, drunk. He had a very cross correspondence with the senior US naval officer, Captain Cadwalader Ringgold, who found it necessary to remind the Consul of the difference between 'pirates' and 'pilots' and recommended that he read a few good books. There were persistent difficulties with British deserters who were encouraged to abscond by US whalers in the port. The Hong Kong Colonial Secretary William Mercer complained to Keenan that 'about fifty men' from the 59th Foot (East Lanes) had deserted in the first three months of 1856, and asked for his co-operation in controlling the problem. Almost certainly this was not forthcoming, since Keenan was permanently irate, as were
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
many of his countrymen, at the British use of Sikh policemen, always referred to in his correspondence as 'Negroes' or 'Blacks'. One inci-dent in 1855, when the steamer River Bird was boarded in a search, was picked up by the New York Times with banner headlines: 'Outrage. An American Vessel boarded by Blacks. American Consul Dragged through the Streets.' Keenan, who had been charged with obstructing the course of justice, wrote a bitter letter to the US Secretary of State William Marcy complaining of British methods of law enforcement and crying for vengeance:
I now have most earnestly to request that such steps will be taken by our Government, as will not only prevent a recurrence of such conduct, but also effect the removal of all the officials engaged in these outrages. The immediate recall of Sir John Bowring, governor of the Colony and the removal of Charles B. Hillier,
W.J. Mitchell (Assistant Magistrate) and Charles May (Super-intendent of Police).
If prompt and energetic measures are not taken to punish the audacity and arrogance of these violators of international law ...athe American name will ... become a byword and a reproach.
Consul Keenan went on to protest in increasingly hysterical tones against: 'The illegal proceedings of a mob calling themselves a Magis-trate's Court and a Police Force ... the Chinamen and the Negro Musulmen who are brought to sustain him ... this growing hostility of English officials . . . this British gangrene . . . must meet with a speedy remedy.'
Sir John deployed his 'restraining influence' to mollify Keenan, who found an outlet for his aggressive energies in accompanying the Ameri-can Navy to the taking of Canton, where he got into trouble for alleg-edly raising the American flag on the wall, since the United States was not taking part in the proceedings. In spite of his vehement denials Keenan was dismissed by the American minister, Dr Parker, which led to another major row, eventually settled by President Buchanan himself dismissing the unrepentant Consul. 17
Bowring too had to go; he had been too radical for his countrymen, and left in May 1859, amid the execrations of a large portion of the European community, with venomous epistles and libellous accusations continuously hurled at him. The Chinese, on the other hand, presented their retiring Governor with most magnificent testimonials of their
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
'genuine esteem', recognizing that Bowring had been the first Gov-ernor to take Chinese interests to heart. His wife's death, a shipwreck on the way home that left Sir John stranded with his fellow passengers on a coral reef, and a severe illness, did not impair his fondness for giving other people advice. Palmerston forgave Bowring enough to send him off to Italy to counsel the new government of King Victor Emmanuel on economic policy, and not very long before he died in 1872 at the age of eighty, Sir John could be found lecturing an audience of three thousand in his native town of Exeter.
Kowloon
One unlooked-for benefit of the Arrow war to the colony was the acquisition of the Kowloon peninsula, some three square miles of the Chinese mainland opposite Victoria. British interest in the northern shore of the peninsula had been manifested as early as 27 July 1844, when a government notification was inserted in the Gazette to the effect that 'houses and buildings of a permanent nature' had appeared there and that 'the British Government would not interfere, should the Chinese Government proceed to remove such erections'. Davis had pointed out to Ch'i-ying that these incursions -which were made by Americans as well as British -had been effected without his per-mission; the intruders were subsequently expelled, and 'for some years the Kowloong Peninsula was occupied solely by some half dozen insig-nificant hamlets tenanted by stonecutters and limeburners'. The situ-ation in June 1859 was summarized by William Mercer:
It was as nearly as my memory serves to fix it, about the summer
of 1853 that the present village began to arise at Teem-cha-tsuy
and has ever since been well known as a place of reception for
stolen goods of all kinds. It has largely increased in the last two
years and its character is by no means improved.
The shipping having moved over to that side oi the harbour
for the Tai-foong [typhoon] months will probably tend to promote
still further the growth of this objectionable settlement.
Mercer took a look himself, with the escort of a party of police, to confirm the disreputable habits and appearance of the population. He decided it would be an act of kindness, as well as a strategic move, to
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
take over this noisome spot, and set out the advantages of so doing: 'I would class as foremost the prevention of the occupation of Kow-loong by another foreign power, or, which is still more to be feared, by irregular settlers acknowledging no order, obeying no rule, and setting the Chinese jurisdiction at defiance.' Which indeed was almost the present circumstance, since what authority existed had been deposed by 'a gang of Hakka bandits'. The limits of the harbour area of Hong Kong, now indistinct, would be defined, and the inhabitants of 'this overcrowded and expensive city' provided with 'occasional change of air and scene, and an escape such as it is from the monotony of this dreary hill side'.18
There were, however, more pressing reasons for taking over Kow-loon. The proximity of the mainland to Hong Kong had worried naval�P and military men from the earliest days. Any forts on Kowloon held the island within easy cannon shot; a 24-pounder was reasonably accu-rate at two thousand yards, which would enable guns at Tsim sha Tsui to cover most of the new settlement's shoreline. Elliot had immediately spotted the danger and suggested that the existing Chinese batteries should be dismounted, even though they were described by one military observer as 'honeycombed rusty old pieces of iron', which 'if anyone attempted to discharge them with shot, the Gunners would stand a good chance of being killed'.19 In times of war, however, military men could indulge themselves, and accordingly areas of Kowloon were temporarily taken over in 1842, and again when hostilities broke out in 1857. This was done in a reasonably amicable manner, without objections from local officials or populace. As an indication of the informality of relations, when Sir John Bowring was upset by the actions of the military mandarin at Kowloon he simply arranged for him to be kidnapped, brought to Government House on the island, duly scolded and returned.
By that time technical developments were bringing a change in atti-tudes. The effective range and power of guns had greatly increased with the introduction of rifled cannon. The French had used them in their Italian campaign of 1859, and William Armstrong, a Newcastle solicitor, had developed his new rifled field-piece, which allowed a higher charge and greater range in a lighter gun; his breech loaders gave an impressively high rate of fire (they were used to equip the new Warrior of 1 860, and some can still be seen on her at Portsmouth). Other powers were beginning to take an acquisitive interest in China. Kowloon in relatively friendly and ineffective Chinese hands might be
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 225
tolerable, but what ifthe French or Russians should install themselves there with a few batteries of the new guns commanding the harbour and the city of Victoria? Britain had just concluded the costly Crimean War against Russia, and conflict with France, even though the two countries were at the moment allied, was permanently possible. Major General van Straubenzee, in command of the Hong Kong garrison, and Captain Hall, late of the Nemesis but now commanding the line-of-:battle ship H.M.S. Calcutta, made these points forcefully to Bowring; who was persuaded to press the British government to acquire at least the Kowloon peninsula -essential for cavalry exercise -andStonecutters Island, a mile or so offshore, which General van Straub-enzee was particularly anxious to have for gunnery purposes. When inthe expeditionary force reached Hong Kong General Sir Hope Grant, China once more, found Kowloon to be
'essential to the defence of Hong Kong harbour and the town of Victoria', and 'a spot of which Iwas most anxious to gain immediate possession'. Reluctantly, however, Grant appreciated that 'the forcible seizure of the promontory would not have been quite legal'. 20
Although both the Plenipotentiary, Lord Elgin, and his brother Frederick Bruce appreciated the military arguments, they too were perturbed by pangs of conscience, which deprecated forcible demands for more Chinese territory, and by the bad example this might set to other European powers, as well as by the fact that the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin had been agreed, and was only waiting for ratification from Peking. Bruce suggested that a separate agreement on the subject of Kowloon might be made at Canton, perhaps accompanied by the remission of all or part of the previously negotiated Canton indemnity. Lord John Russell was especially worried that the French would be upset by Britain gaining territory as a result of joint Anglo-French action, and would demand a quid pro quo.
It was left to that stirrer-up of events, Harry Parkes, to find a sol-ution. He settled the whole thing personally with Governor General Lau at Canton on 19 March 1859, and produced draft proposals for General Hope Grant's consideration. Parkes reported the meeting thus:
Got up to the Heights with said draft at I o'clock, and at once saw General Grant, who fully approved the letter. I also talked with him about the police etc., and got him at once to authorize�P the formation of a strong mounted corps, to be raised from 30
226 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
men, as at present, to 70 or 80, if 100 could not be given. Took tiffin with the two Generals, their respective ladyships, and staffs, and back to office. In the afternoon to Lau, with mY. letter in my pocket, and got him to agree to the whole of the scheme whereat I felt jolly in mind though seedy in body.
The next day Parkes 'had to draw up a deed ofglease and a proclamation relative to Kowloon and in a word to carry into execution the arrange-ment of yesterday, but I was rewarded in the evening by signing, sealing and delivering, I to Lau and Lau to me, the desired deed of lease which settled the Kowloon question, until the peninsula can altogether
1
be ceded to us, which will be the next step, I doubt not.>2
In this casual way, at a cost of 500 taels, was Kowloon ceded by one senior Ch'ing official to a British Consul during a period when the two countries were at war. Bruce approved, although without much enthusiasm: 'This arrangement is an imperfect one, but I thought it would be inadvisable to delay acquiring even this much title to a district'. Clearly perturbed that a junior consular official -Parkes was thirty-one at the time -had appropriated a slice of Chinese territory in his own name, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Duke of Newcastle, suggested that 'it was advisable to send out an intimation of the wishes of Her Majesty's Government to Mr Parkes to whom the lease appears to have been made'. Lord John Russell accordingly acquainted Parkes that Her Majesty 'would gladly acquire possession of the Cowloon Peninsula' -at, presumably, any time that Mr Parkes found it convenient to surrender his title.
Some more official confirmation of the area's permanent cession from the Emperor of China was also needed, and Bruce tiptoed deli-cately around the subject, attempting to fix the responsibility on some-one else. He wrote, havering, to van Straubenzee on 19 February 1860:
Her Majesty's Government has expressed itself desirous of obtaining a cession of that part of the Kowloon Peninsula which is necessary to the security of the harbour, and to the maintenance of order among the population ... I can offer no opinion as to the probability of the Chinese agreeing to cede it to us, but it would be a step gained were it to be occupied ... Should Your Excellency deem such a measure advisable, you will see that I donot think it is politically open to objection ...
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
On 6 March he wrote'to Sir Hercules Robinson, Bowring's successor: 'I wish to state to you, as the person most interested, the position, diplomatically speaking, of the question, leaving it up to you to decide . . . But I need not say that acting as we are with others, there may be grave political objections to mooting the subject of territorial acqui-sition.'
It fell again to Parkes to �Pmake this possible, although involuntarily and in a very uncomfortable fashion. With his command of spoken Chinese and his eighteen years' experience of Chinese diplomaticmethods, Parkes was :in obvious choice to accompany Lord Elgin on his second expedition north in August 1860. While negotiating with the Chinese, Parkes, with a small party that included Elgin's private secretary, Henry Loch, and Thomas Bowlby, the Times correspondent,were seized by the Manchu general Sen-ko-lin-ch'in. After some days of brutal treatment Loch and Parkes were released just before the Emperor's order for their immediate execution was received, but the other members of their party, including Bowlby, and many of their small escort died in a particularly unpleasant fashion.22 The incident immediately brought negotiations to an end. Either the Chinese accepted every British demand or Peking would risk destruction, assur-ing the collapse of the dynasty. As it was the Summer Palace, in which the captives had been imprisoned, was looted and destroyed in what Elgin, after much heart-searching, believed was a suitable reprisal; not as drastic as the sack of Peking would have been, but a severe enough warning. The absolute cession of Kowloon then became nothing more than a trifling addition to the allied requirements, and was grantedwithout demur.
There remained to be settled the future use of the new area, whether it should be employed for civil or military purposes. Sidney Herbert, Secretary for War, who had helped Florence Nightingale in her cam-paign to improve standards of care in the army, warned General Grant to 'look carefully at Kowloon. There is a strong feeling among the Hong Kong civilians that all the advantages of the acquisition should be reserved for them. I have urged on the Colonial Office that mer-chants go out to Hong Kong or elsewhere at their own risk for their own good; but the soldier is sent out to protect the merchant ... and the duty of the Government is to give them the best chance of health and comfort.'23 Sir Hercules Robinson, on behalf of the colonists, claimt:d that the idea of appropriating the peninsula was theirs, and that the Peking Convention expressly declared it to be ceded as 'a
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Dependency of the Colony of Hong Kong'. The General won, leaving Dr Eitel indignant that the colonists' 'incontrovertible arguments ...were brushed aside by the simple fiat of the Imperial Government. The wants, the welfare and the development of the Colony .ere mercilessly sacrificed to Imperial military interests.'24 It was some time before Kowloon became anything more than a useful appendage to Victoria, with only wharfs, godowns and some summer houses supplementing the military installations.
With the signature of the Treaty of Tientsin Hong Kong entered upon a period of relative obscurity. Ten new treaty ports haJ been added to the five already existing, which not only opened the coast as far north as Manchuria to international trade, but also the Y angtse, although the establishment of facilities there had to await the sup-pression of the Taipings. Once the question of access to Canton was resolved, it began to compete more seriously, and a new international settlement, considerably larger than the old, was created on the reclaimed island of Shameen, close to the old factory area. With the appointment of a British Minister at Peking, Hong Kong was no longer the sole centre of British interests in China, and its Governor became a Colonial Service officer, under the direct control of a single Whitehall department, the Colonial Office; and new forces were at work even in that institution.
'What a land is this; with its subject continents and islands,
hardly able to maintain the peace in Ireland, and yet
conquen�Png nations on the Indus, and the Emperor of the
third part of the human race at Amoy and Chusan. '
Sir James Stephen25
Since Virginia was founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century British colonies had proliferated. In addition to the original settlements in North America, numerous and widely scattered parts of the world had found themselves, in the course of a couple of centuries, attached to the British Crown. In 1843, when Hong Kong was added to the list, it joined Singapore, Malacca, Prince of Wales Island, Labuan, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Ceylon, Cape Colony, Gambia and Sierra Leone, St Helena and the Falkland Islands, Aden, the numerous Caribbean possessions, Gibraltar and Heligoland. In Australia the orig-inal convict settlements were developing into properly constituted
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
colonies, as were Newg�PZealand and the later Australian states (India was never regarded as a colonial possession, but treated separately under the Board of Control and the India Office).
Any attempt to manage centrally the affairs of so geographically scattered and diverse a group of dependencies, at a time when com-munications were limited by the time it took dispatches to travel by the fastest sailing ship (steamers of that period were still being out-stripped under most conditions by sail), was beset by impossibilities. The residents of numbers 13 and 14 Downing Street, where the Col-onial Office was uncomfortably housed, wisely did not attempt to do this, relying on colonial Governors to take most decisions. This habit of leaving things to the man on the spot was to stay with the Colonial Office long after telegrams, telephones and jet travel had rendered it less imperative.
Neither assistance nor much interference was offered by the officials' political masters. The post of Secretary of State for the Colonies (until 1854 also the Secretary for War, although the depart-ments themselves were quite separate) was never a plum job. At the end of the Napoleonic wars the Whigs had even wanted to wind the department up, amalgamating it with the Home Office. Sometimes held by able young men on their way to better things, but often by second-rankers, the Colonial Office was rarely a place to linger (in 1855 the post changed hands four times). With the exception of Edward Cardwell (1864-66), the army reformer, the occupants of the post in the twenty years or so after the A"ow affair, although all decent gentlemen, were not distinguished by great talent. Of the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Camarvon ('Twitters'), Lord Granville and Lord Kimberley, only the last took colonial administration seriously, and none displayed any interest in Hong Kong unless forced by circum-stances to do so. The House of Commons considered colonial affairs to be unutterably tedious, and often found difficulty in mustering a quorum for the infrequent debates on the subject.
By contrast the senior civil servants at that time, and for thirty years thereafter, were men of considerable distinction, who held their jobs for long enough to give form and continuity to colonial policy. Sir James Stephen was the initiator. A widely-learned (he later be-come Regius Professor of Modem History at Oxford), conscientious, evangelically religious man, he held the post of Permanent Under-SecretaryJrom 1836 to 1847. His personal abilities, combined with.an immense capacity for work, established a system of clear channels
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
of communication and defined responsibilities within the department. When Stephen retired, under considerable nervous stress, three posts had to be created to cope with the workload he had managed alone:
Herman Merivale succeeded as Permanent Under-Secretary, Fred-erick Elliot, another of that ubiquitous family, as Assistant Under-Secretary, and Sir Frederic Rogers, later Lord Blachford, as legal adviser. All three of these were men of outstanding talents; Merivale, the only man in his time to be compared to Macaulay for the breadth of his learning, had been a Fellow ofBalliol at twenty-two and became Professor of Political Economy at Oxford; Rogers, who in turn suc-ceeded Merivale in 1860, had been a Fellow of Oriel. Colonial Secre-taries came and went, but these men continued to wield the real power; 'The colonies', an Australian journalist acidly remarked, 'have been really governed during the whole of the last fifteen years by a person named Rogers.'
When Rogers retired in 1872 the office of Permanent Under-Secretary had therefore been in only three pairs of hands since 1836. A recognizable 'house style' had emerged, which might be defined as liberal, with a strong bias towards observing the rule of law, a high degree of conscientiousness towards the subject races already in their charge, and a strong disinclination to add to their number. The sub-ordinate clerks -the senior clerks were in fact highly-placed civil servants, who would today be described as Deputy Undet-Secretaries -were sometimes equally eminent. Sir Henry Taylor was a literaryclion, as was James Spedding, both friends of Tennyson; Spedding wascin fact offered the Under-Secretaryship when Stephen retired, butcdeclined the post, pref erring to get on with his monumental edition ofcthe works of Francis Bacon. Selection of clerks was on the basis ofcpersonal introduction from prominent friends, and almost all camecfrom the upper-middle classes, the gentry rather than the aristocracy,cwho preferred the less earnest atmosphere of the Foreign Office.c
Breezes of change in the system were discernible, originated by Lord Macaulay, who proposed in 1854 a system of admission to the East India Company's service by competitive examinatIOn. His criteria were not dissimilar from those of the Chinese. bureaucracy: 'Skill in Greek and Latin versification has indeed no direct tendency to form a judge, financier or diplomatist. But the youth who does best what all the ablest and most ambitious youths about him are trying to do well, will generally prove a superior man.'26 (The Scotch, he admitted, were 'very little cultivated' in 'the art of metrical composition in the
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 23g1
ancient languages', and ought to be allowed to excel in more mundane subjects.) Macaulay's ideas were embodied in the Northcote Trevelyan Report of 1853, which recommended the foundation of a Civil Service Commission to superintend a selection system. In 1855 this was done, and by 1873 extended even to the Foreign Office. In practice this made little difference to the type of candidates who, a century later, were still coming from very similar backgrounds, in spite of many efforts to broaden the entry. It did, however, something to weed out the totally incompetent, and much to further the somewhat complacent attitudes of superiority that characterized the successful.
The great achievement of Sir Hercules Robinson, who replaced Bowring in September 1859, was to establish a similar system for the recruitment and training of future Hong Kong administrators, along the lines earlier suggested by Bowring. Some such programme was urgently needed, since on Robinson's arrival there were only four men in the government service acquainted with Cantonese, and of these only one, the court interpreter, had even an imperfect knowledge of the written language. The 'cadets', selected by competitive examin-ation, made their first appearance in 1862, and speedily began to make themselves felt; within two years Cecil Clementi Smith had become Registrar General, responsible for all Chinese affairs. From that time, instead of having to rely on the scratch assortment of locals and those who could be persuaded to leave England, Hong Kong began to be staffed by professionals who created a competent administration, although a great gulf still separated them from the powerful mandarins of Whitehall. Cadets tended to come from modest middle-class families, to have attended 'minor public and obscure private schools', and nearly half were from provincial universities, at a time when admis-sion to the Home and Foreign Services was very much an Oxford and Cambridge preserve.27
For some time, however, the old methods of selection had to be employed by the Colonial�P Office, and the Hong Kong government officials continued to constitute a mixed, although improving, bag. Robinson himself would not have passed any competitive examination. He came from a remarkable Anglo-Irish family, the Robinsons of Rosmead, Westmeath. The new Governor's father, Admiral Hercules, had served with Collingwood, keeping in, so he said, with the surviving victor of Trafalgar by petting his dog Bounce; his brother Bryan speqt half a century as a judge in Newfoundland. Two of the Admiral's sons became colonial governors; William -who was also a well-known
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
composer -of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland, and Hercules of New South Wales, Ceylon and South Africa as well as Hong Kong. After a short military career (commissioned into the Royal Irish Fusiliers in 1843 at the age of nineteen," resigning three years later), Hercules served as an Irish civil servant, concerned for the most part with Poor Law administration and famine relief before becoming Governor of the little West Indian islands of Montserrat and St Kitts. Only thirty-five when appointed to Hong Kong, Robinson enjoyed a long career in the Colonial Service, being recalled in 1895, after his retirement, to his previous post in Cape Town w:1en things there began to look difficult. Robinson was a professionally affable Irishman, with a young and attractive wife, together described as 'pro-jecting an image of healthy sociality'. Late in life, in New South Wales, he made a name for himself as the winner of the colonial Derby and St Leger, and was extremely popular. The joviality was superficial, though, the real Robinson being described as 'cold and calculating, very cautious, without any personal ties or friendships or hatreds. His first interest was to secure his safety.' Joseph Chamberlain complained of his performance in South Africa that 'I wish he would show his teeth occasionally.'
But a somewhat bland personality was what Hong Kong needed after the excitements of Bowring's tenure of office. Sorting these out occupied much of Robinson's time during his early years in office. When on 16 December 1861, more than two years after his arrival in the colony, Robinson was able to forward to the Duke of Newcastle the Minutes of the Civil Service Abuses Inquiry, it was hoped that this would prove to be the final report on the Caldwell case and that official life would begin a more even tenor. The Inquiry found Caldwell guilty of a 'long and intimate connexion with the pirate, Machow-Wong', and his dismissal from the public service was recommended. On 10 April 1862 this was confirmed by the Duke, although it took him rather longer to silence Anstey, who had proved at least one of his points by what he described in characteristic terms in a letter of 4 June 1862 as 'this late ... partial, mutilated and ex parte inquiry'.
As well as Caldwell, others connected with the stormy past left the scene; that survivor of the Napier mission, Alexander Johnston, had gone in 1852; William Caine and John Hulme retired in 1859, leaving tl1e discontented Mercer as the only remaining member of the original colonial administration. New appointments were of safer men, not for the most part of much distinction -although one, Julian Pauncefote,
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
Attorney General later in the decade, was to become deservedly renowned -but competent and honest. Fixed salaries were agreed, ranging from �G5000 for the Governor and �G2500 for the ChiefJustice to about �Gi ooo for departmental heads. These included a Postmaster General, since the colony was now given its own postal service, and, as another indication of Hong Kong's growing freedom from London controls, its own coinage. This was not to be sterling, as in other newly founded colonies, but the dollars traditional in China. From 1862 the colony's accounts were published in dollars.
Not too Scotch
Although Robinson himself had not much to do with it, it was during his period of office that the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was estab-lished. This institution, usually referred to in Hong Kong as 'the Bank', as the Bank of England is known in the City of London, became the leading financial house in China in a remarkably short time, and remains an important international bank, of major significance in the colony.28 The credit for its foundation should go to Thomas Suther-land, agent in Hong Kong for the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Naviga-tion Company. Sutherland was a self-made man of impressive ability; by the age of twenty-eight he had been made superintendent of the company's China and Japan agencies and a member of the Legislative Council. F.W. Kendall, who later became Chief General Manager of
P.c& 0. under Sutherland as Chairman, wrote in 1862 from India:c'Sutherland passed through. He went home rather under a cloud, Icthink, but had come out with full authority, and is to be Superintendentcat Hong Kong. We have few men with better heads and more enlight-ened and refined ideas than Sutherland has. He had mixed morecin society ... and is a thorough man of business without being toocScotch.'29
In July 1864 Sutherland discovered that Bombay financiers were planning to float a 'Bank of China', as a majority Indian-owned finan-cial house, intended to mop up the profits of the China trade. On hearing of this plan to glean what he believed to be the rightful pickings of firms resident on the China coast, he set off with great speed to put together an alternative concern. Within five days he had prepared a prospectus and obtained the backing of the Dents, through whom the prospectus was issued. Given the state of relations between the
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
two Hongs this a.tomatically excluded Jardine Matheson, which since Sir James Matheson had been chairman of P. & 0. until six years previously, must have been a cause of some annoyance. A Provisional Committee under Francis Chomley of Dent's allocated shares -eight thousand each to Hong Kong and Shanghai, two thousand to India, and two thousand for Japan, Manila and the rest of the world. Since no shareholder was to be allowed to subscribe for more than 2.5 per cent of the total, a wide shareholding was ensured, and the considerable sum of $2.5 million pledged.
An interesting parallel to the flotation of the Hongkong (always one word) and Shanghae 0ater Shanghai) Bank is that of the National Bank of India in Calcutta at almost the same time. This had similar aims -to enable local investors to profit from the banking services engendered by their own activities -and was similarly successful in raising an important capital: 50 lakhs of rupees, or �G500,000. The National Bank of India soon became London-based, while Hongkong and Shanghai remained a Hong Kong-registered Bank, although many of its shares were owned outside the colony. Another interesting con-trast is that while the National Bank of India had from its foundation Indian directors, a practice it continued until its final absorption in 1985 by the Australia and New Zealand Bank, it took the Hongkong Bank a century to elect its first Chinese to the Board.30
Sutherland had tapped an existing vein of enthusiasm, as the pros-pectus -which was in fact hardly more than an initial statement of interest -indicated in its first sentence: 'The Scheme of a Local Bank for this Colony, with Branches at the most important places in China, has been in contemplation for a very long period.' The prospectus, in an optimistic tone, knocking the competition, contained some sweeping claims of the sort that would today horrify the New Issues department of the Stock Exchange, but which in the event were to be fully imple-mented:
The Banks now in China being only branches of Corporations,
whose headquarters are in England or India ... are scarcely in
a position to deal satisfactorily with the local trade which has .
become so much more extensive and varied than in former years.
This deficiency the Hongkong and Shanghae Banking Company
will supply ... For the anticipated success of this enterprise there
are therefore ample grounds ... The Bank will commence oper-
ations simultaneously in Hongkong and Shanghae.
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
Jardine Matheson, who saw no reason to encourage any Dent project, endeavoured to put a spoke in their rival's wheel by using their influ-ence on the Legislative Council, but since both Sutherland and Chom-ley were members, the necessary ordinance was pushed through, and the bank began trading on 3 March 1865.
With hindsight, this must have seemed the worst possible time for such an enterprise, for scarcely a year later the financial world was rocked by the collapse of the London discount house Overend and Gurney. In the wake of its failure there was a run on the banks which brought down many other businesses. On the China coast Jardine's just avoided closure by negotiating a capital sale, and lease-back, of their extensive property portfolio, but Dent's had to shut their doors, bringing to a close the history of one of the two original great hongs.Their place in Hong Kong, and the seat which it had become custom-31
ary to allot them on the Legislative Council, passed to Gibb Livingston, another of the original Canton bongs. But the British firms were rapidly declining in importance relative t<;> the Chinese. Within fifteen years of Dent's closure only Jardine Matheson remained listed among Hong Kong's eighteen largest ratepayers; all the remainder were Chinese.
Jardine's also managed to withdraw their balances from at least one of the failing banks by taking advantage of the speed of their ships, one of which raced the mail steamer bringing the news from Calcutta, 'to the thunder of our paddles and the hiss of our steam pipes ...until I would have thought every bearing was at melting point'. Jardine's won by an hour, and managed to empty their accounts and cash all outstanding notes, getting away with 'A boatload of specie, mostly English gold', before any one else on Hong Kong heard the news.32Their old rivals having left the scene Jardine's were able to take their place in the Hongkong Bank, and thereafter played a leading role in the direction of the Bank's business.
The Hongkong Bank's survival in those dangerous times, when the colony's banks were reduced in number from ten to four, was due to its youth. More established banks had built up balance sheets and lending books which produced good profits in years of boom, when as much as 14 per cent could be charged on loans fully secured by government paper, but placed a great strain on the quick assets needed in order to survive a sharp run. Newly formed banks, not having developed their business to the same extent, had preserved more of their origin_al liquidity: not only the Hongkong Bank's survival, but tl1e even more dramatic instance of the new National Bank of India's
236 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
continuing when 'nearly all the older Indian banks collapsed, prove the advantages enjoyed by the newcomers.
After the crash a clearer field was left to the Hongkong Bank, of which the directors were quick to take advantage: Within a decade branches and bank agencies had been opened in Japan, India, Saigon, Manila and San Francisco, in addition to the Chinese branches. Com-petition was never unduly threatening. The biggest British bank in the East, the Oriental, closed in 1884; and an attempt by the National Bank of India to establish itself in Hong Kong between 1 869 and 1 880ended in losses and recriminations. In 1872 the Bank became bankers to the Hong Kong government. The then Governor, Sir Richard Mac-Donnell, wrote to the Duke of Buckingham: 'I have not been slow to enter into an agreement with the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation ... the Executive Council were firmly of the opinion that the opportunity of obtaining the more favourable terms of the HKSB should be seized without delay, and as that Bank stands on a sound basis, and is accounted so highly in_ commercial circles, I had no hesita-tion in agreeing.'33 Two years later the Bank was given the Peking Legation business, and from then was considered indisputably the leading bank in China and a great asset to the colony in which it wasbased.
Unlawful games
As Hong Kong ceased to be the centre of interest in Anglo-Chinese relations, the colony turned inward to address domestic issues. On these there was often a difference in perception between the men on the spot.and the civil servants in Whitehall, perennially conscious that at any time their poli!ical masters might be ambushed by some colonial issue which had been overlooked. There were few questions raised on colonial affairs and even fewer debates, but Hong Kong attracted attention on particularly embarrassing topics -prostitution, slavery, flogging and gambling being especially noticeable, and always sure of an extensive coverage in the press.
Gambling was the first of these to cause trouble. In Britain gambling was controlled by laws of considerable complexity; diversions ranging from backgammon, bagatelle, billiards, boat races and bowls to whist and wrestling were under certain circumstances permissible; others, such as dice, faro, boulet or roly-poly were absolutely unlawful; boxing
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
was dubious. The rich, who placed their bets in such private clubs as White's or Tattersalls might lose as much money as they pleased; the poor, who had to frequent common gaming houses -unlawful institutions -or place their bets on the streets -equally illegal -were in effect banned from betting. Originally these laws had been enacted because 'crafty persons' had enticed honest men 'to play at the tables, tennis, dice, cards, bowls, ,clash, coyting, loggeting' and sundry unlaw-ful games, 'by reason whereof archery is sore decayed ... and divers bowyers and fletchers, for lack of work, gone and inhabit themselves in Scotland.' Therefore, it was stated, 'no manner of artificer or crafts-man, husbandman, mariners, fishermen, watermen, or any serving man' might so indulge themselves, 'except it be in their masters' house over Christmas'.34 Although the decay of archery was no longer a matter of pressing concern, this class-based legislation suited the mid-Victorians, anxious to remove temptations from the lower orders, admirably: but its enforcement in Hong Kong was unthinkable.
Something for nothing is universally popular, but the Chinese addic-tion to gambling is a cultural phenomenon. Closely related to the Confucian world-view, which stresses the importance of propitiating the gods in order to secure favours, the search for luck was embedded in every part of national life, from the Emperor sacrificing in the Temple of Heaven in order to ensure a good harvest, to the coolies betting at fan-tan on the number of pebbles remaining in a pile. Any-thing could be made the subject of bets, from horse-racing to thimblerig, and although officially illegal in Imperial China, betting flourished everywhere. When the pragmatic Bowring came to consider the question he saw no merit in laws that could not be enforced, and proposed the legalization of gaming, under strict supervision, after a model recently, and successfully, introduced by the Portuguese colonial administration in Macao. But Bowring's proposals fell upon stony ground: the older Whigs might still carry about themselves a flavour of the hard-playing Foxites, who won and lost fortunes on the tables, but the party was evolving into the respectable Non-conformist Liberal party led by the ultra-respectable Gladstone: there were no votes to be gained in permitting gambling, even somewhere as distant as Hong Kong.
It was not until Sir Richard MacDonnell took the initiative in 1867 that anything was done. Sir Richard had little to lose: unlike his prede-cessors he was nearing the end of a long career -Hong Kong was his last posting before retirement -having already been governor of the
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Gambia, St Lucia, St Vincent and South Australia, and received the appropriate order of knighthood, and had therefore no reason to avoid controversy with Whitehall. He was naturally authoritative, fond of adventure -he made some pioneering explorations in Australia -and intolerant ofidleness and humbug. Somewhat reluctantly acknowledged as one of the finest Governors in the service, MacDonnell habitually addressed the grandees of the Colonial Office in terms not ordinarily used by colonial Governors -which particularly irritated the aristocratic and urbane Earl Granville -and did not hesitate to intervene in matters which the Foreign and Consular Services considered their own business; an indignant Rutherford Alcock described MacDonnell as 'coarse, bumpti.us and exceptionally inconsiderate and uncourteous'. A qualified barrister, who had acted as a colonial chief justice, MacDonnell knew his law, and his West African experience, which involved some fighting, proved his willingness to take risks. His dispatches are lively, penetrating, and ready to take on the Colonial Office on contentious issues.
As might be expected of someone of MacDonnell's character, he ran Hong Kong personally, even dictatorially, not relying on his staff or caring overmuch for public opinion. Right or wrong, he pulled the colony, Chinese and Europeans, together as a working unit in a way no previous Governor had done. After four months' investigation he proceeded to brisk action covering taxation, registration of local craft, the suppression of piracy, and the criminal justice system, all of which he pushed against sometimes bitter opposition. The most controversial of MacDonnell's innovations was his licensing of gaming establish-ments. The combination of irrepressible habits and formal interdiction had inevitably led to widespread corruption. An underpaid and ill-trained police force was taking huge sums from the proprietors of illegal gambling houses: and even such drastic steps as replacing English by Scottish constables, as being less bribeable, had failed. Sir Richard persuaded a reluctant Colonial Office that a licensing system was admissible. He was fortunate that the Colonial Secretary at the time, Lord Carnarvon, was young and open-minded (he even supportedwomen's suffrage), with a seat in the House of Lords that made his personal position secure. Carnarvon was therefore willing to take potentially unpopular decisions, which his successors, nervous of precedent, were unwilling lightly to overturn.
In September 1867 eleven public gaming houses were opened, to an outcry from the missionaries, which in turn stimulated indignant broadsides from the reform-minded Social Science Association in
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
London, who were very sarcastic on the subject of 'local authorities' who had 'taken it upon themselves to pass an "Ordinance"' whichhad brought 'geat discredit ... upon the British name at home and
gr
abroad'. MacDonnell fought back, with added acerbity since he was himself a member of the Association. From somewhere, he observed, the Association had got hold of the very odd idea that gambling had been 'entirely suppressed' in China. It might be possible, he admitted tongue in check, to suppress gambling for a short time, by methods such as had been used in China; by 'razing houses to the ground and torturing the landlords, measures to which it was true this government has never yet resorted'. 35
Legal measures had been tried in Hong Kong, with such pussy-footing punishments as British justice allowed, but had resulted only in increased corruption and crime. Sir Richard 'declined to bear a part voluntarily in continuing the sham which the committee unwittingly recommend', and rhetorically asked if they would prefer 'a style of "ad captandum" legislation, tinselled and varnished to catch the applause of vapid declaimers, but ill fined to win the approval of earnest men, thoroughly understanding the question, and filled with a conscientious sense of their responsibility?'
It was possible that Sir Richard might have succeeded in his fight for good sense but for one factor: the former black sheep, Daniel Caldwell.
MacDonnell's licensing policy worked only too well, in that the proprietors of the gaming houses, who were making a great deal of money, were anxious to appear whiter than white. The Governor wanted foreigners excluded? Very well, so they should be, in spite of the loss of profits. Suspicious characters and known villains should be picked up? So they were, in considerable quantities. The instrument of this amelioration was none other than the dubious but effective Daniel Caldwell. Now employed by the licensees, at a salary of $20,000, which was nearly as high as that of the Governor himself,Caldwell undertook to assist them in keeping on the right side of the law. To some effect; when a survey was made of the arrests of 'Illegal Gamblers and Dangerous Characters' it was found that in one month (15 January-14 February 1869) twenty-one of the twenty-four sub-sequently jailed had been apprehended by 'Mr Caldwell's detective'. Caldwell's worth was appreciated by the Governor, who wrote to Lord Granville (who succeeded Lord Carnarvon and the Duke of Bucking-ham as Colonial Secretary -there were four different Colonial Secre-taries to be dealt with during MacDonnell's time of office):
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Mr Caldwell is a person who stands well in the opinion of the Chinese community, and possesses great personal influence amongst them, which, I think, is on the whole deserved. Moreover his present position in the foreign community may be estimated by the strong expression of feeling on the part of the Legislative Council in his favour, which was publicly given on the 15 August 1866, with a full knowledge of all his antecedents as well as of his conduct during recent years.
But the tide of Victorian morality was sweeping too strongly for Sir Richard. What stuck in the home politicians' gullets were the licence fees paid by the gaming-house operators to the Hong Kong Treasury, which amounted to embarrassingly large sums. Nervous of beingaccused of using 'the profits of vice' to s.pplement colonial finances, Whitehall refused to sanction the release of the fees, except to cover one or two specific items of police expenditure. They were reinforced in this attitude by the view of Sir John Smale, Chief Justice of the colony, who was waging a fierce campaign to revoke the licences. In 1870, when MacDonnell was away on leave, Smale began sending messages to the Hong Kong Colonial Secretary and General Whitfield, acting Governor, claiming that 'the evil results of gaming in this Colony are to an appalling extent never hitherto fully appreciated . . . the fearful consequences of gaming ... the trustworthiness of the police ... was never so low as at present'. Fortunately for MacDonnell, the Attorney General in Hong Kong at that time was the remarkable Julian Pauncefote, who later became a distinguished diplomat, Britain's first ambassador to the United States, and was instrumental in foundingwhat became the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Paunce-fote tore into Smale, using the bluntest of language:
I cannot admit the accuracy of the facts which he urges as the ground for his opposition to the system ... On the contrary, I maintain that, since the establishment of the licensed gaminghouses, there has been a vast decrease of crime ... ln conclusion, I venture to express a hope that the Chief Justice [will] abstain from attacking the policy of the government from the bench, as there can be no doubt that he thereby encourages ... every kind of falsehood which can bring odium on this Colony, in relation to the system of licensing gaming houses.36
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
Even so forthright a rebuttal was not enough to save the day at the Colonial Office. The Hong Kong merchants, whose gaming in their clubs was not interrupted, joined with Smale, and the licensing system was abolished. Eitel, who was there at the time, wrote in 1895 after events had ample time to develop: 'no positive gain resulted from the abolition of the gaming houses. Gambling and police corruption continued thenceforth unchecked. The government thereafter simply ignored the problem which is still waiting for a master hand to solve
it.,37
Sir Richard's cavalier way with his official masters in Whitehall was exemplified by his fight over the Hong Kong seal. This quaint device had been put together in something of a hurry in 1842, and depicted an Englishman and a Chinese in commercial congress on a beach amid tea chests, with an island in the background which might charitably have been identified as Hong Kong. In 1869 this was converted into a badge for the colony's new flag. MacDonnell did not approve of the result, and wrote indignantly to Lord Granville on 3 July: 'the design seems to have been compiled by an oilman at Wapping for about �G3'. He proposed, 'in lieu of the gentleman in an evening coat who is purchasing tea on the beach at Kowloon, an unusual place for such a transaction ... the well-known figure of Britannia and the British lion'.
Governors were not meant to address Earls and Cabinet Ministers in so ironic a fashion, and MacDonnell's letter was particularly hurtful as the badge had indeed been designed by Messrs Thomson & Co., a respectable painters' suppliers of Wapping; the badge therefore remained unaltered. Many years later, the scholarly Governor Cecil Clementi had another try when he suggested in 1926 that the badge should include the Chinese characters for Hong Kong surmounted by a royal crown. This was turned down by the Legislative Council, one member of which, C.H. Ross of Jardine's, commented that there were not 'ten Europeans in the Colony who could tell you what those characters were'. Clementi was indignant, and caustically observed that 'the community has at last educated itself up to the Wapping standards of fine art'. In spite of the criticisms the badge remained, with minor alterations, until 1958, when the then Governor, Sir Robert Black, asked for a new design to be prepared; the Hong Kong Police insisted on retaining the old device, which until 1996 was still to be seen on the sides of their Land-Rovers.38
MacDonnell was very much at home in prosecuting the war against
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
piracy, although he was not much helped either by the Foreign Office or the Admiralty, both reluctant to take action outside colonial waters without the permission of the Chinese governme9t. The Governor solved this by arming two junks (one of which he christened the Pre-posterous), and taking the Kowloon magistrate on board to add some legality to the enterprise. In spite of the lack of sympathy from White-hall it seems that after MacDonnell's treatment the industry of piracy never regained its former prosperity.
A royal visit
The war with China brought a lift to Hong Kong society and trade, as agreeable officers were temporarily added to the community and the support services for the expeditionary force developed. Bowring and Robinson, with their wives, were welcoming and hospitable, and modestly favourable accounts of life in the colony began to be received at home. Albert Smith, the London impresario whose entertainments at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly were a great success in the 1850s, decided to base one of his pieces on China, and made a journey for the purpose of collecting material in 1857. Smith was what might later have been called a 'card': a medical man -just -and the quintessential Bohemian, he was a leading light of the Garrick Club circle to which both Dickens and Thackeray belonged, and a great friend of the former, although he fell out with Thackeray. He was said to have inspired Dickens to start his enormously successful public readings, but Smith's own line was a little less elevated -his duet with his hand 'made up like an old woman, which I used to do in the scene of Baden Fair' was a great success with the Chinese girls. In the monotony of Hong Kong's social existence Smith's visit was a welcome break. He was looked after by Captain Twiss of the Gunners, who took him to 'an American Bar where we had some excellent sherry cobblers'.gJohn Dent gave him dinner, 'one of the best I ever sat down to, in London or Paris', cooked by his French chef. The conversation was on horses, bets and yachts. Smith was impressed by 'many people out in carriages, and some Yankees in light iron 4 wheel trotting gigs; also a string of Mr Jardine's horses, led out for airing by black grooms'.
Sir John Bowring was civil, and spoke learnedly of the trees and plants in the Botanic Gardens which he had established. Smith dined convivially at Government House with Sir John, General van
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 243
Straubenzee and Charles Jardine, when 'we had great fun about some wine that Sir John had received from Japan, than which nothing could be nastier'. Gifts for the Piccadilly show were generously forthcoming (they included Yeh's fur-lined coat and the execution crosses on which he had victims sliced, as well as some sketches by George Chinnery from Dent), but in spite of the genuine hospitality, Smith found the place plain and dull. Crime�Pwas still commonplace, although without its previous dramatic character. Smith had his pocket picked, and found that one friend always carried a hand spike and kept a 'sharp dog'. The British knew little of the Chinese, and did not seem to wish to: 'From the majority it was difficult to get any practical hints respect-ing the native habits of the people themselves -those small prominent traits about which the public most care.' But they knew a great deal about each other's affairs. 'A peculiar feature in the society of Hong Kong, is that everybody pitches into everybody else, and says the other will be of no use to me.' After the excitements of Piccadilly, colonial life seemed tedious:
The young men in the different large houses have a sad mind-mouldering time of it. Tea-tasting, considered as an occupation, does not call for any great employment of the intellect: and Inever saw one of the young clerks with a book in his hand. They loaf about the balconies of their houses, or lie in long bamboo chairs; smoke a great deal; play billiards at the Club, where the click of the ball never ceases, from earliest morning: and glance vacantly over their local papers. These journals are mostly filled with the most uninterestingly unimportant local squabbles, in which the names of Mr Anstey, Mr Bridges, Ma-chow-wang, Sir John Bowring, and Mr Caldwell, are pitched about here and there, to the confusion of the stranger, who wonders at the importance attached to these storms in tea-cups.39
Alfred Weatherhead, a government clerk who lived in Hong Kong between 1856 and 1859, found much the same, although his view was perhaps coloured by his own modest station in colonial society:
Of social amusement there is but little of any kind in Hong Kong. No Literary and Scientific Institution, Mutual Admiration Soci-eties &c. A branch of the Royal Asiatic Society exists, or rather languishes there but is confined to a select few. There is, to be
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
sure, a Library and Reading Room, supported by subscription at the high figure of $2 per month -where the members might meet to play at chess, practise music and get up lectures, soirees, and classes if they liked. But they don't. In the first place such proceed-ings would involve people belonging to different circles meeting each other, which would be highly improper and objectionable ... At the Club House, that paradise of the select, and temple of colonial gentility, they rejoice greatly in billiards.40
Low life was more amusing. Sergeant James Bodell of the 59th Regi-ment (East Lanes) was posted to Hong Kong in 1850. At first he found conditions appalling; the soldiers were made to drill for hours a day in full uniform, with leather stocks; morbidity and mortality rates were alarming; the Colonel fled to England, and no replacement could be found until Major H.H. Graham was promoted. Then things got better; cricket, football, boxing and skittles replaced excessive drill, andgJardine's gave the soldiers several good pulling boats. Bodell acted as a stage manager in the garrison theatricals, and was entertained by the other participants: 'In hot weather ... they would keep bottles of Ale, gin &c in a basket down a well to keep it cool. These drinks would be very soothing and acceptable.' Another useful friend was Dent's groom, who had come out with two racehorses from England, and took Bodell to the races where 'you could get more Chinese ladies in one day at the Races than you could in five years in the City of Victoria Hong Kong', although there were there 'more Houses of bad repute kept by Chinese women than any place I have ever seen with the same population'.
Pirate hunting was also fun: H.M.S. Reynard was particularly suc-cessful, since she could lower her masts and funnel, and with after-burners suppressing her smoke, could steal undetected up the rivers. Bodell 'saw the pirates brought in, tied together with their queues, and later executed hanged in three rows of three'. The attractions of a young lady to whom he was 'paying advances in the love line' seduced Bodell from army life, and in October 1854 he married one Sarah Mackinay, with the regimental band in attendance and general rejoicing. 41
Hong Kong's first royal visitor arrived on 31 October 1869 with
H.M.S. Galatea, a steam frigate, under the command of Prince Alfred,the Duke of Edinburgh. 'Affie' was the Queen's second son and every-one's favourite; his 'very manly good temper' was contrasted sadly withg
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
245
his elder brother's wayward disposition. He had been fortunate in having been allowed to choose a career in the Royal Navy, unlike the Prince of Wales who was denied any important occupation. By 1869 Affie was only twenty-five but had already been shot by an Irish terror-ist (he survived) and elected King of Greece by an overwhelmingly favourable plebiscite (he declined). The Duke's talent to charm was immediately demonstrated to Hong Kong when he found that his old commander Henry Keppel -of the Summers incident, and now an Admiral -was about to leave the colony just before the Duke was officially to arrive. Affie immediately made arrangements to replace the crew of the admiral's barge with his own officers, who then rowed Keppel off from the pier to his ship, the Duke himself pulling stroke.
The character of the entertainment arranged for the Duke indicated how far Hong Kong had developed as a respectable colony. As well as the usual balls, fireworks and banquets, Affie was entertained by the Amateur Dramatic Corps (with a selection from Shakespeare given by Mr York) and the German choir at the new City Hall Theatre (illuminated by gas). He conducted another concert (he was a com-petent violinist), attended a Chinese theatre, played cricket (the cricket club had been founded as early as I 85 I) and bowls (at the Oriental Bowling Alley), and laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral chancel. The extra space thus afforded eliminated the troubles experi-enced three years previously when Mr Vaucher and Captain Thomsett, R.N., fell out over a rearrangement of the seating. The question ofwho was entitled to the sixth pew 'although the said sixth pew is 2'6"nearer the pulpit than the 6th pew originally was' had to be sent toWhitehall for settlement, where it was decided in favour of the Captain,since 'Parishioners have a claim to be seated according to their rankand station.' The rule at the Hong Kong Club, whose new clubhousehad been opened in I 860 -'the interior arrangements are very elegantand reflect great credit on the Architect (Mr S. Strachan)' -that navalofficers were not allowed credit might well have been waived for theward room of Galatea. Certainly no such difficulties would have beenexperienced at the Masonic Lodge, of which the Governor was amember.42
At least one day of the Duke's visit was devoted to Chinese recep-tions and entertainments, which underlined the fact that the Chinese population of Hong Kong was beginning to be accorded a measure of recognition, although nothing in proportion to its importance. Mac-Donnell's instructions, drafted by the authority of the Liberal reformer
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Edward Cardwell,�Phad specified that no legislation could be passed by the colony without the consent of Whitehall 'whereby persons of Afri-can or Asiatic birth may be subjected ... to any liabilities to which persons of European birth or descent are not also -subjected'. Mac-Donnell did not let this stop him from taking actions resented by many Chinese, but only as a result of his willingness to offend anyone in the interests of getting things done rather than from any prejudice against the Chinese community, which was in fact rapidly developing a new cohesion and sophistication. 43
One benefit of the Taiping upheaval had been to bring to Hong Kong its first considerable influx ofg'respectable' Chinese, driven from secure and prosperous backgrounds on the mainland by the continuing violence. Unlike the coolies who had flocked to Hong Kong in the early days, the newcomers brought their families with them. Legge felt that this was 'the turning point in the progress of Hong Kong. As Canton was threatened the families of means hastened to leave it and many flocked to the colony.' In 1844 the ratio between men and women had been 5:1. By 1869 this had settled at 2.7:1, at around which it remained for the rest of the century. In 1845 there were only seventy-eight family houses, while by 1867 the number had risen to 1,775. Many of the migrants were indeed people of substance and enterprise: by 1859 sixty-five Chinese firms were large enough to be registered as 'Hongs', representing a considerable accumulation of capital. Some of these were comparable to the great British firms; Kwok Acheong, Compradore of P. & 0., organized a management buy-out of P. & O.'s engineering division and established his own steamship line; by 1876 he was the third-largest rate-payer in the colony.
By 1869 the second generation of missionary-trained Hong Kong Chinese was also emerging, men who had not only learnt fluent English but who had experienced Western methods of business and politics. They had been educated not by bigots like Summers, but by Bridgeman and Legge, who combined liberal views with a knowledge of China and sympathy with Chinese aspirations, and formed a closely knit group able to exercise a growing influence in the colony. Tso Aon worked for the Superintendency of Trade from its inception until 1857; his nephew, Tso Seen Wan, became a member of the Legislative Council and his grandson, Tso See Kai, Rector of St Paul's church. In 187g1 the Revd. Ho Fuk Tong died, leaving $150,000, the fruit of successful property speculations. Two years later his son, Ho Ch'i, left for England to begin his legal studies, at much the same time as
THE TUMULT AND THE SHo"UTING DIES
his cousin-in-law, Ng Choy, who had married Fuk Tong's daughter. In 1880 Ng became the first Chinese member of the Legislative Coun-cil; his successor there was Wong Shing, who had earlier accompanied Yung Wing to America; his son-in-law, Wei Yuk, became a member of the same Council in 1896.
Paralleling this penetration of the government by the second-generation Chinese colonists, an attempt was made to recreate in the changed environment something of the infrastructure of a traditional Chinese community. The colonial authorities were cautious; such Chinese institutions as the Triad societies were viewed suspiciously, and with good reason; some others, including the trade guilds, with no justification at all. Yet others were, in varying degrees, encouraged. The first of these to achieve official recognition was the District Watch Force, recognized by MacDonnell, against considerable opposition, as an auxiliary police force deployed in Chinese areas to supplement the deficiencies of the regular police. Membership of the District Watch Committee became acknowledged as the anteroom to a political career, which might lead to the Legislative Council and British Imperial honours. More traditional societies centred around the temples, especi-ally the new Man Mo temple in Hollywood Road, which had become a forum where grievances were aired and disputes settled in surroundings and in a language with which the Chinese were familiar. Such pro-cedures were altogether less alarming than those of the new British courts, however sincerely these attempted to accommodate Chinese practices, for even if British justice was less arbitrary and ferocious than that ofglmperial China, it was thought infinitely preferable to settle things among oneselves. In the eight years after the temple was founded no case involving only Chinese appeared before the British courts.
Representation on the temple committee -a parish council is a possible comparison -was through neighbourhood associations, or kaifongs. Members of the temple committees soon assumed more extensive responsibilities than those of a parish council; they 'secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbitrators, arranged for the due reception of Mandarins passing through the colony, negotiated for the sale of official titles, and formed an informal link between the Chinese residents of Hong Kong and Canton authorities'. Although kaifongs did not at first seek to represent the interests of the Chinese community to the Hong Kong government, their very existence led to government officials, when it suited them, consulting these emergent associations.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
The colonial government looked on Chinese assoc1at10ns with some sympathy, especially those concerned with trade and policing, both areas of mutual concern, but British officials found great diffi-culty in understanding Chinese concepts of hygiene and medicine. Chinese medical theory and practice had remained for centuries at a similar stage to that of Imperial Rome -which had itself re-mained almost unchanged until the Renaissance. It was -and con-tinues to be -based on a theory of 'humours' and balance not unlike those of Galen. Anatomical knowledge was almost non-existent, and surgical techniques were on a level with those in Europe before Pare. There was, however, a powerful pharmacopoeia, even more extensive than t.hat of medieval Islam, and an awareness of some aspects of physiology that Western medicine has still to accommodate (acupuncture, exercise and breathing techniques are perhaps the most widely recognized).
Inevitably, the latest advances in Western practice, which had been coming thick and fast in the nineteenth century, had not reached China. Anaesthesia and asepsis had revolutionized surgery, but public health control had done much more to reduce mortality. With enor-mous energy mid-Victorian Britain had cleaned up its cities, which only a generation previously had been every bit as disgusting as Dickens described them, and brought the enthusiastic conviction of the newly converted to the problems of Hong Kong. Chinese culture recoiled from these invasive fields of medical activity with shocked distaste. Surgery of any kind was regarded with fear and abomination, and the unfamiliar discipline of Western hospital life was disturbing. In particular the enforcement of sanitary measures disrupted domestic privacy, and infringed many of the most cherished aspects of Chinese tradition which were concerned with death, interment and reverence for the remains of the dead.
In such a community as Hong Kong, where very few of the popu-lation were native, and through which a stream of emigrants passed, a demand quickly developed for the provision of an 'I Ts'z' -a death house or hospice, where bodies could await return to their own villages, and a communal ancestral hall, where memorial tablets could be kept. Since the act of dying was considered with peculiar revulsion, necessi-tating expensive and bothersome ceremonies and rendering the house in which it took place unclean, the Hong Kong I Ts'z also became a place where the moribund could be left without incommoding others. Nothing more calculated to horrify Victorian medical and moral stan-
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES
<lards could easily be imagined. Conditions in the I Ts'z were described by one of the first cadet officers, Alfred Lister, in 1869:
Another room contained a boarding on which lay two poor crea-tures half-dead, and one corpse, while the floor, which was of earth, was covered with pools of urine. The next room contained what the attendants asserted to be alive . . . and other rooms contained miserable and emaciated creations, unable to speak or move, whose rags had apparently never been changed since their admission, and whom the necessities of nature had reduced to an inexpressibly sickening condition.
MacDonnell, perhaps embarrassed by the existence of such deplorable conditions in his territory, but certainly displaying the vigorous practical approach that distinguished all his acts, closed the I Ts'z and produced plans for something better. This was the suggestion, initiated by some Chinese in the government service, of a hospital to be funded and managed by the Chinese community itself, to provide traditional Chinese treatment and accommodate the terminally ill, and which would be subject to official inspection. The proposal was accepted with alacrity in Hong Kong and agreed in London, where the Colonial Office was at the time more occupied with disturbances in New Zea-land and Canada. Chinese leaders readily formed an organizing com-mittee and produced generous funds: MacDonnell was allowed to give a subsidy from his politically embarrassing surplus from gambling licences. The Tung Wah Hospital emerged as an original and imagina-tive fusion of Western and Chinese ideas. In what was the most signi-ficant acknowledgement so far that Chinese views, even when these appeared to be 'prejudice and superstition', should be treated considerately, traditional Chinese medicine was afforded official recognition.
The governing body of the new hospital, composed of the richest and therefore -there being no Imperial scholar-administrators or clan gentry -the most influential Chinese in Hong Kong, almost immedi-ately became the focus of Chinese power in the colony, intimately linked with the kaifongs and the merchant guilds. Leung On, the Compradore of Gibb Livingston, was the Chairman of the organizing committee, and was joined by such influential figures as the compra-dores of the P. & 0., the Hongkong Bank, Gilmans, and the Chartered Mercantile Bank. These, acting together in the Tung Wah Committee
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
as a recognized body, were able to exert pressure on the government, which, politely, they lost no time in doing.
The committee of the Tung Wah was a conservatiye group, with a keen attachment to status, many members having purchased Ch'ing Imperial ranks and honours, by that time freely on sale. Among them however were representatives of the new generation, including Ng Choy and the Revd. Ho Fuk Tong, although the hospital's Board of Directors was composed only of merchants, representatives of the guilds. Of these the most influential was that of the compradores. Playing a part not dissimilar to that of the Hong merchants in Canton, Chinese compradores were an essential component of any foreign business. Chinese language and customs, together with the complex system of influence and obligations that characterized Chinese society, made it almost impossible for a foreigner to transact business without an intermediary. Originally a humble major-domo or house-steward figure, the compradore had evolved into an official at once the servant and the partner of the foreign businessman, of considerable impor-tance, whose services were eagerly competed for.
Chinese nationalist historians have often displayed their distaste for compradores, a class considered as traitors, running dogs of the foreigners. As a matter of course compradores had to possess a reason-able command of English, and they became well-versed in Western business methods. Allying to these Chinese sophistication and enter-prise, some compradores based in Hong Kong and the treaty ports became powerful instruments of economic development and contrib-uted greatly to what economic progress China enjoyed in the nine-teenth century.44 Compradore shareholdings in early Chinese industrial developments were significant, sometimes critically so. One young compradore, Cheng Kuan-ying, had a significant influence on Chinese political thought. While employed by the Dents, Cheng pub-lished a book which, under various titles and in different editions, was in print for over thirty years, and was apparently avidly studied by the young Mao Tse-tung. Cheng appreciated that Western strength lay not in military technology, but in commerce, industry and social struc-ture: 'The reason why China is poor and weak whereas the West is rich and strong lies in their different social customs.' It was not the soldiers' muskets, but their firing discipline, that enabled them meth-odically to mow down the bannermen at Ningpo.
With the thoughts of such men as Cheng and Ho leavening their attachment to tradition, the committee of the Tung Wah Hospital
THE TUMULT AND THE SHOUTING DIES 2521
developed into something approaching an alternative, if limited, Chinese administration. And the colonial authorities, for the first time, had a reliable means of canvassing collective Chinese opinion.
9
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
The evils of sewage flushing
'Affie's' visit in 1869 might be taken as signalling the start of Hong Kong's period of colonial respectability. The eccentricities of Bowring, who fancied himself as a figre of worldwide significance, had been
gu
submerged by the more domestic concerns of his successors, the affable Robinson and brisk MacDonnell. Nor was Sir Arthur Kennedy, who succeeded MacDonnell, faced with any international compli-cations. Ch'ing rule had been restored in China after the Taiping rebellion had been repressed in an exceedingly bloody fashion, it beingnot uncommon for Imperial troops, having gained the upper hand, to slaughter every Taiping, man, woman and child. Such methods were applied with equal vigour in suppressing the later troubles that emerged in the 186os -Muslim revolts in Sinkiang and Szechuan, and the persistent Nian rebellion in Shantung. In the course of ten years' campaigning the nucleus of at least one effective and disciplined Chinese army had been formed, and an outstanding leader, Li Hung-chang (Li Hongzhang) had emerged. For the next forty years Li func-tioned as the leading figre in the 'self-strengthening' policy, and was
gu
an indispensable representative of China to the rest of the world. At that time it seemed possible that with such men as Li and Prince Kung at her head, a united China, willing to accept Western support, might well find its place among the powers without further troubles.
MacDonnell had been the type of tough and forthright Governor Hong Kong appreciated, and both Europeans and Chinese regretted his departure, after seven years, on II April 1872. With his wide
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
experience of colonial administration he had recognized that circum-stances in Hong Kong were 'so entirely exceptional' that Colonial Office precedents were useless. The staff at the Colonial Office, more interested in Oxford than the Far East (at that date no senior member had penetrated further east than the Mediterranean), remained uncon-vinced.
Sir Arthur Kennedy, who arrived a week after MacDonnell left, was, at the age of sixty-three, near the end of his colonial career, and anxious for a peaceful e.stence. He was readily persuaded to second the business community's complaints, and was popular enough to be allowed such eccentncities as inviting Chinese on special occasions to Government House and increasing the number of Chinese in the police force, using the Sikhs who had so provoked Consul Keenan as prison guards.
The population of Hong Kong seemed to have stabilized at a little over 120,000:
Year Non Chinese Chinese Total
1862 3,034 120,477 123,511g
1865 4,007 121,497 125,504
After 1867 the proportion of foreigners increased somewhat:
1869 7,699 I 14,280 121,979
but thereafter declined:
After which the European total remained in the region of twenty thou-sand while the Chinese population continued to increase.
It was this great disproportion between the races that gave rise to the most awkward problems. Chinese customs and culture were too strongly marked and deeply ingrained to adapt easily to those of the British. Infanticide and piracy evoked unanimous disapproval and were indeed gradually suppressed, but footbinding, gambling, opium smok-ing, child marriage and concubinage were not so easily dealt with. Prostitution, although it might perhaps exist (there were probably 250,000 women in London alone who earned their living at the trade), must certainly not be officially recognized. Even the punishments
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
apparently accepted by the Chinese community were disapproved of by an increasingly sensitive electorate in Britain: branding (which, itwas often explained, was in fact tattooing with Indian ink, with a broad arrow on the ear, and said to be quite painless) was un-English; flog-ging might be reasonable enough (it was only abolished in the British army in 1880, and was still in use in prisons until after the First World War), but had to be kept within bounds.
All these issues gave rise to the gravest concern in the Colonial Office, perpetually nervous lest they should be harried by a morally outraged electorate, but the Hong Kong administration saw things in another perspective. Being at the sharp end, as it were, they were all too conscious of the near-impossibility of changing Chinese habits, and not entirely convinced of the desirability of doing so. Skills in procrastination were developed which allowed some practices, such as that of mui-tsai (indentured girls), which shaded off into child slavery and concubinage, to persist until the 1930s in the face of shocked British opinion.
Chinese medical practice had been tolerated, and institutionalized under Tung Wah direction, but all Westerners were united in deplor-ing Chinese ideas of sanitation. Personally clean and fastidious as they were, it seemed that the Chinese had no concept of public hygiene. They could crowd together in the most insanitary conditions, almost as a matter of course keeping a family of pigs under the bed (172 were found in a single tenement block), and disposing of their sewage in buckets to refuse collectors whose business it was to transport the mess to Cantonese farms for use as manure. Anything that could not command a price was consigned to stormwater drains, which therefore became public sewers. Cattle were rarer members of households than pigs, but an investigation in 187 5 found calves reared in houses so small that when grown they had to be butchered on the spot. These conditions were not the result of any proclivities of the unhappy resi-dents, but due to their exploitation by landlords, usually Chinese them-selves, who crammed hundreds of families into minuscule tenements and charged extortionately high rents. As long as these nuisances were confined to Chinese areas the foreigners were prepared to tolerate them -especially if they happened to be landowners anxious to benefit by building high-density housing -but as they began to encroach on the expatriates' own houses patience evaporated. Strict segregation between European and Chinese types of housing was enforced, but pressure on space forced these into contiguity. The energetic newly
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS 255
appointed Colonial Surgeon Dr Phineas Ayres made an inspection in 1874 of the Chinese districts, where he found fearful conditions: 'Many and many a time have I come out of the houses to vomit in the street',
1
and forecast some 'fearful epidemic if matters were not improved' .
A destructive typhoon later that year, the worst that Hong Kong had experienced, exacerbated the already vile conditions. Eitel, who was there at the time, described it: 'the town looked as if it had under-gone a terrific bombardment. Rows of houses were unroofed, hundreds of European and Chinese dwellings were in ruins, large trees were tom out by their roots ... in. every direction dead bodies were seen floating about or scattered among the ruins . . . thirty-five foreign vessels, trusting in their anchors, were \\Tecked or badly injured'.2
There were, as ever in Hong Kong, economic considerations. Believing that paper was cheaper than concrete, and might be as effec-tive a building material, the administration issued a series of admirable sanitary regulations, but did little to improve sewerage systems. Dr Ayres formed an effective partnership with J.M. Price, appointed as Surveyor-General at the same time, in attempting to provide an effec-tive sewerage system. For some time they were frustrated by foot-dragging at the Colonial Office, which put an effective stop not only to new projects but even to essential repairs. The hospital, badly dam-aged in the storm, took three years to replace, and the proposals of Ayr
es and Price to provide a comprehensive sewerage scheme were constantly stalled, criticized, and reduced in scope. These delaying tactics worked effectively in that 1877 saw the appointment of a Gov-ernor who set his face steadfastly against such modern fads as water closets, and from whom little progress on sanitary matters might be expected.
It might have been possible to find a man more unsuited to be a colonial Governor than John Pope Hennessy, but it would not have been easy. A diminutive and arrogant Irishman, Hennessy had great charm, and an innate sympathy for what he believed to be the under-dog, but an almost complete lack of common sense, method, reliability, tact, or management skills. His was a purely political appointment, awarded by a Tory government to a former Tory M.P. as a consolation prize. Hennessy had been not just a Tory M.P., but that rarest of creatures, a Tory Irish nationalist, and a Catholic to boot. Something had to be done for him since, deprived of Parliamentary immunity after-a defeat in only his second election, Hennessy found himself deep in debt and saddled with a pair of illegitimate children. He was
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
saved by the Tory victory in 1866, when Disraeli, an admirer of Hen-nessy's undoubted panache, promised to find him a 'lucrative but quiet governorship'.3
Labuan, the smallest and least desirable of colonies, an island off the coast of Borneo with a white population of less than a hundred, was chosen as a suitable place, and Hennessy, muttering furiously at what he regarded as an insult, packed off there in 1867. In the suc-ceeding years, as Governor of Labuan, the Gold Coast, and the Wind-ward Islands, he blazed a trail through colonies, leaving unhappy civil servants in Whitehall and disgruntled colonists behind. The permanent officials were sometimes close to despair, as their comments in the memoranda reveal: 'backbiting'; 'waspish, petty and spiteful'; 'So many instances of Mr Hennessy's intrigues'; 'Mr Hennessy has grossly mis-managed every Government he has been entrusted with'.4
In view of such decidedly unfavourable opinions, it seems incredible that in 1877 the Colonial Office should have promoted Pope Hennessy to the important governorship of Hong Kong. Again, this was a party political gesture, and would never have come about if Disraeli had not returned to power in 1874, with titbits once more available for distribution among the party followers. The permanent staff in the Colonial Office were understandably nervous: 'I hope this restless spirit may quiet down,' one among them noted. The Colonial Secre-tary, Lord Kimberley, eventually saw the error of his -ways, and recorded:Kong ... 'I was unfortunate in removing Sir Arthur Kennedy to Hong
I was still more unfortunate in appointing Pope Hennessy ... A man of quick intelligence and considerable abilities, he is vain, unscrupulous, wanting in sound judgement and common sense, and prone to quarrel with his subordinates.'5 On the other hand Sir Robert Hart, no poor judge of his fellows, found Hennessy 'essentially a fair man, and is also pro-Chinese and pro-Customs' -identical qualities, in Sir Robert's mind.
Sir John was certainly not lacking in imagination, flair, and genuine humanity, but these gifts were almost completely stultified by a con-tinued failure to sustain reasonable relations with his colleagues. These relations deteriorated almost to the extent of making effective com-munication impossible, and were not much helped by Hennessy's policy of always consulting Chinese interests and, as disgruntled officials saw it, falling in with Chinese predilections. He claimed: 'Ihave often taken counsel with my Chinese friends as to what would be the best course to adopt for this colony.' Although admirable, this
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS 257
practice was not welcomed by the foreign community. Another of the new Governor's eccentricities was a rooted objection to what he termed 'The evils of house sewage flushing', and a preference for earth closets or simple buckets. In an angry memorandum to the Secretary of State, who must have been taken aback at its contents, Hennessy reported that the underhand Price had 'made an effort ... to get the Govern-ment to sanction water-closets in the new hospital', that '182 water closets have unfortunately been constructed from time to time in Hong Kong', and asked for permission to insist that these pernicious devices should be replaced by earth privies. Both Price and Ayres protested, but the objections of Colonial Surgeon and Surveyor General were in vain. Ayres' 'annual philippica', as Eitel termed them, were not only ignored, but suppressed by the Governor, who actually went so far as to cancel some of the health ordinances and instruct Eitel, as Inspector of Schools, to draw up a new list, which he wisely seems not to have attempted. Price was driven to write to the Colonial Office on 15 August 1881 protesting against 'officially sanctioned ... fever dens ... abominable human rabbit warrens', and the 'official support of foul sewers' which had forced him 'to abandon further attempts in despair'.6
But help was at hand, for early in 1881 the Deputy Surgeon-General, Dr McKinnon, worried that the increasing insanitariness might affect the health of the troops, protested to the War Office, who sent a medical inspector to report. A stiff letter was sent to the Gov-ernor from Lord Kimberley, pointing out 'that in opposing the measures, which had been thought necessary by the sanitary officers of the colony, and were approved by your predecessor, you have incurred grave responsibility', and announcing the appointment of 'an officer of professional experience to decide, investigate, and report upon the actual state of affairs'.7 The officer appointed was Osbert Chadwick, son of the famous Sir Edwin Chadwick, former colleague and collaborator of both Bentham and Bowring, who had from the early 1830s been the moving force behind the thorough programme of municipal reform carried out by successive Whig governments.
Chadwick could speak with authority, but it was perhaps just as well that his report was only published after Hennessy had left. It demol-ished any idea of earth closets, although admitting that 'slopping out' must continue until a proper system of water-borne sewerage could be installed, and pointing out that 'in advocating the system�P of water-carriage I do not advocate the use of the ordinary water-closet
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
(mahogany seat and brass handle)'. But he used strong words to con-demn the existing system:
... the dwellings of the Chinese working classes are incon-venient, filthy and unwholesome. Accumulations of filth occur in and around them ... Above all the water supply is miserable. It is unjust to condemn them as a hopelessly filthy race till they have been provided with reasonable means for cleanliness. I conceive that it is d1c duty of the Government to see that these means are provided and applied.8
Almost as dear to Victorian hearts as sanitation was corporal punish-ment, which was another of Governor Pope Hennessy's hobby horses. The early settlement was placed under an almost military discipline as far as the Chinese were concerned, conducted by the redoubtable Colonel Caine. The Europeans were left pretty much to themselves until a colonial court was established in 1844 under Chief Justice Hulme. Caine had very considerable powers; he could order up to three months' imprisonment, fines to a maximum of $400, or up to a hundred lashes. Since few Chinese had much in the way of ready money, and prison accommodation was limited, corporal punishment was freely administered. After Dr Bowring's intervention in 1846 public floggings were suspended, but they were resumed 'after a brief interval, much to the satisfaction of the European community, con-vinced that only rigid discipline and sharp punishments protected them from the evilly-disposed Chinese. The sight of an Englishman being lashed in public was naturally more contentious, and after 1866 Euro-peans were flogged in decent privacy.
Sir Richard MacDonnell shared the colonists' predilection for cor-poral punishment, and substituted for the rattan cane previously used, and judged too mild a punishment, the cat-of-nine-tails at that time still standard in the British services. He also introduced an ingenious system of offering convicted criminals the option of being deported, after branding (or tattooing). If they accepted their sentence was remit-ted, but if thereafter they should return to the colony and be identified by the brand, they would be liable to serve their original sentence, with a flogging in addition. Entirely illegal though it was under British law, this practice won the approval of the European community in Hong Kong, and seemed to be justified by the results, in that both the crime rate and the number of those sentenced to prison were very
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
nearly halved. The Colonial Office was worried about MacDonnell's methods but, after an interval, allowed themselves to be convinced.
Only one case caused some controversy. In 1866 Colonel William Henry Sykes, Liberal M.P. for Aberdeen, an ancient campaigner and notorious House of Commons bore, complained that Mo-Wong, a man who had claimed political asylum in the colony, had been handed back to the Imperial authorities in Canton, who had him executed by the death of a thousand cuts, and concluded the performance by eating his heart. William Mercer, that invaluable source of continuity, acting as Governor in the interim between Robinson and MacDonnell, was able to demolish Sykes's story point by point, concluding that he had 'rarely met with a statement containing so many errors in so brief a space'.9
Pope Hennessy arrived in the colony in 1877, ready to make an issue of corporal punishment, and immediately ordered an investigation. It appeare_d that floggings were inflicted for the most trifling misdemean-ours -'committing a nuisance ... general idleness ... singing in solitary confinement . . . plucking fruit' -as well as for such grave matters as 'unnatural offences'. Some of the victims were very severely punished: one Lee-a-Yee twice received ninety lashes on convictions, and subsequently when in prison one flogging of thirty-six lashes and two of twelve, making 240 in all over a period of four years. Public floggings in particular horrified Pope Hennessy: 'The ostentatious marching of the prisoners half naked through the crowded streets, and the public exhibition of an English turnkey flogging with a vigorous arm the speedily bleeding body of a Chinese.' He sounded rather disappointed on discovering that floggings in public were rarer than he had believed: 'I was not at all prepared to find out of these floggings so small a percentage (55 of about 1,150) had been administered in public. Indeed I was under the impression that a public flogging was a very frequent exhibition,'10 and had little difficulty in convincing the officials that the practice of public flogging could be safely terminated, as it was in 1880, even for Chinese.
The British in Hong Kong were less enthusiastic, having been loyal attenders at both public floggings and public executions, but no one was so radical as to suggest that corporal punishment should be abolished altogether. How it should be administered was a matter of great inter-est, and the Governor ordered an inquir"j into the best methods _of flogging, to be carried out jointly by Doctors O'Brien and Wells. Wells had served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy for thirty-three years, which
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
had 'afforded him�P opportunities of judging the effects of flogging with the cat on the back and the breech'. In spite of the 'many ill conse-quences likely to follow severe wounds, such as are caused by the cat', the doctors found it preferable to the rattan, which they described as 'too heavy a weapon, and its effects are very likely to go deep into the cellular and muscular tissues, probably producing loss of substance by sloughing and thus for a long time delaying the healing of the wounds'. (Wells had never seen more than forty-eight lashes inflicted at any one time while in the Navy, which indicates something of the severity of Lee-a-Yee's treatment.) Much better to rely on the well-tried cat, with 'care being taken by means of a thick canvas collar that the neck is not injured and that the loins be protected in a similar way'. For those between thirteen and eighteen years of age 'flogging on the breech with the six tails of the cat' was recommended to be enough, and that the '"Birch" be used for any offenders of more tender years' .11
Hennessy's genuine sympathy for the underdog, which led him to consult Chinese interests, took him in similar directions to those pur-sued by Bowring on utilitarian grounds. Labouchere had written twenty years earlier in response to Bowring's suggestions: 'If you should here-after be able to select from the Chinese inhabitants persons deserving of confidence, whom you may think fit to hold this [the position of magistrate] or any other administrative office, I should be willing to assent to such appointments.' He went on to suggest that 'Tht; experi-ment should be very cautiously made.'12 Since English was the only language of debate and legislation, and British nationality was a requi-site for any Crown post, it would have been impossible to find any qualified candidates at that time.
Only when the second generation of Hong Kong Chinese had emerged could an appointment be made, and even then the field was extremely limited, there being in 1880 only one professional British-educated Chinese in the colony. This was Ng Choy, born a British subject in Singapore, and the first Chinese to be called to the British Bar three years previously. Hennessy accordingly appointed Ng a temporary stipendiary magistrate and a member of the Legislative Council, again on a temporary basis. The appointment was reluctantly sanctioned by Whitehall, even though the Colonial Secretary at the time, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, had a reputation as a liberally-minded Conservative. It is probable that London's lack of enthusiasm was due more to the deep distrust of Hennessy, and the assumption that any-thing advanced by him was likely to be wrong, than to a reluctance to
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
admit Chinese. Certainly Beach's successor, the Liberal Lord Kimber-ley, when refusing to make Ng Choy's appointment permanent, minuted: 'Tell Hennessy's successor that it is desirable to have a Chinese on the Legislative Council' -but not, presumably, one of Hennessy's choice. As it turned out, Ng Choy resigned from the Coun-cil in April 1883g, following financial difficulties, and joined the Ch'ing service, rising to become an adviser to Li Hung-chang and the first Chinese Ambassador to the United States.13
The Commissioners do not appear to appreciate that
syphilis is only communicable by contact
For the British soldiers and sailors sent to Hong Kong the chief com-pensations for a hot, tedious and sticky life were cheap booze and sex. Statistics seem to indicate that the British soldier was either consider-ably more demanding or greatly more careless than his Continental comrades in pursuit of the latter, since as many as a quarter of them could be down with the 'Havana 'flu' at any one time.
Per 1000 unfit for duty with venereal disease14
Year Gennan French Austrian British British
Home India
1876 28.8 57.o 65.8 146.5 203.5
36.0 59.7 75.4 291.6
1878
1880 34.9 65.8 75.7
245.9g
249.0
Disease had always been by far the biggest killer of troops in foreign parts, and sexually transmitted disease was one against which effective preventative measures could be taken. In the early days of Hong Kong the incidence of disease was quite as high as in India. During 185 3one-third of the crew of H.M.S. Winchester got themselves infected.In 1856 the Colonial Surgeon reported that 'The poiice, both Euro-pean and native, labour under the disease in the mo_st frightful form'; the following year he noted that 'among the police and sailors of Hong Kong, some of the worst forms of the venereal disease arc to be seen . . . I have had under my care female prostitutes (picked up by the police in the streets, and evidently turned out by the brothel-keepers
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
for the purpose) suffering from the disease in the most shocking form I ever beheld. Death at last put an end to their sufferings.' Even Colonel Caine, with his long experience of the East, spoke of 'ravages
too fearful to detail'. 15
Bowring, that unregenerate utilitarian, had tackled the problem in classic Benthamite fashion by registering those brothels used by ser-vicemen and providing both for regular medical inspection and com-pulsory treatment. Compulsion was also used on some of the clients, since merchant seamen could be subjected to examination and treat-ment at the request of their captains. Reluctantly, the home govern-ment admitted the logic of Bowring's actions, but Labouchere, like all good liberals sensitive to any connotations of servitude, pointed out that:
The Colonial Government has not, I think, attached sufficient weight to the very grave fact, that in a British Colony large numbers of women should be held in practical slavery for the purposes of prostitution ... and allowed ... to perish miserably of disease ... for the gain of those to whom they suppose them-selves to belong. A class of persons, who by no choice of their own are subjected to such treatment, have an urgent claim on the active protection of Government. 16
In I 867 the British government, as part of the reforms both in the armed services and in public health, passed a Contagious Disease Act, providing for the compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes in garrison towns and designated seaports. Hong Kong adopted a vari-ation of the Act by licensing all approved brothels but only continuing the inspection of establishments intended for the use of foreigners, and not those frequented by the Chinese. The idea of a Chinese woman being forced to undergo intimate medical examination and possibly removal for treatment in a Western institution was so repellent to Chinese sentiment that enforcement would hardly have been poss-ible. Red light areas were formally established for both Chinese and foreigners. Since the police were allotted the task of searching out unregistered, or 'sly', brothels, it is hardly surprising that the rate of venereal disease among the force was extraordinarily high -16.6 per cent of all police sickness in I 869 was caused by syphilis, compared with just under 7 per cent for servicemen.
Apart from that predictable discrepancy, Hong Kong's methods of
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
control were everything that a Victorian social engineer could have wished. Rates of infection were halved, and the Colonial Surgeon reported: 'So completely satisfied am I of the incalculable benefit that has resulted to the Colony ... that I shall be glad to see the provisions extended to both the so-called purely Chinese houses and to that still more fertile source of infection, the boat population. Both Military and Naval Officers concur. with me in estimating very highly the advan-tages of the Ordinance as affecting the health of their men.'17 The US Fleet Surgeon, Dr Mae;coun, was agreeably surprised at the way in which the men of the U.S.S. Delaware had remained free from infec-tion after their visits to Hong Kong; things were much worse in Japan, and he congratulated the Colonial Surgeon on 'the success with which ... his labours in the cause of humanity ... have been crowned'.
These arguments held no appeal for Governor Pope Hennessy. His personal history -a Roman Catholic west of Ireland childhood, a pensioned mistress, two illegitimate children and a beautiful young Creole wife -led to a peculiar sensitivity on sexua! matters (he described a catalogue of the National Museum of Naples as 'obscene'). He therefore initiated a scathing attack on the system of registration, which turned out to be a typical Hennessy muddle.g18 A Commission of Inquiry of only three members was appointed, and they were told what answers were expected from them. Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary at the time the Commission's findings came through, raised his eyebrows: 'I presume that you had a good reason for appointing this Commission, since I need scarcely point out that it is a somewhat unusual course to institute a Commission of private persons to inquire into the administration of an important Department of Government ... you have adopted an unusual course in anticipating the conclusions of the Commission.'19
Not only did the Commission, when it began its operations in Nov-ember I 877, fail to take evidence from any Europeans, apart from the officials, who had their own cases to make, but one member -WilliamKeswick of Jardine's -disagreed with most of the conclusions of the other two, a disagreement the Governor attempted to gloss over. The inquiry did however result in a thorough report from the Naval Inspec-tor of Certified (venereal) Hospitals, one Dr W.H. Sloggett. His report typifies the difficulty even experienced home-based officials found in comprehending the peculiar institutions of Hong Kong. Although Sloggett recommended the withdrawal of licensing, which he .greed was equivalent to granting formal permission to commit in Hong Kong
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
what in England wa. an offence, he wanted all brothels, whether for Chinese or not, registered and controlled. He could not understand why Chinese brothels were exempt from control, and queried 'the extreme tenderness shown by the Commissioners for die feelings, and prejudices of the Chinese brothel-keepers and prostitutes so long as the latter are supposed to reserve themselves for the use of Chinamen only'. He also found it strange that 'very unnecessary delicacy and forbearance' had been shown to "'protected" prostitutes who use their premises as brothels for unregistered prostitutes'.
Sloggett dismissed the suggestion made by the Commission that there was no evidence for the effect of the laws on limiting venereal disease as 'contrary to all opinions of all medical authorities, civil, naval, and military'. His contempt for the Commission was made clear in one devastating comment: 'There is one fact in the history and pathology of syphilis which the Commissioners do not appear to appreciate, viz., that it is only communicable by contact, and that so long as an infected woman is prevented from having contact with other persons, she cannot communicate the disease.no
But attitudes in Britain were changing, and rigidly utilitarian stan-dards of legislation were being subjected to moral scrutiny on the grounds that the greatest good of the greatest number did not justify all intrusions on personal liberty, and that, as Sloggett suggested, the public recognition of 'vice' (which had only a single me;:aning) was immoral. In particular the right of magistrates and senior police officers under the Contagious Diseases Act to enforce medical examination was attacked, the opposition being led by the remarkable Josephine Butler. The British public were quickly impressed by both arguments, especially when an entirely innocent young woman (who proved to be a virgin) was forcibly examined as a suspected prostitute. In 1883 the Acts were suspended, to be repealed three years later.
It was inevitable that colonial legislatures should take similar action, however different they might consider their circumstances to be. Hong Kong procrastinated for as long as possible, forwarding to London appeals to the Governor from respectable brothel-keepers, and the girls themselves, that the law might be retained. This delayed action for a couple of years, but eventually the repeal had to be forced through a dissenting Legislative Council by the use of the official majority.
The result of the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act on ser-vicemen overseas was exactly what might have been expected; rates of
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
infection shot up to. unprecedented heights, as the figures for British soldiers in India demonstrate.
Year State of law (allfonns) Admissions per 1000
Contagious Diseases
1880 Acts in Force 249
1881 259.6
1882 265.5
1883 27s1s.3
1884 Partial Suspension 293�P5
1885 342.6
1886 385.8
1887 361.4
1888 Total Suspension 372.2
1889 481.5
1890 503.6
At which time over half the army in India was infected.
Hong Kong avoided the worst results by the simple method of behav-ing as though the legislation was still in force: establishments remained classified as either European or Chinese, the girls in the former con-tinuing to present themselves for examination, the latter not. Even this was scotched by the London authorities, and in 1890 the Legislative Council, protesting bitterly, was obliged to dismantle the whole appar-atus of control. This time there was no escaping the consequences: the Chinese members (by then two) of the Legislative Council com-plained of the proliferation of 'sly' brothels; the China Association produced statistics to show the 'persistent improvement' which fol-lowed the first regulations imposed by Bowring, compared to the 'immediate revulsion and deterioration which ensued upon their recision'. The figures were impressive enough; both the ratio of admis-sions and the number of sick doubled, to the point that in the first four months of 1897 the number of admissions per thousand of the Hong Kong garrison reached 499.29, and of these 213.29 were for syphilis. Within three years half of the Hong Kong garrison was being treated for venereal disease.
Something clearly had to be done, and an ingenious solution was found. Public opinion in England would not allow brothels to be per-mitted. but there was no objection to brothels not being permitted.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
The Colonial Office and the Hong Kong administration therefore agreed that magistrates should be empowered to close down any brothel to which the police drew their attention; applause from the moralists. The police then did not draw to the magistrates' attention any brothel that continued to allow the girls to be examined. All were content, and this simple system continued to flourish for many years.
Young Rudyard Kipling was responsible for some of the British public's concern when he published his account of a visit to a Hong Kong brothel in 1889. He did not much enjoy it; Corinthian Kate frightened him, and he found the girls, 'who had been to Leadville, Denver, and the wilds of the Wider West, who had acted in minor companies and who ... generally misconducted themselves in a hun-dred weary ways' disquieting.21
I have had my eyes on those junks for a quarter of a century
Absorbing as were the topics of sewerage, drugs, brothels and flogging, these were not the only sources of contention between the European population of Hong Kong and the government departments in White-hall. With Hong Kong now clearly a dependency within the ambit of the Colonial Office, other ministries whose interests were sometimes opposed to those of the Colonial Office developed antagonistic pos-itions. Of these the most prominent was the Foreign Office; both then and for many years after the rivalry between those two departments of state was notorious. The Foreign Secretary was one of the three great ministries, held by the most senior of politicians, while the position of Secretary of State for the Colonies, although officially ranking close behind, was regarded as something of a backwater, a fitting post for meritorious second-rankers or bright young men on their way up. The staff reflected these distinctions; elegant ambassadorial figres at the
gu
Foreign Office, groomed to embellish the chanceries of Paris and Vienna, looked down on members of the Colonial Office, whom they regarded as doubtless worthy and capable of dealing with horny-handed colonists, but essentially unsophisticated; these attitudes were countered in the Colonial Office by passive resistance and lack of co-operation.
The Board of Trade was even less decorative, but shared with the other departments a distrust of anyone actually in trade; and all
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
civil servants, whatever their departments, were deeply suspicious of the British businessmen on the China Coast. Sir Louis Mallet, Per-manent Under-Secretary at the Board of Trade, gave his views in 1863:
The paramount difficulty and danger to be avoided in our dealings with China, is all unnec.ssary contact between British traders and Natives. The class of Britons who press into this new and untrod-den field of enterprise is mainly composed of reckless and unscrupulous adventurers who seek nothing but enormous profits on particular transactions and care little for the permanent inter-ests of commerce -still less for the principles of truth and justice. These men always cloak their injustices under the guise of patriot-ism and civilization.22
No merchant in Hong Kong would of course, then as now, recognize himself in such a description, but the colony was a particularly fruitful ground for such misunderstandings to develop. Colonists, Governor and Colonial Office were all concerned with the well-being of the colony, although they often had very different ideas as to how this should be achieved: relations with China were dealt with only through the Foreign Office, operating through the Minister in Peking and the Consuls who reported to him; and contacts between the colony and Chinese had therefore to be referred to the Foreign Office through the machinery of Whitehall. So too must any matters be processed which involved other departments, such as the Board of Trade and the Treasury. Much frustration was thereby created; and even in purely colonial matters the Governor's independence of action was becoming more restricted.
In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened, and a submarine telegraph link between Britain and Hong Kong was established in the following year. In theory this should have enabled London to exercise almost day-to-day control, but the practice remained to leave things to the man on the spot, even when his actions, as those of Hennessy, proved worrisome. Nevertheless, compared with the palmy days of the forties and fifties, when the Governor of Hong Kong was himself Minister, Superintendent and Plenipotentiary, and immediately available to be got at by the merchants, the new state of affairs proved a source of irritation to the colonists. Their frustration was aggravated by the fact that the Foreign Office considered maintenance of good relations with
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
China to be of greater importance than the domestic concerns of Hong Kong, or even, for much of the time, the united pressure of the China trade lobby (a reluctance to appreciate that this is still so, and that the well-being of Hong Kong is an object of real, but only secondary, importance to any British government and of very little interest at all to the mass of the electorate, explains much of the discontent and frustration still experienced in Hong Kong).
A particular acerbity often entered into the relations between the Governor of Hong Kong and the Consul-General in Canton. Gov-ernors, unduly influenced by businessmen, attempted clumsy inter-ventions and 'failed to see the difference between governing and negotiating; their legalism was not suited to China', complained Sir Brooke Robertson, Consul-General in Canton.23 There were also times when Governor and Colonial Office clashed, as MacDonnell and Whitehall did over the gaming house licensing; and when Gov-ernor and colonists failed to agree, as perennially on the question of taxation, and on almost all questions in the peculiar circumstances of Pope Hennessy's administration. But on what came to be known as the Chinese Customs Blockade, which engaged the attention of the colonists for twenty years, businessmen, Governor and Colonial Office developed a united front against the Foreign Office and its officials.
This controversy had begun with the establishment in Bowring's time of the Shanghai Inspectorate of Customs, which evolved into the Maritime Customs Service. From the beginning this was opposed by all the foreign traders, who were not at all anxious to see an incorrupt-ible and efficient revenue collection service, forwarding its receipts intact to Peking. As Jardine Matheson commented in 1861: 'the country is in a state of desolation . . . duties now collected at the foreign custom house are being applied to Imperial and not provincial wants'.24 In spite of this, and of opposition from the more conservative Imperial officials, the new service, under the energetic leadership of the Inspector-General Sir Robert Hart from 1861 until 1906 (officially from 1863 to 1908), became the most important institution in the Chinese economy. From the beginning Hart made it clear in his instructions to the staff of the Customs Service that they were, as he was, part of the Chinese government's civil service: 'In the first place, it is to be distinctly and constantly kept in mind, that the Inspectorate of Customs is a Chinese and not a Foreign Service.' However badly other foreigners might behave, and in language that revealed the near-
SOMF. DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
contempt he felt for. many of his compatriots, Hart left his own men in no doubt as to what was expected of them:
Whatever other Foreigners resident in this country may deem themselves entitled to do, whether from their position, or fancied superiority to the Chinese, or in the way of showing their superior enlightenment by riding rough-shod over prejudices ... it is to be expected from those who take the pay, and who are the servants of the Chinese Government, that they, at least, will so act as to neither offend susceptibilities, nor excite jealousies, suspicion, or dislike. In dealings with native officials, and in intercourse with the people [they should remember] that they are the brother officers of the one, and that they have, to some extent, accepted certain obligations and responsibilities by becoming, in a sense, the countrymen of the others.25
Hart realized that a service so motivated could hardly expect much sympathy from the foreign merchants. 'Most of the merchants are said to entertain a deep-rooted dislike for the Inspectorate; many of them are at no pains to conceal that dislike; and all of them equally will cry out whenever regulations are enforced to their prejudice.' He concluded by stressing that all staff, from the Inspector-General down, were paid servants of the Imperial government of China: 'The Inspector-General is responsible to the Chinese Government ..g.and he is liable to be dismissed from his post at a moment's notice, in the event of his services ... being deemed unsatisfactory by the Government.'
The Inspector-General's expectations of opposition from the foreign merchants were more than fulfilled, especially from those taipans in Hong Kong who had been accustomed for so long to arranging their own law. Jardine Matheson appealed to their friends in London: 'The entire foreign custom house system has become such an obstruction to business ... the sooner foreigners cease to uphold it the better and it is much to be desired that influential persons at home connected with the trade would make a move in this direction.' Their newspaper, the Shanghae Recorder, advocated that all duties and restrictions be removed, Imperial officers ignored, and trade be conducted by personal arrange-ments made on the spot and backed, as in former days, by private armed vessels. The Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce early took the lead in protesting against the monstrous idea of actually imposing the law of the
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
land. Their annoyance was aggravated by a strong, although not often publicly expressed, feeling that by helping the Chinese, and what was worse by doing so effectively, Hart's British staff we.re in some way betraying their own race.26
In their pursuit of the best interests of China the Customs Service had not only to cope with recalcitrant foreigners, often backed by the Hong Kong government, but also with the immemorial corruption and inef-ficiency of the rest of the Imperial administration. Hart's organization was concerned only with international trade; the coastal trade remained under the supervision of the traditional Imperial authorities who usually enforced their rule by armed sailing junks, 'pull-away gigs, snake boats and hak-kows', whose crews did not necessarily adhereto the same high standards as those of the steam revenue-cruisers, and smuggling therefore continued popular. Although opium was now legal, even the 5 per cent duty was considered worth evading, and a few dozen balls of the drug were easily concealed. Salt took up more room, but since duties on this Chinese state monopoly commodity were higher, smuggling it still presented profitable oppor-tunities.
Canton remained a centre of this trade, legal and illegal, as it had done in former times, and under the jurisdiction of the same official, the Hoppo, who continued to administer it \\'ith a eye to the private profit of himself and his friends. In order to maximize his income the Hoppo maintained a chain of customs posts and, as he was entitled to, patrolled Chinese waters right up to the boundaries of the colony. Hart was well aware of the problems this might cause, and would have been happy if the Hoppo's duties could have been assumed either by the Chinese Viceroy or by his own service, but he was aware of the 'anomalous character' and 'angularities' of his position. 27
At that time the colonial waters consisted only of those surrounding the island itself and the three square miles of the Kowloon peninsula; all the islands and bays of what became the New Territories, which afforded perfect cover for the illegally-minded, were then Chinese territory, and in places only half a mile distant from Hong Kong. Revenue patrols were therefore often conspicuous, and the steamships among them were, as men-of-war under international law, able to use Hong Kong Harbour's facilities themselves. Hart defined the situation for the benefit of his Commissioner at Canton, E.C. Bowra:
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
1.
The collection of revenue from goods carried in Chinese ships in Chinese waters is a matter in which China is competent to legislate and take action without consulting any one.
2.t
The British government has declared that, so long as Chinatdoes not take action in Hongkong and does respect what cantfairly be styled British waters, the colonial authorities cannottinterfere with the proceedings of the Canton officials.t
3.t
Neither the governor at Hong Kong nor consul at Canton willtbe supported in any steps they may take, to suppress the opiumtstations, against the wish of the Chinese officials.t
Bowra had previously been told by Hart, on 7 March 1871, that 'Mr Wade [who had succeeded Alcock as Minister at Peking] is with us, the Board of Trade is with us, the Foreign Office is with us, and we may safely infer that they [the Hong Kong authorities] cannot do much against us.728
But they tried hard. Irregularitjes of greater or less importance in the controls exercised by the Chinese inevitably occurred, and were seized on by the Hong Kong merchants in their perennial struggle to avoid regulations of every sort. They believed Hong Kong to be a foreign port, a free port, and one at which all trade should be subject to the minimum of regulations. This individualistic interpretation was reflected in the statistics produced by the Harbour Master: all vessels coming to Hong Kong, even from Chinese ports only a few miles off, or from Macao, were adjudged 'foreign', which enabled the figures to be grossly inflated. By 1906, it was proudly proclaimed, Hong Kong was the largest port in the world: 22,453,007 tons of shipping had been entered and cleared, more than either London or New York (both about 20 million tons). But in fact the greater proportion of this was coasting trade, and that coming from genuinely foreign ports was only 8,812,827 tons, which puts the international position of Hong Kong in a clearer perspective.
An opportunity was handed to the Hong Kong traders in 1867 when the ten-year date for the revision of the Treaty ofTientsin approached. In language reminiscent of that which had so irritated Pottinger twenty-odd years before, they demanded Chinese 'compliance with both the spirit and the letter of the evaded and unfulfilled provisions', and denied 'the right claimed by employees of the Chinese maritime cus-toms to adjudicate in cases of contravention of the revenue laws't�P-which was tantamount to denying the Chinese government jurisdiction
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
within its own la.s. Neither the Consuls, the British Minister at Peking, nor the Foreign Office were prepared to put up with this brand of arrogance, and the Colonial Office found itself uncomfortably
caught in the crossfire.
In this instance the merchants prevailed, mustering sufficient sup-port in Britain to persuade the Gladstone government to uphold their dubious case. Sir Rutherford Alcock, former chief of Harry Parkes, who succeeded Bruce as British Minister at Peking in 1865, had agreed terms for an update of the Tientsin Treaty with the Tsungli Yamen, allowing more ports to be opened and a modest increase in tariffs. These reasonable terms were vehemently opposed by the mercantile community, who continued to press for complete freedom of trade and residence. The revision, which had been amicably and painstakingly negotiated between the British and Chinese officials in Peking, should have marked a new stage in China's emergence into the comity of nations, but the business interest prevailed against it. Led from Hong Kong, the traders succeeded in convincing the British government not to ratify Alcock's arrangements. This was the more surprising in that the President of the Board of Trade at the time was the painfully upright radical John Bright; yet the Board's approval of non-ratification contained the devious suggestion that it 'should not be publicly attrib-uted to mercantile opposition. Such a course could hardly fail to create an impression on the Chinese government that the mer.hants, whose attitude towards them had been so often of an unfriendly character, are strong enough to overrule the Government even in a case in which their own convictions are opposed to mercantile views' -which was, of course, exactly what had happened. If there was an occasion in the nineteenth century when the British government and British traders were united in exploiting t.'1eir power to the detriment of China, it was this. Alcock was deeply disappointed, and complained bitterly about the conduct of his countrymen to the Tsungli Yamen, where Wen Hse-ang sympathized: 'I, too, am accused of being a renegade and only wearing Chinese clothes.'29
Disappointed too were the officials at the Foreign Office, who would much rather have backed Alcock. The government's surrender was announced in the strangest terms, 'with much regret', but they had 'determined to defer to the wishes expressed by the Commercial bodies who have so urgently appealed to them', in spite of their judgement that 'sgreat immediate, and still greater prospective advantages' would have been obtained by ratification. Rarely can a weaker decision have
RIGHT: The elegant original fac;ade of Government House.
.; Z �E :-;-; :;. .. Z ,. 41
,..,.,,.., ,u,,or,n
...,.,. ,.-.
LEFT: The interior of Government House in the 1860s. The punkahs hide some of the similarities with the interior of Flass (below), but note, for example, the almost identical double doors at right
and at left.
BELOW: The saloon of Flass, the
house built in Westmorland by
the Dent family after Lancelot
and Wilkinson retired from Hong
Kong.
ABO\E: This 1857 vie\\ is taken from the present site of Chatcr Gardens, at that time the foreshore. The barracks arc on the left, with the band of the 59th Foot performing on the parade-ground. The accompanying text from the Illustrated London .\'ems of 15 August 1857 describes the scene: 'Here a fortune-teller; further on a juggler (when the police is not there); charming maidens, three-
an<l-thrcc, two-and-two; white-attired soldiers; dashing European carriages, some \\�Pith Chinese dri,�Pcrs, some without; coolies carrying ladies and
laZ) gentlemen; Chinamen on horseback; sepoys in undress, looking as if they had jumped out of bed in a hurry and put on their sheets and anything they could get; snobs in black hats such is a mild description of a band evening at Hong-Kong.'
BELOW: The Sepo) barracks in 1857. The drawing shows the method of building matsheds, the tcmporar) buildings that served man) purposes, from godowns to churches and theatres.
RJGHT: 'T'his Punch cartoon,
published in November 1860, refers to the destruction of the Summer Palace, which Lord Elgin judged to be the proper retribution for the imprisonment and killing of British envoys
BELOW: The sandy wastes of Kowloon Peninsula in the
1860s -acquired by Consul Harry Parkes for $500 in March 1859.
fac;1..-to Em�ELlviR. "CO!IIE, h.:\TCl-.LE llO\\':,;'! :,;o CllI::\Tl;\'U 1Jl1S TIME',.
'Reputablee' and 'disreputablee' Chinese, u86o
LEFT: A Chinese tea-room.
BELOW: Opium smokers -a photograph previously in the possession of the Dent family.
SOMF. DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
been taken by a strong government, with a substantial majority; the only excuse was that the Gladstone Cabinet was, as usual, preoccupied with the much more important subject of Irish Land Tenure.
The recovery in trade after the crises of 1866-67 did not continue.
Another slump began in 1873, and continued for some years, to be followed by an even more serious crisis in 1882-86, activated by the collapse of the great French bank Union Generate. The effects of the first caused an unpleasant shock in Hong Kong; company collapses, which included that of the old Canton firm Augustus Heard, prolif er-ated; the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, which had backed many of these enterprises, took heavy losses and had to pass theirc.dividend; even Jardine's had some nervous moments. British exports to China fell, and remained long after below the level of the years 1869-72. Looking for a scapegoat, the Hong Kong merchants, as usua!, blamed the Chinese authorities.
A Hong Kong commission of inquiry drawn from the merchants, the very people who had been complaining, predictably discovered that 'a most vexatious system of blockading is kept up ... The confines of these waters are ... infested with cruizers of every description'.30 Wounded comments were made on the attitude of Sir Brooke Robertson, whose 'remarks seem peculiar as coming from a British officer, protecting British interests'. Diplomacy might be tried to rem-edy this sad state of affairs, but if that failed recourse should be made to gunboats operating against the Chinese customs vessels 'who now prey without let or hindrance on the trade of the Colony'. To bolster these arguments a petition was sent to the Governor purporting to come from some Chinese merchants, but which turned out to be an attempt by some of the English to disguise their own interest, written in 'almost unintelligible Chinese', and contrived by the firm of Caldwell and Brereton, the Caldwell in question being the untrustworthy son of Daniel, later deported from the colony.
At first Kennedy took these complaints with a pinch of salt, but increasing indignation spurred him to action. A public meeting on 14 September 1874 spoke of 'A flagrant and unparatleled breach of international usage ... the impending annihilation of [Hong Kong's] trade'. Brooke Robertson did his best to expose the dubious arguments presented by the Chamber of Commerce in a long and carefully argued dispatch to the Foreign Office of I December 1874, which pointed out that smuggling remained at the root of the difficulties, a faci which the Hong Kongers were reluctant to admit. MacDonnell, ironic as
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
usual, had described the establishment of the Chinese customs as 'a blow to the prosperity of the Colony, which unquestionably it was -that is, to the smuggling prosperity'. There was not the least evidence of any desire on the part of the Chinese to interfere with the legitimate trade, and far from this happening there had been a steady increase in the junk trade. Even in the last two years, when conditions generally had deteriorated, the junk-carried coastal tonnage had fallen only from 1,817,8g1o to 1,789,598, which was hardly annihilation. James Whittall, the senior partner of Jardine's, agreed; he had not heard a single grievance from a legitimate Chinese trader. The Chinese were simply collecting the dues to which they were entitled; there was no block.de of the port, and any diminution of trade had quite other causes. Robertson unequivocally backed the Viceroy at Canton and sympa-thized with his government's difficulties, which were great. 'They can not only obtain no assistance from Hong Kong, but are subject to complaints against the only plan they can devise to prevent smuggling ... At Hong Kong the Chamber of Commerce, and the merchants generally, with some exceptions, denounce the blockade system and call for its removal, but fail to point out any substitute for it. It is this unreasoning attitude that adds to the difficulty.'
In London Kennedy's pleas went to Lord Carnarvon and the officials at the Colonial Office, and Robertson's elegant rebuttals to Lord Derby at the Foreign Office: the Minister at Peking, now Sir Harry Parkes himself, with thirty-four years' experience of China, agreed with Robertson. The upshot was that on 22 March 1875, nearly a year after Kennedy's first approach, Lord Carnarvon replied. Although sympath-etic in tone, the dispatch rejected the merchants' case: 'The right of the Chinese Government to search its national vessels on the high seas or within its own territorial waters cannot be disputed ... the exercise by the Chinese Government of the right of search complained of ... does not affect the freedom of the port, and affords no valid grounds for diplomatic remonstrance.' An ill-concealed reprimand was delivered to those who allowed 'a state of things which exposes the Colony to the imputation of giving protection and encouragement to a contraband trade', and they were warned that British assistance would only be given 'consistent with those principles of international law and justice which have ever been maintained by Her Majesty's Government'.
Lord Carnarvon's reply was not well received in the colony. Inter-national law did not figre too highly in the minds of the businessmen
gu
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
of Hong Kong: 'In some technical manner' a contention of Robertson's 'may possibly be true', the unofficial members of the Legislative Council admitted, and the Chamber of Commerce regretted, on 10 February 1876, that the British government had decided to adhere to the mere letter of the law: 'it is most unfortunate that the Government have thought fit to accord to the vessels in question the status of men-of-war, to which they are in no respect entitled, the only warfare they carry on being against the commerce of the colony'.
The whole round of communications began anew; Governor Ken-nedy, now thoroughly converted to the colonists' cause, attacked Consul Robertson: 'I am amazed at the unwarrantable claims and pretensions of the Canton authorities -claims and pretensions, too, which receive not only the acquiescence of Her Majesty's Consul at Canton, but his active support,' he wrote on 13 July 1876. The Chamber of Commerce discovered a new bugbear: a Mr Brown, of Canton (Thomas Brown, of the Maritime Customs Service), was actu-ally seeking information on smugglers in the territory of the colony itselfm! 'Often . . . informers report that some junk . . . had opiumconcealed, and the Peng Chai Hoi [the Maritime Customs gunboat] follows and captures her. A search is made ... and if any contraband goods are found, the junk is taken to Canton' (Police Magistrate's report, 3 May 1876). These proceedings, which sound like a classic piece of good intelligence work, were astonishingly characterized by the Hong Kong legal authorities as 'an organized system of espionage and secret detectivism carried on in this Colony in the interest of the Chinese Customs' (Acting Attorney General, 6 June 1876) and 'a species of terrorism practised by low officers in the service of the Chinese Government tending greatly to disturb peaceable Chinese residents in this Colony' (Chief Justice, 13 June 1876). It is hardly surprising that the exasperated Robertson wrote: 'I care very little for the opinion of the governor of Hong Kong or his subjects and know the position better than they do.'31
Some progress towards a solution was made in the Chefoo Convention of September 1876, which -among many other more pressing matters -appointed an independent commission to examine the question and warned the Hong Kong merchants that the Chinese would not alter their methods until 'the colony devised some scheme by which the Chinese government could collect the revenue fairlydue to them'. When the commission eventually met, which was not until 1886, there having taken place another unconscionable bit of
.A, HISTORY OF HONG KONG
foot-dragging on the part of the British government, some difficult negotiation followed, mainly between Hart, representing the Chinese government, and the Hong Kong authorities. At one point Hart, aggra-vated by the Hong Kong government 'funking the opium smuggling interest', threatened resignation, but eventually it was agreed that the opium trade should be exclusively carried out by the authorized govern-ment agent, and that all the junk trade, whether for opium or not, was to be removed from the jurisdiction of the Hoppo and placed in the reliable hands of Hart's Maritime Customs Officers. Sir Robert was glad to get away from Hong Kong ('the place is very stupid for an old fogey'32) but was delighted with the outcome of the talks, writing tog
,
his American colleague Edward Drew, the Senior Commissioner, on 10 August 1887: 'we have put another nail in the coffin of the Hoppoate ... I have had my eye on those junks for a quarter of a century, I maysay, and now at last we have got hold of them. The twisting and turning of the old gentlemen who wanted to retain the junks was at once amusing and aggravating: I pity them, but we can't let abuse stand in the way of reform.'33
Travellers' tales
Sea travel in the 1870s and eighties became altogether safer and more reliable as shipbuilding techniques evolved. Compound engines, twin screws, watertight bulkheads and the increased size of ships, combined with the opening of the Suez Canal, made the voyage East less of an adventure. Many tourists however remained anxious to press on to the exotic sights and spent only a short time in the colony, enjoying the amenities of civilization after their long voyage. Fresh butter particu-larly appealed to Prince Henry of Prussia, younger brother of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who stayed at Government House in 1880. Pope Hennessy recorded that the Prince played lawn tennis 'with great vigour, in fact he strikes the ball too hard, though we have a very long court'. The next year his two cousins followed, Princes Albert Victor and George, later King George V, both midshipmen on HMS Bacchante making a three-year cruise around the Empire to which Albert Victor was heir-expectant. The Governor wanted to make a great fuss of them, claiming that he had the 'special command of Her Majesty to do so', but was suppressed by the princes' commanding officer, and the midshipmen were received quietly. The princes were
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
particularly struck by a Japanese screen which showed the first Portu-guese landings, recording that 'the people on board have enormous baggy breeches'. When it was discovered that Sir John had spent �GSoo on photographs taken during the visit the Colonial Office was furious.34 General Ulysses S. Grant, former President of the United States, called in 1879, and was able to exchange pleasantries with the Ameri-can Consul, his old opponent John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate cavalry leader.35
Reports of official personages were necessarily blander than those of private visitors. One of these was Isabella Bird (Mrs John Bishop), an indefatigable and well-known traveller. Miss Bird was an earnest evangelical, suspicious of the 'Romish' Church, who very suitablystayed with the Bishop. She liked and admired Victoria, 'moored to England by the electric cable, and replete with all the m2.ificent enterprises and luxuries of England', but had reservations about its society, with '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'. In private she was more critical: 'I believe that half the people don't speak to the other half -none of the missionaries except two are on speaking terms . . . The Governor [Pope Hennessy] . . . is believed to be . . . the tool of the Portuguese Bishop Raimondi [ the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong].' She did not think much to the Governor, who was 'much overdressed ... with a mouth which smiles perpetually and sinister eyes which never smile', and who manifested an 'obviously diseased ... sympathy with criminals'.36
By something of a coincidence Mrs Gordon Cumming arrived at the same time as Isabella Bird -December 1878m-but saw a different side of Hong Kong life, and seems to have enjoyed herself a gooddeal more. Mrs Cumming first stayed with her friend Mrs Louisa Coxon, wife of Atwell Coxon, a broker. They went to the races together, Mrs Coxon rather daringly driving in her pony carriage, 'the only wheeled vehicle in that vast assemblage'. Mrs Cumming's hostess was, if not quite fast, at least a trifle bold; suitably concealed under a stage name she had appeared in the first performance of the Amateur Dramatic Corps to cast ladies; the 1879 production was, appropriately, The School for Scandal. Mrs Coxon was also a founder member of -the Ladies Recreation Club, where ladies could play lawn tennis. A rather different aspect of society was shown by Mrs Cumming's other
�P t\ HISTORY OF HONG KONGe
hostesses, Mrs Snowden, wife of the Attorney General, and Mrs Lowcock, whose husband was an unofficial member of the Legislative
Council.37
Lady Brassey had no need to stay with friends since she arrived with her husband, Sir Thomas, on their yacht Sunbeam. It was a sign of the times that when Sir Thomas was invited to dinner with 'some Chinese gentlemen' he found their 'command of English, fully equal to the best educated Englishman'. He was fed with a variety of dishes, including 'duck's paws, fish brains, birdsnest soup', which afterwards made him rather ill. Sir Thomas, an Opium Commissioner, had come on an official mission charged with the investigation of trade. He visited one Hong Kong factory where he found a startling contrast between 'this accumulation of property, and the low scale of pay for the employees', which varied between one penny and fourpence per day.38
Few visitors had much complimentary to say about European society in Hong Kong. The open-handed hospitality of the great taipans no longer featured so prominently in their accounts, and many critical comments on the narrow and querulous attitudes of the colonists appeared. In the mid-187os the distinguished photographer James Thomson was struck by the 'expensive style' of the Europeans, who lived 'much more expensively, I would think, than they need to', and especially by the way in which English assistants were housed, and 'the luxurious way in which they were indulged'. He concluded that Americans and Germans were not only more modest in their mode of life, but took trouble, unlike the English, to learn the language.39
This last complaint was frequently heard, and evidenced the increas-ing smugness and complacency that was doing so much to lose the industrial and commercial lead that Britain had previously enjoyed. Many visitors were shocked at the casually brutal treatment afforded to Chinese: 'You cannot be two minutes in Hong Kong without seeing Europeans striking coolies with their canes or umbrellas,' complained Miss Bird. Lord Ronald Gower deplored the way subalterns of the 74th Regiment (the Highland Light Infantry) treated Chinese 'as a very inferior race of animals to themselves. No wonder that we English are so cordially disliked wherever we go.'40 The young Robert Hart, newly arrived from Ulster in 1854, was 'rather surprised' to see how his superior 'treated the Chinese -pitching their goods into the water and touching them up with his cane'.41 One of the earliest Chinese missionaries, Dr Wong Fun, who had taken his medical degree at Edinburgh University, complained that his work was made more diffi-
SOME DISTASTEFUL TOPICS
cult by 'a strong prejudice against Englishmen for what they [the Chinese] think the high-handed way in which they carry everything'.
James Thomson was discreet about the low life of Hong Kong, although he reported that there were 180 'music halls', and found that those dealing with the police had discovered 'something of the security and dignified silence procurable by a judicious use of the coin of the realm'. Rudyard Kipling, less discreet about the underworld, was also revealing on many aspects of the island. His account of a meeting with'the biggest Taipan on the island, and the nicest', summarizes the essential Hong Kong as it was then and remains today. Kipling asked:'How is it that everybody here smells of money?' and was told: 'It is because the island is going ahead mightily. Because everything pays.' He was invited to look at the share list, all items on which were selling at a premium. 'Everything pays, from the Dairy Farm upwards.'42 (TheDairy Farm was an imaginative innovation of Dr Patrick Manson, founder of the Hong Kong College of Medicine, who wanted to pro-vide fresh milk for the European children; in Hong Kong even that modest venture could not help becoming a paying proposition.)
Kipling on Hong Kong as a colony is equally telling: 'There is something very pathetic in the trustful clinging attitude of the Colonies, inwho ought to have been soured and mistrustful long ago.' That was 1889; Hong Kong may no longer be 'clinging', and is perhaps
becoming 'soured', but it has still not appreciated quite how mistrustful of the 'Mother Country' it is prudent to be.
10
FORTRESS HONG KONG
The defence of greater Bn"tain
In 1865 Lord Palmerston had died: and with his death an era was ended. He had first taken office fifty-nine years before, in 1806, the year of the Battle of Wagram. Three years after Palmerston's death Lord John Russell, his colleague and rival, finally retired, having been in Parliament since 1814 (he was able to impart some instruction to his young grandson, Bertrand, who survived to give Prime Ministers Eden and Macmillan some hard times in the 1950s and sixties). Palmerston and Russell had begun their political careers in a world dominated by Napoleon (whom Russell once met), and ended them in one overshadowed by Bismarck.1 For much of this time it had appeared that Britain was indeed a European power, but the limited ability of their country to control the course of events in Europe was better grasped by 'the two old boys' than by most of their contempor-aries. When Austria and Prussia invaded Denmark in 1864, British public opinion was strongly pro-Danish. Intervention was demanded, and proposals made for a squadron to be sent to the Baltic. But Palmerston, always a realist, appreciated that Britain could do nothing on her own on the continent of Europe.
British resources were too few and too thinly stretched to allow for an independent European policy, as Bismarck made brutally clear when he said that if a British army landed in Prussia he would send a policeman to arrest it. Six years later the message was thrust home when, in the summer of 1870, it took less than three months for the Prussian army to crush the French in a war for which one million men
FORTRESS HONG KONG
were mobilized. Had�P Britain wished to intervene it would have been entirely powerless to do so. Sir Robert Morier, the Foreign Office German expert, declared that the war could have been prevented if for twenty-four hours the British public had been furnished with a backbone. 'What the hell is the use of a backbone without an army, which we have not got!' was the explosive comment of the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards.2 At that time the entire land forces of Britain, including the volunteers, were not much more than 100,000 men, and only with the greatest difficulty could an expeditionary force of ten thousand have been raised.
The Palmerston-Russell administration was succeeded by an inter-lude of Tory rule, first under Lord Derby and then Disraeli, between 1866 and 1868. Thereafter, for sixteen years, power passed between Gladstone and Disraeli -two periods of five years for the T .iberals, and one of Conservative rule, during which the whole structure of Europe, and almost of the world, changed. A united Germany and Italy, a revived Austria-Hungary, Russia emerging as a modem power and France licking the wounds of war, manoeuvred for position. All, together with Holland, Belgium and the United States, made industrial expansion a priority and provided extensive government support by financing industrial developments, building railways, docks and canals, and adopting protective tariffs. Britain began to lose her previously undisputed position as the world's workshop: in 1870 more than half the world supply of pig iron and nearly half of steel production origin-ated in Britain; within twenty years the United States was producing more of both than Britain.
Britain USA Gennany World
Year iron�E steel iron steel iron steel iron steel
1870 5964 292 1665 69 1369 -11 900 629
1880
1375 3835 1247 2685 728 17950 4205
1890 7904 3679 9203 4277 4583 2127 27157 11902
1899 9302 5001 13621 10639 7900 6189 39752 26685
*(,ooo tons3)
World markets were little affected by the emergence of the USA as the leading industrial power, since the rapid expansion of the American domestic market speedily mopped up this capacity, but by the tum of the century Germany, a late starter which had shown a phenomenal increase, was also producing more steel than Britain. And German
. t,. HISTORY OF HONG KONG
steel products, unlike those of America, quickly found their way on to markets where previously Britain had enjoyed a commanding lead. Some of these looked extremely difficult to penetrate -the settlement colonies and India -but others offered virgin territory to German exporters, and foremost among these were Africa and China.
Although other countries were taking the lead in modern industries, British pre-eminence in world trade continued. In 1870 British and British colonial trade was greater than that of France, Germany and the United States combined (�G675 million as against �G604 million); twenty years later the same situation prevailed (�G1,038 million com-pared to �G997 million). This was in part due to an unparalleled outflow of capital to foreign and colonial investments, investments which, although handsomely profitable, deprived home industry of the capital needed to keep pace with the new competition. There was considerable variance according to patterns of world trade: British money invested abroad frequently totalled at least half that invested at home, and often more -in the decade 1881 -90 it rose to almost three-quarters oftdomestic investment. By the beginning of the Second World War British investment in foreign commercial and industrial companies amounted to as much as 75 per cent of that invested in domestic concerns. Returns, even when adjusted for risk, were comfortably higher than those obtainable at home, and the wealth of banking and trading experience available in the City of London made for easy identification of opportunities.
So huge a proportion of the national wealth had to be protected, and, just as the governments of Imperial Germany were influenced by their manufacturers towards an aggressive policy of securing new markets by colonial expansion, British administrations were under pressure to retain the investments already made and the outlets already developed. In order to protect these a strong navy was essential, but a large army unnecessary.
Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's War Minister, initiated an extensive reorganization of the army between 1869 and 187 4, again:.t the deter-mined resistance of the Duke of Cambridge. Succeeding governments, Conservative and Liberal, carried through an impressively wide range of much-needed measures: abolishing the purchase of commissions; improving conditions and equipment (a breech-loading rifle was at last introduced, although the generals refused to accept anything but muzzle loaders for artillery); reorganizing the regimental system; even -and the Duke of Cambridge was near apoplexy at the idea -clothingt
FORTRESS HONG KONG
the troops fighting in the Egyptian desert in khaki rather than red serge. With modestly increased numbers, the reformed army was one designed to protect existing interests abroad by fighting quick colonial campaigns, rather than engaging in pitched battles on a Europeanscale. Even limited wars were regarded with suspicion. Colonists were expected to avoid confronta.ions and to see to their own defence should this be needed.
Cardwell's expansion of the home army had been achieved at the' cost of repatriating some twenty thousand troops from tl1e self-governing colonies, leaving the colonists to arrange their own defence, and Gladstone was permanently distrustful of any colonial entangle-ments that might lead to extra expense. Looking about, as ever, for an excuse to 'dish the Whigs', Disraeli seized upon the Liberals' anxiety to avoid Imperial commitments. His speech of 24 June 1872 is often taken as marking a turning point in Britain's selection of a world, rather than a European, role. He jeered that the utilitarian Whigs had no feeling for the glories of empire:
It has been shown with precise, with mathematical demonstration that there never was a jewel in the Crown of England that was so truly costly as the possession of India. How often has it been suggested that we should at once emancipate ourselves from this incubus! They [the Whig-Liberals] looked upon the colonies of England, looked even upon the connexion with India, as a burden upon this country, viewing everything in a financial aspect and totally passing by those moral and political considerations which make nations great, and by the influence of which alone men are distinguished from animals.4
Disraeli's opportunity to put his views into action came early in 1874 when Gladstone, some months after having been defeated in the House of Commons (again over Ireland, as was almost inevitable), called a general election which produced a substantial Conservative majority. Apart from his nine months in office in 1868, this was Disraeli's only solid stint as Prime Minister. His policy for 'making nations great' was signified by the new title arranged for Queen Victoria: 'Empress of India'. While this was nothing more than an inexpensive piece of sym-bolism (although it gratified the Queen a good deal), the purchase of a 7 / 16th interest in the Suez Canal shares was a genuine stroke of policy. The route to India was secured, albeit at the cost of being drawn into
A IIJSTORY OF HONG KONG
continuous squabbles with the French and some expensive Egyptian complications, which brought down a British Prime Minister as long
after as 1956.5
The division between Conservatives and Liberals on colonial affairs was more apparent than real. However anxious they might be to resist involvement, Gladstone's administrations were pushed into Imperial commitments. The Boers of the Transvaal, who were annexed unwill-ingly into the British Empire by Disraeli in 1877, assumed that Glad-stone would restore their freedom: had he not described the annexation as 'almost insane', and said that he would repudiate it as being 'obtained by means dishonourable to this country'? Not a bit of it; on coming into office in 1880 the Liberal government chose coercion, and only the Boers' defeat of the British army saved the independence that Gladstone had promised to restore. Likewise in Egypt it was a�P Liberal, and not a Conservative, government that in 1882 authorized the bombardment of Alexandria and the suppression of the Arabi Pasha revolt, a genuine nationalist uprising that had promised to give Egypt its first independent and responsible government.
The truth of the matter was that whatever the political rhetoric, any British government was inevitably drawn into colonial disputes by matters outside its control: either the preservation of existing interests, as in the 'fransvaal and Burma (in 1885), or by the need to react to other European powers' increasingly aggressive policies. Since the permanent staff at the Colonial Office remained opposed to any additions to their responsibilities, and Ministers followed a course of reducing colonial expenditure whenever remotely possible, the effect was that something not unlike a bipartisan policy towards the colonies was quietly established, which lasted at least until the beginning of the Second Boer War at the end of the century. Bipartisanship did not always extend between departments of state, and the Foreign and Colonial Offices remained at odds over Hong Kong, with the Foreign Office continuing to insist that the interests of the colony must be subordinated to those of British relations with the Chinese Empire, while the Colonial Office transmitted, not always enthusiastically, the sentiments of the colonists.
Nor did the Admiralty and the War Office see things in the same light as the Colonial Office. Admiral Sir John Colomb had been reporting to the Admiralty on defence strategy for some time, but his publications on 'Colonial Defence' in 1877 and on the 'Defence of Great and Greater Britain' in 1879 were decisive.6 Colomb described
FORTRESS HONG KONG
how the defence of both motherland and colonies could only be effected by a strong navy, capable of deterring any invasion. Such a navy was dependent upon a secure chain of fuelling, victualling and repair stations; the career of the Confederate commerce raider Alabama during the American Civil War had shown how dependent any steamer was on such ports, and how shipping was thereby forced into using predictable routes. Although Colomb believed Singapore and Fiji to be more important than Hong Kong, the Admiralty, while accepting his principles, was not convinced of Fiji. The strategic importance of Hong Kong -although secondary to that of Singapore -was hence-forth established. Hong Kong was to be not only a useful centre of trade, but an essential link in Imperial defence. The question of who should pay for this -colonists or British taxpayers -remained unre-solved and contentious.
Gladstone and his successors were less interested in European and colonial than in domestic matters -the Irish question, which eventually destroyed the Liberal Party, being the most important among them. It seemed indeed that a period of stability on the Continent was likely, and this was at least partly true. Disraeli's swan song was his partici-pation in the Treaty of Berlin (1878) which, ostensibly called in order to end the renewed conflict between Russia and Turkey, turned out to provide the mould into which European affairs settled until the eve of the First World War. With no inseparable rivalries left engaging them in Europe, the powers, for differing reasons, turned their atten-tion to colonial expansion.
In search of la gloire
Between 1790 and 1852 there had been in France nine different forms of government -three monarchies, two republics, two empires, a con-sulate and a directory -the changes of which had been habitually accompanied by violence. As a result all French administrations were twitchily nervous of public opinion, acutely conscious that their con-tinuance in power, and even their personal survival (one Prime Minister was nearly lynched as late as 1885 -as a consequence of events in China) depended on their not unduly irritating the populace; and one source of irritation was the continuously sinister behaviour of the Eng-lish, most suspicious when seemingly inoffensive. National policy after 1815 inexorably dictated co-operation with Britain, as the only other
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG2
286 ..
constitutional, unautocratic European power, but only a secure and confident ruler could afford to offend the powerful, sometimes hysteri-cal, Anglophobic lobby. At no time was French public opinion more inflamed that in 1839-40. The Orleans monarchy reinforced its mun-dane appeal with Napoleonic sentiment when in 1840 Napoleon's body was brought back to Paris from St Helena amid extraordinary scenes of emotive pageantry; it seemed that Thiers, the Prime Minister, might have so managed things in the Levant that French domination there was secure; rearmament was enthusiastically embraced, and a war with England was hopefully expected: 'a shudder of rage agitated the entire country ... and France took its sword in hand'.7 But the realistic King Louis Philippe, who had made co-operation with England a cornerstone of his policy, sacked Thiers, and accepted the Treaty of London, which settled matters with Britain but greatly disa!'pointed the French people.
Casting around for something else to engage his subjects' attention, the King turned to the East. At that time there was little reason for the French to concern themselves with China. A nation of coffee-and wine-drinkers, they did not rely on the revenue from duties on tea to the extent that did Britain: they had their own well-protected silk industry, and, shorn of most of their Indian possessions {by the infa-mous British!), had no need to find markets for cotton or opium. Nevertheless, French governments remained anxious to keep informed of events in the Chinese Empire, and in 1839 a secret agent was dispatched to Canton.
M.cMallet de Bassilan, of Dieppe, sent by Louis Philippe's govern-ment on an undercover mission, does not seem to have been the most judicious of spies. He was given a convivial welcome by the British merchants, who clearly enjoyed misleading the credulous Frenchman, convincing him that the East India Company still held power in Canton -'le nom seul est change' -and that a cunning plot existed to take overcthe whole of China. This was to begin with the removal of 'l'empereur Tartare Mongol' and his replacement by another Chinese, or possiblyca suitable Englishman, none other than young Robert Thom ofcJardine's.8
Whether these flights of fancy were believed or not, a formal mission was dispatched two years later, led by Adolphe-Philibert Dubois de Jancigny, who had made a name for himself in India, and was anxious to do the same thing in China. French and Chinese accounts of de Jancigny's mission differ considerably. Officially he was there to show
FORTRESS HONG KONG
the flag; unofficially' he asked for the French to be given land for a settlement as the English had been given Hong Kong, which he sug-gested should be at Humen -Ch'uen-pi, at the entrance to the Bogue. Ch'i-ing dismissed this with polite derision; French trade was not nearly large enough to justify equal treatment with Britain, and Humen, the Tiger's Mouth, was a strategic site, the very gateway to China, qmte unlike Hong Kong, which was regarded as an outer island of minimal importance.
To confuse things further, Captain Cecille of the French frigate Erigone pursued an independent course, and presented himself at Shanghai in August 1843 -an episode which still needs explanation.9It was put to the Chinese that the French had no quarrel with China, but were hereditary enemies of the English, and would therefore help China in her struggle with the British. With French aid, the Chinese would learn to build ships and cannon and to fight at sea. Again, Ch'i-ing was unconvinced: he was in the process of coming to an agreement with the British, whom he felt he could understand and rely upon, and whose power was all too obvious, whereas the French were an unknown quantity (and he had certainly been told of Trafalgar!).10
All this behind-the-scenes work bore no immediate fruit. When a formal delegation was sent out in 1844 under Theodore-Marie-Melchior-Joseph de Lagrene, an experienced diplomat who had been at the Congress of Vienna and sat at the feet of the super-diplomatist Talleyrand, it was found that the French Consul at Canton had already been accorded the most-favoured-nation status specified by the Treaty of Nanking, and there should have been no need for de Lagrene's accomplished diplomacy. His instructions also however included a very odd request, and one that foreshadowed future French strategy: he had been ordered to seek another strategic site for a French outpost, this time the small island of Basilan, off Mindanao in the Philippines. This territory, being in Spanish occupation, was hardly China's to give, unless France was looking for a pretext for a quarrel with Spain. Needless to say, no progress was made on this question.
Probably in order to save face, for otherwise the expensive French delegation would return without having achieved anything not already accorded, de Lagrene decided to specify toleration for missionaries as a French demand. Since he had been sent by the conservative Guizot ministry, which had been making efforts to win the support ofthe Catholic Church, large sections of which were hostile to the Orleans
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
monarchy, this could be presented at Paris as a politically useful con-cession. The request was readily acceded to, and in future was to afford the French opportunities for creating a casus be/Ii. when the need was felt.
It was left to the next regime but one, the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon, to take advantage of the provision of their original treaty, reinforced after the Anglo-French expedition of 1858-6o, which firmly specified that 'members of all Christian communities should enjoy entire security for their persons and property, and the free exer-cise of their religious practices' (Article XIII). At that point Mallet de Bassilan came back into the picture, with a series of documents for-mally presented to the French government between February 1857 and December 1859. Although charged with Anglophobia and hysterical overtones -'They will attempt anything against the Empire, and it is only the Empire that can stop them' -de Bassilan produced some evidence to reinforce his thesis: 'It is clear to me from the disturbances in Egypt, that the English ... wish to occupy it one day,' and forecast that Tibet would inevitably be interfered with by the British (both of which eventualities did in fact transpire). He also pointed out the importance of the south China rivers, which soon after became the preferred French route for expansion into China.11
For some time the small scale of French commercial interest in China left French and British able to co-operate. A change came after the catastrophes of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the humiliating Paris Commune of the following year. Emasculated in Europe, with no prospect of restoring the lost prov-inces of Alsace and Lorraine, now held by Germany, the Third Republic looked for foreign success in compensation. She came out of the war with her colonies intact, in spite of German industrialists lobbying Bismarck to have French possessions seized as war reparations. It was a repetition, although of greatly aggravated severity, of the situation after Waterloo, when the restored Bourbon Charles X had begun the conquest of Algiers, consolidated during the following reign of Louis Philippe. Successive governments had made forays into Mexico, Tahiti, and Egypt; the acquisition of Madagascar was openly intended as part of an anti-British strategy. De Lanessan, Radical Deputy and Navy Minister, pointed out in his book L 'Expansion colonialede la France that French fleets based in Madagascar and in lndo-China would 'put an end to all commercial relations between England and Singapore, Hong Kong and China and even menace India itself' .s12
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Whether consciously influenced by the suggestion of de Bassilan or not, the government of Louis Napoleon had turned to lndo-China as a potential field for expansion and a counterbalance to British India. By 1862 a foothold in Saigon was secured, promptly countered by the British annexation of Lower Burma. Within another five years, France had obtained all the Mekong River basin. The trouble with the Mekong delta, which became the French province of Cochin China, was that the Mekong led nowhere of commercial interest. Only the Red River, in the north of what is now Vietnam, offered access from the sea to Hanoi, and on to the Chinese province ofgYunnan. But the Red River lay in die territory of the province of Tonking, part of the ancient empire of Annam, and Annam was, theoretically at least, numbered among the feudatories of China. The Annamese Emperors were racial Chinese, and the administration was partly staffed by Chinese scholar-officials.
Feudatory obligations were not necessarily observed by the Chinese -it was, for instance, judged prudent not to insist on traditional rightswhen the Japanese occupied the Ryuku (Liu-chi) islands in 1879 -but in this instance an appeal from Annam was recognized by China.Quite possibly China might not have thought it worthwhile botheringgabout Annam itself, but Tonking was useful as a buffer zone betweenthe Middle Kingdom and the predatory French. It was thereforedecided to intervene, at least to the extent of sending irregular buteffective forces -the Black Flags -to counter French aggressions.Li Hung-chang, the most prominent of the Chinese reformers, whounderstood too clearly the limitations of his country's military andnaval strength, attempted to avoid a clash, but the Dowager Empress'sparty were spoiling for a fight.
The French decision to expand this modest imperial success into what was, within a single generation, to become the second-largest Western colonial empire, was not taken quickly or unanimously. The French army was organized for large European rather than small col-onial operations, and there were many who resented any diversion of effort from the preparation for 'revanche' -the next victorious war with Germany that would restore to France her lost provinces. Among the left-wingers the curious idea that even the dissemination of French culture did not justify foreign adventures was beginning to spread. Nor was there the continuity of government that might encourage a settled policy. The I870s and eighties were one of those periods when minis-tries succeeded ministries with breathtaking speed: between February �P
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
1879 and February 1883 there were no fewer than eight governments -Waddington, Freycinet, Ferry, Gambetta, Freycinet again, Duclerc, Falliere and Ferry once more. It was not until Jules Ferry's return, with a programme of anti-clerical education and colonial expansion, that progress was made.
In August 1884 China stumbled into a war with France for which neither country was prepared. Admiral Courbet earned some easy successes, destroying at Foochow (Fuzhou) a very inadequately modernized Chinese fleet, but the land forces had a more mixed record. A French expedition to Formosa got itselfbottled up in the port of Keelung (Ch'i-lung), unable to break through the ring of Chinese defences, and in February 1885 a defeat at Langson, near the Sino-Tonkinese border, led to the downfall of Ferry's government: Ferry himself was lucky to escape with his life from an infuriated P'l.ris mob (the Chinese forces contributed to this by returning the French dead with their helmets neatly sewn on, but without their heads). But in spite of nearly losing the war, the.French won the subsequent peace. In the treaty arranged in Paris with Robert Hart's assistance, French sovereignty over the territories of the empire of Annam, Tonkin and Cochin China was recognized and direct French rule was imposed, while the areas of the Siamese empire, now Laos and Cambodia, were brought within the French sphere of influence: a slice of the world equivalent in size to France itself, stretching a thousand miles south from the border with China, had passed under French control. Some French politicians wanted more; the influential publicist Joseph Chail-ley-Bert thought that Siam, Macao and part of China proper ought to
13
be allowed to benefit from France's 'mission civilisatrice'.
What seemed to be an explosion of French colonial ambitions, reach-ing to the borders of both the Indian Empire and southern China, caused major concern in Whitehall. An indecisive and largely theoreti-cal Chinese presence had been replaced by a predatory French one, intent on expansion into Yunnan. Insofar as the British government considered Chinese interests, it was with a benign neutrality. Having established diplomatic relations and secured the lion's share of the trade, Britain had accepted China as part of her 'informal empire'. French activity, on the other hand, was always an object of suspicion.
The bombardment ofFoochow in August 1884, in which some three thousand civilians were killed, provoked widespread disgust; Harry Parkes called it 'little less than treacherous'. Questions were asked in the House of Commons; Mr Ashmead Bartlett, Tory Member for Eye,
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demanded on 28 October 1884 that 'The British admiral stop these piratical proceedings'. When the French announced a blockade of the Chinese coast, and added that they would consider rice to be a contra-band of war, Britain responded indignantly, and hinted at the Navy being called upon to resist. One observer described the action as 'elec-trifying the civilized world', and in the House of Lords the French actions were described as 'barbarous'; Lord Bury said that it was well known that the country was in a position in which it might at any' moment be involved in war; and Colonel Gordon, celebrated as 'Chinese' Gordon for his role in assisting in the suppression of the Taipings, wrote that 'humanly speaking, China going to war with France, must entail our following suit'.
The Chinese reaction to the French attack was fierce and immediate.
For the first time the electric telegraph and steam-powered press enabled the news of the bombardment ofFoochow and the destruction of the Chinese fleet to be speedily disseminated. The whole country was outraged, and the Viceroy of Canton issued a proclamation calling on all Chinese to sink French ships and to sell poisoned provisions to their forces. In Hong Kong this was received with some consternation by the authorities, but was acted on only to the extent of anti-French demonstrations and a refusal by port workers to service French vessels. It was the first manifestation in the colony of a spontaneous, grass-roots nationalism, distinct from the old generalized xenophobia, and directed against one specific nation. Not recognizing this, the colonial govern-ment acted with clumsy authoritarianism. The strikers were ordered to return to work and fined; the Buffs had to be called out to suppress the disturbances which followed, and an emergency ordinance was rushed through the Legislative Council giving extensive powers to the government. These actions were widely criticized, as considerable British sympathy for the Chinese protest was expressed. Sir John Hay,
M.P. for Wigton, an Admiral who had seen service in China, defendedcthe strikers, and asked that the Hong Kong authorities 'be directed tocrefrain from enforcing any contract to labour ... which for patrioticcreasons may reasonably object to such enforcement'. A Hong Kongccourt rejected the administration's attempt to prosecute the newspaperceditor who had published the Viceroy's original proclamation.14
The results of the war were widespread. Although the settlement had conceded little to the French that damaged Chinese interests, the Ch'ing claims on Indo-China being largely theoretical, the conflict had destroyed any hopes of stability that had developed in the quarter
,A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
century after the Convention of Peking. The other European powers, alerted to French ambitions in China, were determined nottobe left behind in any division of the spoils that might be subsequently offered, and Britain had been made aware of Hong Kong's vulnerability to French or any other aggression. Naval strategists everywhere noted how easily China's new fleet had been overwhelmed, nowhere more so than in Japan, where modernization was proceeding swiftly and efficiently. Any illusions China might have had about the reliability of Western protection were shattered. Neither Britain nor the United States, generally counted as allies of China, had intervened. But the French had not had it all their own way, and amilitant Chinese nation-alism had begun to make itself felt.
General Sargent's guns
At a time of international tension and crisis, Hong Kong had to put up with a weak and nervous Governor. Sir George Bowen was a polished example of smooth pomposity, who had glided swiftly through the ranks of colonial administration. A brilliant Oxford career-scholar of Trinity, a first in Classics, mice President of the Union, a Fellow of Balliol -hewas appointed Rector of the Ionian University of Corfu (which had slipped under British administration as a result of the Napoleonic wars) in 1847, at the age of twenty-six, and became Politi-cal Secretary to the government of the Ionian Islands. An adventurous journey to Hungary in 1849, where he wasinstrumental in rescuing the revolutionary hero Louis Kossuth, andanumber of books-including Mun-ay's Guide to Greece -kept Bowen in the public eye. Aptly described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as 'self-opinionated, obstinate, and long-winded', he was much given to name-dropping, and fond of retailing anecdotes of the great and famous, but it was his friendship with Gladstone that got him the post of the first Governor of Queensland in 1859, at the age of thirty-eight.
Already a KCMG at thirty-four, Bowen was macte GCMG15 on this appointment, and looked set for higher posts, for underneath the pompous and time-serving veneer real abilities lurked. But the Antipodes were too much for him, as they might well have been for anyone who saw the sheep-runs of Australia as 'exactly the dromoi eurees of Homer', the squatter question as 'a revival of the strife between the patricians and the plebeians for the ager publicus', and was reminded
FORTRESS HONG KONG
by the Darling Downs'ofHorace's 'Larissae campus opimae'.1'' Although Bowen's colonial career lasted for over twenty years -and was not without successes, especially in New Zealand, where he succeeded the pugnacious Sir George Grey as Governor in 1867, and persuaded the colonists, aggrieved at their treatment by Whitehall, that they should refrain from asking to become part of the United States instead -he came to grief in Victoria, to which state he was appointed Governor in 1872. There was a tremendous row over the budget proposals in' 1877 between the elected �PAssembly and the Council, whose members had life tenure: 'a sort of political madness ... some members of the Council talked of hiring and arming Irish mobs . . . while some members of the Assembly advocated violent and revolutionary measures'. Bowen failed to smooth things out, and wrote that he had 'damaged my ... reputation and my career to a degree that I shall never recover'.17 In this he was right; after three years in Mauritius, he was sent to Hong Kong for his last posting in 1882, being seen by the Colonial Office as likely to be a soothing influence after the turbu-lent Pope Hennessy. Sir George was happy to co-operate if that would assist in making his own life there as easy as possible.
By the time Bowen reached Hong Kong in 1883 he had developed into a consummate bore, idle, inordinately pleased with his lofty acquaintances and immensely conceited. His superiors viewed him with scorn. Lord Granville described him as a 'pompous donkey'; Kimberley noted his 'ridiculous egoism'. W.R. Malcolm, an Assistant Under-Secretary, revealed to Lord Ripon: 'Bowen has served a long time, and officially we say with distinction. But in truth he is nothing but a wind bag and has only been preserved during a long career by Lady Bowen's tact and popularity and by the great personal friendship of Herbert [Sir Robert Herbert, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, who had served under Bowen in Australia] which he has requited with the most violent abuses.'18 Bowen's successor, Wil-liam Des Voeux, described a dinner at Lord Carnarvon's which had also been attended by Hennessy, Bowen's predecessor. Bowen was talking 'according to his wont, in a somewhat loud voice. After a remark had fallen rather flat to the effect that he had had an interview on the same day with the Pope, Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, he shortly afterwards said, apropos of nothing: "Very extraordinary thing, very extraordinary; I was asked to dine the same day with the Prime Minis.er and the Archbishop of Canterbury."' Which was followed by a sharp putdown from 'little Pope Hennessy'.19
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Bowen's expectation of an agreeably lazy sojourn in Hong Kong should have been amply justified, for, as he remarked: 'the routine and absolutely necessary work of Hong Kong administration seemed to me from the first to be much lighter than that of any Crown Colony which I had previously governed'. This was due mainly to the services of the officers who had passed through the cadet recruitment scheme, set up twenty years before. Such men as James Stewart Lockhart {Assistant Colonial Secretary in 1883), Alfred Lister {Colonial Trea-surer), Walter Deane (Superintendent of Police) and Sir James Russell (Police Magistrate), had all passed the stringent examinations and developed a good working knowledge of the Chinese and their lan-guage. The Colonial Secretary, Sir William Marsh, proved his capacity for carrying out the Governor's post on his own by administering the government for considerable periods both before and after !Jowen's appointment. But it was Bowen's misfortune to arrive in the colony at a time when wars and rumours of wars abounded, and the responsibility for defence lay in the hands of a particularly active and irascible soldier, Lieutenant-General J .N. Sargent.
It was Sargent's third tour of duty in the Far East, his first having been in 1860. Since that time there had been another major advance in gunnery, with the general introduction of very heavy steel pieces, with improved propellants, giving greatly improved range and accuracy. Even the wrought-iron rifled cannon developed during the American Civil war had a range of well over three miles, and more modern guns were capable of much more. French battleships of the 'Hoche' class onwards (1876) carried 13.4" seventy-five-ton guns in their main arma-ment -more than capable of devastating Victoria from far beyond the range of the existing fortress batteries. Nor were these proof even against small-arms fire, since some of the most strategically placed were mounted in the open, en barbette, and therefore protected from direct but not from dropping fire. Sargent was acutely aware of this, and made sure that the War Office knew of his views. In spite of seventy years of Anglo-French co-operation both he and the Horse Guards in Whitehall remained nervous of France as a potential aggres-sor, and the tension over French expansionism in the East confirmed them in their apprehensions.
From being a colonial backwater, Hong Kong had been pushed into the foreground of international confrontation. The distinguished military engineer, later M.P. for Portsmouth, Sir William Crossman had visited Hong Kong in 1881 and designed suitable fortifications,
FORTRESS HONG KONG 295
but work on these had not been put in hand. Sir Andrew Clarke, Quarter-Master General, agreed with General Sargent that Hong Kong's 'defences were then far inferior in armament to those of many of the Chinese ports, and that in the event of war, it would be possible for the French with a preponderating force of six ironclads to destroy the capital and shipping of Hong Kong'. As an immediate measure itwas recommended that the garrison be massively strengthened by the addition of three more Indian regiments, two first-class torpedo boats, and additional heavy guns and quick-firing pieces. Lord Derby was sufficiently concerned to authorize the immediate dispatch, 'in hot haste', of guns for the purpose, diverted from a new fort at Plymouth.
Sir Andrew Clarke had also written to Bowen: 'At present, against an ironclad, Hong Kong is almost defenceless, so if war broke out immediately suddenly I expect to see you a prisoner.' Bowen was only too well aware of the dangers, and had protested to the Colonial Office on 8 March 1884 that 'if four or five thousand soldiers of any Foreign Power were landed at the back of this island they could, of course, march into town (a distance of only four miles) without effective oppo-sition from our small garrison'. Sir Andrew's letter had the effect of throwing Bowen into a major funk, and he cannot have been much pleased either by the curt telegraphic notification from Lord Derby on 13 September 1884 that the colony was expected to pay for Sargent's howitzers: 'full details by post ... In the meantime advance to General Officer Commanding amount required.' 'To what,' Bowen plaintively enquired of the General, 'does the "advance" refer?' Two days later he took himself off to the safety of Japan, on the doubtful excuse that his rheumatism was playing up.
Sargent was furious, and wrote to Bowen: 'these are times when men circumstanced as we are must have no thought of their own lives, and should prefer death to dishonour'. The colonial press was derisory, the Hong Kong Telegraph writing on 13 September:
His Excellency calmly deserts his post on a frivolous pretence, at what is unquestionably the most critical period in the history of the colony since the last Chinese war.No amount of sham sophis-try, no shallow explanations as to ill-health, no twisting of the truth, not one of the dozen stale pretences ... can disguise the fact that Governor BOWEN �E�E�E makes an easily obtained medical baths in Japan for a pleasant holiday certificate a sufficient reason for ... taking himself off to the . . . Great Britain's
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
supremacy coulcl not long be maintained if there were many
responsible officers in the service of the Crown of the calibre of
Sir GEORGE BOWEN.20
Sargent got his howitzers, although, as Lord Carnarvon complained five years later, they were still of too small a calibre, but lost his job. Sir George Bowen had enough friends in high places to procure the General's recall, which prompted Sargent to write an entire book on the iniquities of Sir George and of the Duke of Cambridge.21 But the new guns alone,t.which were speedily mounted, were not enough to ensure the colony's safety. General Sargent had personally recon-noitred the numerous bays in which an enemy could shelter, and the commanding heights on the north side of the harbour which would enable him to threaten the colony, and had come to the co'lclusion that nothing less than the occupation of these key points would suffice: 'The possession by the Chinese of the North Shore of the harbour is a source ofinconvenience and of insecurity ... but should this territory pass into the hands of any foreign Power, other than Great Britain, the consequences would be disastrous.' These points of strategic weakness must be, if not acquired, at least neutralized. It was, Sargent wrote, 'of the most vital importance for us to be in time to prevent either of those two European Powers [France and Russia] seizing or in any other way acquiring possession of the Chinese territory which comm;mds the entrance to the harbour of Hong Kong, as well as the harbour itself'. Sargent was not necessarily thinking in terms of the whole of the area now known as the New Territories, but only 'the land ... absolutely necessary to our defence'. He wrote energetic dispatches to Lord Harrington, the Secretary of State for War, which Bowen countered through the Colonial Office. The message was received, but the time was not ripe for Britain to be seen to lay hands on more Chinese territory.
Colonial officials who had suffered under Bowen's ineffective rule were sorry to see Sargent go. James Stewart Lockhart expressed his serious regrets -the colony needed 'leaders of a strong, vigorous and fearless character'; Cecil Clementi Smith wrote: 'I am extremely sorry that you are leaving this command for we shall never have another General with who we shall get on so well.' Bowen himself did not stay for long, leaving in December 1885 after a period in office of thirty-two months, of which he had spent only fifteen in the colony. A 'leading merchant' wrote to Sargent: 'I do not think anyone will regret his
FORTRESS HONG KONG
departure. He is a vain, silly old man, with an egotism so obtrusive as to be disgusting. No arrangements were being made for any farewell entertainment, and he sent for Mr Ryrie and asked him to organize a
22
demonstration of some kind, but that gentleman declined.'g
The politics of plague
Whether the credit should be given to Bowen or to his excellent staff,some useful things were done in his time. Perhaps the most significant was the reconstruction of the Legislative Council, which included the first Chinese sitting as of right, in succession to the temporarily-appointed Ng Choy. In discussions between Bowen, representing the views of the more prominent colonists, and the Colonial Office, it was decided that, as Kimberley had recommended, at least one unofficial member of the Legislative Council should always be Chinese. At the same time an element of representation was introduced by authorizing the Justices of the Peace and the Chamber of Commerce each to elect a member, a form of indirect election that still subsists, and that was substantially increased in the first major reform of the electoral system, in 1985. There were to be five 'unofficial' places in all, and therefore in theory the Legislative Council would be able to fulfil its function of representing community opinion considerably better than before. The difficulty was the preponderance of mercantile influence.
Both the Chamber of Commerce and the Justices were predomi-nantly British. The Chamber had twenty British members and six other Europeans, three Jews, two Chinese, one Parsee and one American. Of the seventy-nine Justices sixty-two were British, seven Chinese, seven Parsec or American, and three Jewish. Only the sixty non-stipendiary 'unofficials' voted; all these were required to hold British citizenship, and they included all the Chinese. (Hong Kong Chinese could apply for British citizenship, but were not obliged to do so. Complete freedom for any Chinese to travel to, and live in, the colony was retained until the Second World War.)
The Justices elected David Sassoon, from the great Bombay Jewish family. This was done in a conscious effort to widen the non-Anglo-Saxon element on the Council (Sassoon was succeeded by Sir Paul Chater, an Armenian, in a continuation of the tradition). The Chamber of Commerce elected Thomas Jackson, the Chief Manager and undoubted Taipan of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Since one of the two remaining members was always a member of Jardine Matheson's, the Legislative Council's opinions were usually both unequivocal and predictable. The system remained essentially unchanged for exactly a century, until the electoral refo.rms of the 1980s began to introduce a more stimulating and provocative membership.
Uninhibited comment was, however, not lacking in Hong Kong, for tht colony enjoyed a free -sometimes free to the bounds of scurrilityg-press. Nor had Bowen any intention of muzzling criticism; Australia and New Zealand had habituated him to it. He arranged for the Council minutes and departmental reports to be distributed, and for the forma-tion of a standing committee system with unofficial representation. The most important of these, the Finance Committee, was given the responsi-bility of commenting on budget proposals before these were referred to Whitehall, which at least gave it a useful psychological leverage. These reforms were accomplished with minimal opposition from colonists relieved at no longer having to cope with Sir John Pope Hennessy. When Bowen left the colony Phineas Ryrie, the senior member of the Legislat-ive Council, was able to say that 'whereas a certain amount of friction and asperity of feelings between the official and unofficial elements' had existed previously, there was 'nothing of the sort now'.
Some progress towards institutional development was also made in Bowen's successor Sir William Des Voeux's term of office, which began in October 1887. In the interim of nearly two years after Bowen's departure the Acting Governor Sir William Marsh carried on running things as he had done since his appoinnnent as Colonial Secretary in 1879, under the impossible Pope Hennessy and the ineffectual Bowen. Des Voeux had learnt from personal experience the truth of Talley-rand's advice to young diplomats, 'Surtout, pas trap de zele.' At the age of twenty-nine, having taken a degree at the University of Toronto -an unusual background for a colonial governor -he had been sentin 1863 as a magistrate to Charles Elliot's old territory, British Guiana,and, like Elliot, had protested about the way the planters treated theirlabourers. Although these were not, as in Elliot's time, black slaves,but indentured Chinese coolies, their standards had apparently notbeen much improved. Des Voeux's protests, described by The Timesas 'the severest impeachment of public officers' since Warren Hastingswas tried for alleged offences in India seventy-five years before, led to the appoinnnent of a Royal Commission. Some of his criticisms were declared to be exaggerated, and Des Voeux thereafter was considerably more restrained. In part this may have been due to his ill-health,
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which necessitated frequent vacations. F.H. May, Sir William's Private Secretary in Hong Kong, did most of the work, as the Governor was happy to acknowledge, although he still found it necessary to make the painful journey from the summer residence, Mountain Lodge, to Government Offices, 'once or twice a week'. Bowen's institution of regular Council meetings encroached too severely upon the Governor's leisure time, and was therefore abolished.
Sir William reserved his energies for visiting celebrities. The Comte de Bardi occupied a great deal of his attention. Hardly a figure of international importance, the count was nevertheless a Bourbon, and owner of the Chateau de Chambord, to which return invitations would be welcome. The Grand Duke Alexander Michael of Russia and the Tsarevitch, later Tsar Nicholas, also stayed at Government House in 1891, and went on that perennially favourite occupation of visitors to Hong Kong, a shopping trip. This was made incognito, the future Tsar heavily disguised in a billycock hat and tan shoes. Young George Curzon, already making a name for himself in Parliament and in society, was small beer by comparison, but within a comparatively short time was to have an important influence on the future of the colony. He was rather too enthusiastic for credibility, being enraptured by 'the Elysian graces' of Victoria.
It was a considerable sadness for Sir William to be absent on one of his extended leaves during the visit of Affie's younger brother, the Queen's favourite son, the Duke of Connaught, in I889. The Duke's visit marked the official initiation of Des Voeux and Connaught Roads, the start of a new reclamation scheme which was to advance the water-front to Connaught Road and provide valuable land in the heart of the central district. The original shoreline had been extended and pro-tected by a sea wall and some reclamation done by 1862, but work had since been desultory. The new scheme provided, when complete (which was not for another seventeen years), space for a new clubhouse, the Supreme Court building, a cricket pitch, and the tramlines, all much appreciated additions to the city.
Sir William was however forced to give his attention to a less attrac-tive subject -public health. Osbert Chadwick's 1882 report had been consigned to another new committee, the Sanitary Board, but before the Board could implement any of its recommendations, one of Chad-wick's and Ayres' prognostications was realized. Neglect of sanitary conditions throughout Hennessy's obstructive tenure of office hail constituted a time-bomb, which exploded in the form of a cholera
A IIISTORY OF IIONG KONG
epidemic in 1883. The new Board had its work cut out in coping with the immediate consequences of the epidemic, and when they were able to find time to produce plans for the future they ran into strident opposition. Chadwick's waterworks were indeed built at Tai Tam, and helped with sewage disposal, and his recommendations for food handling, the control of markets and the reorganization of garbage disposal were implemented, but nothing was done about the desperate overcrowding which made the spread of disease inevitable. There was, after all, no money in it, always a powerful arguand the few thousand Europeans were adequately, ment in Hong Kong,
if not luxuriously, housed; in the 1890s all hotel bedrooms advertised in the Hong Kong Guide had bathrooms attached. Gross overcrowding was limited to the Chinese quarters thousand to the acre -there were instances presented of more than a -and meant high rents with consequent profits
to landlords; compulsory clearances, the only effective remedy, were certain to lead to trouble.
Chadwick wanted three hundred cubic feet of space per person -a room about twelve foot square for a family of four -and at least one window per room, but even this modest standard was too much for Hong Kong landlords. The opposition was led by Ho Ch'i (rather strangely himself a qualified physician), and in an effort to move things forward he was invited to join the Board. An extraordinary man, Ho Ch'i (or Ho Kai, or He QD, son of that Revd. Ho Fuk who was among the founders of the Tung Wah Hospital, embodied all the virtues and contradictions that form Hong Kong, and over the next thirty years he was to be the most considerable political figre in the colony.23 Ho
gu
had spent ten years in England, where he studied medicine and law, becoming a member both of the Royal College of Surgeons and of Lin-coln's Inn, and taking an English wife before returning to the colony enthusiastic about British constitutional and social ideas, but dedicated to presenting a Chinese point of view. He had been suggested as a member of the Legislative Council at the early age of twenty-five, and was only thirty-one when appointed in 1890. But for the moment, in spite of the Board also having as a member Dr Manson, the distin-guished parasitologist, founder of the London School of Tropical Medicine, who had already identified the causes of elephantiasis and was to pioneer the research into those of malaria, very little was done. It seemed that the Chinese themselves would prefer to live in insanitary conditions, rather than pay higher rents and face inspections: certainly forty-seven of them petitioned against any form of regulation.
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In 1879 Mrs Cumming had been horrified by the primitive standards
of hygiene in the colony, writing that
no sort of effective drains or sewers have been provided ...whatever sewerage finds its way [into rain-water conduits] is simply deposited along the whole harbour front, thus poisoning what else might be a pleasant situation ... as regards all that is generally understood by the term 'sanitary arrangements' ... all such necessary matters are provided for in a manner primitive in the extreme; and thi: arrangements for the daily (or among the poorer classes only bi-weekly!) removal of nuisances from every house (for subsequent conveyance to the mainland as an article of agricultural commerce) form a very unpleasant page in the sanitary statistics of Her Majesty's empire. 24
It was not until 1889, seven years after the Chadwick report, that even the most basic action was taken to amend sanitation, and then only at the instigation of the Colonial Office. The Crown Lands Resumption Ordinance of that year gave powers of compulsory purchase in order 'to facilitate a contemplated experiment having for its object a permanent improvement in the sanitary condition of the town. A large part of the population is densely crowded in houses which are without yards or windows at the back, and which as regards five-sixths of the rooms are in perpetual and complete darkness.' But even if the experiment was not successful, Des Voeux felt there was no real need for concern:
It is hoped that the cost of reconstruction and the loss of building area from the provision of 'back-yards' will be largely compen-sated by demand for the improved dwellings. If the event should prove otherwise the project need not be pushed further; but Iapprehend that it would be worth some cost to the public to get rid of a grave scandal and a serious danger to the public health by the only method yet suggested which would not cause widespread distrust and discontent among the Chinese population.
At all events the Europeans were safe, for in the previous year the European District Reservation Ordinance had been published. A pet-ition from foreign residents had characterized as a 'crying evil which demands instant removal' that 'such a concourse of Natives should be
25
allowed to collect in such close propinquity to European Residents'.g
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
The evil was remedied by the Ordinance reserving the higher central part of the town 'not for exclusively European occupation, but for houses built according to European models'. This somewhat shame-fated attempt at racial segregation was hedged about with numerous explanations: 'No opposition was offered . . . on the part of the Chinese, possibly because they themselves prefer to be segregated from Europeans.' It was for the good of the Chinese themselves that Europeans should live in Hong Kong, 'For, though possessed of many valuable characteristics, [they] are still, and likely to be for a long time to come, lacking in some of the qualities that are essential for true progress.' They were used to 'close packing in houses ... the normal condition of all classes among them'. They 'have, probably by a long process of natural selection, become inured and insensible to the con-ditions inseparable from extreme density of population'. And, after all, if they wanted to live in European areas, 'there is nothing in the Ordi-nance to prevent them from doing so'.26
But Nemesis was at hand. In 1894 plague struck Hong Kong, part of a great pandemic that swept through Asia. It had been preceded by a violent outbreak in Canton, when more than a hundred thousand were reported to have died. The onset of the plague found Hong Kong a society deeply divided between traditional Chinese and modem British, with only a very few of the Western-educated Chinese begin-ning to appreciate the advantages of a scientific approach to public health. At that time the causes of plague were only beginning to be understood, but by an ironical coincidence the bacillus pestis was identi-fied that year in Hong Kong by the Japanese doctors Aoyama and Kitasato. Japan had already begun to make important scientific dis-coveries at a time when Chinese science was still half a millennium behind the times.
Although rats were suspected, but not proven, to be the carriers of the disease, what was certain was that insanitary overcrowding was highly conducive to its quick spread, and that Hong Kong offered some of the best possible examples of such conditions. If they had done little to prevent the outbreak, the Hong Kong government set about dealing with it briskly enough, in the best traditions of paternal-istic colonial rule. Volunteer parties of soldiers, some of whom were to die from the plague, went to the worst areas to remove corpses and to disinfect and whitewash affected houses; emergency isolation hospitals, including a floating hospital ship, were prepared, and every-thing possib_le was done to control the disease. 'Unfortunately, how-
FORTRESS HONG KONG 3o3
ever,' as the Governor reported, 'the Chinese do not see things with European eyes,' and neither Des Voeux nor his officials made any attempt to see things through Chinese eyes.27 Des Voeux left Hong Kong in May 1891 -for eighteen years of pleasant retirement, which suggests that his frequent ill-health cannot have been too serious.
His successor, Sir William Robinson, showed every indication of outright hostility to Chinese customs and ideas. Robinson had come to this, his last post, the hard way. He joined the Colonial Service as�Pa boy clerk -not having been to university -and made the rare transition to Colonial Governor. His career had been passed in London and the West Indies, and he had no experience or knowledge of China. Throughout his stay in Hong Kong he. displayed a formidable insensi-tivity; the tone of his dispatches indicates the assumption of European superiority which was to characterize his period in office. Sir William explained the Chinese reluctance to co-operate with his preventative measures:
Educated to insanitary habits, and accustomed from infancy to herd together, they were unable to grasp the necessity of segre-gation; they were quite content to die like sheep, spreading disease around them as long as they were left undisturbed . . . Thesefeelings, no doubt the result of blind prejudice and superstition, naturally prompted concealment which eventually necessitated the organization of search parties and a system of house-to-house visitation. Harrowing tales are told of how, upon a search party entering a house in which there were cases of sickness, every possible means of evasion and concealment was hurriedly devised ... Never was Chinese ingenuity put to so sore a test, or exercised in such a pitiable cause.'28
Nor did the Chinese have any confidence in the government's hospital treatment, preferring traditional Chinese remedies, which were almost entirely useless. Not that Western medicine had discovered an effective treatment for the plague, as opposed to preventative measures, but 82 per cent of infected Chinese died, compared to only 18 per cent of Europeans. In this crisis of conflicting cultures the Tung Wah Hospital Committee was able to intervene. Since its inception in 1872 the Com-mittee had been too successful for its own popularity. With the encour-agement�P of Sir John Pope Hennessy it had almost assumed the functions of the Registrar-General, who was also Protector of the
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Chinese. Hennessy, with a good deal of logic, saw the absurdity of having a single official (who did not, as it then happened, even under-stand the language) entrusted with the welfare of the great majority of the population, which ought to be the most pressing concern of the whole administration. But Hennessy's announcing that the Tung Wah hall was one of the places where he had 'often taken counsel with my Chinese friends' was enough to ensure a surly response from the European community, who saw this as none of the Tung Wah's business; they had 'taken over the responsibilities that the Registrar-General was meant to fulfil' and were acting as 'Advisor-General' to the government. When Hennessy left William Marsh, who had been at daggers drawn with the Governor, succeeded in reinstating the office of Registrar-General, and appointing a cadet officer with good Cantonese to the post.
Again with Hennessy's support, the Hospital Committee had estab-lished a sister-organization, the Po Leung Kuk, the 'Protect Virtue Association'. Its purpose was to protect women and children from being kidnapped for sale, usually into prostitution, and it quickly became something very like an alternative legal system: 'the Po Leung Kuk directors aspired for mandarin costumes, wearing long gowns and hats with imperial feathers ... The directors judged cases in the same manner as Qjng mandarins did in imperial courts, but they took place mostly at night, with at least two directors present. Before the hearing started, all concerned would be escorted into the Kuk by the Kuk detectives.'29 Only after the directors had recorded their verdict was the case passed on to the Registrar-General for action. Such a system was far more likely to be effective in difficult cases than the British courts, but was not popular with the British community, who appreci-ated nothing of the frustrations of their Chinese fellow-colonists.
The Governor and his senior officials inevitably spent most of their time in the company of a small number of the most prominent Euro-pean citizens, at receptions, garden parties, the races, the club, cricket matches and games of lawn-tennis, musical and theatrical perform-ances, and all the tea-and dinner-parties that made up colonial social life. No Chinese was encountered in this restricted society (and few lower-class British, for that matter). The Hongkong Club, the Jockey Club (founded in 1884), the Victoria Recreation Club (1872) and the Amateur Dramatic Corps (1844) had not a single Chinese member between them; even the Freemasons, supposedly dedicated to promot-ing the brotherhood of man, originally set their faces against admitting
FORTRESS HONG KONG
Chinese. Under these _circumstances there was not much chance of any official being left in ignorance of the European community's senti-ments, but contacts with the Chinese were much more limited, and were almost entirely confined to matters of business, on which the interests of all races were likely to be identical. The Chinese members of the Legislative Council should have been able to present a Chinese view, but since such men as Ho Ch'i were themselves deeply concerned in business they tended to follow the same line as their European counterparts.
In such circumstances ii: was only reluctantly that Robinson co-operated with the Tung Wah Committee on controlling the plague. The Governor would not back down on house-to-house visitation, which was indeed absolutely necessary, as the more reasonable Tung Wah members agreed, but devised a plan
which, however undesirable it may have been from a medical point of view, was fully justified by the urgency of the occasion and by circumstances generally. I allude to the establishment of a temporary plague hospital under the management of Chinese doctors belonging to the staff of the Tung W a native hospital ...The Chinese sick had now the choice of European or native treatment, and although many elected in favour of the former, the vast majority preferred to be attended by their own countrymen.
But little could be done about other injured susceptibilities; with so great a number of deaths 'the burying parties had to dispose of the dead by burying the coffins in trenches ... a great shock to the feelings of a people whose chief form of religion consists in the rites and ceremonies of burial, and in the annual worship of the dead'. Robinson found it impossible to understand the horror with which this prospect was viewed. Most of the Chinese population were born outside the colony, and desperately wanted to return home to die in the bosom of their ancestors; the Governor saw this only as a sure method of spread-ing the plague further. Restrictions of movement had been the only method of control since medieval times; the strict quarantine of the lazaretto was still enforced, on pain of death, in those Mediterranean countries where plague was to be expected. Since Canton was quite as badly affected as Hong Kong such restrictions might have seemed unnecessary, but Robinson believed the Chinese request for plague.victims to be allowed to leave the colony 'a most preposterous demand,
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
and all the more so seeing that it was made by a deputation of Chinese gentlemen who should have known better than to make it'. Sir J.F. Brenan, the Consul-General at Canton, 'incensed' -at Robinson's atti-tude, attempted to argue the Chinese case in vain: 'The attitude in Hong Kong seemed to be that any deference to Chinese sentiment was a reflection on Western medical science ... and as usual the Hong Kong press had stigmatized any tenderness towards Chinese feelings or religious conviction as selling the British birthright in Hong Kong.'30
But Robinson's hand was forced: he recorded that, on being refused permission to go, 'the Chinese retaliated by leaving the colony en masse. Compradores, contractors, shroffs, tradesmen, domestic ser-vants, and coolies all joined together in a general exodus altogether numbering some 100,000 persons.' The refugees made their way to Canton, where anti-foreign hysteria was rampant: doctors were accused of removing the eyes from newly born children to make plague medicines, and placards were displayed 'accusing the Government of every kind of atrocity and inciting the people to take vengeance on the foreigners'. A controlled evacuation had therefore to be arranged, under medical supervision, with specially equipped junks taking plague sufferers to Canton, where it was piously trusted they would be con-fined in isolation hospitals.
In these anxious exchanges the Tung Wah Committee found itself caught in the crossfire. Not only the colonial administration but the scientifically-informed Chinese accused them of appeasing 'the angry, ignorant and riotous mobs composed of the coolie classes', and pan-dering to 'ignorance, fanaticism and ridiculous jealousy'. From the other side the Chinese masses, ready to believe anything of the foreigners (including their removal of plague corpses in order to be ground up for medicine for the British royal family), attempted to lynch the Committee's chairman when he admitted the necessity for some sanitary control.
With the cooler weather of autumn the plague subsiued, only to recur with varying levels of intensity in the succeeding years. The worst-affected spot, Tai-ping-shan, was cmppulsorily purchased for redevelopment, at the considerable cost of $82g1,000, but trouble was created when the Sanitary Board attempted further reforms.31 Fouryears previously, in 1891, byelaws had been passed requiring lodging houses, which were much used by immigrant coolies, to be registered so that some degree of sanitary control could be exercised. Registration
FORTRESS HONG KONG 3o7
of any sort was anathema to the Chinese, who saw it as an inevitable preliminary to taxes, squeezes and other interferences. So many objec-tions had consequently been raised by the Chinese community, led by Ho Ch'i, that the byelaws had been quietly shelved. This policy of peace at any price had been drastically amended by the plague, and it was announced that the regulations were to be once again enforced.
One lesson of the plague had been learnt, and three months were therefore spent explaining the purposes of registration, and attempting to convince suspicious coolies that no wicked plot was afoot. In spite of these efforts, no registrations were forthcoming, and when it was decided 'to enforce the law without further parley', the response was a strike in the harbour. This quickly developed into a full-blown stop-page, involving over twenty thousand workers and bringing the move-ment of goods to a halt. Unlike the previous harbour strike, directed against French interests, or attempts to improve pay, this was the first large-scale example of action clearly aimed at influencing the HongKong government to change its policies. Governor Robinson correctly, if over-excitedly, described it. 'It was perfectly clear that the strike was not an economical one, but was in fact nothing short of a rebellion against the law and the Government.' The Chamber of Commerce was alarmed: 'the Chinese, no doubt, are children. But parents do not discuss with children; they simply say that this or that is to be done, and they insist on it being done.' Nevertheless they attempted to negotiate directly with the strikers, but the confident Robinson refused to accept their proposed compromise, and pushed for complete victory, which was achieved by the simple expedient of engaging other coolies -always plentiful on the mainland -at slightly increased wages. He complacently reported that 'the strikers, the coolie class, who were beginning to think that they held the reins of power, have received an object lesson which, it may be hoped, they will not forget.'
The whole episode had two informative features; it typified the British approach to multi-cultural problems, and marked a stage in the emergence of popular sentiment as a factor in Hong Kong politics. A thorough-going cultural imperialism would have ri<lden roughshod over what could be seen, with justification, as irrational objections to unquestionably improved practices: it is not easy to imagine a French, American or German administration showing the same tolerance, weary and superior as it undoubtedly was. But the British administra: tors had ,Jearnt in India that other people's sensibilities were onlyoffended at a cost: a British officer accused of disrespect towards a
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
Muslim ceremony could be (and was) cashiered. As previously the mandarins at Canton would go out of their way to avoid an upset, so Colonial Secretaries and Governors would know�P when blind eyes needed to be turned. At the same time it was felt that the Chinese really should not be allowed to conduct their lives according to 'blind prejudice and superstition', and that standards of education in the English language and Western methods must be improved.
A vital step in this direction was taken by Dr Manson when in 1887 he founded the College of Medicine. This had been made possible by the opening that year of Ho Ch'i's Alice Memorial Hospital, from whose staff the instructors were drawn and where the facilities for clinical study were provided. Manson had no illusions about the primi-tive state of Chinese medicine, but he had the sensitivity, so noticeably lacking in the British officials, to appreciate that this could not be remedied by attitudes of sneering superiority. It may have been true that in Chinese medicine:
The notions on Anatomy and Physiology are absurd; there is no Surgery worthy of the name; medicines they have in abundance but there is no knowledge of their action or of the diagnosis or pathology of disease ..g. there is nowadays nothing like original observation and thought ... but a persistent effort to make facts tally with fancies.
But Westerners could hardly expect an attentive audience for instruc-tion when they so often committed
the vulgar folly of confounding ignorance with folly, knowledge with wisdom ... We swagger before them and by word and manner say to the Chinese we would have follow us -'You are a pack of fools. All these things you revere are arrant humbug; your ancestral worship, your literature, your talk of filial piety, your paternal Government ... are mere foolishness, superstition and vain words. Whereas, look at us -our steamships, our iron-clads, our railways, electric telegraphs, industrial machines, parlia-mentary government, free press and what not . . . Are we not Gods and you a kind of idiots.32
Manson's college was a deserved success, and one of its earliest gradu-ates was the first President of the Chinese Republic, Dr Sun Yat-sen.
FORTRESS HONG KONG
Another move in the right direction, in which both Ho Ch'i and Manson were involved, was made the following year with the introduc-tion of an elective element into the Sanitary Board. This institution, ineffective and limited in powers as it was, did constitute the first Hong Kong official body to include some democratically elected members. The first electorate, in June 1888, consisted of all ratepayers on the jury rolls, 'all good and sufficient persons ... not ignorant of the English language', whatever their race: inevitably this included some Chinese. The first two elections were lively, and although the first
produced a disappointing turnout the secand, in 1891, 492 votes were cast from an electorate that cannot -187 from a list of 669 voted -in have exceeded 738. It seemed as though a genuinely democratic (within the British interpretation of local franchise, which was then similarly confined to ratepayers) municipal authority might emerge. But however limited the franchise, it was probable that it would not be long before the number of Chinese electors outnumbered the British. At that time there was no absolute restriction for the franchise on grounds of race in British colonies (apartheid came later, and there were easier methods of retaining control): Jamaica, Honduras, Mauritius and Cape Colony all had black voters with the same rights as whites.
Hong Kong, however, it was once again agreed, was different. Sir Cecil Clementi, Governor in the 1920s, was to say: 'This colony is so small and compact that it is in effect a large township, and the Govern-ment of Hong Kong is and must always be mainly concerned with municipal affairs. I regard myself as being in effect Mayor of Hong Kong.'33 Sir George Bowen, like Margaret Thatcher a century later, compared the task r,f governing Hong Kong to that of running a county council; but it would have been a county council poised on the per-imeter of a vast and potentially hostile empire, to which the great majority of the voters owed some form of allegiance.
The European members of the community continued however to press for a higher degree of self-government, with the support from London of the successor to the East India and China Association, the China Association. This body, chiefly composed of those who had returned from Hong Kong and Shanghai, emerged as the most power-ful lobby dedicated to persuading British governments to support what were considered to be the British commercial interests in China. In Hong Kong terms the Association was remarkable in that it mark.d the end of a long feud. Alfred Dent, who as a junior in the old Dent Hong had been forced to leave Shanghai after the collapse of 1866,
310 A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
had found his way to the top as Sir Alfred Dent, Chairman of the British North Borneo Company, and sat amicably together on the Board of the China Association with the Jardine Taipans. These were then, and remain, the Keswick family, descendants' of Jean Jardine, sister of the founder, Dr William. The message of the London China lobby, and of the Shanghai and Hong Kong Chambers of Commerce, had not changed much in half a century, in spite of the disappointing British exports to China between 1875 and 1895:
Year �G,ooo
1875 6,340
1880 6,382
1885 6,396
1890 6,357
1895 5,518
These astonishingly static results hid an increase in dollar terms, due to the variations in exchange, but the incontrovertible fact remained that China still took less than one third of the amount of British exports as Holland. The remedy, according to the manufacturers and merchants, remained the same -only do away with all restrictions and trade would boom. They did not explain how, during the same period, Japan had managed to increase her sales to China from �G746,000 to �G2,794,000.
They had to admit that Hong Kong itself was not doing badly, but claimed that the colony was suffering at the hands of a British govern-ment which did not understand its peculiar problems (it was not the last time that this complaint was to be heard!). Hong Kong, it wasargued, was essential to the success of foreign trade in China, and as such should be regarded as an asset of the Empire, to be paid for by the Imperial government. Instead, locals were mulcted to the general benefit without having any real voice, and certainly without being able to take effective action. An annual contribution of �G20,000 towards the colony's defence costs had been agreed as far back as 1863, butthis was unilaterally increased by �G56,000 in 1884 and �G60,375 in the following year in order to pay for Sargent's new fortifications. In order to meet these costs the Hong Kong government had to float a loan, which it was forced to do in sterling, although its income was in dollars. This came at a bad time from Hong Kong's point of view, for the rate of exchange between the dollar and sterling had worsened significantly
FORTRESS HONG KONG 311
with a drop in silver prices. Then in 1889 London decided that the annual contribution should be doubled, pointing out that this rep-resented only 17 per cent of the increased colonial revenue, and there-fore restored the original value, which had been fixed at 16 per cent of annual revenue. The colonists, led by Thomas Whitehead, manager of the Hong Kong branch of the Chartered Bank, did not think much to this argument, and accepted the proposal only on certain conditions. These included the reinforcement of the garrison by British troops; in the event Indian sepoys were sent. Even Sir Francis Fleming, caretaker Governor in Des Voeux's absence, felt that Whitehall was being neither frank nor open. Great mdignation ensued, and the unofficial members of the Legislative Council were unanimous in opposing the increases, voting to reduce the official's salaries as a measure of their discontent.
On the question of what might be done the unanimity was less complete. When a petition was dispatched to London it was supported by Whitehead, Ho Ch'i and Chater, but not by the two other unofficial members, Jardine's James Keswick and E.R. Belilios, the foremost opium trader in the colony. The petition referred to 'the common right of Englishmen' to manage their local affairs and control the expendi-ture of the colony where imperial considerations were not involved -thus revealing the inconsistencies in the colonists' arguments. The 22unfortunate facts were that the latest census indicated a population of
1,400, of whom 211,000 were Chinese. Of the remainder only 1450 were British, and of these only eight hundred would have been entitled to a vote on the basis of adult male suffrage. There was no possibility of a British government allowing the destinies of nearly a quarter of a million people to be decided by so small an oligarchy; Hong Kong would be much better off, decided the Colonial Secretary, Lord Ripon, as a Crown Colony, 'under which, as far as possible no distinction is made of rank or race, than by a representation which would leave the bulk of the population wholly unrepresented'.34
Ripon had addressed the petition with some care, observing that under the protection of the British government Hong Kong had become a Chinese rather than a British community, and was rapidly becoming more so. He did agree that unofficial representation on the Executive Council would be justified, but warned the petitioners that they should not necessarily expect that this should be European. In fact in a letter to Robinson, the Colonial Secretary suggested that there should be two members, one of whom should be Chinese. Robinson shied away in horror from this; the Chinese did not understand rep-
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
resentative government, and no suitable candidates existed. Before finality could be reached, Ripon had been replaced by JQseph Cham-berlain, who decided that there should be another urofficial member of the Legislative Council, dropping a strong hint that he should be Chinese, and that two unofficial members should be appointed to the Executive Council, to be chosen purely on merit, without regard to class or race. Not surprisingly, they turned out to be Mr Bell-Irving of Jardine's, and Paul Chater.
II
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY OF HONG KONG
A suitable occasion for aaion
The island of Hong Kong and the peninsula of Kowloon had both been ceded outright by China .and were, at least as far as the British were concerned, a permanent part of the possessions of the Crown. The third constituent part of the colony, that much larger area known as the New Territories, was granted in 1898 only on a ninety-nine-year lease, a fact which has complicated, and which continues to complicate, the subsequent history of Hong Kong.
Historians are unanimous in their condemnation of Western coun-tries' behaviour in China towards the end of the nineteenth century, 1 but the view from Hong Kong was rather different. At the start of 1894 it seemed as though China might once more be set on the road to stability. After the suppression of the Taipings there had been thirty years of something approaching normality; the internal reformers loosely grouped around Li Hung-chang -'the Chinese Bismarck', according to his admirers -had brought about some steps towards a modem economy, with railways, cotton mills, steamship lines and a fleet which, on paper, was capable of standing against any likely aggres-sor; the Emperor's brother Prince Kung had established normal chan-nels of diplomatic communication between the Tsungli Yamen and foreign governments; and Sir Robert Hart had made the Customs Service into an incorruptible and reliable source of government revenue. Apart from the Russian seizure in the 1870s of the border province of Iii, from which they were only dislodged after much negotiation, including the cession of a considerable extent of
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
not-very-valuable territory, and the payment of an indemnity, Chinese borders had remained essentially intact. The Ryuku Islands were annexed by the Japanese in 1879, but the Chinese claim to the archi-pelago had never been convincing. The Portuguese gained official recognition of their occupation of Macao, which after 350 years of de faao presence was hardly a matter of great moment; and the French conquests in Inda-China and the British annexation of Upper Burma were theoretical rather than practical intrusions on Chinese sovereignty, being in reality the transfer of a vassalage from a Chinese suzerain who did not exercise his powers to French and Indian ones who did. Britain, although not much use in fending off French aggressions, had sided with the Ch'ing in discouraging foreign depre-dations, having secured a commanding position in the China trade which weighed British interests on the side of maintaining stability. Tseng Chi-tse, the Marquis Tseng, on his retirement from the post of Chinese Minister in Britain, felt able to write in 1 886: 'Each encoun-ter [with the French] and especially the last has, in teaching China her weakness, also discovered her strength,' and to forecast that China would soon be able to 'denounce' those treaties which referred to 'the alienation of Sovereign dominion over that part of the territory comprised in foreign settlements at the treaty ports, as well as in some other respects'.2
But such confidence was misplaced; the reactionary Dowager Empress still held power, acting as regent first for her son, T'ung-chih (Tongzhi), then for her nephew, Kuang-hsii (Guangxu). Huge sums were diverted from defence projects into the expenses of the Imperial Court, including the building of a new and lavish Summer Palace outside Peking; except in Hart's domain bribery and corruption con-tinued to flourish -Li was said to have made an immense illegal fortune -and reformers were outnumbered by conservatives, complacent instimes of relative quiet and hysterical when things began to go amiss.s
Across the Strait of Korea the changes were much more real.sJapan had undergone a similar uncomfortable exposure to Western pressures; treaties had been agreed, but not ratified, foreigners murdered, retali-ations made, indemnities levied, and a strenuous rearguard action against Western encroachments fought by the Imperial Court. But it took only a decade after the first American treaty was signed for final agreements to be reached with Japan, after the collapse of the Toku-gawa Shogunate and the accession of the young Emperor Mutsihito. The new reign, the Meiji, the Enlightened Government, transformed
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY 315
Japan from a feudal tog�Pa modern state in a single generation, and a modern state as bent on expansion as any European power.
A foretaste of what was to come was given in 187 4, when the Japan-ese occupied Formosa, from which they were dislodged after the pro-tests of the British Minister at Peking, Sir Thomas Wade. Twenty years later, after a number of Sino-Japanese incidents in the independent kingdom of Korea, Japan manufactured a suitable pretext, not to declare war, but to open hostilities without that formality by sinking a British ship carrying Chinese troops to Korea. When, in spite of attempts by the Western powers to avert it, war ensued, the result was sharp and decisive. Within a matter of months the Ch'ing naval and military forces were decisively defeated, a defeat to a fair extent due to the siphoning off of defence monies to private corruption. Hart discovered that 36 million taels had been thus diverted, with the result that the navy 'have no shells for the Krupps, and no powder for the
3
Armstrongs'.
It was Li, who had benefited richly himself from such corrupt activi-ties, who was left to discuss matters with the Japanese Prince Ito Hirobumi. Their recorded conversation on 20 March 1895 is revealing: Li suggested that China and Japan 'ought vigorously to maintain the general stability of Asia, and establish perpetual peace and harmony between ourselves, so that our Asiatic yellow race will not be encroached upon by the white race of Europe'. But Ito queried why China had been slow to modernize: 'Ten years ago, when I wasat Tientsin, I talked about reform with the Grand Secretary [Li]. Why is it that up to now not a single thing had been changed or reformed? This I deeply regret.'g4 Li could hardly answer this satisfactorily, and Ito was too much of a gentleman to recall that, as a young samurai, he had condescended to take a berth before the mast on a British ship from Japan to London, where he had learnt the language and customs of the West.
Such an action would have been unthinkable to a Chinese of similar rank, and goes a long way towards explaining why Japan had adapted so much more effectively than China. By 1895 Japan had so progressed in achieving an acceptable rule of law that the British volunteered to cancel the extra-territorial privileges that had been written into the earlier treaties: it
done in China. was to be another thirty-five years before this was
The Treaty of Shimonoseki (April 1895), which Li and Ito negoti. ated, was extremely harsh, making far greater demands on China than
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
any of the Western powers had formerly exacted. All of Formosa, the Pescadore Islands and the Liautung peninsula of Manchuria were ceded to Japan and an indemnity of 230 million 'taels demanded -more than ten times that paid to Britain in the terms of the Treaty of Nanking. Great indignation was aroused in China by the treaty, which was felt as a gross humiliation. In particular Liautung was a part of the Imperial heartland, and not much more than a hundred miles across the bay from the Peking province of Chihli. In all probability its loss would have meant the downfall of the dynasty, but this was averted by the intervention of the Russians, who had their own eyes on the territory. With the assistance of France and Germany, Japan was persuaded, in return for an extra indemnity, to concede that Liau-tung should remain Chinese: but there was a price expected for this helpful intercession.
This was the first occasion on which Germany had taken an active interest in Far Eastern affairs. Bismarck, who powerfully influenced German policies until 1890, was not particularly enthusiastic about colonies, but when the inexperienced, ebullient and slightly deranged young Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, dropped the pilot and took over erratically personal control of policy, colonial expansion was the order of the day, and China was seen as presenting exciting opportunities for the new German Weltpolitik.
It was however Russia which was the prime mover in extorting concessions from the Ch'ing government. The rapid expansion east-wards of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century reached the Amur River, where the town of Nicholaievsk was founded in 1850. Eight years later, as part of the settlements reached at Tientsin, Russia gained a huge area running seven hundred miles from the Amur to the new city of Vladivostok ('Lord of the East'), which brought Russia to the borders of both Korea and Japan. The ultimate prize, an ice-free port, which had eluded the Russians in Europe, was gained as the price for their promised assistance to China against the Japanese. The agreement reached between Li and the Russians Prince Lobanov and Count Witte on 3 June 1896 was meant to be secret, but was widely leaked at the time. It provided for common action to be taken against Japan should there be an attack on either Russia or China (including Korea), and allowed Russian ships to use any Chinese port; immediate permission was given for the Russians to extend their railway, which had followed their advance from Moscow, to Vladivostok.
Russia's success stimulated a German initiative. Admiral Tirpitz,
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY 317
closely following the progress of the Sino-Japanese War, had already been convinced of the need for a coaling and victualling station, and identified Kiau-chou Bay and Mirs Bay as suitable. The latter, only fifteen miles north-east of Kowloon, was too close to Hong Kong to be acceptable, and Kiau-chou, with the town of Tsingtao (Qingdao), was selected as a suitable German foothold. The German Minister in Peking was instructed in November 1896 'to direct his special attention to bring about a suitable occasion for action'.5 This was not too long in coming, since the convenient murder of a pair of missionaries the following November provided the pretext for dispatching a German fleet on 18 December 1897 with instructions from the Kaiser to demand recompense, 'if necessary, with the most brutal ruthlessness'. The hgerbole that accompanied the ultimatum indicated the magni-
yp
tude of German ambitions: 'The German Michael has planted his shield with the device of the German eagle upon the soil of China,' the Kaiser declared, to be answered by the Admiral, Prince Henry (who had so much enjoyed Sir John Pope Hennessy's butter seventeen years before): 'The aim that draws me on, is to declare in foreign lands the gospel of your Majesty's hallowed person, to preach to everyone who will hear it, and also to those who will not hear it.'6
This was the signal for all the other powers to move in; Count Witte of Russia saw it as 'a favourable opportunity for us to seize one of the Cliinese ports, notably Port Arthur [Liishun]', and agreed with the French not to object to their own demand for Kwang-chou. Both Port Arthur, with the nearby commercial port of Talien-wan, and Tsingtao were promptly seized by Russia and Germany respectively. Subsequent negotiations led to these areas being granted by China on leases, and it was the terms of these which were used as precedents for the British expansion of Hong Kong. The land granted to Germany included the whole area of Kiau-chou Bay, together with the adjacent islands, for ninety-nine years. In addition a fifty-kilometre zone was established which was to remain under Chinese sovereignty, but to be garrisoned by German troops and to be governed with German approval. The Russian lease was for only twenty-five years, but restricted access to Port Arthur to Russian and Chinese ships only, although Talien-wan (also known as Liida, Dalien or Dalny), was to be open to all. A similar security zone was established which remained Chinese, but under Russian control.
Both these agreements were reached in March 1898, and in the following month the French were able to announce that they had
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
secured a lease of Kwang-chou Bay as a naval station. Once again this was for a period of ninety-nine years, and extended for a distance of
thirty-five nautical miles from the port.
None of this was at all to the liking of the British government, which saw these armed interventions as gravely threatening the stability ofthe region. Gladstone, discouraged by the implacable opposition ofthe House of Lords to his proposals for Irish Home Rule, had been succeeded as Prime Minister in 1894 by Lord Rosebery, who struggled on against the opposition of the peers until defeated on a vote ofconfidence on the very secondary topic of cordite supplies. In 1895Conservative administration took office which was to hold power, first a under Lord Salisbury and then Arthur Balfour, for the next eleven years. For the first nine of these the post of Colonial Secretary was held by Joseph Chamberlain, who proved to be the most influential politician ever to hold that office, and who exercised an influence far beyond the usual confines of the post. In other parts of the world, notably Africa, Chamberlain's policy was aggressively expansionist, but in China the Conservative government could reasonably claim to have no territorial ambitions.
What was believed to be of importance remained the potential China trade. As developing industrial countries sheltered their products by tariffs, British exports met with increasing resistance. Iron and steel exports increased only modestly (from {;j2 million to {;j8 million) in the twenty years between 1880 and 1900, while textiles, which still represented considerably the most important sector, actually fell (from c.�Gio4 million to c.�G97 million) in the same period, at a time when other countries' production was forging ahead. In China a free market still existed, and one in which Britain had a commanding lead, being by far the biggest of China's trading partners: in 1898 56.4 per cent of the customs revenue came from duties levied on British goods, while Russia contributed 1 .63 per cent and France 2.49 per cent: of a total foreign trade of 378 million taels, 234 million was with Britain, the rest of Europe's share, including both France and Germany, being only 35 million. Only Japan and the United States were beginning to increase their share of the market in any significant quantities.
To put that market's economic importance to Britain in perspective, however, in 1898 only about 1.5 per cent of all British exports went to China. Even when the total of Chinese imports from all Britishpossessions, including Hong Kong, was included -and opium still formed a respectable proportion of these -China still took a smaller
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY 319
value of British exports .than did Holland; the total value had hardly increased in a quarter of a century. The China Association, however, argued, as it had done for all that period, that the potential was enor-mous; at a time when Argentina had more than six thousand miles of railways, China had only 340. Growing increasingly agitated at the success of foreign governments in forcing concessions from China, the Association's members in London and abroad badgered their own administration with a series ofintemperate recommendations. Mr Kes-wick, of Jardine's, said that all the maritime provinces of China should be claimed as a British sphere: 'we had the might, therefore we had the right'. Thomas Whitehead, of the Chartered Bank and a member of the Legislative Council, wanted to send a telegram to the Foreign Office: 'Growing unrest seething mass discontent throughout China, impossible indefinitely avert serious outbreaks, position urgentlyc�P requires the presence of a mobile column of British troops in Wei-haiwei [in Shantung province] or Hong Kong,' but what would really be preferable was the occupation of the entire Yangtse valley, working alongside the local authorities and ignoring the Peking government. Those members who had seats in the House of Commons proposed that 'if necessary Great Britain should be prepared to go to war in order to maintain her predominant position in China'.
There were pressing economic reasons for this near-hysteria, for King Cotton was declining, and the heartland of the industrial revol-ution moving into recession. Exports of cotton goods fell from �G75,564,000 in 1880, to �G69,751,000 in 1900: European countries, which had formerly processed less than two-thirds of the quantity of raw cotton imported inJo Britain, had increased their intake to more than double that of Britain. Only India and China remained predomi-nantly British markets, and, ominously, China had opened her first cotton mill in 1891. An official letter embodying the Association's anxiety was sent to the government on 13 July. R.S. Gundry, the Association's Secretary, privately attempting to persuade F.L. Bertie of the Foreign Office to adopt a more belligerent attitude, put forward the interesting suggestion that 'the best way would be to find a Ming claimant and set him up "counter" at Nanking'.7
There was never any possibility that a British government would take these proposals seriously. Bertie, later Lord Bertie of Thame and British Ambassador to France throughout the First World War, unequivocally rebutted such reckless and irresponsible ideas: 'Never,'c�P he reported, 'would the Government consent to such action.' Little
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
encouragement had ever been given to suppose they might. Arthur Balfour, then leader in the Commons, in a speech made in January 1898 specified that 'our interests in China are not .territorial: they arecommercial ... territory, insofar as it is not necessary to supply a base for possible warlike operations, is a disadvantage rather than an advantage'. Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed that within a week by proclaiming a 'Monroe Doctrine for China': 'We do not regard China as a place for conquest or acquisition by any European Power. We look upon it as a place, the most hopeful place, of the future for the commerce of our country and the commerce of the world at large.' A debate was held in the House of Commons in March of that year on the proposal 'That it is of vital importance for British commerce and influence that the independence of Chinese territory should be maintained.' Replying for the government, George Curzon, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, stated that 'The Government have no difficulty in accepting the motion . . . theintegrity and independence of China ... may be considered to be the cardinal bases of our policy ... We are opposed to the alienation of any portion of Chinese territory, or the sacrifice of any part of Chinese
8
independence.'
All this hardly betokened much enthusiasm for imperialist expansion on the part of Britain, but even as Curzon was speaking the actions of other European powers in China were forcing the pace, and the Under-Secretary was obliged to warn the House that if circumstances changed another policy might be needed, although it remained the case that 'the seizure of Chinese territory, the alienation of Chinese territory, the usurpation of Chinese sovereignty, is not primarily part of British policy'. In short order this proved to be so, when in spite of Curzon's words the British felt themselves forced to reply to what was perceived as a Russian threat. Lord Salisbury, doubling as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, took charge of the negotiations him-self, and handled them blunderingly. He failed to reach agreement with any of the other powers, and could not persuade China to withdraw the concessions made to Germany, France or Russia. Last in the queue, therefore, the British looked for some titbits to balance the advantages gained by the others.9 The Chinese suggested that Britain might con-sider Weihaiwei, not far from the Germans in Kiau-chou. At first Salisbury declined, on the grounds that it was not British policy to accept the alienation of Chinese territory, but when it became clear that the other European powers were not going to be moved, the offer
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY
was unenthusiastically accepted, 'for a period as long as Port Arthur shall remain in the possession of Russia'. At the same time China was asked to agree to an extension of the boundaries of Hong Kong.
The lease hath all too short a date
Arguments in favour of this had first been advanced by General Sargent in 1884, but were turned down in London, the feeling being that if trouble did break out any territory that was needed for defence could be acquired without difficulty by the simple expedient of taking it, since the fighting would either be with the Chinese, or, more likely, on their behalf. It was only when Japan proved how quickly Chinese forces could be defeated, and the European powers began to show their predatory intentions, that any urgency was felt. The General Officer Commanding, General Digby Barker, advised Sir William Robinson in 1894 that for the purpose of defence Hong Kong's boun-daries should be extended to a line running from Deep Bay to Mirs Bay, including the islands within three miles from Hong Kong (approximately those eventually obtained, with the addition of Lantau island).
These considerations were reinforced by Sir Paul Chater, the remarkable Armenian financier who occupied a seat on either the Legislative or Executive Councils between 1887 and 1926. Chater had promoted the land reclamation in Central Victoria and had his eye, as had many others, on the property development potential of an expanded Kowloon. He pointed out that although China had been humiliated and defeated by Japan, 'that Empire is too intrinsically strong, too full of resources, too patient and persevering ever to remain for any length of time in her present condition', and that a move ought therefore to be made while China was still weak. Although Robinson enthusiastically pressed the case for extension, going to the lengths of suggesting that the troublesome Dr Sun Yat-sen might be surrendered to the Chinese in return -and getting his knuckles rapped for his pains -London was unresponsive. It was entirely against British policy that British territory should be increased by taking advantage of Chinese weakness; it would be immoral, and a poor example to the lesser breeds without the law. Only when the lesser breeds began throwing their weight about as aggressively as had Germany was it appreciated that things had changed, and the War Office agreed to
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
request an extension. The Biitish Minister at Peking, Sir Claude Mac-Donald was therefore told to approach the Tsungli Yamen to ask for
compensating concessions.
Sir Claude became the object of the world's attention two yearslater when he organized the defence of the legations in Peking against the Boxer assault. Such bold strokes were meat and drink to Sir Claude, but as a diplomat he caused some misgivings. He had gone straight to Peking after twenty-four years in the army, rising only to the rank of major, during which he had served for nine years as a Consul-General in West Africa. That was the sum total of his diplo-matic experience, while his knowledge of China was of course minimal. When the question arose of appointing him, the hero of Peking, to be the first British Ambassador to Japan, the Foreign Office was decidedly dubious. MacDonald's handling of the negotiations over the boundary extension was typically military and brisk.
He was dealing with the Tsungli Yamen at a weak point in that never terribly strong body's development. The defeat by the Japanese in 1895 had stimulated both the conservatives and the reformers at court to press their very different programmes. In June 1898 the reformers gained, for a brief period, the upper hand as the Emperor Kuang-hsii decided to exert his power and began a short-lived bid for constitutional reform. This abortive effort, which might have saved at least the bloodshed of the Boxer rebellion, and the consequent huge indemnities demanded by the foreign powers, was betrayed by the Deputy Minister of War, Yiian Shi kai, and pitilessly crushed after only three months by the Dowager Empress. Nevertheless, the settle-ment reached over the Kowloon extension was not a walk-over for the British: stipulations were made by the Chinese, and accepted by the British, in a series of meetings and negotiations. On the British side, Lord Salisbury, having shot his bolt, left matters in the hands of Arthur Balfour, as leader of the House of Commons. Three major points of agreement were needed; the extent of the territory, the terms on which it was to be granted, and the question of jurisdiction within it.
From the start it was clear that the sticking point would be Kowloon city. An unsavoury collection of gaming houses, brothels and shops known as Kau Lung Gai formed the suburbs of the 'walled city' of Kowloon, which was the fortified administrative centre of Chinese authority in the region. The Hong Kong authorities were anxious to suppress the nefarious activities in the suburbs, in which the Chinese would probably have concurred, but the walled city itself, constructed
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY
in 1847 as a counter-measure to the British in Hong Kong, was a symbol of Chinese authority, and Peking was anxious to preserve it intact.
MacDonald made it clear at the outset, on 26 April 1898, that 'negotiations would be much assisted if we grant the continuation of Chinese jurisdiction in the city of Kowloon', but Balfour insisted (28 April) that 'However much we limit our demands the town is necessaryto us.'IO The precedents were hardly helpful to the British case, since in all other leases with Western powers Chinese sovereignty had been preserved in the cordon sanitaire; even in Weihaiwei the Imperialofficials were allowed to remain. Some fudge on the issue was needed if both Balfour and the Chinese were to be satisfied.
The extent of the land requested surprised the Tsungli Yamen, who had 'in contemplation only such a limited extension as woulcl enable the British authorities to fortify both sides of Hong Kong Harbour and to defend the hills overlooking it'. Two sets of arguments justifying the extension had been proposed, but only one was advanced. Sir Claude did not hide his amusement at the parochialism of HongKong's case in his dispatch no. 225 to Lord Salisbury of 27 May 1898. The Acting Governor had sent papers containing 'sundry argumentsin favour of an extension of Hong Kong territory, such as the necessity for a new rifle-range and for exercise ground for the troops, the in-adequacy of cemetery accommodation at Hong Kong and the like; but in view of the fact that, as far as I could estimate, the area demanded amounted to some 200 square miles, I did not think it desirable to put forward these considerations ... to the Yamen, for they would have met me with offers to give us all territory required for the purposes named'.
The rationale for the boundaries requested was that of the technical advances recently made in gunnery. Alfred Nobel's work on explosives, which had led to the adoption of cordite for use in British shells -as well as, indirectly, the downfall of the Liberal government -combined with developments in heavy steel forgings, had resulted in much more powerful guns (the 1893 model 9.4 Woolwich gun had a range of just under thirty thousand yards, with considerable accuracy}. Construction of the railway line then under discussion between Canton and Kowloon -whether terminating in British or Chinese territory -would enablemsuch heavy artillery easily to be transported within range. Any defensivemline would therefore need to be sited much further back than themChinese had envisaged, covering the reverse slope of the Lam Tsuenm
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
hills and the waters of Deep Bay and Tolo harbour. At the time it wasanot entirely clear what the British proposals were, MacDonald notahaving been given an agreed map, and there being confusion aboutathe sea boundaries, but it was at least evident that the British wantedamore than the Chinese expected to have to give. This comprised theamainland and islands -one of which, Lantau, was considerably largerathan Hong Kong itself -within a radius of some twenty miles ofaVictoria Harbour, creating a land boundary of about ten miles withalmperi:il China.
Any cession of so large an extent of territory the Tsungli Yamenawere very reluctant to agree, arguing that the British lease ofWeihaiweiahad already been agreed as a counter to the other foreign concessions.aBut Sir Claude made the point -and it is one that illustrates theaessentially defensive nature of the British demands -that Weihaiweiahad 'been leased to us as much in their interests as our own, and thatawe would give it up tomorrow if Russia would leave Port Arthur', and that as far as Hong Kong was concerned 'we should, long before this, have invited China to make over to us what was necessary for the Colony's safety had we not been afraid of setting an example to other Powers'. MacDonald also pointed out that the Germans, foravery simi-lar reasons, had been given an equally large area for the defence of their new territory of Tsingtao, and might have added that the French had demanded the same.
MacDonald had informed the British government on 28 April that 'the arrangements for the acquisition of the territory desired must be in the nature of a lease', but added what appears to be a suggestion that the arrangement might later be made more permanent: 'and it may be pointed out that British Kowloon was originally acquired by a lease'. Balfour did not demur, but hoped that the lease might be for an indefinite period, 'determinable by mutual agreement', but if this could not be managed a ninety-nine-year term 'as in the case of Kiao-chou' would be acceptable. There was a strong feeling that if an outline agreement in principle was reached the detail could be settled later; but the devil is in the details.
In the end concessions were made by the British which went some way towards satisfying the Yamen's main concerns, but aroused strong criticism from Hong Kong. The walled city of Kowloon was to remain within Chinese jurisdiction and the Kowloon landing stage was to be reserved for the use of Chinese ships, including men-of-war, which were also to be allowed to use Deep Bay and Mirs Bay. MacDonald
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY
was conscious of the fact that these concessions would not be popular in the colony, and pressed the need for the helpful co-operation of the authorities there, asking that 'every effort be made by the Hong Kong authorities to work smoothly with Chinese officials'. He also seconded Sir Robert Hart's efforts to persuade Hong Kong to be more helpful in controlling smuggling, suggesting that the colonial authorities should sign a pledge to 'take proper measures for the policing of Mirs Bay, and the other territory placed under their con-trol, and for the prevention of smuggling'.
Hong Kong opinion was duly indignantly expressed; the Chamber of Commerce described the retention of Chinese jurisdiction in the walled city as 'tantamount to having a foreign authority exercise juris-diction in British territory ... absolutely without precedent'. Eyebrows were also raised in the House of Lords on 13June when Lord <:amper-down protested that a treaty had been signed, 'the effect of which was considerably to extend the boundaries of the colony of Hong-kong', without any official notice having been given to either House, the Members learning of it only from the columns of The Times. Lord Salisbury himself replied, with great portentousness: 'his noble Friend's discontent was due to the novel state of things brought about by the existence of the telegraph' (it had been connecting London and Hong Kong for twenty-seven years, but the House of Lords does not move quickly). As soon as the text of the agreement was available it would be communicated to Parliament, but he did 'not know that the details of this matter are of any general interest, although they are of strategic importance', and went on to talk of 'a slight extension to the colony of Hong-kong'. Hampered by knowing very little about the subject, the Prime Minister took refuge in verbosity: all that had been done was to act 'in conformity with the ordinary rules of military prudence that all strategical considerations should be so revised that if an accident we cannot foresee takes place we should not be exposed to any danger or disadvantage'. For their part the Chinese government 'value the solicitude that is displayed by us', and 'met us very frankly and freely in the matter ... I do not know that there is anything else I can explain to the noble Lord.'
Although the agreement between the governments was ratified on 6 August 1898, much remained to be settled before the British could take over the area which has remained known as the New Territories. One complication was that the American navy was at that time using Mirs Bay as its base during the Spanish-American war, and an
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
occupation by the British would disturb the Americans' right to stay. This the British government was reluctant to do, since relations with the USA, which in 1895 had been brought to their-nadir by US Secre-tary of State Olney's claim that the USA was 'practically sovereign ' over the American continent, were in the process of being repaired. It was also necessary to define the future of the Chinese customs stations in the territory, Sir Robert Hart having been left with only words of comfort from MacDonald that Chinese revenues would not be adversely affected. The Tsungli Yamen, encouraged by Hart, and permanently suspicious of the colonial administration, remained con-cerned about the collection of customs. Sir Robert conceded on 10 November that 'China has no objection to offer against anything that makes for the defence of Hong Kong and cannot but assist any means of that sort strenuously', but wanted to retain his customs stations in the leased territories. The Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce found this bitterly objectionable: 'If there was one benefit we hoped to derive from the accession of territory, .ore acceptable than another, it was the prospect of getting rid of these st'ltions.' They found the Chinese requests 'wholly inadmissible . . . they should be most vigorously opposed in the interests not merely of trade, but of the position and prestige of Great Britain in Hong Kong and China'.11
It would have seemed logical to settle the boundaries definitively, but partly owing to the absence of a proper survey this was not done, and in fact arguments about details continued for many years; even in 1967 discrepancies were observable in official publications. The Canton Viceroy proved reluctant to accede to Peking's concessions, and advanced demands that his own regulations should be incorporated in the statutes of the leased area. This may have been plain unco-operativeness, or it may have reflected a genuine misunderstanding a:, to the status of the lease, but Lord Salisbury correctly assessed the Viceroy's demands as 'an attempt to treat the leased territory as if it were a settlement at a treaty port', and turned them down out of hand. The intervening period did however allow the Hong Kong Colonial Secretary,James Stewart Lockhart, the opportunity to make a thorough study of the territory and its people, which later proved of great advan-tage and formed the basis for the major decisions on the area's future.
Delayed by these various arguments, possession was not taken until the following year, after some complaints: 'We are told that the Kow-loon hinterland now belongs to us, though we have as yet seen no sign of it being taken over' (Hong Kong Telegraph, 19 January 1899). In the
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY
interim period of uncertainty some inhabitants of the New Territories, who had not been consulted as to their future, formulated a resistance to the occupation. Claims were made that this opposition was due to Triad agents prfJVocateurs, or to the agitation of the gentry and clan-leaders, who feared their own squeezes would be interfered with -as indeed they were -but many of the villagers seemed too well-organized for spontaneous resistance. Ii seems likely that there had been a change of heart by the Ch'ing government, since only a few weeks after the ratification of the agreement the coup d'etat of September 1898 had taken place, and a violently anti-foreign sentiment had developed in the capital. Prudence would then require any provincial official . to encourage, and even organize, resistance against foreign occupation of Chinese territory. Eventually it was decided that, even if outstanding points remained at issue, the take-over would be on 17 April I 899. When a company of Hong Kong Volunteers (the local militia) and some police went on the fourteenth to make arrangements, they found uniformed men in prepared positions, supported by artillery. An extra three companies, each with a Maxim gun, were dispatched, and given covering fire by the gunboat Fame. This enabled the Union flag to be raised a day early, on 16 April. Some Chinese were killed and wounded, but there were no British fatalities, and the Volunteers enjoyed the exercise. Their commander, Captain Berger, wrote: 'After the basely material !if e one continuously sees in Hong Kong, it was certainly a treat to find oneself among purely natural people where ... a man would not actually die if he had forgotten to put a flower in his coat, or to curl the ends of his moustache.' Another scuffle took place on the seventeenth, with a number of attacks by some three thousand Chinese being easily repulsed. All in all, though several hun-dred Chinese casualties were taken, 'while the gravest injury to the British forces was caused by an enraged and patriotic buffalo', resist-ance was neither fierce nor protracted, but served to indicate the diffi-culties that might have been encountered sixty years previously, had prosperous Chusan been selected as a place for settlement rather than the sparsely populated island of Hong Kong.
Although in 1841 the island of Hong Kong contained only a small fishing community, the population of the New Territories was con-siderable and well-established. While the island had little recorded history before the arrival of the British, the mainland county of San-on (Xin'an),was, although small and distant, a recognized part of the administrative structure of K wangtung.12 The earliest inhabitants seem
A HISTORY OF HONG KONG
to have concentrated around the littoral, where there was abundant food, and left permanent traces of their occupation in the form of rock carvings. A number of these have been found around the shores, and even at their early date -probably first millennium B.C. -have a distinctly 'Chinese' look about them, quite different from the contem-porary cup-and-wheel engraving found in northern England, although the autochthonous people were not of the Han.
At what time the coastal area came under Imperial rule is not clear, since there are few recorded references before the eleventh century
A.O. Long before that date the Han had colonized, if not settled, here, but it is only with the Sung Dynasty that any records are to be found. Of these the most prominent is on a boulder in Joss House Bay (Tai Miu Wan): a rock inscription dated 1274 A.O. records the generosity of a saltworks official, Yen 1-chang, who built a pagoda on Tung Lung island and renovated the Tai Miu Tin Hau temple which stood near the site of its modern successor. For some time before Yen's visit Han Chinese settlers, who called themselves 'Punti' (natives, which they were not), had been moving in. The supplanted aboriginals are said to have formed the present 'Tanka' boat-dwellers, who accounted for a substantial proportion of the original population of Hong Kong island. Those edifices constructed by the five great clans of Punti settlers -the Tang, Hau, Pang, Liu and Man families -are the oldest existing buildings in Hong Kong, although it is doubtful if any now remaining date before the end of the seventeenth century.
It was then that the inhabitants of San-on county were devastated by the ruthless action of the new Ch'ing governors, in their drastic forced evacuation of 1 662, when the populace were moved away from the coast, as the East India Company factor at Surat had reported (p. 26):
The boundary was marked straight with a rope ... A deep ditch
was dug ... One step beyond the ditch, and the punishment was
death ... Fathers abandoned their sons, and husbands their wives
... sons were sold for a peck of rice, daughters for 100 cash ...s
Some families took poison en masse, others jumped in the river
... The authorities treated the people as no more than ants and
made no provision for relief ... It is recorded that several hun-
dred thousand people from the eight departments affected died.
Since the evacuation had been preceded by a ferocious campaign against the Ch'ing, during which 'for three years the country presented
A SLIGHT EXTENSION TO THE COLONY 329
the appearance of a battlefield ... The ground was covered with bones, in the day time nothing could be heard but the humming of flies, and at night the voice of weeping,' the population was much depleted. From over thirty thousand in the sixteenth century it had declined to 17,871 before the evacuation, after which it slumped to just over two thousand. It took nearly a century to return to its former level.
The increase was in large �Pmeasure due to an influx of newcomers from the coastal provinces further north, the Hakka, who reinvigorated the local agriculture. The Tankas were joined by another fishing com-munity, the Hoklos, from the coast of Fukien. The different peoples lived uneasily together. EJ.M. Rhoads comments:
contention and at time outright warfare have characterized relations among the three groups. One of the causes ha!-been the contempt of the Puntis toward both Hoklos and Hakkas, whom they consider not as Han Chinese at all but as uncultivated abor-igines. Another has been the aggressiveness of the Hakkas. Born to adversity, the Hakkas developed a reputation for hard work, frugality, and studiousness.13
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