an-illustrated-history-of-hong-kong-nigel-cameron — Page 4

On Murray's retirement in 1872 after 14 years' service, he was succeeded by McCoy who soon died and was in turn replaced by Dr Phineas Ayres who arrived as the new Colonial Surgeon in 1873. The mortality among Colonial Surgeons in itself offers a sharp comment on public health in the colony. The first, appointed in 1845 , was dead within a year, the next survived a mere eight months. The third lasted almost seven years. Ayres was the longest serving nineteenth-century incumbent and retired in 1897, after almost a quarter of a century in the post.

He had begun with some gusto, condemning the conditions he discovered. His January 1874 report pin-pointed the cases of typhoid originating in brothels, which were indescribably filthy with rooms constructed within other rooms, and without in many cases any sanitation at all. A few months later he condemned domestic accommodation where houses were occupied by from five to 10 families, dwellings unfit 'to put pigs in'. These houses were owned by rich Europeans and Chinese 'who squeeze those who have no power to make their complaints known'. He wrote in his April 1875 report:



I have made a series of inspections in company with Mr Price the Surveyor-General. The result of these inspections goes to prove that however much on the surface the town of Victoria may appear cleaner than most Eastern towns, beneath the surface it would be difficult to find a filthier condition of things.

My first series of inspections discovered that pigs were kept in houses all over the town in hundreds, and that pigsties were to be found under the beds and in the kitchens of the first, second, and third floors. I visited many houses in which over a hundred pigs were kept, every bed in these houses had large pigs in a sty constructed underneath it, and . . . the late Inspector of Markets, whose duty it was to see that pigs were kept in proper places, [had given people Government licences to keep their pigs there] .

Imagine houses whose upper floors are constructed of thin board, with wide interstices between them, and whose lower floors are inhabited, and the state they

would be in under these circumstances, with pigs urine etc. dropping through from floor to floor.2

Ayres goes on to detail the unsuitable construction of those houses, their total lack of sanitation or, where there was any, the broken and half-choked pipes that led no further than from the kitchen (also in use as a lavatory) to the gully outside. There were further horrors. ' Cows were only to be found in the basement, but goats and sheep, like pigs, might be found on any floor. Pigs and sheep were kept until they were wanted for slaughter, goats and

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A. The ladder staircase of entry. B. The couch for the opium smoking.

c. An ante-chamber. D. The salle a manger. . E. The table, with stools round it.

F. Where the musicians sat. G. A terrace in the open air, overlooking the sea.

H. A table with brandy, soda, pale ale, and cigars.

I. flowers in pots on the edge of the terrace. K. Hong-Kong harbour.

Plan of the first floor public rooms of a wealthy Chinese house, that of the P. &. 0. comprador. The dimensions of the house are similar to those of the tenement house. (Source: Smith, To China and Back.)



cows for dairy purposes.' Goats were led round from house to house and milked, as required by the customer.

It was not only the Chinese whose health was at risk. Ayres discovered, among many others, one 'dairy' which supplied most of the households in Caine Road, then the preserve of European families and situated just up the



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Part of Taipingshan �bout 1868 in a photograph by William Pryor Floyd.



hill from the pullulating slum of Taipingshan. This 'dairy' was in the basement of a house between Shelley Street and Peel Street, the entry via a gully leading from the former. The basement consisted of cellars whose sole light came from doors or windows on to the gully. To milk or tend the cows required the use of a lamp to dispel the gloom. And, as the cows had been quartered there since they were calves, the full-grown animals had to be slaughtered in situ and then carved up because there was no other way they could be got out. Of another house, Ayres wrote, 'I found a quarter of beef hanging over the bed of a man who was in the last stages of smallpox.'

The highly charged language of Ayres' reports was instrumental in their suppression; and unfortunately the facts he reported were read as less significant than their implicit condemnation of those in authority who had permitted the public health perils thus revealed. With the suppression of his reports it is perhaps not surprising that Ayres, in frustration at their fate, dealt in later ones with less controversial aspects of the sanitary situation. He had also come to realize that in the absence of drastically changed building

r 5 6 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

ordinances there was little that could be done about the potentially disastrous state of sanitary affairs.

What government impotence and inertia failed to do, the great fire of r878 largely achieved for them, Ayres calling the destruction of much of Taipingshan in that year 'a sanitary dispensation of Providence'. Hennessy was saved the responsibility for an even greater disaster - rampant epidemic

- by those cleansing flames. The Governor's blindness to the dangers was due to his conviction that 'the Chinese inhabitants maintain that the attempts now and then made . . . to force what is called "Western sanitary science" upon them were not based on sound principles'. They should be allowed to build houses of the Guangzhou type with earth closets. Hennessy completely opposed the introduction of flushing toilets. What he failed to see - blinded by prejudice - was the dire overcrowding in Hong Kong which negated whatever might be reasonable in Guangzhou. Had he read the reports of Dr Peter Parker working as a medical missionary there (one of whose patients had been Commissioner Lin), Hennessy might have formed a different view. It took another of Hong Kong's episodes of infighting and backbiting to spring the Ayres reports out of the Secretariat and lodge them on the desks of the Colonial Office. Hennessy's ordinance permitting Chinese housing in what were formerly European preserves so incensed the choleric General Donovan that he complained of the nuisance near the barracks 'giving ocular, auricular, and nasal demonstration' that Chinese were unfitted to live near Westerners. He cited the Ayres reports as proof. As a result, the Surgeon­ General of the army was dispatched to Hong Kong, and his report of r September r880 condemned not only the sanitary conditions but also the policy of the Governor. The Colonial Office then demanded to see the Ayres reports and sent out Osbert Chadwick, a former Royal Engineers officer, to make a full-scale enquiry. His report in r882 turned out to have even further­ reaching effects than he could have suspected, in that it formed the basis on which the Sanitary Board, precursor of the Urban Council, came into being. Chadwick was almost the ideal man for the job. Not confining his invest­ igations to sanitation, he surveyed the social picture of the colony in an attempt to place its problems in their context. He probed the views of the .

Chinese, who surprised him by their openness in receiving him.

The Chadwick report scotched all Hennessy's sanitary ideas as invalid in Hong Kong. Fortunately it was submitted after the Governor had left. Calling for energetic remedial measures, the report pointed out that even in Chinese systems correct drainage is required. Noting that the water supply in the colony was inadequate, Chadwick made the point that neither 'the proposed works, nor works many times larger, would satisfy the wants of the city', while the water rate charges were unjustly applied. He considered that a new building ordinance was essential, and that apart from rectifying defective or absent house drainage which he called 'radically bad', the whole town should

Public Health, and the B lockade 15 7

be supplied with effective drainage. He separated the questions of ordinary scavenging and the collection of the euphemistically named 'night soil'. Collections were to be made by a trained sanitary staff under an appointed officer. Chinese involvement and co-operation should be obtained by using the district watchmen to enforce the process, and for this they ought to be paid extra. All those connected with the sanitary process should be closely in touch with the Registrar-General's office. There should be more public toilets, more baths, new markets - and a proper water supply for Kowloon across the harbour.

The report shows Chadwick pointing out the means by which Chinese could be involved, means suggested in his conversations with them when they frequently called his attention to points requiring alteration or improvement. The fear that the town might 'outgrow itself ', expressed by an r84 5 visitor, had proved all too true, and the barest amenities - water, drainage, and health care - had not kept pace.

The report reached Hong Kong in r8 8 2, before a new Governor was appointed and during the administration of W. H. Marsh, the Colonial Secretary, recently knighted. His tenure was regarded by the Western community as a welcome respite from the ministrations of Hennessy who, arrived in- England, began accusing the colony of being the distributor of

£1 ,000,000 worth of opium a month to China. The figure was nearer to

£200,000. But it required the appointment of a commission to repudiate his accusation, and it was on Sir William Marsh's shoulders that the brunt of the dispute fell.

As it affected the economic viability of the colony, the so-called Chinese customs 'blockade' of Hong Kong was quite as serious a matter as that hanging sword of Damocles, an o�tbreak of epidemic disease. The back­ ground lay in the confused state of relations with Chinese customs authorities over a clause in the r8 5 8 Treaty of Tianjin. As ever, the root of the problem was opium. The clause in question laid down that opium, now legalized, could only be carried in foreign vessels, and these were confined to trading in the Treaty Ports where the import duty on opium and the likin transit tax were enforceable. This provision was largely disregarded by the Chinese in Hong Kong whose junks, under British protection, carried opium to China. The Chinese, however, regarded all Chinese-owned vessels, even if the owners lived in Hong Kong or the craft had (as did the Arrow) a British captain, as Chinese and therefore illegally trading. The Chinese government was, in consequence, losing revenues which it would have collected had the opium been carried in foreign vessels entering the Treaty Ports.

There were other grievances of the Chinese side. The protection of the British flag was quite legally given to vessels belonging to Chinese lessees of Crown land in Hong Kong. Although they were few in number, the Chinese customs also lost revenue in this trade. The obligation which confined foreign

15 8 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

trade to the Treaty Ports was largely circumvented by the fact that the colony's rapidly increasing coastal trade with China was conducted for the most part by Chinese merchants in Hong Kong who served as distributors of foreign goods which they bought from European import agency houses.

On the other side of the argument was the opinion that since the colony was a free port the suppression of this illicit trade was a matter to be dealt with by the Chinese themselves. The bones of contention were many, but the real question between Hong Kong and Guangzhou was which would win the battle for control of the local distributive trade. The sums involved were large. The loss of opium revenue at Guangzhou, normally collected by the Imperial Maritime Customs, was considerable. The likin tax levied at the Treaty Ports was $16 per chest of opium sent inland from there. Then there was the $ 3 o per chest levied by the h oppo who controlled the collection of Chinese native customs revenues. It was these two agencies who, from November 18 67, began to check all native craft operating to and from Hong Kong.

The first episode came in Macdonnell's time when, in November 18 67,

an opium-carrying junk was seized by Chinese revenue cruisers operating off the entrance to Hong Kong harbour. Macdonnell wrote in strong terms to Robertson, Consul at Guangzhou, demanding the return of the junk and compensation for the value of its cargo - both of which he received. This dispatch was eventually passed from the Colonial Office to the Foreign Office by the Duke of Buckingham who expressed his disapproval of the language used by the Governor, in which he appeared to query the right of the Chinese government 'to exercise its O}Vn jurisdiction over its own subjects in its own waters in a manner which it considers conducive to its own interests'. 3

In the following year nine marine and land customs stations were set up by the Chinese around Hong Kong, all native vessels being subject to stop and search. Rutherford Alcock, British Minister in Beijing, took the Chinese part, referring to the colony as 'little more than an immense smuggling depot'. Both he and Robertson supported the Chinese purchase of gunboats for the purpose of enforcing the blockade. Macdonnell called them 'a new species of. corsairs'. The Governor took a strong line throughout, but he was champion of a somewhat dubious cause. Only some of his points were soundly based. The Treaty of Tianjin did allow for the $30 tax on every chest of opium, but it did not provide for the likin tax which was therefore illegal. It was true that the blockade failed to differentiate between Hong Kong Chinese and foreign ships, although only Chinese vessels were affected, while ships bound for non-Chinese ports were also affected - commerce which the Chinese had clearly no right to interfere in.

Robertson defended the measures in that they applied solely to opium - to which the Governor replied in effect ' so far'. He also denied estimates of the

Public Health, and the B lo ckade 15 9

amount of opium smuggled. Of the 80,000 chests annually imported to Hong Kong, 63 ,ooo went to the northern Chinese ports, and 3 ,ooo to Chinese in California. His estimate was that about one and a half thousand chests were smuggled from Hong Kong, as against the Chinese estimate of thirty to forty thousand. What happened to the remainder he did not say. The Chinese next requested permission to set up customs stations in the colony, and Alcock in Beij ing wanted a Chinese consul there, too. Both were turned down by Macdonnell with the retort that it would be inadvisable 'in the special circumstances of this very peculiar place, its very peculiar inhabitants and most peculiar geographical position'.4 He complained that Alcock and Robertson had approved of the blockade measures without so much as consulting him on a matter which deeply affected the colony.

But Macdonnell found himself well out on a limb, the home government unsupportive. 'More than one of the claims advanced by you', Lord Granville reprimanded him, 'have been exaggerated and untenable . . . the interests of

H. M. Service are injured by the tone in which they are advanced . . . I hold you in no slight degree responsible for the want of co-operation which at present exists. '5

Under Kennedy, a man more ready to concede points, a commission of enquiry was set up in 1874. But the unruly merchants called a public meeting in September at which the customs cordon sanitaire was roundly condemned, Jardine's representative calling it an 'organized invasion of the freedom of the port'. The motion passed at the meeting went off to London where Lord Carnarvon at the Colonial Office responded in peremptory manner:



The action of the Chinese revenue cruisers in the exercise of the right of search in close proximity to Hong Kong for the purpose of defeating the attempts of Chinese subjects to defraud the revenue of their country did not affect the freedom of the port and afforded no valid ground for diplomatic remonstrance.



Both the Minister in Beij ing and the Consul in Guangzhou took the part of the Chinese. Kennedy had recourse to his 'panacea for all problems', another committee - this one composed of a small number of British and Chinese officials whose duties were to investigat� complaints of illegal seizures from vessels. A convention signed in Beijing between the Chinese and the British in 1876 provided for the appointment of a commission on Anglo- Chinese lines consisting of an officer of the colonial government, a Chinese official, and a British Consul, so as to establish a system 'that shall enable the Chinese government to protect its interests without prejudice to the interests of Hong Kong'. Article 3 of the Convention also provided that opium be kept in bond until sold, whereupon the purchaser would pay in a lump sum the transit dues of the provin'cial governments involved en route to its destination.

Hennessy having taken over as Governor from Kennedy, it was hardly to

1 60 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

be expected that much progress would be made towards settlement. On his arrival in Hong Kong he was confronted with the seizure of an opium junk by the Chinese in colonial waters. Correctly, he demanded full compensation for both junk and cargo. But, receiving this, he refused to turn the money over to the junk's owner because the vessel had illegally set sail from port at night without a clearance. Although he was technically correct, mercantile opinion viewed this as an open invitation to the Chinese to continue the blockade.

Later, in March 1 878, Hennessy reported an increase in the junk trade, mentioning that complaints about the blockade had 'mostly ceased'. This was a fiction in which, isolated as he was from the merchant community and others, he may well have believed. The Chinese merchants were worried by the Chinese government's interference with the shipping of cotton piece goods, and other legitimate trade. Hennessy planned to solve the opium problem by collecting all dues on it in Hong Kong and tqen issuing clear­ ances. In the contraband salt trade he thought that if Chinese government agents were to license the trade the matter would be cleared up. In return for these suggested easements he asked for the ending of the blockade. As ever, in a sense correctly, Hennessy's thought was for the Chinese mercantile com­ munity on whom, to his mind, the colony's prosperity greatly depended. He ran into profound opposition from the mercantile community to the setting up of any collecting agency in a free port, and these various plans came to naught. The opium trade was still a very significant earner, the 83 ,ooo chests clearing Hong Kong in 1 870 worth $48,742, 23 8.

Few events or processes in history are without their brighter, or at least other, side and the blockade, which was not to yield to reason for some time yet, was no exception. The seemingly timeless, sturdy, adaptable work-horse of the coastal trade, the Chinese j unk in all its variety of shapes and sizes suited to this or that condition, now began to give way, as sail was giving way elsewhere, to the blandishments of steam. Steam launches of the Chinese Maritime Customs were proving every day that they could overtake the junk in all weathers. Soon enough Chinese merchants took notice. The potential was recognized. The China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was formed in 1 874. It did not at first prosper so splendidly as the logic of its­ formation had given hope it would, yet its very formation marked the end of the foreigners' monopoly of steam navigation, and the beginning of a decline of the junk in sea transport. Competitors among foreign-owned companies included the China Navigation Company established by Butterfield and Swire in 1 872, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company established in 1 881, belonging to Jardine, the Douglas Steamship Company, started in 1 883 , and the Canton and Macao Steamship Company, formed in 1 865. By 1 877, Kwok A Cheung, a Hong Kong Chinese, had bought 13 steamers, a large enterprise for that time.

Until 1 883 , the movement of goods from China to Britain exceeded that

Public Health, and the Blockade 161

in the other direction, and since the material was mostly tea and silks which could be shipped direct from the Treaty Ports, Hong Kong did not become a major collecting centre in this trade. Conversely, almost one-half of British exports to China passed through the colony. The 1880 statistics show that Hong Kong handled 21 per cent in value of China's total export trade and 3 7 per cent of its import trade.

The best indication of the growth of import and export trade in this period, in the absence of figures for tonnage, is to be found in the numbers of ships entering and clearing the port. The data afford an overview of the expansion of trade and of the types of goods involved.

In 1866, 1, 896 ships totalling 949, 85 6 tons entered the harbour, and 3 ,783 ships totalling 1,891, 281 tons entered and cleared; by 1881, 'foreign-going ships' other than junks entering port numbered 3,214 totalling 2,85 3, 279 tons - of which 2,750 totalling 2, 5 99,46 1 tons were steamers. From 1867 figures for the junk traffic are available; in that year 20,787 junks totalling 1, 3 53 ,700 tons entered, all engaged in foreign trade, carrying cattle, fruit, vegetables, and firewood. They took on opium, rice, salt, lime, cotton, and local granite. In 1874 the Harbourmaster reported that the j unk trade had increased each year from 1867 to early 1872, at which point a fall in numbers began. Thus it would appear that the blockade had at first no serious impact. But by 1879 the junk trade had not yet returned to its former volume, and more foreign-built ships were now under the Chinese flag. Hong Kong Chinese vessels by that time carried 42. 3 6 per cent of the total of the colony's inward trade.

That Hong Kong Chinese were taking a larger slice of trade was reflected in their increasingly monied lifestyle, seen in their new appetite for Western property and their growing use of their own steamers, Kwok A Cheung being one example. They were also the biggest ratepayers. In 1881 there- were 18 ratepayers with property rated at over $ 1,000 per quarter, 17 of whom were Chinese - the remaining one being Jardine, Matheson and Company. Old patterns were changing. Important factors in the changes were the lower freight rates following the opening of the Suez Canal and the evolution of improved marine steam engines. The great breakthrough was the invention, patented in 1884, by the Irish engineer Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, of the steam turbine. In conjunction with the high-speed electro-generator, this revolutionized marine propulsion the world over. Its effects on trading patterns in Hong Kong as elsewhere were one of the dramatic events in the evolution of nineteenth-century commerce.

Hong Kong had long been the centre for Chinese migration overseas. From the privations of life in China, from the ravages of bandits, from the periodic scourges of epidemic and hunger, streams of migrants filtered through to Hong Kong's port and, often unwitting of the terms of contracts they were acquiescing to, were shipped over the Pacific - to California as labourers, to

162 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

endure the horrors of the voyage to South America and virtual slavery there - to the tin mines of Malaya, and to the gold-rush shanty towns of Australia and New Zealand. The trade in human beings was little better than the African slave trade. Such were the abuses in this traffic that in 1869 coolie emigration on contract was prohibited from Hong Kong. But it went on flourishing in Macau where it was said that there were 800 coolie brokers. Kennedy passed this Chinese complaint to London where the Colonial Office asked if it were true that Hong Kong was supplying Macau with the ships to conduct it. Replying, Kennedy admitted this - almost all coolie ships were fitted out in the colony, there being nothing in law to prevent it. And when the law might be broken by work on 'objectionable fittings', these were simply manufactured in Hong Kong and installed at sea. In the first nine months of 1872, 15 Peruvian, 10 French, nine Spanish, one Austrian and three Dutch ships had been dispatched to Macau for the coolie trade.

In London, Lord Kimberley saw this as 'most unsatisfactory' and wanted

new legislation and rigorous searches of all passenger ships. Contract emigration from China had been legal since 1860, the process regulated in 1866 by a convention between China, France, and Britain; and further restricted in 18 69 when migrants were not permitted to leave Hong Kong for any destination other than the British colonies. Emigration of Chinese other than by contract, termed 'voluntary emigration', was of course permissible. It brought in trade, and returning Chinese often brought bullion. Figures for 1866 show departures at 5,116 and returns at 9, 253. In 1872 almost thirty thousand left and almost twenty-four thousand returned; and in 1881 over seventy thousand left and close to fifty-three thousand came back.

The outcome of queries from London on the subject of the coolie trade was an ordinance of 1873 imposing severe penalties on restraining women and children with a view to shipping them abroad, and also on the fitting out and possession of emigrant ships without a licence. When the ordinance was passed, the migrant ships that were fitting out in the harbour immediately sailed.

Voluntary emigration increased. The first five months of 1874 saw over seven thousand coolies take ship for San Francisco, with another 1, 211. awaiting passage - most headed for the gold mines in search of wealth.

One further effect of increased Chinese migration in conjunction with the increased efficiency of steam navigation was the expansion of overseas markets for Chinese goods supplied via Hong Kong. Just as did Western communities in foreign settlements, the Chinese abroad always attempted to construct a little China in alien lands. They needed the rice, the dried goods, and all the diverse ingredients of Chinese food. They wanted familiar textiles and house furnishings, porcelain tableware that only the motherland could supply. Most of these goods were bought from China by shrewd Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and shipped across the Pacific to California,

Public Health, and the Blockade 163

to Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore, to the Indonesian archipelago, and to Australia. The stream of Chinese grew to a flooding river, until restrictive immigration laws were passed in the British Dominions, and until the 1887 Exclusion Acts in America.

I5 . Constitutional Reform J and the Legalization of Opium



AFTER the departure of Hennessy in the spring of r 882 a whole year elapsed before Sir George Bowen, his successor, arrived. The Acting Governor, W. H. Marsh, administered in the interregnum. Bowen left Hong Kong in December r 885, and another gap without a governor ensued for almost two years before Sir William Des Voeux arrived in October 1887. Marsh again held the reins, and in his own absences Major-General W. G. Cameron and the Colonial Secretary, F. Fleming, took over. After Des Voeux left, Major­ General Digby Barker administered until in December r 89r the new Governor, Sir William Robinson, came out.

This repeated change of helmsman within the span of a few years was unfortunate, coming in the wake of the turbulence left by Hennessy. Many pressing issues, new and old, required a firm continuity in leadership and administration, and it says a lot for the qualities of the civil service that a moderate and acceptable course was steered.

Both Bowen and Des Voeux had reached the peak of their careers as they arrived in the colony. An academic by early choice, Bowen had later joined the colonial service. Des Voeux had begun as a graduate of the Canadian Bar and had governed two colonies before Hong Kong. His health, never robust, appeared to require him to spend a considerable part of his term shooting duck on the Yangzi. He left Hong Kong in r 890.

Marsh when he took over had to tackle urgently the muddle bequeathed by Hennessy and also to begin the implementation of the Chadwick report. His first steps were incisive - the building of the new hospital, the Central School, and the junk shelter at Causeway Bay. He then upgraded the Registrar-General's office under a cadet named James Russell.

The Colonial Office asked for the appointment of a Sanitary Inspector and Marsh appointed H. Macallum, the apothecary at the Civil Hospital. The whole question of sanitation and public health and what to do about it, hanging over the administration, could scarcely be ignored for ever. Marsh,

Constitutional Reform, and Opium 16 5

as Acting Governor, tentatively appointed a triumvirate of officials to sit on a Sanitary Board - the Surveyor-General, Registrar-General, and Colonial Surgeon. In 1 883 , when Bowen arrived as Governor, he constituted the Board with three members ex officio, and the Surveyor-General as Chairman; and he nominated two other members to represent ratepayers.

The wide powers accorded to the Board in the relevant ordinance - powers to inspect insanitary housing and where deemed necessary to disinfect

the premises, and to remove for treatment anyone suspected of being a source of infection - were met with vociferous opposition from the community. The Board remained in being but powerless to act in the face of such popular revulsion; and the ordinance was withdrawn, although Bowen added to the Board a Sanitary Inspector and the Captain Superintendent of Police as extra members.

Bowen quit the scene in 1 885 having in effect accomplished nothing

meaningful. In 1 886, Marsh again acting as head of the administration, the Board was strengthened by the addition of four unofficial members (Dr Patrick Manson, Dr Ho Kai, and two others representing ratepayers) and the old proposals were again considered, the Board producing another draft ordinance in 1 886, offering wide-ranging powers to a partially elected Board of Health. The proposals included measures designed to compel owners of dwellings to upgrade their property to give adequate ventilation and a minimum of space for the residents. Human nature not having altered in the meantime, this proposal provoked another serious outcry, especially from the Chinese whose spokesman in the Executive Council, Dr Ho Kai, opined that no one should make 'the mistake of treating Chinese as if they were Europeans' - that is, of enshrining in an ordinance the idea that Chinese required the same Lebensraum as the ruling class of Westerners.

The then Acting Governor, Major-General W. G. Cameron, took what he thought was action. He simply omitted all the offending clauses in the proposed ordinance. Five years after Chadwick had condemned the disgust­

ing sanitary conditions and had sagely indicated the minimal remedies, a piffling, toothless ordinance on the subject became law. And the question of what amounted to 'challenging an Englishman [not to mention a Chinese] in his castle [and] also traversing the belief of Chinese that once their taxes were paid, they were guaranteed against . . . interference and were free to live or die, avoid, catch, and spread disease as it pleased them' - seemed to have won the day.

In 1 887 the Public Health Ordinance established the constitution of the Sanitary Board as consisting of four officials (the Surveyor-General, the Registrar-General, the Captain Superintendent of Police, and the Colonial Surgeon) with up to six other members (four of whom were to be the Governor"s appointees - two of these to be Chinese), and two others elected by ratepayers on the jury list.

166 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

In this step we see the decisive move towards local government institutions being entrusted with a measure of responsibility for municipal affairs, and also the first elections in the colony not reserved solely to British nationals. On his arrival in 1887, Des Voeux immediately encountered a petition signed by 47,ooo Chinese damning all the powers of the Sanitary Board. The Chinese simply stated that there had been no plague despite the fact that none of the envisaged measures had been taken - so what was the fuss about? They feared that the intended action would force up rents to an unbearable level, and they utterly condemned any idea that Chinese homes could be

entered under any circumstances whatsoever.

The Colonial Office in London, however, accepted the terms of the Public Health Ordinance. And now came a rash of new building in order to beat what was in the wind - the Buildings Ordinance which became law under Des Voeux in 1889 and which he tacked on to the. Crown Lands Resumption Ordinance - which in its turn embodied the hated clauses"about ventilation and minimal space. However, the sop of compensation for property owners was also envisaged. Thus, after years of opposition the property lobby had its way and was to be paid for the destruction of its vile housing. The Secretary of State in London gave his approval.

The implementation of this ordinance was to take place piecemeal over

the ensuing 20 years of resumptions and rebuilding of the Chinese areas. Des Voeux's vacillation must certainly be blamed for the inept handling of Chinese dissent and the emasculation of the content of the Chadwick report; and also for the rash of new insanitary construction before he promulgated the Buildings Ordinance. Strong Chinese prejudice, and the near unanimity of owners' self-interest presumably scared him away from speedier intelligent action.

But living conditions were altogether too appalling to be left at that. The

Board empanelled a two-man committee of investigation. Their 1890 report revealed the extent of the foul conditions . It described rooms subdivided to form between four and eight cubicles, dividers and furniture estimated to occupy about 29 per cent of the available ·air space. Many city blocks had a population den-sity of 1, 5 00 per acre, and one even of 3,23 5. Des Voeux's_ response was to pass an amending act to deal with overcrowding. As to sanitary conditions, little improvement was achieved.

In contrast to these procrastinations action was taken on the public works elements recommended by Chadwick. The Tai Tam water scheme was boldly set in motion, the estimated cost of $ 60,000 soon proving inadequate. A new and more hygienic Central Market, and the draining of swampy ground in Causeway Bay, were also begun, as were new main drainage and sewers at Yau Ma Tei, and the provision of dustbins and improved scavenging. More Inspectors of Nuisances were employed and a veterinary surgeon to look after the pig and sheep depot.

Constitutional Reform:, and Opium r 67

The old idea of linking the east and west Prayas by a road to seaward of the central naval and military cantonments was revived, and one of the colony's enterprising business men, Paul (later Sir Paul) Chater unveiled his own scheme for a radically conceived reclamation in Central District, to provide fresh land for commercial development. Dr Patrick Manson of the Sanitary Board, a shrewd Scots business man, inaugurated his Dairy Farm Company in the spring of 1 886 with a herd of 80 cows quartered on the breezy slopes of Pok Fu Lam. On the board Manson included some of the best brains and business heads in the colony - Paul Chater among them. The establishment of the Dairy Farm Company led eventually, after vicissitudes including the loss of almost the entire herd from rinderpest, to the provision of a supply of milk free from the health hazards of the milk from the Chinese 'dairies'.

Manson was also responsible for starting a college of medicine, obtaining

the patronage of China's elder statesman, Li Hongzhang. The first and brightest student to qualify was Sun Yatsen (Sun Yixian). In later years, Sun was to state that his reforming and democratic ideas which were to crystallize in the Guomindang and eventually lead to civil war and the establishment of a Communist regime in China had been gained during his student days in Hong Kong.

Prior to Des Voeux's term, while Bowen was still Governor, one major task confronted him - the reform of the Executive ·and Legislative Councils. This was a timely bid to lay a firmer foundation for the colonial legislature. In

the four decades since the councils were first set up their membership had



/ .

Dr Sun Yatsen.

168 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

undergone several changes aimed at increasing their effectiveness. The original councils of 1 84 3 consisted of three members each - the same three, the entire senior civil service at that time. The councils were purely official. In 1844 the Lieutenant- Governor was appointed to an additional seat on each council, while on the arrival of the first Chief Justice and first Attorney­ General both were given seats on the Legislative Council and the latter on the Executive Council. After that the membership of both councils altered rather frequently. Bonham created two unofficial seats in 18 5 o. Bowring in 18 5 5 enlarged the Legislative Council, throwing meetings open to the public. Rohinson laid down that the proportion between official and unofficial members would be 2: 1, excluding the Governor, and he also enforced a rule that official members should vote with and not against the government. Hennessy, typically, upset the balance severely; and the position on Bowen's

arrival was that there were six officials and only two u.,nofficials on the Legislative Council.

The new Governor at once objected. He thought it incorrect that the Chief Justice should have a seat on the Legislative Council, on the principle that the judiciary should be independent of the remainder of the adminstration. He supported the inclusion of a Chinese, but a problem arose when Hennessy's appointee, Ng Choy, got into financial straits in property speculation and resigned his seat. Bowen thought the choice of a successor - a Chinese British subject who was 'a native gentleman combining in his own person the proper social position, independent means and education', independent of the government, he presumably meant - a difficult matter.

The Governor disagreed with the exclusion of the General Officer Com­ manding British Forces from the Legislative Council, and disapproved too of the fact that official members filled two of the four places reserved for unofficials - something which was also disputed by public opinion. He therefore increased the membership of the Council by three officials - the General, the Registrar- General, and the Surveyor- General - and added two additional members, giving a total of eight official members and six un­ officials. Among the latter he wanted the Chamber of Commerce to nominate two of the unofficials, and the Magistrates one, with three to be nominated by the Governor (of whom one at least should be Chinese) . He wanted members to hold office for six years only, not for life as before. He further suggested the Council hold a fixed annual session in which proposed future legislation could be sketched out and submitted for public discussion.

Bowen thought the Executive Council ought to be increased by adding

the Colonial Treasurer and the Registrar-General; and he suggested also that the heads of government departments ought to have seats there.

With only minor amendments Lord Derby accepted these ideas, and the new Legislative Council had its first sitting on 28 February 18 84. The Chamber of Commerce had nominated as an unofficial the Chief Manager of

Constitutional Reform, and Opium 1 69

the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Thomas Jackson. The Chamber itself was racially a rather broadly based body with 34 members : 20 British, one American, six Europeans, two Chinese, three Jews, one Parsee, and one Armenian. The 79 Justices of the Peace were all of British nationality, 62 being purely British, seven Chinese, three Jewish, and seven Parsees and Armenians. The election held by the Justices was curious in that they decided the British were already sufficiently represented on the Council, so they voted for Frederick Sassoon who came from an Indian Jewish family and had been educated in England.

The Governor nominated as Chinese member a man named Wong Shing who had been educated at the Morrison Society School and later in America. He had served under Li Hongzhang in China and in the Chinese Legation in Washington. He was reputed, by virtue of his background, to be 'fully qualified to look at Chinese affairs with English eyes and at English affairs with Chinese eyes'. When there seemed some doubt whether the Governor had the right constitutionally to appoint the fifth member, Jackson stood down and Wong took his seat.

The new Legislative Council's members had a ' constitutional opportunity of expressing their opinion of the conduct and proposals of the government'. A request from the Chamber of Commerce that the Legislative Council have the same powers as the Shanghai Municipal Council was turned down by London. But the movement for a municipal council elected by ratepayers was not to be so easily waved aside. It strengthened when the rates were raised in 188 5 by 1 per cent. Bowen's attitude was matter-of-fact. There were, he reminded the Chamber, only 8 3 British ratepayers, heavily outnumbered by 647 Chinese and 98 others, most of whom were Portuguese. He suggested that in an election it was highly improbable that any British person would stand a chance. Then, playing on the British distaste of Oriental habits (as they saw them), he reminded his listeners that Chinese attitudes to 'water supply, sanitation, police, harbour regulations . . . differed widely from those in Europe'. It was unthinkable to put a large garrison town with its trading activity in the charge of the Chinese. Bowen thought that the Legislative Council was near enough to being a municipal council.

He did, however, concede a point by placing municipal rating before the

Legislative instead of the Executive Council. He also insisted that it should be a constitutional principle that the majority officials 'should not be used to control an absolutely united unofficial minority, especially on financial questions', a considerable item of progress in constitutional development.

Having put the legislative house in order after the disarray of the Hennessy period, Bowen faced an unusual problem - a threatening international situation brewing almost on the doorstep. In the light of Russia's apparent designs on the Far East, imperial defence had to be taken with more than usual seriousness. In Britain the Colonial Defence Committee had been set

1 70 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

up, and the colonies were to provide their own committees so that available resources there could be assessed, integrated, and if required tapped for the common good. Given the geographical spread of the colonies, and the slowness of communication, the process could not but take time.

Apart from Russian intentions, in Hong Kong's near neighbourhood the war between France and China over Vietnam had ended in the Li-Fournier Convention of 1 884, but border disputes continued, leading to general tension in the area.

Reacting to these disturbances the colony began defensive works at either end ·of the island, and a Hong Kong Regiment was formed, mostly from Indians, the officers being British and Indian personnel. Bowen was full of complaints about the defenceless state of Hong Kong, and Russian action in Korea and their 1 885 occupation of Port Hamilton prompted a request for torpedo boats from London. The Colonial Office assured him the Admiralty were 'thoroughly aware of what is necessary for the defence of the colony'. In January 1 885 the legislature voted $5 6,000 for up-to-date weaponry, and further large sums were committed later. More troops were required, and a doubled military contribution from the colony was demanded before the troops arrived. And when they did come, they turned out to be a Madras regiment and not the 'infantry of the line' as promised. The situation was

handled by London with consummate insensitivity.

In the interim Hong Kong had suffered the spin-off from the Franco-Chinese conflict. Throughout it Britain had maintained strict neutrality, and Bowen had entertained both French and Chinese officials while protecting British rights. But Chinese opinion in Guangzhou and in Hong Kong was naturally anti-French, and when Chinese newspapers published edicts of the Viceroy of Guangdong urging Chinese to attack French ships and personnel, Marsh (Bowen was in Japan at the time) took four Chinese editors to court. The prosecutions failed. By September 1 884 the boatmen handling cargo stopped working French ships, and French owners took 14 of them to court, securing convictions and fines of $ 5 on each. Whereupon all the boatmen went on strike and the harbour was brought to a standstill. In October a tense situation flared up and rioting erupted. The police were called out and troops_ paraded the streets. Imprisonment of the riote�s served merely to sharpen the antagonism and, when mediation by the Tung Wah Committee failed, a Peace Preservation Ordinance was pushed through the Legislative Council in one sitting. This allowed detention and banishment of persons who, though not convicted, were 'dangerous to the peace and good order of the colony'. In a week or two things had returned to normal. Marsh had made 3 8 banishment orders but only eight were carried out since the remaining men could not be found.

Another response to threats of war was the reviving of Hennessy's Hong Kong Volunteers, first flung together in 1 878 following the Russian war

Constitutional Reform, and Opium r7r

scare. There had always been a touch of patriotism about the Volunteers, mingled with a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere on weekend get-togethers in the style of the as yet unthought-of Boy Scout movement. Under the slightly disapproving eye of the Colonial Office Bowen equipped the corps with guns and rifles. And the Volunteers rapidly took new heart, becoming an accepted part of the colonial social fabric. In r885 Bowen went further and created the Hong Kong Auxiliary Water Police, with yachtsmen under the command of the assistant Harbourmaster. Four years later a machine-gun corps was formed, partly mounted, armed with Maxim guns paid for by the leading members of the colonial community.

Under Des Voeux the bold scheme for reclamation along the northern shore of the island was advanced by Chater. In essence what he wanted was the creation of a strip of land over three thousand metres long and over seventy wide in front of the existing shoreline, the reclamation to be paid for by holders of the marine lots but under government control. Owners of existing lots were to get the new land at $ 200 per quarter acre. Des Voeux, studying the scheme which had been approved by Major-General Cameron before his arrival, thought that the government ought to have a larger slice of the financial cake. Meanwhile Paul Chater had been in London pressing his suit with the Colonial Office, and it was he who won the day. The original scheme was approved with only minor amendments: and a grand opportun-



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Various modes of conveyance on the old Praya around 1880.



The Praya before reclamation. Markers in the harbour show the extent of the new land to be formed. Wardley House, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's second building, is the domed structure just left of centre with the City Hall on its left.



ity for a reclamation that would have benefited the public as a whole was lost. The new Praya, extending seaward from the old one, was to be renamed (with considerable injustice) Des Voeux Road. An enlarged reclamation suggested by the consultant engineer Sir John Goode was turned down by the Governor and by the lot holders involved, and the Praya Reclamation Ordinance was passed. Work began in 1890 and went on to completion In 1904.

Chater's interest in the scheme was considerable. On 2 March 1889 he had joined forces with James Keswick, Jardine's senior representative in Hong Kong, to form a new company called The Hongkong Land Investment and Agency Company Limited, of which he was 'the directing genius from its inception. 1 Working capital was initially $1.25 million, a sum rather more than the total revenue of the Hong Kong government only a few years previously. Two years after the company's formation government revenue. reached slightly over $2 million per annum.

The town planning tragedy of the era was the refusal of the Admiralty to move the naval docks to Kowloon, a decision backed by Des Voeux on the spurious grounds that the Kowloon area was growing in value and that the expense of moving would be excessive. Des Voeux also believed that for defensive reasons the Navy ought to be island-based. On these superficial and indefensible grounds the chance to remove once and for all the 'con­ striction at the waist' was lost.

The 'blockade' at last came to an end during Des Voeux's time as Governor, though not as a result of any specific act by him. One of the obstacles



The new headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, built in 18 86.



in the way of ending it had always been the hostility between the colonial authorities and the Foreign Office. This now eased, resulting in a more commonsense view of the Chinese side of the dispute. In 18 8 5 Britain and China had signed a new agreement on opium after two years of nego­ tiation. In this the duty and also the likin tax on it were raised to 11 0 taels per chest, the immediate result being seen in increased smuggling to avoid payment of the taxes. Bowen had sympathized with the Chinese in this. He suggested a compromise, and in 18 8 6 the commission reached agreement. All opium entering the harbour was to be reported to the Harbourmaster; none was to be landed, moved, transhipped, stored, or exported without his express permission and notice being given to the opium farmer, the concessionaire who had paid the fee exacted by the government for the right to import opium; .all movement of opium was to be reported and accounted for; night clearance of junks was prohibited; raw opium was to be imported only by the opium farmer, and no import or export of amounts of less than one chest was to be permitted. A branch of the Chinese Maritime Customs, whose head was British and whose revenues were collected by the British and remitted' to China, was to be set up in China to sell opium duty certi­ ficates at 1 00 taels per chest. The terms of this agreement were to be set forth

1 74 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

in an ordinance and the whole agreement was subject to a similar one being arrived at with Macau - in default of which the Hong Kong controls would merely drive smugglers to the Portuguese territory to operate.

Hong Kong passed this ordinance, and another under which Chinese were forbidden to carry arms (thus pre-empting the depredations of armed gangs engaged in smuggling). The Colonial Office insisted the word ' Chinese' be altered to 'persons'.

The Opium Ordinance when introduced in March 1 887 was regarded as offensive by the small traders and owners of junks, and both Des Voeux and Cameron reported that officials in the Chinese provinces would not work under the restrictions. In Hong Kong control and communication with the Chinese was assigned to the new Imports and Excise Department, and in 1888 the opium monopoly was once more sold to the highest bidder. Owing to the complexity of the agreement and the practical problems encountered in carrying out its terms in relation to a very lucrative trade, trouble continued and clashes at the Chinese border with Kowloon were frequent. Few were surprised when a smart Hong Kong opium concessionaire was discovered calmly and at great profit smuggling opium to China instead of confining his operations to Hong Kong. He had perceive.cl a loophole in the law whereby opium which belonged to him was not subject to the provisions of the ordinance.

Added to the hazard of crooked opium concessionaires was the triad

menace with its protection rackets and its blackmailed witnesses, among whom many a policeman and other government employee were numbered. Strong action against the triads seemed for a time to reduce the problem but, as successive administrations down to the present day were to find, the triad societies, almost as old in Hong Kong as the colony itself, were virtually ineradicable. Stemming from patriotic institutions far back in Chinese history, these organizations had become an integral part of Chinese society. To disentangle them from the web of social interactions never was easy and constitutes a problem in contemporary Hong Kong where the degenerate descendants of these ancient groupings still compete in organized crime - from the sale of sex to the sale of drugs.

Setting aside those darker aspects of life which emerge from the story of

J.

events in the Bowen and Des Voeux periods, the picture of the era varies very much from writer to writer. It also varies with whether the recorder was Western or Chinese. As to the latter, we have rather little evidence. But an article by a Rhenish missionary, Nacken, which appeared in the China Review of 1 873, describes Chinese conditions in the colony which did not alter for many a decade afterward. Nacken, in his stilted, somewhat arch English, succeeds in bringing that life alive in his Chinese Street Cries of Hong Kong.2 The following description is probably unique in its content in written material on the subject.

Constitutional Reform, and Opium r 7 5

The Chinese generally are early risers. Most of them will get up with the sun; then they dress, after which, rich as well as poor look out for their warm water to wash in and have some tea. But the Congee hawker has been up an hour or two before sunrise . . . he sallies forth, two boxes hanging from his shoulder-pole, each con­ taining a large cooking pot and a small wood fire . . . Every Hawker cooks his own brand of Congee . . . Here comes the first crying Mai chii hiit chuck [Buy pig's blood congee] ; the next Mai chii shang chuck [Buy fish congee] . And you can buy mulberry-root flavoured congee, or barley, or kidney, or pork, or a variety of others . . .



Then come the vendors of crabs, shrimps, fresh and dried oysters, shark's fin, and 'others who go about with baskets of live fowl'. In Guangzhou other hawkers employ what the writer terms a 'Western mirror', probably meaning a peep-show :



but perhaps the Police do not allow them [in Hong Kong] as the . . . pictures are . . . of a licentious character.

At noon tables are set . . . shaded by a large umbrella. A bench for guests stands in front, whilst the . . . cook attends behind . . . Those Chinese who can afford it sit down to shik an chau [eat the evening meal] . . .

Here is [a coolie] panting under his load of earthenware; there is another who cries out his bamboo wares . . . baskets, brooms, mats, benches, ginger-grinders . . . Hawkers of fans, pipes, feather dusters, china, firewood, tobacco, salt, oil, cloth, lanterns . . .



Reading these and other lists of Nacken's there emerges the feeling of a man who loves the a�bience, and while still considering the Chinese



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Auguste Borger made this watercolour of cooked food stalls just before Hong Kong was annexed, but little had changed in this respect by the end of the century and even for many years after.

176 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

heathens, cannot but be delighted in his bones at their activities and their ordinariness within the surrounding exotica.

Des Voeux, who was not a great mixer, gives a less animated picture of ordinary life, and a dispirited one of his own. He spent the summers at Mountain Lodge perched on the edge of a precipice on the Peak, rebuilt after the former residence was carried away over the heads of the Kennedy family in the 1 874 typhoon. For him the house was a mixed blessing. Talking of mist and cloud, he wrote:



In our second season, this miserable experience lasted for the greater part of the summer. On one occasion for several weeks together the fog was as dense as the worst that afflicts London in November . . . The damp inside the house was such that water ran down the walls in streams and collected in pools on the polished floors . . . At such times one seemed entirely cut off from the wqrld, the existence of which was revealed only at rare intervals by the arrival of a government messenger with papers.



Mountain Lodge survived the summer laments of damp governors until the Japanese occupation in World War II, when it was destroyed. No governor since then has been tempted to exercise the privilege of living on the Peak.

Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1 887, the event marked in the colony by processions, the inauguration of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and by municipal resolve to commission a statue of Victoria the Queen suited to the dignity of Victoria the city. Two days after the celebrations, a newspaper carried a letter from an indignant citizen of Victoria who wrote:



Sir: Yesterday I got into a street chair and told the bearers to take me to Tai-lai-pai­ t'ong, the Cathedral [that is, the Large Worship Hall] . When one of them caught the right idea he said to his fellow 'It is the Hung-mo-miu (Red-hair Temple)' [or temple of the red-haired foreigners - barbarians] . I felt a little disconcerted on that glorious Jubilee morning to hear a nick-name applied to the British people as represented by the august assembly gathering in the Cathedral . . .



More than a century later a civil servant recalls seeing a memo in circulation in the Secretariat in Hong Kong, to the effect that clerks should be forbidden from writing on papers destined for Government House the words Ping Tau meaning Military Boss, a common term for the governor. Similarly, the Botanical Gardens adjacent to Government House are still often referred to as Ping Tau Fa Yuen - tl1e Military Boss's Garden.

Hong Kong was changing quite perceptibly as the century ebbed. Not far

from the Governor's residence, on 2 May 1 888, the Peak Tramway opened for business. This spectacular piece of nineteenth-century transport engineer­ ing, whereby counterbalanced cars ascended and descended what must

Constitutional Reform, and Opium 177

at the time have been a record gradient from the level of the Cathedral to the Peak, was the instigator of a social revolution. What had been Hong Kong's most desirable area of residence for Westerners - Mid-levels - began almost at once to give way to the airy and frequently mist-wrapped heights of the Peak. There had been a few intrepid and wealthy Peak-dwellers before the tram, but now the slopes began to sprout luxurious mansions. The days when relays of chair-coolies sweated slowly upward from town with what the Chine se might well have called the Yellow Man's Burdens (human and material) gradually disappeared. The tram, swiftly, noise lessly, e le vated the privileged to the cool Elysium above the sweating throng of Victoria in a matter of minutes. In those days, at the height of Empire, in the flush and glow of the Age of Steam (by which the Peak Tram was operated), the convenience of it seemed evidence of that splendidly Victorian thing - the march of progre ss carried forward by the grand superiority of the Empire­ builders, brought like some life-saving draught to the subje ct races. The Hong Kong Telegraph wrote with enthusiasm of 'the first car leaving St John's Place - the lower terminal - punctually at 8 o'clock and the suc­ ceeding cars being dispatched according to the Company's time table'. That document reveals the information that the 'down' cars departing between 8

a.m. and 10 a. m. were reserved for first-class passengers only - for at that hour it may be pre sume d that the majority were like ly to be gentlemen descending for business. On reaching the lower terminus they found their chairs, each borne by four liveried coolies, and off they went at a jog-trot to the office with a flourish of shouted warnings to straying pedestrians. Until the early 19 3 os, business men and others were still using the same two linked modes of conveyance .

Some of the numerous late-Victorian travellers add word-picture s, or just a comment or two, which plump out the bare historical facts. Miss Isabella Bird, a writer of many books of travel, was only minimally impressed by Hong Kong. 'The colony', she remarke d, 'is moored to England by the e le ctric cable',3 a view shared by several governors inhibited by quick responses from the Colonial Office. It was also lit by electric light by this time. The first vestigial street lighting had been by means of lamps fue lled by peanut oil. Those were replaced on 1 January 1 865 by gas lamps, and by 1 888 there were about six hundred of them illuminating the main streets, amid frequent cries that it was the less reputable districts which required lighting to deter criminal activities.. By 1 8 90 electricity had superseded gas, although after their successful inauguration the lamps were dowsed by a shower of rain on the following day; but these teething troubles were soon cured. Four of the antique gas lamps still burn at a flight of steps leading from Ice House Stre et down to Dudde ll Street - the sole surviving link with that e le ment of Hong Kong's past.

Another visitor, Lord Ronald Gower, found himself, he wrote :

178 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

transported two thousand years back in ancient Rome or glorious Carthage. This illusion is helped no doubt by the coloured dresses and fanciful drapery of the Chinese, and by the . . . classical style of the white houses . . . porticoes and col­ lonades . . . sparkling under the intensely brilliant sunshine, outlined sharply against the almost purple sky. 4

The apparently whimsical attribution of purple to the Hong Kong sky may just have a basis in fact. For in the years after the colossal eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in August 18 83, sunsets around the world were much more colourful than normal.

Another comment on the times comes from a French writer, Jean Chailley­ Bert:



The life rolls by, varied, swift, happy, useful. After three or four years one goes to recuperate in old England. After fifteen or twenty years one retires there. One is looked up to by reason of this hard-earned wealth, and thereafter . . . one follows and encourages the efforts of those who, in their turn, strive and strain to conduct on so high a plane, with such faith and indomitable energy, the destinies of the Anglo-Saxon race.5

An Anglo-Saxon writer, the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, later 1st Marquis Curzon of Kedleston and Viceroy of India, gives a more factual account:



it is evident that business competition is much keener now than it ever was before. Large fortunes are made with difficulty; the merchant princes and magnificent hongs of an earlier day have disappeared; Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Co remain

almost alone among the great houses whose establishments almost a generation ago were the talk of the East. Men do not now expect fortunes; they are content with competencies . . . The traveller finds the British merchants banded together in a powerful confederacy 6

The truth lay, probably, somewhere among these various assessments.

In 1891 Hong Kong celebrated its first half century as a colony, the Queen sending a congratulatory telegram to the Governor. Anniversaries provoke reflection. Bowen, as he left Hong Kong, had reflected that



in the brief period of forty-three years which has elapsed since this island, then barren and desolate, was erected into a British colony, it has risen, by the blessings of Providence and the enterprise and energy of our race, to the proud position of the third greatest mart of shipping in the British Empire, ranking next after London and Liverpool.



Bowen had made his contribution in the revamping of the legislature, a real constitutional advance. To him must also be ascribed the achieving of

Constitutional Reform, and Opium r79

the waterworks scheme whereby water ran from Tai Tam through the hills by tunnel and conduit to the filter beds along Bowen Road, augmenting the supply to Victoria. He had also been responsible for the resumption of life, after Hennessy's procrastinations, of the Central School building programme. Completed in r8 8 9 and named Victoria College, it offered education to no fewer than r,ooo boys.

Des Voeux, who had been out of the colony on sick leave, returned to serve a few more months. Probably when he departed on that leave at the end of r889 he did not think he would be returning at all, for he took the opportunity then to deliver a survey of progress, entitled Report on the Conditions and Prospects of the Colony, dated 3 r October r889. It contains a summing up which, while similar to that of Bowen, enters into more precise reasons for that progress.



Hong Kong has indeed changed its aspect; and when it is remembered that all this has been effected in Her Majesty's reign and indeed during a space of less than fifty years and on ground in immediate contact with the most populous empire in the world, by a comparatively infinitesimal number of an entirely alien race separated from their homes by nearly the whole earth, and, unlike their countrymen in Australia and Canada, living in an enervating and trying climate; and when it is further remembered that the Chinese, whose labour and enterprise under British auspices have largely assisted in this development, have been under no compulsion, but have come here as free men, attracted by our liberal institutions, equitable treatment, and the justice of our rule; when all this is taken into account, it may be doubted whether the evidence of material and moral achievement, presented as it were in focus, make anywhere a more forcible appeal to eye and imagination, and whether any other spot on the earth is thus more likely to excite, or much more fully justifies, pride in the name of Englishman.



This resounding, splendid, architectural sentence, ringing with the very essence of Victorian trust and delight in the burdens and responsibilities of Empire, must serve as an ironic memorial to the legalization of the opium trade, as it does to a Governor whose main claim on posterity's attention is that he contributed virtually nothing to the colony he ruled.

I 6. Plague, and

the New Territories Acquired



THE age of steam which had revolutionized the Far East m�aritime trade was the forerunner of the age of electricity. Without the steam-driven turbine to generate electricity, oil lamp, candle, and gas remained the only forms of light when dark fell. Heating was the job of coal, and cooling meant the traditional fan and the punkah, imported from India, powered by a servant activating, by means of a rope, a hanging textile strip to move the humid air.



At Pok Fu Lam, Douglas Lapraik, the watchmaker who became a shipping magnate, built Douglas Castle with its machicolated turrets. A sedan chair and its occupant are being conveyed along the road in this Chinese rendering of the scene.

Plague:, and the New Territories Acquired 181

The concept of architecture, commercial or domestic, suited to Western use in the tropics was based on the need for a current of air flowing through the interiors, themselves shaded from the sun by deep verandahs. The grace of the resulting buildings - and Hong Kong until some time after World War II had preserved its share of them - blending, often enough, Gothic Revival with classical and Romanesque elements, and Mogul and other oriental styles, gave the cities of empire (British, French, and German) in the East a certain charm and lightness. The solid sobriety of much nineteenth-century architecture in Britain was happily almost absent from Hong Kong where it gave place to a structural lightness and brightness of surface quite foreign to Northern Europe, more reminiscent of Italy.

In the 1880s Fung Wah-chuen, the comprador of Russell and Company, set

up a small electric power-station in Guangzhou and, a mere 16 years after the opening of the world's first commercial power company in London, that ancient Chinese city received its first hesitant supply. Fung was a product of Queen's College, graduating with the prize for the best spoken English. Under the name Fung Shui, he became an assistant teacher there. The school magazine records him as a Chinese assistant and, later, comprador of Shewan Tomes and Company, the earlier name of Russell and Company. Jury lists of 1882-8 show him as assistant to Yan Wo Opium Firm, and in the 1883 Opium Commission he is described as comprador, National Bank, which he seems to have had a hand in floating. He was also involved in the Wai Sing lottery at Guangzhou in which bets could be placed on the candidates in the Imperial Examinations. Fung was a director of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1892, and in 1894 and 1899 was director and then Chairman of the Po Leung Kuk. The fiftieth anniversary issue of The Chimes, the magazine of St Stephen's College at Stanley, names him as one of its founders who, in March 1901, petitioned the Governor for a school in which Chinese children would be taught English and Chinese. St Stephen's opened on 23 February 1903 with seven pupils, one of whom, Fung Man-siu, was probably a son of Fung Wah-chuen.

Fung went on to a brilliant career in Hong Kong - Chairman of the

Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1900, and then in China as deputy of Foreign Affairs to the Viceroy of Guangdong in 1909. And in that year he negotiated the sale of the electric company to new owners in that city. While the Hong Kong Electric Company began production on Hong Kong island in 1890, it was the vision of Robert Shewan (of Shewan Tomes) and Paul Chater, on the example of Fung Wah-chuen, which saw Kowloon as a potential city and which led to the construction of the first power-station there. This company became in time The China Light and Power Company, without whose forward thinking the eventual development of Hong Kong as an industrial giant of the latter half of the twentieth century could not have been so smoothly accomplished. 1

182 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

It was into this setting of the early age of electricity, of still leisured manners, and commerce conducted in buildings cooled by natural breezes and the swinging punkah, that the new Governor, Sir William Robinson, disembarked in December r89 r - the colony's fiftieth year. It was in this year, as Sayer succinctly phrases it, 'that Hong Kong's non-Chinese popu­ lation rose to over ro,ooo, her Chinese population to 20,000, her revenue to $2,000,000, and her shipping to 10,000,000 tons'.

Amid the general jollifications, a number of carping voices were raised at the choice of r89 r to celebrate Hong Kong's jubilee. Hong Kong, they said, did not legally become a colony until the signing of the Nanjing Treaty in r842; and there were even pedants who preferred r84 3 when the treaty was ratified, and when Pottinger remarked that it was now 'a bona fide possession of the Crown'.

In r89 r it was apparently a prosperous place, its expansion phenomenal, equalling that of mushrooming Shanghai up the coast, demonstrating the unbeatable qualities brought forth by the combined efforts of the Chinese and British. Lord Curzon described this in admiring terms.



The national love for neatness and decorum [of the British] appears in the private grounds, the bunds, the public gardens of the cities where the English are in the ascendant; and, were every other mark of British influence erased tomorrow, it would always remain a marvel how from a scorching rock have been evolved the

Elysian graces of Hong Kong. 2

Sayers takes Curzon up on this: 'It was', he wrote, 'of course the "scorching rock" itself that made an essential contribution to this transformation scene. At the magic touch of British capital and Chinese labour Hong Kong's

unprofitable hills had lielded up their hidden treasure and a town of native granite had emerged.'

The new Governor was very much a Colonial Office man from the time when at the age of r8 he began there as a clerk. Twenty years later he was Governor of the Bahamas. In Hong Kong he took over the administration from Major-General Digby Barker. Almost at once the shining face of

In

.prosperous Hong Kong darkened. To a degree Robinson was responsible.

his first speech to the Legislative Council he announced a change in the system of accounting by which all accounts for any one year, some previously not settled until January of the next, would be put into the balance of the relevant year. On the books this meant an additional expenditure of

$1 70,000 in r89 2. A loan committee put forward two methods of dealing with this problem - securing local bank overdrafts at low interest, and the sale of land (even at depressed prices). A loan of $ 200,000 in stock was agreed. But retrenchment vvas to be the order of the day. Less urgent public works were to be postponed and economies were to be made by



Sir William Robinson, Governor from December 1891 to January 1898, photographed with the members of the Legislative Council. On his left is Sir Paul Chater, and the second figure from him on his right is Sir James Stewart Lockhart. Robinson had an almost uncanny resemblance to King Edward VII.



amalgamating certain government offices. A retrenchment committee set up in 1 894 suggested staff cuts in some government departments, but it would not countenance any reduction in spending on public works.

With a basically resilient economy much of the cutting back proved temporary. But the situation was impaired by the doubling of the defence contribution in 1 890 and the falling price of silver which made sterling payments heavier and pushed up the cost of living, requiring upward adjustments in salaries. At this time, coincidentally, Britain was in the throes of one of its periodic attacks of conscience over opium. In Octobe� 1 891 the Secretary of State ordered the colonial government to take direct control of opium sales with a view to confining its consumption, in close co-operation with the Opium Commission which sat in Calcutta. This, eyen at the cost of lost revenue.

Another move was to pay government officials' salaries half at the old rate

and half at current rates. But with the announcement of the 1 894 revenue figures - $ 2, 207, 203 , which topped the estimate by almost three hundred thousand dollars, an increase over the previous year of more than two hundred thousand dollars - the economy appeared buoyant enough.

r84 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

In all this Robinson proceeded in a thoroughly text-book manner. In 1 895 he raised stamp duties and almost succeeded in balancing his budget, even under the stress of the military contribution and the continuing public works programme. The deficit was a mere $12,000.

The momentum of certain public works projects continued. At Tai Tam the Water Extension Scheme envisaged a reservoir capacity increased by 400 million gallons to satisfy demand at Shau Kei Wan and Aberdeen. The population of Kowloon was also outdrinking the water supply, but proposals for sinking wells and pumping the water to storage tanks were not approved. The Colonial Office kept insisting on a new gaol, the old one being manifestly inadequate; but here an unforeseen obstacle arose. The unofficials of the legislature, abetted by Dr Ho Kai, argued that separate cells were unsuited to the Chinese. Robinson compromised, proposing a new police station and magistracy which would give room for the extension of the existing gaol on the same site.

On the Governor's innocent head fell blows consequent on his predeces­

sors' lapses of judgement; By omitting fully to implement the recommenda­ tions of the Chadwick report, they had paved the way for the 'irresistible logic' of the great bubonic plague of r894 which then overtook the colony. The beginnings were discovered by chance. No law called for the notification of Chinese deaths, and there was consequently no hint of an unusually large number in any particular area. Plague was endemic up and down the China coast and, after the bitterly cold January of ! 893 (the Peak down to 450 feet above sea level was ice-bound for three days),4 when the weather warmed up, several cases came to notice - the first to be recorded in the city. By May r50 cases were reported, most proving fatal. In the next ro to r2 days the death toll was 450, and increasing. Thus began the most dramatic episode of Robinson's time, and perhaps the most traumatic in Hong Kong's history to that date.

In great haste a special committee of the Sanitary Board was convened to suggest the necessary action - by-laws permitting radical cleansing and disinfection in the plague areas, compulsory removal of infected persons, provision of extra hospital beds, and the institution of house-to-house visits_ by an augmented sanitary staff. Other laws, passed later, allowed for the scouring of all buildings thought to pose a danger to health, with the forcible ejection of the occupants. Three hundred troops were impressed to help out, but when five contracted plague (whose cause was unknown at this time) their numbers were reduced. Hong Kong was declared an infected port. Chinese prejudice against Western medical procedures was almost universal and deeprooted. Chinese dislike of Western intrusion into their private lives and houses was strong, as would Chinese intrusion into the lives of Europeans of the time have been resented (the reciprocity of such feelings was not con­ sidered by the foreigners). Such was Chinese dislike of the military house-

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired r 85

to-house visits that the Tung Wah strongly urged the Governor to let it take over the treatment of all plague victims. But Robinson, doubtless feeling his authority challenged, unwisely refused.

At this point placards began to appear in Guangzhou warning Cantonese women to refrain from visiting Hong Kong, and accusing Western doctors of gouging out the eyes of children for use in the treatment of plague. Schools in the colony emptied overnight, thousands of Chinese fled in panic to China. Anti-foreign feeling in Guangzhou ran high. A Chinese charitable organiza­ tion in the city sent junks to Hong Kong to take plague victims away, and also to remove all the dead, an offer which Robinson at first refused. Later he allowed 1 70 cases to be taken to Guangzhou. One further problem arose - the Chinese custom of keeping the dead for burial on an auspicious day. This, added to the fear of evil influences emanating from the dead which meant that corpses were often deserted, led to situations which aggravated an already dire threat to the whole community. In June, on one single day, 109 corpses had to be collected.

Large areas of Taipingshan were roped off and sealed. About three hun­

dred and fifty houses were condemned and 7,000 Chinese were evicted from



t,



.... 1I



' ,



,. '!





I -



t



A newly built glassworks was turned into a makeshift 'hospital' for victims of the plague of 1894.

r 86 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

their homes - what happened to them went unrecorded. Room had to be found to set up temporary hospitals. The hospital ship Hygeia, a recently built but as yet unoccupied pig depot, and the Kennedy Town glassworks which had likewise not been occupied, were quickly filled with victims .

Robinson was of the opinion that the only remedy was wholesale

destruction of buildings in the affected areas, and it seemed, since at least half of the cases recorded came from the Taipingshan region, that this might well be effective. As cooler weather came the epidemic died down, but not before over two and a half thousand persons had succumbed: the figure for those who fled was officially put at 80,000.

The strike among coolies in the following year, r895, in protest against the provisions of an ordinance giving power to inspect their lodging houses, demonstrated the need for extreme caution in using such powers. An officer of the Chinese Maritime Customs at Guangzhou during the strike,

L. C. Arlington, wrote:



The treatment . . . accorded · to the Chinese inhabitants caused thousands to flee to Macau and the Hinterland. The specific reasons for this exodus were the house­ to-house visitations of the 'Whitewash Brigade', the burying of the dead in lime, and the interments higgledy-piggledy at the western point of the island. The 'Whitewash Brigade' used to enter a house and demand a 'squeeze' - otherwise the furniture and other things such as clothing, trunks, etc., were thrown out into the streets and destroyed by fire. The Brigade consisted of foreigners who did the dirty work, and their native helpers and interpreters did the money-making. 5



Arlington appears to have believed what he wrote - that it was the Chinese in the Brigade who did all the 'squeezing' while the foreigners (who were mostly a raggle-taggle of soldiers whose pay was a pittance) remained ignorant of what was taking place, and were neither tempted to nor took any part in the financial exactions . Or was he merely reciting that nineteenth­ century British credo about the incorruptible Englishman? There can be no doubt, as Austin Coates writes of these events, that 'it was the most harrowing situation that had yet arisen between British and Chinese in Hong. Kong, on the one side the necessity to cleanse the city of a deadly disease, on the other the people's incomprehension of the need for this . . . '. 6 The further provocation of crude blackmail by the instruments of cleansing must have come near to ending in civil strife. Robinson remained firm on the strike, deporting some of the ringleaders and publishing a notice in Chinese explaining the position. And the strike collapsed with no incidents of violence reported.

Trade suffered. Shipping naturally avoided calling at an infected port,

but as the plague died down a return to normal did not take long.

Plague, from being a thing that affected China, a remote horror to which a

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 187

civilized society (in European eyes) was scarcely subject, had now become endemic. Almost every year it was to recur with varying severity as spring came. The Sanitary Board had to bear the brunt of the criticism, only some of it fair. Ayres, in his 189 5 report, castigated the Board for its 'long, wordy, windy, desultory, rambling discussions' which led to nothing being done. While the Board had an unofficial majority and an elected element, it relied fundamentally on government favour for its funds. Even its by-laws had to be passed by the Legislative Council, which was also responsible for its policy. The Board existed somewhat tenuously in a legislative and executive limbo, its only real power its power to resign. This its unofficial members unanimously elected to do, in protest against a government decision to appoint a Medical Officer of Health. Thus, by 1895, the Board was to all intents and purposes defunct. Robinson sought permission of London to abolish it, but this was denied, the Colonial Office appearing to perceive in Robinson a degree of panic reaction. Robinson had indeed said at the height of the plague in June 1894: 'I may assert that so far as trade and commerce are concerned the plague has assumed the importance of an unexampled calamity. ' In fact its effects were passing. But for Robinson it was 'one of the saddest and most disastrous [years] in the recorded history of Hong Kong'. True. And also, to be just, the Governor had suffered the loss of his wife in the colony. His sorrows were compounded.

In the end Robinson changed his mind, making the Medical Officer of

Health a member of the Sanitary Board in place of a lay administrator. But the beleaguered Board was not yet out of the woods. Its every act, it seemed, was destined to provoke public criticism, so that in 1896 Robinson was forced to respond by holding a plebiscite among the British community to decide whether the Board should have an official or an unofficial majority. The result was 3 3 1 votes in favour of the latter, with 3 1 against. This pro­ cedure roused the Colonial Secretary in London to remark that 'it is incon­ sistent with Crown colony government to seek the guidance of a plebiscite'. Plague, very light in 189 5, returned in all severity in 1896. By August of that year, 1,193 cases were reported, of which 1,088 proved fatal. The next year only 17 cases were reported, but in 1898 the epidemic was more serious. Few non-Chinese had so far died, but in that year two European nurses suc­ cumbed. The cause of plague, a disease of rats conveyed by fleas deserting the bodies of dying creatures and infecting by their bites the human being on whom they settle for sustenance, was still unknown. Europeans and Chinese alike thought the miasma arising from the advent of hot weather and the season's rains to be the cause. Malaria (from Italian mal' aria - bad air) had also been attributed to the same cause before the discovery - by Sir Reginald Ross in 1897 - of the transference of the parasite by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito. Sir Patrick Manson was near to the discovery at about the same time in Hong Kong. The pandemic plague of South China and Hong

188 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Kong would appear to have found its way - doubtless via ships' rats and sailors - round the world in succeeding years, and it re mained endemic in the colony until the mid-192os.

During its ravages not only Chinese but also large numbers of Portugue se left Hong Kong, fleeing to Macau and abandoning residential areas around Caine Road. Ironically, it was in 1894- 5 that a group of Japanese researchers under Shibasaburo Kitasato managed to isolate the plague bacillus and recognized the conne ction between its habitat in rats and other rodents, and the i_nfection of human beings. Yet, some considerable time after this, a government medical official is on record as denying the connection between rats and plague ! Aside from the pitiable ignorance of the Medical De partment staff, there must have been few enough occasions for laughter during the re curring blight. One was occasioned by the instructions issued to Chinese householders to catch their domestic rats and, unless they w(shed to be visited by the Whitewash Brigade, to place them in 'rat-boxes' hung on lamp posts. This 'gave rise to a charming Cantonese expre ssion used solely in Hong Kong when, if there is any marked disparity in height between husband and wife, and the husband is slim, the couple . . . find themse lves affectionately called "the lamp-post and the rat-box" '! 7

By the end of 1895 the governme nt had resume d the Taipingshan area and by the end of 1898 it had been razed and rebuilt.

One other result of the plague was mentioned by Robinson in November 189 5. 'It is extraordinary - not to say discreditable - that after fifty-five years of British rule , the vast majority of Chinese in Hong Kong should re main so little Anglicized.' This led to various measures such as the demand for the teaching of more English. Less cogent responses were criticism of the Tung Wah Hospital in the treatment of plague. In fact neither Western nor traditional Chinese medical proce dures had any effe ctive treatment for the disease. Government medical men then recklessly de manded the abolition of the Tung Wah. A committee of enquiry of 1896 recognized the organization's valuable work for Chinese poor and sick, but suggested that the Medical De partment should act in a supervisory capacity, and that Western medical treatment should be introduced on a voluntary basis under the supervision . of a Chinese trained in Western medicine. The Tung Wah agreed to Dr Chung's appointment - he had qualified at the Hong Kong Medical College and was resident House Surgeon at the Alice Memorial Hospital. They insisted that he be paid by the government.

Oddly enough, contrary to general opinion among the British, Chinese

patients prove d not to be as prejudiced as expected. In the scheme 's first month 17 of them ele cte d to have Western treatment. In fact almost the sole superiority of Western medical 'science ' at the time lay in vaccination tech­ niques and in a more highly developed system of nursing care.

Before he le ft Hong Kong, Robinson had one more obstacle to address,

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired r89

the reiterated and now increasingly insistent cry for a Municipal Council. After Bowen's reforms affecting the legislature, its members had tasted a modicum of power in that they voted all taxation and held debates on the appropriations suggested by the Finance Committee. Unofficials were not a majority, but were influential and exerted pressure on a system of government by discussion if not always consensus. By r 894 a petition from ratepayers led by T. H. Whitehead of the Chartered Bank, Paul Chater, Jackson of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and Dr Ho Kai was sent to the Secretary of State in London. Its message, briefly, was that Hong Kong's annual trade was worth $40,000,000; that this prosperous state in the colony had come about largely through the exertions of British merchants and ship owners; yet their reward was only the flimsiest share in decisions affecting the colony. They pointed out that other Crown colonies had been accorded representative institutions, and they wanted the 'common right of English­ men to manage their local affairs and control the expenditure of the colony where imperial considerations were not involved'. What they suggested was 'free election of British nationality in the Legislative Council', and that the British should constitute a majority.

Robinson, forwarding the petition, thought that the best course might be to

add slightly to the unofficial element in both Councils. Lord Ripon in London treated the matter with the utmost gravity, penning a dispatch in which he passed in review the whole history of constitutional reform in Hong Kong. His conclusion was that 'it had prospered because it has been a British



The Marquis of Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies from August 1892 to June 1895.

190 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

colony', having few lifelong residents of either British or Chinese nationality. He wanted to know if the voters could be of any nationality, if the British were to be from the British Isles, or to be subjects by race only; and, con­ cluding, he had no difficulty in demonstrating the ill-thought nature of the petition, and its tendency towards setting up what would in effect be a little oligarchy. He thought that the addition of more unofficials to the Legislative Council would best be balanced by adding more officials and perhaps by adding a second Chinese; and that as to the Executive Council, unofficial members should be appointed, who might be any subject of the Queen, not necessarily a European. On a Municipal Council, Lord Ripon wrote: 'I frankly say that I should like to see one established', and (prophetically) he thought that the Sanitary Board might in time develop into such a body. But, in view of the continuing Sino-Japanese war, there should be no im­ mediate change.

Lord Ripon was not alone in discerning the defects of the petition. In Hong Kong the Registrar-General, James Stewart Lockhart, soon to be the colony's Colonial Secretary, dissected its contents in a memorandum to the Governor.



Most of the taxes fall almost entirely on the Chinese. The only tax to which the British and other residents as a whole are subject in the same manner as the Chinese is the tax of I 3 per cent levied on the rateable value of house property in Victoria . . . This tax yields annually about $470,000, of which over $3 50,000 are contributed by the Chinese and the balance by all the other nationalities combined. The petitioners, who are not in some instances British, and who do not in many cases contribute directly to taxes, claim [the already quoted ' common right of English­ men', and so on] . They have, however, carefully omitted to point out that the local affairs include Chinese affairs of which . . . they are generally ignorant and which the Chinese have shown no desire that the British merchants and other residents should manage, and to indicate that to the expenditure of the Colony of which they desire the control they contribute a very small portion. Petitioners surely do not wish to maintain that Britishers have an inherent right to control all expenditure . . . 8



After further lobbying the Marquis of Ripon recommended that two . unofficials might be nominated to the Executive Council (one of whom was to be Chinese). One official should be added to the Legislative Council (he suggested Major-General W. Black), with two unofficials representing 'retail traders or skilled labour'. These changes were made in July 1896.

J. J. Bell-Irving of Jardine, Matheson and Company and Paul Chater became the first unofficials on the Executive Council; Wei Yuk, an astute business man, became the additional unofficial member, and the General became an additional official member, on the Legislative Council in December 1896., With this little sop, the petitioners had to be content; and the clamour for reform temporarily died down.

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 191

A vital step had been taken in 1892 towards the goal of honest administra­ tion when it was ruled that no government official might own land or prop­ erty in the colony except his own dwelling, or engage in commerce, or buy shares in local companies. The rule had been laid down once and for all that holding government office was incompatible with commercial interests, which might conflict with absolute integrity in the administration.

The uneasy situation of the colony on the border of a China under attack by Japan emphasized the need to consider its defences. The Hong Kong Volunteer Corps had been revived in 1893 , and 1 897 saw a new commander installed in the person of the Chief Justice, Sir J. W. Carrington. The 159- member Corps was to come in handy at the take-over of the New Territories in 1899 - the cession of which was negotiated in Robinson's term. The requirement was for strict neutrality on the part of Hong Kong, and in relation to this _ tl}e_ _case of Dr Sun Yatsen was pertinent. He had been

banished, acct1d of Deep Bay, follow'ing the Sham Chun rive� mcties, and had left fo� Japan. blythe inconsequentiality, running down the midct to app�al to the B�insh P�-ying - China-Britain Street) of the village of :o emancipate my m1serable nains to this day. Initial delight at the cessiorreen musIC to Robinson's ecas soon tempered by doubts of various kinds. Tb Six years (the longest-servin:y with Chinese exercising jurisdiction in it, and t brink of one

;ketchiest knowledge of the terrain and its inhabit:



The so-called 'scramble for concessions' of territory from the Chinese around the turn of the century was graphically illustrated in Punch. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia are seen tearing at the helpless body of China - Britain with the strongest position, arms encircling the mandarin's chest.

192 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

of the most extraordinary events by which it acquired 3 6 5. 5 square miles of territory - more than twelve times the area of Hong Kong island. The history of how this came about need not detain us long. Broadly, the reasons were the impossibility of defending the colony against attack from the mainland. By acquiring the land whose shores flanked the harbour its defence would be a more feasible proposition. In what was to be called the 'scramble for concessions' Britain negotiated cession of the needed territory in 1898 on a 99-year lease from China. The documents, signed on 9 June, ceded the waters of the two bays east and west of the Kowloon peninsula, and all the waters and islands north of 22°9' latitude and between 113 °52 ' and 114°30' longitude. Civil administration over Kowloon City, unwisely as it turned out, was reserved to Chinese officials. Equally un­ wisely, the exact frontier was not defined in detail in the treaty, nor were



µ was not alone in discerning the defects o( thl he Registrar-General, James Stewart Lockhart, s4 nial Secretary, dissected its contents in a memor�



,xes fall almost entirely on the Chinese. The only ta� er residents as a whole are subject in the same manner per cent levied on the rateable value of house property annually about $470,000, of which over $3 50,000 a1 e and the balance by all the other nationalities cc 1 o are not in some instances British, and who do not '

1

;ctly to taxes, claim [the already quoted 'common rig p] . They have, however, carefully omitted to point ou Chinese affairs of which . . . they are generally ignorant \ hown no desire that the British merchants and other n

� indicate that to the expenditure of the Colony of wh y contribute a very small portion. Petitioners surely c

�ritishers have an inherent right to control all expendi



�r lobbying the Marquis of Ripon recommend {] ght be nominated to the Executive Council (o: nese). One official should be added to the Legislc Major-General W. Black), with two unofficials

or skilled labour'. These changes were made ir of Jardine, Matheson and Company and Paul CJ cials on the Executive Council; Wei Yuk, an asj

th P --:,,-lrl;t-; ,--,. .,,, I ,, .,,..._ff; ,--; ,:, I m,:,mh,:, .- ,....,..,J +J I' · -

The map attached to the Convention between Great Britain and China signed at Beijing on 9 June

1898, demarcating the area leased to Britain. (Source: Wesley-Smith, Unequal Treaty, r 898- r997,

p. 193. Redrawn from MacMurray (comp. and ed.), Treaties and Agreements With and Concerning China, r894 -r9r9, p. 131 .)

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 193

the positioning and operation of the Chinese customs posts. There was no firm plan for the administration of the territory.

Adding to the prevailing nervousness, the American fleet was anchored in Mirs Bay, intent on taking Manila; and tension was increased by the lack of co-operation between the Foreign and Colonial Offices in London. The confusion was compounded by the fact that the Viceroy of Guangdong was under the impression that China's authority was still paramount in the newly ceded territory.

Stewart Lockhart, in England at the time, was immediately dispatched to Hong Kong to survey the ceded territory. His report prompted the new Governor, Sir Henry Blake, who arrived in November 1898, to suggest a separate administration for it. This was vetoed by Chamberlain in London since it had already been declared an integral part of Hong Kong. After talks between the two sides the boundary was fixed to run from the head of Mirs Bay to the head of Deep Bay, following the Sham Chun river most of the way; the line, with blythe inconsequentiality, running down the middle of the main street (Chung-ying - China-Britain Street) of the village of Sha Tau Kok, where it remains to this day. Initial delight at the cession of the New Territories was soon tempered by doubts of various kinds. The inclusion of Kowloon City with Chinese exercising jurisdiction in it, and the absence of any but the sketchiest knowledge of the terrain and its inhabitants, were but



New Territories villagers using a rotary winnowing machine - an ancient Chinese invention.

1 94 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

two of them. The government was not in any way prepared for the take-over. Lockhart's report offered the opinion that a welcome was by no means assured, and Blake, who had been in Hong Kong only a few months, decided the best way was to proceed with the occupation and not await settlements in all the disputes. He planned to raise the flag over the New Territories on 17 April 1899.

Three days prior to that date, numbers of outraged inhabitants (the total population was estimated at about one hundred thousand) who had not been consulted on their conversion from Chinese to British citizens, rose up in what they must have seen as properly righteous anger to prevent that action. The matshed structures, which had been put up at Tai Po Hui to serve as temporary headquarters for the British administration, were discovered by a party of the colonial police on 14 April to have been burned to the ground; and a threatening band of about one hundred a�nd fifty Chinese was gathered on the hills. The police, under Captain F. H. May (later to_ be Governor of Hong Kong), decided that the better part of British valour was to retire to the safety of Hong Kong overnight. The next day, 15 April, augmented by a detachment of the Hong Kong Regiment under Captain Berger, the police were sent back by the Governor, who had no expectation of an attack. Reaching Tai Po Hui they were, however, met by considerable numbers of what appeared to be regular Chinese troops entrenched in positions on high ground with artillery. The Chinese took the offensive, many armed with gingalls (muskets fired from stands) and furiously waving banners. But faced with a small, disciplined British force, the Chinese melted away over the hills.

On the following day, 16 April, a larger body of troops under Major­ General Gascoigne was sent to the site, and Stewart Lockhart who accom­ panied them succeeded in raising the British flag.

This did not mark the end of Chinese resistance. That very evening the Volunteers were called out, and on 17 April several thousand armed Chinese were routed by British forces near Kam Tin. After they had retreated to nearby hills and regrouped, another battle took place, resulting in a Chinese defeat which apparently scotched any further thoughts of resistance.

Blake, blaming Tan, the Viceroy of Guangdong, who had undertaken to supervise the transition of power, sent the Volunteers into Kowloon City, and simultaneously seized Shen Zhen as an earnest of his intentions should the Viceroy fail again. The Colonial Office endorsed this action. A Colonial Office minute records the passing of an Order in Council stating that the city of Kowloon should not be under Chinese jurisdiction, 'and the matter is at an end'. Chinese official presence there was not thenceforward permitted. The question of Chinese jurisdiction in Kowloon was discussed between Blake and Li Hongzhang, the new Viceroy of Guangdong, when the latter passed through Hong Kong on his return from a visit to the West in June 1900, but





,_

Sir Henry Blake arrived to take up his post as Governor a few months after the New Territories lease had been signed and had come into effect on I July 1898. He sits here with the Viceroy of Guangdong.



no changes were made. Shen Zhen was occupied for several months and the customs officials removed from their stations, the latter being re-established at Lingding, Tai Shan, and Sam Mun.

The occupation was completed, the flag unfurled, the proclamation duly read; the new lords of the Kowloon peninsula took up their duties. Their main problem was not military but administrative. It was decided that, with certain omissions, the laws of Hong Kong were to prevail in the newly acquired lands. A local Communities Ordinance created district and sub­ district courts with limited civil and criminal jurisdiction, but there was no power to prevent what immediately occurred - the wholesale buying up of land at rock-bottom prices by at least one syndicate of Chinese among whom, it was suspected, was the Legislative Councillor, Dr Ho Kai. The syndicate appears to have achieved its aims on the pretext that the British, as rumours



Guards at a New Territories Customs Post in 1900. The Englishman is accompanied on his tour of inspection by his wife. Hong Kong people were intensely curious about conditions beyond the familiar hills that formed the backdrop to the Kowloon Peninsula and were keen to travel there once it became possible to do so.



predicted, were about to confiscate the land. Hearing of this, Blake wanted to return the land to the rightful owners, but the legal problems involved were so formidable that the matter was dropped.

The Governor toured the New Territories in August 1899, inspecting the eight districts and 48 sub-districts. He promised to respect Chinese customs, warned that punishments would be according to the laws of Hong Kong, and informed his audience that landowners must register their holdings and that all land rent was payable to the government. In return he promised protection from banditry.

The Governor's subsequent report painted a grim picture of the New Territories, of a population misgoverned by former masters and 'squeezed' _ by corrupt officials. Disputes had frequently been settled only by clan feuding. It was a land, he reported, where malaria was rife, a land of murders in Shen Zhen, of robbery and piracy round the coasts. He asked for more money to police the area, estimating the sum needed at almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the year.

Much of the early work of organization and the setting up of a workable administration in the New Territories fell to Lockhart who continued, until he left Hong Kong a sick man in March 1901, to interest himself in its problems and their solution, although latterly he was not directly responsible. In his last report, in 1901, he wrote: '. . . in bidding farewell, I do so with



An ancestral hall in the New Territories, Door Gods painted on its tall portals.



much regret, mingled with pleasant reminiscences of . . . work . . . in the midst of its charming and beautiful scenery, and lessened by the recollection that I have been and still am a strong believer in its future'. The day-to-day work of administration was assigned to three cadets - E. R. Hallifax, C. M. Messer, and ]. H. Kemp. Much discussion went on about how to effect improvements in the economic and other conditions, with Charles Ford of the Botanical Gardens Department being asked for advice on vine and camphor culture, and for improvements in sugar-cane and mulberry cropping. Jardine, Matheson, ever active, wanted the coal concession for the whole area.

But conditions remained highly unsettled, the Chinese rebellious. Village elders, requested to attend meetings on land tenure, refused to do so, and in January 19 00 an ordinance gave power to summon Chinese to the Registrar­ General's office for questioning. This provoked an outcry. A land court was set up to settle disputed claims, and instructed by London not to be too rigorous, the aim being to confirm occupation and to encourage improvement of the terrain. But the facts as they came to light revealed a tangled mass of disputed claim and counter-claim, often complicated by the absence of adequate, or indeed any, documentation. The bemused court discovered that one in 20 claims was disputed, and yet further problems arose in having lands accurately marked on the map. Corps of surveyors were imported

198 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

from India to deal with this. All unclaimed land was to be held for disposal by the Crown.

To no one's surprise, the land court took until 1904 to complete over 3 5 4,000 cases and to determine the real owners of lots, an exercise that cost

$143, 615. Over subsequent years the New Territories was to prove a costly acquisition. By the end of June 1901 its revenue stood at only $14,140: expenditure amounted to $73 6,571. Lockhart's optimism seemed unwar­ ranted.

Blake's opinion about administration in the leased area was that 'existing village organizations should be maintained and utilized'. But such organiza­ tions had in many cases become invalid, the village elders powerless in a situation where appeal could be made over their heads to British officials. The main problems for the government were law and order and the slippery terrain of land revenue. A workable method of administration was only slowly evolved in the light of long and painful experience. �

The New Territories was eventually divided into two geographical and

administrative parts: that· part between the China border and the Kowloon range of hills became New Territories North; while New Territories South consisted of the tip of the peninsula from the range southward, and all the islands. By 1907 the two chief officers of the northern district, then the Assistant Superintendent of Police and the Assistant Land Officer, became District Officer and Assistant District Officer respectively (the latter office was later abolished) . And in September 19 10 the Assistant Land Officer (South) was given the title of Assistant District Officer. These civil servants, as well as being in charge of the police and general administration, were also police magistrates, and in 1908 were given power to try petty debt cases up to

$200. Education both in traditional village schools and in due course in schools set up by the government was encouraged, and health matters were supervised by the resident Medical Officer - the first holder of that office being a graduate of the College of Medicine, Hong Kong. These arrange­ ments remained in place until 19 13.

The acquisition of the New Territories took place against a backdrop of ominous events in China as that country entered its last decade of dynastic. rule, and as the Western powers increased their stranglehold on its economy by both military and commercial means. The year 1901 proved to be inauspicious. The old Queen in England died at last as Hong Kong celebrated its diamond jubilee. The military contribution from Hong Kong towards the cost of the British garrison rose from the figure fixed in the 1 890s, 17 1/2 per cent of the colonial revenue, to 20 per cent, and plague returned in the worst outbreak since 1 894 - so serious that the community petitioned the Secretary of State, alleging the government's failure to implement the Chadwick report's recommendations.

Once again, as Sayer recounts it, 'the deus ex machina' in the person of



Water shortage in 1901. A line of people wait to fill their containers from the tanks brought from Tsuen Wan to the Praya.

Chadwick himself returned to the colony, 20 years after his first visit. He must surely have reflected on the irony of the situation, for had his original report been heeded his return would not have been called for. Chadwick brought with him Professor Simpson, a plague specialist. In the following years they produced another report dealing once more with the deficiencies in housing and the appalling shortcomings in public hygiene.

The year r9or was also the year of a serious drought in which the colony experienced the 'practical value of the ·newly acquired territory'. Supplies of water were brought from Tsuen Wan by boat to Hong Kong and emptied into tanks set up on the Praya. During the spring and summer it was from these tanks, laboriously, that the population got much of its supply. Drought, hitherto a less serious problem, now made its debut (and continued a serious threat sporadically until the r97os). Steps were taken in 1902 to provide the Kowloon peninsula with an adequate water supply, the old wells at Ho Man Tin being supP,lemented by a new scheme in which a reservoir was built in the hills near Ma Tsz Keng (Smugglers' Ridge) and a tunnel cut, through which water gravitated down to Kowloon.

200 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

It was the contents of the new Chadwick-Simpson report which inspired Ordinance No. 1 of 1 903 (the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance). At last it appeared the government was taking the position seriously. Plague deaths in 1 898 were 1, 1 75, rising to 1 ,428 in 1 899. In 1 900 a total of 1 ,43 4 died, and in the following year the epidemic was so severe that numbers of Europeans died and Chinese began to leave the colony. It is open to suspicion that the numbers of Westerners appearing for the first time in the casualty lists may not have had a negative effect on the counsels of the administration. Despite the medical officer's pronouncement that it was more probable that rats caught plague from man than man from rats, it was generally accepted that fleas transmitted the plague from rats to man. Blake had started a great campaign against rats and an offer of two cents for each rat tail produced by members of the public was a stupendous success; 43 ,ooo tails were handed in during 1900, but suspicion grew that the numbers were swollen by imports from the New Territories - even from China - and were not from infected animals.

The Governor had done much to improve general sanitary conditions by strengthening the Sanitary Board and by appointing extra Inspectors of Nuisances and introducing drain inspectors. In 1 899 he had pushed through the Insanitary Properties Ordinance to deal with cocklofts, and to restrict the partitioning of rooms into tiny cubicles - all matters recommended in the original Chadwick Report.

Embodied in the Chadwick-Simpson report were meticulous directions for the examination of rats, the rat-proofing of all houses, and the need for more



In 1902, Sir Henry Blake and his family moved into the newly rebuilt Mountain Lodge, the Governor's official summer residence on the Peak.

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 201 water. The report also couns.elled the government that there was no substitute for the resumption and demolition of unsuitable structures, and rebuilding on sanitary principles. In Central District in 1902 there was still an average of 502 persons per acre, in 1904 no fewer than 608.

In the last year of Blake's tenure important public works were begun. The

new red brick Post Office and Government Offices started to rise at the foot of Pedder Street; the Supreme Court, designed by Sir Aston Webb, the architect of Buckingham Palace's new fa<;ade and of Admiralty Arch in London, was begun on a site next to the Hong Kong Club which, with the statue of Queen Victoria, had been completed in 1 898. The memorials to the old Queen - the Victoria Hospital on Barker Road, and Jubilee Street connecting Connaught Road with Queen's Road Central, were both com­ pleted. But the enthusiasm of town planners for that civic dream, the long­ awaited waterfront road to connect Central District with Wan Chai, was again to be dashed when the Admiralty's 1903 plan to build a dock on the naval site in Central was finally approved. The decision, ill-advised and hasty, was made in response to international tensions and the presumed need for a strong naval base in Hong Kong.



The unveiling ohhe statue of Queen Victoria, commissioned to commemorate her Golden Jubilee. It was enshrined in the domed construction on the left. Beyond, the new Hong Kong Club building is nearly finished.

202 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Partly in the wake of public realization that British rule had so singularly failed to change the outlook of the Chinese in the colony, the subject of education again raised questions in Blake's time; but another reason was to be found in the dilemma which had been faced many times over in other colonies, particularly in India - the relative value and the position of the local language and English in education. In Hong Kong this problem, not to be solved either soon or easily, was complicated by the demands of British parents for separate schools for their children, and for the introduction of the Cam�ridge, and later Oxford, Local Examinations, whose standards compel­ led some schools to raise their own in order to prepare candidates who might want to sit them, and who were mostly English.

There was a growing recognition that Chinese private schools were more sought after by parents than the free government institutions offering similar education. Eitel, Inspector of Schools, retired on a pension in 1 897 and was replaced by E. A. Irving in 1901. The new Inspector hailed from Perak and was an advocate of vernacular education. The year saw a petition from the European community on · the subject of Europeans-only schools, and the allegation was made that in mixed European and Chinese schools the races held each other back. On the Chinese side, eight leading figures petitioned for schools where children of the 'better classes' would not have to sit with those of the lower classes.

The topic was a thorny one haunted by ill-defined questions of racial as

well as educational content, and to deal with it Blake wisely set up a com­ mittee of enquiry whose recommendations, given in May 1902, turned out to be of a highly controversial nature. It proposed separate schools for European British subjects, and 'English' schools for non-British children whose parents wanted them to be educated with English as the medium of teaching. Grants to four Portuguese-language schools were to be withdrawn. The report criti­ cized Chinese education, reasoning that it was better to educate a few Chinese well than to attempt the task with the multitude. The low standard of English where it was taught in Anglo-Chinese schools was deplored and it was pro­ posed that the higher forms in these schools be taught by British teachers.

Vernacular schools were to be attached to Anglo-Chinese schools under one . headmaster.

A well-known Eurasian philanthropist, Sir Robert Hotung, had presented a school in Kowloon to the government, open to all and having English as the medium of instruction. The government now high-handedly proposed to take it as the British school, excluding other races. Belilios had given Hong Kong a reformatory school, and this too was commandeered by the government for use as a British school on the island.

Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State, was deeply critical of the report and strongly condemned the racist attitudes which countenanced the setting up of schools exclusively for the British; and was appalled at the misuse of the

Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 203

Hotung and Belilios generosity in donating schools which were now taken over for British schoolchildren. The report, he thought, was inconsistent since, while advocating an educational system on racial lines, it also wished to do away with the Portuguese schools. 'The first duty was to maintain the vernacular schools', he suggested. And he was against restricting to any one race the entry to Queen's College and the Belilios Girls' School. The purely Chinese classes at the former were to be restored. Since parents had demanded a British school in Kowloon, he sanctioned this. In short, Cham­ berlain rejected the report as a basis for reform.



Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies from June r 8 9 5 to December 1905. The artist is John Singer Sargent, one of the fashionable portraitists of the period.



Thus the process of change continued, gradual, unsatisfactory, piecemeal, in the British democratic tradition. The system by which grants were made was amended. Under the next two Governors, Nathan and Lugard, technical education received a boost with the setting up in 1907 of the Hong Kong Technical Institute which also offered teacher training; and later, in 1911, by the formation of the Board of Chinese Vernacular Primary Education - after which the principle of this form of teaching was not again seriously challenged. But the government's reluctance to formulate a realistic education policy closely resembled the foot-dragging of successive administrations in the matters o'f water supply and sanitary legislation. As in the field of public works, so in education, vested interest as opposed to public interest, the

204 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

monied Westerners and wealthy Chinese could be seen making sure that their own received the best education. The efforts they made for those in less privileged positions were, if not merely cosmetic, then less than enthusiastic. Hong Kong entered the twentieth century with a vastly enlarged territory, with an administration groping its way towards a satisfactory means of dealing with r00,000 newly acquired and dubiously loyal citizens - and in an atmosphere filled with the gun smoke in which the Western and Japanese powers had engulfed the Orient. Few people in Hong Kong or indeed elsew_here could then have envisaged that this process, begun by Western mercantile rapacity in China, would result under half a century later in an entire ly new, sharply different Orient, one in which their influence

(apart from that of Japan) would no longer be paramount.

I 7 . The First Two Decades of the New Century



SIR Henry Blake left in November 1903 . It was nine months before his successor arrived, the interim filled by F. H. May who had replaced Stewart Lockhart as Colonial Secretary. Sir Matthew Nathan, a bachelor of 39 on his arrival in July 1904, was the colony's only unmarried governor. Although by career a Royal Engineer, he was, as Sayer puts it, 'a natural financier'. He was to put both capabilities to good use.

Sir Matthew Nathan tackled the financial side first, taking measures to stem the constant loss to the treasury incurred as the subsidiary coinage diminished in value in relation to the dollar. He set that department the goal of restoring its proper value. In 1904 and 1905, there was no less than $44 million worth of silver coins in circulation, an oversupply greatly exceeding the needs of the populace. Nathan stopped the issue of further supplies and demon­ etized all the small silver received until the sag in value was taken up.

Nathan's civil engineering background was the probable spark that fired his interest in the project for a railway to connect the colony with Guangzhou, and from there north to Hangkou, which was already linked by rail with Beijing. The Russian Trans-Siberian line to Europe had already opened in 1903 . Nathan's was the inspiration, and later the dogged patience, in the convoluted negotiations behind the construction by British interests ot the sector from Guangzhou southwards, while the line from Kowloon to the border was being laid. That section was completed in 1910. By 1912 it was possible to reach Guangzhou by train from Hong Kong. By raising

£1,100,000 from the Crown Agents and lending the sum to the Viceroy of Hubei-Hunan at 4 r/2 per cent interest (the principal repayable at £ r10,000 per annum), the Hong Kong government enabled the Chinese to start the construction of the Guangzhou- Hangkou track. It was at the time 'an act of faith', for 'the line existed on paper only . . . and thirty years were to pass before [it] was through'. 1

In anticipation of further concessions by China following the suppression of the Boxer troubles, the British and Chinese Corporation had been formed

206 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

by the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardine's in 1898. The company built the Kowloon- Guangzhou railway line and later parti­ cipated in that from Guangzhou northwards.

Meanwhile the reclamation which Chater had initiated, running from Pedder Street to Western Market, was completed in 1905 and two years later had been 'practically built over; there were only one or two lots still vacant'. 2 And the first section of a tramway line along the road from Kennedy Town in the west all the way to Shau Kei Wan had been opened in 1904, the inaugural run made in a tram driven by Mrs Jones, wife of the Director of Public Works - her son 'operating the bell continuously'.3 The early trams were open, elegant vehicles designed for summer's heat but less convenient in the torrential rains that accompany it. In 1909 Governor Lugard was to show civic pride in this enterprise by taking his guest, the Viceroy of Guangdong, for a ride in a procession of two decorated cars to Quarry Bay to inspect the new Taikoo Docks built there.



John Samuel Swire, founder of Butterfield and Swire, now John Swire and Sons.

The First Two Decades of the New Century 207

By the end of the nineteenth century Hong Kong had become a major port in world trade. One factor which had contributed to this development was, importantly, the undeveloped state of land transport within China, which necessitated the efficient linking of its coastal with its inland water communications, and those with the outside world. By 1900, some 41 per cent of China's foreign trade passed through the colony - forming 3 3 per cent of Hong Kong's total foreign trade. In the 15 years prior to 1900 the tonnage of shipping clearing the port had reached 14 million, and most of that was accounted for by British shipping (6 5 per cent) - which also had the lion's share of tonnage clearing China's open ports (5 8 per cent).

In this all but incredible dominance of China's trade the bulk of the coastal movement was handled by the Hong Kong company Butterfield and Swire Limited, whose China Navigation Company vied with the shipping line owned by Jardine's, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company. Other lines were smaller - the Douglas Steamship Company (originally owned by Lapraik), and the Macao Steamship Company. Even the inter-ocean scene was dominated by British interests - the Peninsular and Oriental, the Glen Line, the Blue Funnel Line. By the turn of the century sailing ships had largely given way to steamers whose ability to keep to fairly tight schedules was a significant factor in import and export profits. But cost-free wind power, as opposed to the expense of coal, permitted sailing ships to linger on, if only in a minor role. Even in 1920, a total of 26 British and nine American square­ riggers cleared Hong Kong harbour.

Another component in Hong Kong's growth was the question of the

Chinese language. Written and spoken Chinese having proved an insur­ mountable obstacle to doing business in other countries, Hong Kong had been quick to offer the conduct of import and export transactions on their behalf.

A third important element in expansion after 1900 related to the changing pattern of things in China where railway development went on apace, and where, after the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, foreigners could operate factories in the Treaty Ports. The railways facilitated the opening up of areas from which local produce could be readily extracted and exported. There was a gradual increase in China's exports and a corresponding increase in her imports of such materials as coal and kerosene, dyes and metals.

But while the Sino-Japanese war allowed foreign expansion in China, it also resulted in a .diminution in the export trade through Hong Kong (and also through Shanghai) as Japan extended her sphere of influence over north China. By 1913 the all but 5 o per cent of British exports to China which had passed through the colony in the late 18 8os had fallen to about 22 per cent. At the same time, however, Hong Kong's trade with other countries was on the increase, and this to some extent offset the decline and began to alter the overall picture of the colony's commerce.

208 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong

Accompanying this trade expansion and diversification was the need for docking and ship-repairing facilities. The new Taikoo Docks was thought to be one of the most sophisticated shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards in the East. Designed in 1900, the dry dock was capable of taking the largest ship then afloat, the Oceanic, a giant 685 feet long with a beam of 68 feet. The docks had been constructed on 5 2 acres of reclaimed land, the attraction of the site being its close proximity to the harbour's eastern entrance, Lei Yue Mun Strait. With this development and the almost simultaneous naval dockyard extension, Hong Kong harbour reached the peak of its docking facilities - although numerous smaller shipyards sprouted later under Chinese management at such sites as Tai Kok Tsui, Cheung Sha Wan, and the north-eastern part of Kowloon Bay. Together with the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company which owned five docks and had been in business since 1866, the Taikoo Docks sufficed for the colony's need_s. These docking companies were the leaders in heavy industry, employing an average of 12,000 workers. A demand for deep-water berthing was satisfied by Butterfield and Swire's wharves and back-up facilities at Kowloon Point (Tsim Sha Tsui), collectively known as Holt's Wharf, and extended in 1915 by dredging to permit ocean-going steamers to berth. By 1925 there were 18 deep-draught berths, and Hong Kong had, tardily, in response as usual to events outside its borders, developed into that 'mart of trade' prematurely predicted over sixty years before.



The Taikoo Docks in use.

The First Two Decades of the New Century 209

Nathan's enquiry into the Sanitary Board in 1907, under pressure for its conversion to a Municipal Council, had served a wider purpose than the exposing of irregularities. It had directed attention to the whole question of corrupt practices in Hong Kong. The large number of Chinese in Hong Kong who had been born and brought up in China saw what was termed corruption in the colony as a normal part of living. It was regarded as neither good nor evil, social behaviour institutionalized and related at root to the miserable salaries paid to Chinese government servants, which they supple­ mented by levying surtaxes and receiving gifts - what were euphemistically calle d kuei-fei, customary gifts. But the British born and educated cadet officer in the colony was quite another matter. Raised in a climate of values and with a code of behaviour inculcated by public school education, he was not normally tempted into corruption - his salary was generally adequate. Few, however, of the middle and lower level officers of the government came from that background. The Sanitary Board's inspectors and overseers were locally recruited, often former servicemen paid off in the colony; others were beachcombers.

In departments such as the Surveyor-General's (renamed Public Works in

1891), the Registrar-General's (called Secretariat for Chinese Affairs after 1913 ), and the Police, there were obvious opportunities for corruption. The average Chinese could not reach the officer heading the division or even his Western subordinate s. He saw some junior Chinese clerk in the outer office. To obtain the correct form or licence, to voice a complaint, a little money had to change hands in the age-old Chinese manner.

The Hong Kong Gazette of 1898 revealed the extent of police corruption. In the previous year one well-known gambling e stablishment was raided by the Captain-Superintendent of Police who impounded various receipt books. These revealed that the e stablishment, headquarters of a Chinese gambling syndicate , had been paying protection money to numerous police constables, and to European inspectors and members of the Registrar-General's depart­ ment. The outcome, in a self-righteous flurry of public outcry about immoral practices (which everyone knew existed), was that a European police in­ spector received a six-month prison sentence, three others and a sergeant were dismissed, and two sergeants were asked to resign. Nineteen Indian and 18 Chinese constables were dismissed, and a further 44 Chinese constables resigned - a procedure which left the force at approximately half strength. Britain and Japan signed the Anglo-Japane se Alliance in January 1902, a pact aimed at isolating Russia. Japan declared war on Russia in 1904 and sank its flee t, emerging as the dominant power in the Far East. China, oblique ly, lay under Japanese threat. Into a gene rally threatening inter­ national situarion the great typhoon of 18 September 1906 injecte d a note of terror as it struck Hong Kong with what seemed unparalleled violence and with little warning, leaving in its wake a harbour littered with wrecks, an



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