an-illustrated-history-of-hong-kong — Page 1

J.
Nigel Cameron
AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF HONG KONG
In a period of about one hundred and fifty years as a British colony, Hong Kong has grown from an uninviting collection of sparsely populated islands to become one of the manufacturing, commercial, and finan- cial centres of the world, with a population nearing six million. This is a remarkable achievement in any context.
The history of Hong Kong is as dynamic as its economic and social achievements, and a fresh examination of that history is long overdue. Previous studies of the history of Hong Kong have seen events largely through Western eyes. This important new assess- ment makes use of Chinese sources, where these are available, and presents a very dif- ferent perspective on the interplay between the Chinese and Westerners who have shaped the development of Hong Kong.
Within a broadly chronological frame- work, a narrative history of wide-ranging scope unfolds
sweeping from prehistoric times to the 1980s, when Hong Kong began preparing for the resumption of Chinese sov- ereignty in 1997. Enlivened by character studies of many of the significant and colour- ful figures in Hong Kong's past and illu- minated by a fascinating selection of illustra- tions, this authoritative volume will appeal to general readers, students, and scholars.
The book contains over one hundred and twenty illustrations, of which twenty-four are colour plates. Many of these illustra- tions are published here for the first time. In addition there are maps, a glossary, and a comprehensive bibliography.
Jacket illustrations: A Chinese school painting of Hong Kong from the harbour, 1850, showing the hulks Princess Charlotte and Tamar at anchor. St John's Cathedral, with the house of the Commander-in-Chief to its left, is visible on the hill, and the two turrets of the Roman Catholic Cathedral are above the sails of the clipper (lower right). Reproduced by courtesy of Martyn Gregory, London. Back: A view of the north shore of Hong Kong island, 1989. To the left are the naval docks and in the centre are the business district and behind this, Mid-Levels. Serried ranks of tall build- ings stretch on to West Point, far right. Reproduced by courtesy of Frank Fischbeck, Hong Kong.
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AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY
OF HONG KONG
AN
ILLUSTRATED
HISTORY
OF
HONG KONG
NIGEL CAMERON
Hong Kong
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
1991
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Oxford University Press 1991
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press 'Oxford' is a trade mark of Oxford University Press
First published 1991
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press, Inc., New York
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cameron, Nigel
An illustrated history of Hong Kong. 1. Hong Kong, history
I. Title
951.25
ISBN 0-19-584997-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cameron, Nigel.
An illustrated history of Hong Kong | Nigel Cameron.
р.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-584997-3: $45.00 (est.)
1. Hong Kong-History. I. Title. DS796.H757C36 1991 951.25-dc20 90-48787
CIP
Printed in Hong Kong by Elite Printing Co., Ltd. Published by Oxford University Press, Warwick House, Hong Kong
IN AFFECTIONATE MEMORY OF IRENE JOYCE (JO) BOSTON (1909-1989)
CONTENTS
List of Colour Plates
List of Maps and Figures
INTRODUCTION
४ ४
1X
I
I.
THE ORIGINS OF CONFRONTATION
4
2. FIRST CLASHES
/3. THE TREATY OF NANJING
4. EARLY HONG KONG
17
26
32
5. GOVERNOR DAVIS ONE AGAINST ALL
44
6. EARLY VICTORIA
―
FABRIC AND SOCIETY
55
7.
GOVERNOR BONHAM
67
75
90
8. BOWRING'S WAR WITH CHINA
9.
IO.
II.
I2.
CONSOLIDATION UNDER ROBINSON
THE GROWTH OF CHINESE INSTITUTIONS, AND THE PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION
MACDONNELL AND THE LAWLESS 'DEPOT'
COLONIAL APPEASEMENT
13. MR HENNESSY'S PROCEEDINGS
14.
PUBLIC HEALTH, AND THE BLOCKADE
15. CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM, AND THE
LEGALIZATION OF OPIUM
103
119
129
138
152
164
16. PLAGUE, AND THE NEW TERRITORIES
ACQUIRED
180
17. THE FIRST TWO DECADES OF THE NEW
CENTURY
205
Contents
18.
INTER-WAR YEARS
THE TWENTIES
224
19. INTER-WAR YEARS
THE THIRTIES
237
20. INVASION AND OCCUPATION
21.
REHABILITATION AND TRANSFORMATION
22. POPULATION, HOUSING, AND EDUCATION
23. GROWTH OF AN INDUSTRIAL GIANT
250
265
280
293
24.
CORRUPTION AND THE ICAC
25. FINAL YEARS
Notes
306
320
327
Appendices
Bibliography Glossary
Acknowledgements
Index
333
342
346
347
348
LIST OF COLOUR PLATES
(Between pp. 102 and 103)
An East India Company officer, c. 1800 (Martyn Gregory)
Tea being packed for sale to Western merchants, late eighteenth century (Martyn Gregory) Opium ships at Lingding Island, 1824 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.) A street in Guangzhou, 1838 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
A view of the Guangzhou factories, c.1850 (Martyn Gregory)
Admiral Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief, who arrived in Macau in 1841 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Howqua, the senior Chinese merchant in Guangzhou, c. 1830-40 (Martyn Gregory)
A young Chinese merchant at Guangzhou, early nineteenth century (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Commissioner Lin, c.1840 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
View of Macau, prior to 1844 (Martyn Gregory)
Possibly the earliest oil painting of Hong Kong island (The Asian Collector Ltd., Hong Kong)
The opium clipper, Red Rover, undated (Martyn Gregory)
Two medals awarded to Sir Henry Pottinger (Christie's)
(Between pp. 230 and 231)
Jardine's East Point offices and godowns, 1844 (Martyn Gregory)
The residence of the Lieutenant-Governor, Major-General D'Aguilar, in Hong Kong, 1840s (Hong Kong Museum of Art)
Chinese nursemaids and their charges, 1856 (Christie's)
Happy Valley racecourse and the colonial cemetery, late 1840s (Martyn Gregory)
Spring Gardens, Hong Kong, 1846 (Martyn Gregory)
Sir Boshan Wei Yuk, a wealthy business man, early twentieth century (Christie's)
A crowd on the way to the races, 1858 (Christie's)
A street stall and its patrons, south China, 1839 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Hong Kong coolies, mid-nineteenth century (The Asian Collector Ltd., Hong Kong)
Races at the Canton Regatta Club, 1850s (Martyn Gregory)
The north shore of Hong Kong island, 1989 (Frank Fischbeck)
LIST OF MAPS AND FIGURES
The Territory of Hong Kong
1. A plan of Guangzhou
2. The geographical setting of the opium trade
3. Victoria in 1845 and 1848
4. Plan of a typical tenement house, built before 1903
5. Plan of the first floor of a wealthy Chinese house, nineteenth century
Front endpaper
6
13
59
154
154
6. The map attached to the Convention between Great Britain and China, 1898 7. The defensive line and the routes of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong Reclamation and development in Hong Kong
192
258
Back endpaper
Introduction
IN the year 1997 when Hong Kong-reverts to Chinese_sovereignty, a mere one hundred and fifty-six years will have elapsed since it became a British possession. What was then an insignificant mountainous scattering of larger and smaller coastal islands in the South China Sea, the haunt of pirates, the refuge of occasional storm-blown fishermen, peopled by several hundred resident fishers and farmers, changed in a few years into a small, bustling, striving, and strident Victorian seaport of the Orient.
A war with China gave it birth, its other parent being the Western passion for trade. Further wars between the British and the Chinese, basically over that unruly and headlong passion, were to shape Hong Kong's society, while the flux of trade itself conditioned its thinking as well as the physical form of Victoria, its main settlement.
As other ports opened to Western trade up and down the China coast, the fledgling colony faltered but persevered, attaining its apparently final form by the first decade of the twentieth century. The First World War did not deeply affect its fortunes, or greatly alter its outlook or position in the world. By the outbreak of World War II, Hong Kong was little different from the colony of 1910. But this second world conflict ended the colony's life under a brutal Japanese occupation that lasted three years until the tide turned and the British returned, uncertain colonists in a now anti-colonial Orient.
Within a decade of the war's end the Hong Kong of the past was embarked on a curious process of change and development. This process was so unusual in an apparently adult city that it took most Hong Kong people by surprise. The 1949 revolution in China served as the catalyst initiating this unexpected development; the post-war economic climate and the revolution in industrial processes encouraged and continued it. An entirely different colonial entity emerged modern Hong Kong, a city haphazardly grown into one of the commercial, industrial, and financial giants of the world.
The last part of Hong Kong's colonial history constitutes the period of its real significance in the world. In this, Hong Kong is unlike most places where growth usually follows a more predictable pattern. Gradual decline from greatness is a more usual picture than that of dramatic rebirth.
2 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Historically, Hong Kong is a distinctly odd place. Lacking a background of normal, logical progression to eventual maturity, it turned from_a_sort_of fixed colonial adolescence to an adult state of a genetically improbable kind. The huge success of this new entity imbues it with a quality as unique as it is elusive of description.
The story and significance of Hong Kong, more than that of most cities (or city-states as in some ways it may be seen), is to be sought primarily in early nineteenth-century economic thrust and later in the effects of economic and political upheavals in China. Hong Kong's belated economic success is due in essence to post-World War II capitalist drive and a massive influx of Chinese refugees who became its manpower. In successful combination those factors forged the Hong Kong of today. Equally, they are contributing factors in the coming demise of the territory as a separate political entity in 1997.
In his history of Hong Kong, first published in 1958, the late G. B. Endacott opens the first chapter with the following sentence: 'Hong Kong is a British colony situated on the South-east coast of China.' It is a measure of the profound change in status of the place that today, thirty years on, virtually no one in the world who can read a newspaper any longer needs to be offered that piece of information. Many of them may in fact be wearing clothes or listening to a radio inade in Hong Kong. From the barely emerging industrial entity described by Endacott, an astonishingly different Hong Kong has bloomed. Its future, cloudy and disregarded in those early days of the communist revolution in China, is now approaching something like clarity. As its term draws near and the treaty with China terminates Britain's lease in 1997, we shall see the final close of a colourful period.
-
In the light of those facts, one of the periodic updatings which the passage of time and the press of events requires in considering the history of any place would seem due for Hong Kong. It was still possible in 1958 to regard colonial possessions — those which had not by then been surrendered to their indigenous peoples — with a certain glow of nostalgic pride as Britain relin- quished them and their (in colonial terms) insurmountable problems. That opinion is largely unacceptable now. Thirty years on, whatever our personal view may be of colonialism, it can scarcely be identical with that current in the climate of political opinion of 1958. The intervening years have, among myriad other transformations, cast Hong Kong in a role of some significance in the world context, a position it did not then hold. In those three decades major shifts in political thought have taken place, and the perspective we now apply to the scene has sharply altered. Reason enough for a retelling of the story.
However tempting a pastime it may be, gazing into a crystal ball has little relevance in a history, and it requires no clairvoyant faculty to see, and no great courage to admit, that whatever the state of affairs after the colony's return to China in 1997 a state of affairs promised by the Chinese to
Introduction 3
remain unchanged for 50 years. a great city which will have passed from the hands of a Western democracy to those of Chinese socialism will be rather unlikely to continue as the same sort of organism for very long. What Hong Kong will become after 1997 must be envisaged as its third state.
It is with the first two historical states of the colony, the pre-industrial and the industrial, that this volume attempts to deal.1
1. The Origins of Confrontation
HONG KONG was from the very beginning a unique colony. Unlike other lands when the British took them, it was sparsely populated, an island (in the guess of the government Gazette of May 1841) of some 7,450 villagers and fishermen. It had not a semblance of mineral wealth, its terrain was mostly mountainous with little flat land, and there was scarcely a tree, far less any- thing that might be called a forest. As the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put the matter, in high disgust at the choice, Hong Kong was a 'barren island with hardly a house upon it'. No teeming populace awaited the chance of British employment on plantations or other enterprises, no great river flooded down from some rich hinterland. The local Chinese eked out a paltry living from tiny rice paddies squeezed into valleys, by keeping chickens and a few pigs, and by fishing the local waters. Pirates, indigenous to the China coasts, perched now and then between raids like predators in this or that secluded cove. It was an altogether insignificant place.
The reason for the taking of Hong Kong that understood by British merchants of the time and only partially comprehended by Lord Palmerston in England was the need to secure a land base from which they could conduct their business of purveying to China the illegal import opium. For this trade they required only a sheltered deep-water harbour for their ships and a strip of shore for their 'factories',1 as trading stations were then named. They took Hong Kong as they had taken other places, by force of arms. A small force, admittedly, but deployed without the consent of the rightful owners, the Chinese imperial government. There is some slight room for doubt, indeed, whether the choice of Hong Kong island was entirely a British one. E. J. Eitel, a civil servant in Hong Kong whose book Europe in China is a history of the colony's first half century, hints at this. It is conceivable at least that the cunning Qishan, Viceroy of Chili, with whom Captain Elliot negotiated for a base, made the suggestion. Guangzhou, seat of the provincial governor of Guangdong Province, was a mere day's sailing west and up the Zhu Jiang (the Pearl River), and from there it would be simple, in theory at least, to keep an eye on the barbarian colonists and their activities which, after all, were principally the importation of opium up that same river to
1
The Origins of Confrontation 5
Guangzhou, the sole port at which the Chinese countenanced trade with foreigners. Eitel, who knew personally many of those who participated in the founding of Hong Kong, allows the possibility of Qishan's influence.
-
-
One of the fundamentals of Chinese policy towards commercial contacts with non-Chinese peoples, applying equally to tribes from Central Asia and to foreigners who came in ships to its coasts. a policy initiated as long ago as the Ming dynasty laid down the principle that trade was a privilege granted by a beneficent emperor to the inhabitants of the less desirable regions of the world. To trade with the Chinese could in no sense be con- sidered a right. Conversely, one of the fundamentals of Western thought was, and is, that to trade with those, no matter where, who are willing to purchase and to sell is the natural right of all men.
It was the inevitable contradiction enshrined in those opinions which lay at the root of the history of relationships between the West and China, from the very first time_a_Western merchant, a Portuguese, arrived at Guangzhou in September 1517 with the serious intent to trade. In fact, the Portuguese ships managed to trade peacefully and returned to Malacca from where they had come, their captain 'loaded with riches and renown'. And Macau, established by the Portuguese on a tiny peninsula at the mouth of the Zhu Jiang, was ceded to Portugual in 1557 one result of the banning of direct trade between China and Japan, after which the Portuguese fleet of merchantmen became the prime carriers of that commerce in place of the Chinese.
Trade restrictions imposed in the Ming dynasty, and in the early Qing (which succeeded it in 1644), were eased by the late seventeenth century, and foreign vessels called at Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Ningbo. Later, restrictions were reintroduced and British attempts to claim old trading privileges in 1755 met with resistance. Under the Qianlong emperor (1736-95) trade was virtually confined to Guangzhou. It was this restriction, imposed by the Chinese in an attempt to ward off the aggressive attentions of stubborn foreign merchants, and to stem the outflow of silver from the treasury to pay for opium imports, which proved to be one of the principal precipitating causes of what came later to be termed the century of Western aggression and dominance in China.
Guangzhou was to remain the sole legal port where trading was permitted from 1757 until the forcible opening of Nanjing by the British under the terms of what the Chinese justifiably call the First Unequal Treaty of 1842. British trade with China has a much shorter history than that of the Portuguese. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the major part of Western trade with China came to be in British hands, and this was very largely because of the proximity of India. The sub-continent acted as a staging post on lengthy voyages to and from China and was, more importantly, a source of some of the goods which were carried in ever larger quantities to China in British ships.
6 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The monopoly of British trade with China was held by the British East India Company whose principal cargo was the tea to which the British public was so deeply addicted. Other goods from China porcelain among them were carried, but tea was the mainstay, the company gradually permitting other merchants to handle other goods. The Chinese, in an effort to regulate trade and to profit by it, had long ago designated a group of merchants in Guangzhou through whom foreign trade was exclusively channelled. This group, called by the British the Co-hong, was required by the authorities in Beijing to pay large sums of money for this privilege. They in turn extracted it from foreign traders in the form of taxes levied by the Guangzhou Maritime Customs with a severity and stringency which varied from time to time in an arbitrary manner.
SPORT
PLAN
OF THE
CITY OF CANTON.
1. Custom House.
2. Foreign Factories.
3. Hoppo's Yamen.
4 Viceroy's Yamen to 1868; R.C. Cathedral
from 1860.
6. Viceroy's Yamen from 1860.
6. Governor's Yamen.
7.
Tartar-General's Yamen.
8. Manchu Parade Ground.
9.
Examination Hall.
10. British Consulate from 1860.
11. French
12.
Execution Ground. 18. Petition ·Gate.
FORT
MOSQUE
FI
11
Approximato Scale of
A
1000
2000
Foot
3000
4000
FATI
FLOWER GARDENS
SHAMEEN
(SANDBANK)
RECLAIMED IN 1859
+
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FORT
FIVE STOREYZO
BFORT
PAGODA
8
5
UTCH FOLES
7
HONAM
HONAN TEMPLE
hmm
9
FRENCH FOL FORT
FORTSD
1. A plan of Guangzhou showing the locations of the foreign factories and other principal sites.
(Source: Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire.)
-
-
The Co-hong owned what were termed 'factories' warehouses and residential buildings — situated outside Guangzhou's city limits to the south- east and fronting the river. There foreigners were permitted to live and trade for the 'season' (from October to May each year), after which they were
The Origins of Confrontation 7
obliged to leave for Macau. These conditions had been accepted with more or less good grace as inevitable, but other constraints on trading became increasingly irksome and were seen by the merchants as approaching the intolerable. The Eight Regulations laid down by the Chinese, while not always applied, included not only the ban on residence and trading during the four summer months but also a ban on movement outside the factories and on entry into Guangzhou itself. Foreigners were forbidden to learn Chinese, although this rule was not always enforced, and all communications with the Co-hong had to be made in Chinese via the officially appointed linguists. Even more vexatious, those communications were required to be couched in the form of petitions and forwarded through the Co-hong to the civil authorities. This, of course, was in line with the Chinese opinion that foreign trade and even the presence of foreigners on Chinese soil was a privilege and in no way a right. Merchants were forbidden to bring their womenfolk with them, and, in theory at least, Chinese servants were not permitted to work in the factories. On a wider horizon, foreign warships were forbidden to enter the mouth of the Zhu Jiang (called by the British, with that combination of romanticism and bravado characteristic of the times, the Bocca Tigris, the Tiger's Mouth).
The effect of those restrictions on the merchants was cumulative and more profound than their content would on the face of it appear to merit. In addition there was the climate of opposing convictions which aroused fury in the merchant breast. And it must also be remembered that in those times there existed an assumption, at least among the less educated members of the foreign community, of their own innate superiority over the Chinese at large; and this was paralleled and mirrored by a strongly held Chinese conviction of similar content.
Behind the details of the regulations, enforced only periodically in time of tension, lay the fact that their strict implementation when the Chinese wished could, and did, bring the unruly traders to heel. To the proud British merchants this was abhorrent.
Both sides erred, both were guilty of misjudgement. The Westerners had no conception of the quality, far less the greatness, of Chinese civilization: the Chinese, having known mostly the rough and ready manners of merchants and seamen, equally had no idea of the attainments of Europeans, classing them as they designated all non-Chinese as yi, a word usually rendered in English as 'barbarian' but meaning 'uncultured'. Even the august Lord Macartney, arriving in Beijing in 1793, found that the barges carrying him to Beijing had been labelled ‘tributary' by Chinese officials following the normal procedure.
China was in a strong position. The Chinese had little need of any of the merchandise brought by the foreigners, while they appeared to be in great need of China's tea and to a lesser degree its silks, porcelains, and even
8 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
exotica such as rhubarb (which was regarded in Chinese circles as the loosener of Western bowels without which it appeared they functioned only sporadically and uncertainly). From the inception, the trading profits were very much China's. All that the merchants bought had to be paid for in silver, the sole currency of the country. The Chinese were a virtually self-sufficient people. They had little need of English broadcloth. Small quantities of lead, tin, and copper from Cornish mines were acceptable. But the balance of trade rested with the Chinese. In 1761 the East India Company shipped 2,626,000 pounds of tea from Guangzhou worth £831,000. Forty years later the amount had risen to 23,300,000 pounds at a cost of £3,665,000. Nine-tenths of the stock on board any British ship bound for Guangzhou consisted of silver bullion.
To some extent this unpromising situation (from the British point of view) was offset by what was called the 'country trade', that which was carried on by private merchants trading between India and China, from which the East India Company derived a profit from shipping the goods.
Attempts to redress the conspicuous imbalance of trade were in the end a crucial factor in determining the future course of relations between Britain and China, and were to result in the birth of Hong Kong.
British determination to trade with China was given a further powerful impetus by the Industrial Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the pioneering East India Company had become an arthritic, deeply conservative organization. In 1833 private traders in cities such as Glasgow and Manchester persuaded the government to end the Company's strangle- hold on all British trade. This was received in the Guangzhou factories with glee, the English-language periodical The Canton Register of March 1834 declaring roundly that 'British trade to China will be entirely free and unrestricted'.
―
The realities of the situation were more complex. In the eighteenth century what were called 'agency houses' had been set up, private traders at Guangzhou working for companies in London and India on commission. Gradually such firms began trading on their own account in rice and opium. The best known was Jardine, Matheson and Company which, in the 1830s, acted in both capacities agency and private trader. The original partners were William Jardine (1785-1843), a ship's surgeon who joined Magniac and Company as their agent at Guangzhou; and James Matheson (1796–1878), who came to South China as Danish Consul at Guangzhou and went into the agency business. He joined Magniac, then controlled by Jardine, and in 1832 the name became Jardine, Matheson and Company. This event was to cast its shadow over the relationship between Britain and China for many a decade
to come.
The economic clout of the agency houses proved to be an irresistible force. Before the end of the East India Company's monopoly of British trade there
Dr William Jardine (1785-1843). The portrait by George Chinnery (1774-1852), the most accomplished Western artist to work in the East during the nineteenth century, spending the last 27 years of his life in and around Macau, is one of the artist's most accomplished. Jardine and James Matheson were co-founders of the 'Princely Hong', as Jardine, Matheson and Company came to be known.
were 88 of them in Guangzhou, and by 1837 they numbered 158, and handled more than half of the total British trade there. The Co-hong merchants, charged by the Chinese government to deal with all foreign trade, lacked sufficient capital and were indebted to the foreign traders, by the 1830s owing about $3 million to them at 1.5 per cent interest per month. The Co-hong merchants were further squeezed by their government which arbitrarily extracted from them huge sums in 1834 almost 500,000 taels of silver, earmarked for the emperor, repairs to the banks of the Huang He (the Yellow River), and presents to the hoppo, the head of Chinese Maritime Customs. The situation for the Chinese merchants gradually became intolerable.
The other factor, besides the difficulties encountered at Guangzhou, leading to the seizure of Hong Kong was opium. The subject has been chronicled as the dirtiest scandal of British trade and foreign relations, and set aside by other writers as an inevitable product of the trade imbalance between Britain and a self-sufficient China. Yet, during much of the nine- teenth century, opium (called laudanum in Britain) could be bought freely in
ΙΟ
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
any chemist's shop and was in regular use before the discovery of aspirin for the alleviation of pain.
The zeal with which merchants traded in opium is well documented, not least in their own letters and other papers, by the Chinese involved, and by those on both sides who wished to suppress the trade. But when the stakes are high, zeal is common enough among the punters. Yet in any balanced summing up it has to be conceded that the whole history of the importation of opium into China by unscrupulous merchants forms one of the most unsavoury and ignoble episodes in British mercantile ventures, surpassed only by the horrors of the slave trade.
A mere outline of the figures involved in the sale of opium shows the scale of the financial exchange that took place. At the time of the first Chinese prohibition edict in 1729 (there were another 47 to follow, 22 of them imperial) about two hundred chests of opium were imported by China in a year. A chest generally weighed 140 pounds, the weight varying with the season and the type, thus the annual total consumption was 28,000 pounds of the drug. In 1767 the total had jumped to around the thousand mark (140,000 pounds). And this comparatively slow increase rocketed from about the turn of the century until the beginning of the Opium War four decades later. Despite what one of the principal merchants called 'the hottest persecution we remember', suppression of the trade by the Chinese was almost always ineffectual, even when the opium ships were driven from Guangzhou to the mouth of the Zhu Jiang in 1820, whereupon the island of Lingding was quickly pressed into service as the new depot. The trade, hitherto fluctuating under attempts at suppression, then increased to 18,670 chests per annum and a price war began between Jardine, Matheson and Company and others selling opium from Western India. This was resolved by the formation of a syndicate of all the opium dealers, and by 1834 the total opium import for the year stood at 16,516 (over 3.3 million pounds) valued at silver $9,654,970. In the following year (1835–6) the total import rose to 27,111 chests (almost 4 million pounds) valued at $17,904,248.
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The British were not alone in the trade. Their supplies were grown in India (in some places under duress). There was a sizeable American contribution of opium from Turkey to the extent that many Chinese thought that country was a part of the United States. The traffic was so profitable that in 1839 The Chinese Recorder, published in Guangzhou, summed up the situation in these words:
-
The most eminent merchants engaged freely in the traffic... Throughout India and China, many of the most distinguished merchants men who would be slow to partake in any other than what they regarded as honourable pursuits have been foremost in this traffic.
―
Opportunities for profit on a massive scale were taken up by both Chinese
The Origins of Confrontation II
and foreigners. Chinese law was openly flouted by both sides and, when temporarily enforced, subverted by stealth. In such a climate of opinion the effects of opium on the users was not considered. What was more apparent, at least to the Chinese, was the economic havoc caused by the colossal drain of China's silver into Western pockets.
—
Even the torpid Beijing authorities at last informed the emperor in 1838 of the plight of Fujian and Guangdong Provinces where nine persons out of 10 were opium addicts. Western travellers remarked that in Chinese towns opium shops were as common as gin shops in England. The causes of opium addiction among the Chinese have been more often investigated than has the parallel English addiction to cheap Dutch gin, without much in the way of solid conclusions perhaps the squalid and miserable conditions of life for the poor in both places may offer some clues. But there is no doubt of the extent of the addiction to opium. Lin Zexu (1785-1850), a provincial governor soon to occupy centre stage in the opium conflict, affirmed that I per cent of the population of China (estimated at about four hundred million) was addicted, and official alarm was considerable. In a letter to the British monarch by Lin and others, drafted but not sent, the ravages are eloquently expressed:
There is a class of evil foreigner that makes opium and brings it for sale, tempting fools to destroy themselves, merely in order to reap profit... Now the vice [opium smoking] has spread far and wide... But our great Manzhu Empire regards itself as responsible for the habits and morals of its subjects and cannot rest content to see any of them become victims to a deadly poison...
2
The following year another version of the letter was actually sent, but it seems that it was never received.
The plain fact of the matter was that the Beijing government, having failed in the early stages of opium importation to stop or control it, was now quite incapable of doing so. The problem had become a nation-wide phenomenon involving the very officers of the government who would have to suppress the trade. Corruption was near total.
On the British side was the fact of the enormous sum of money paid out annually for China tea, now more or less balanced by the sum earned from the sale of opium from India especially from Bengal. The total value of the trade in 1832 was 10 million rupees, in 1837 over 20 million, and in the following year over 30 million. A select committee of the House of Commons in London reported in 1830, and again in 1832, that 'it does not seem advisable to abandon so important a source of revenue as the East India Company's monopoly of opium in Bengal'.3 Captain Elliot, soon to play his part in the birth of Hong Kong, wrote from Macau in February 1837 to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, that the value of opium imported into
I 2 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
China in 1836 was larger than that of all the tea and silk bought from China by Britain. But he deplored the dependence on a ‘vast prohibited traffic in an article of vicious luxury ... liable to frequent and prodigious fluctuation'. In the following year, however, the Duke of Wellington remarked that Parlia- ment did not look down on the opium trade but had in fact looked for ways of promoting it. Not surprisingly Jardine, leading importer of opium, in reply to accusations that the trade was mere smuggling, stated with specious reasoning: 'We are not smugglers, gentlemen! It is the Chinese Government, the Chinese officers who smuggle, and who connive at ... smuggling; not we!'4
Such, then, were some of the mercantile, financial, political, and human aspects of the opium trade. The results when the Chinese government at last made up its mind to extirpate the trade were predictable. They included the annexation of the island of Hong Kong.
The train of events that led up to that act began to speed up, and the conflict of interests to intensify, with the appointment of Lord Napier as the British government's Superintendent of Trade at Guangzhou following the cessation of the East India Company's monopoly in 1833. Formerly communication with the Chinese authorities had been via the Co-hong. Lord Napier, however, sent officially as Superintendent of Trade, was a govern- ment official and not, as the Chinese had requested, a taipan or manager. His instructions were, however, to refrain from ‘all such conduct, language and demeanour as might needlessly excite jealousy and distrust', and to impress on the British community at Guangzhou ‘the duty of conforming to the laws and usages of the Chinese Empire'.
Lord Napier, unfortunately, was a man hopelessly unsuited to such diplo- matic address. As the Chinese began to strengthen their defences on the Zhu Jiang, he sent British frigates to cruise off the mouth of the river and 300 soldiers to the Portuguese enclave of Macau. Astutely, the Chinese responded by bottling him up at Guangzhou by means of laying barriers across the river, with fire-ships placed ready to be drifted down-river should the need arise. The Chinese demanded Napier's speedy removal, promising that normal trading would then resume. The British community was at first unsure whether its interests required it to support Napier, but he soon lost their allegiance and was forced to retreat to Macau under Chinese guard severely harassed by their incessant beating of gongs and firing of crackers. An ill man, once there he shortly died.
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Napier's contribution to a tense situation had been to ignore both his instructions and the accepted manner of dealing with the Chinese authorities in almost every particular. The Chinese, in contrast, behaved at all times with strict propriety. The net result of the episode was the worsening of relations and new regulations reinforcing Chinese control of the mercantile community. Napier was succeeded by another figure later to play his part in the story of
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The Canton Estuary
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Scale
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2. The geographical setting of the opium trade and the area in which hostilities took place during the First China War. (Source: Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War, p. 59. Copyright © 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)
Hong Kong, John Francis Davis, a conservative, a Chinese scholar, a man predictably unpopular with the merchants. On his arrival, 85 of the British community dispatched a petition to London demanding a plenipotentiary in his place. Davis resigned.
His successor, Sir George Robinson, appointed in 1835, conceived it best to conduct affairs from a ship moored in the Bocca Tigris. H. B. Morse, in his International Relations of the Chinese Empire, characterizes him as ‘a bad case of swelled head', and the Chinese ignored his existence. The two years during which he was in office were marked by ever more frequent and potentially dangerous incidents between the two sides. Captain Charles Elliot was appointed in place of Robinson in June 1836.
Charles Elliot, who was to play a large part in the coming events, was born
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Captain Charles Elliot (1801-75). This photograph appears to be the sole likeness of the man who decided on Hong Kong as a British base on the China coast.
in 1801, son of the Honourable Hugh Elliot, at one time governor of Madras. At 14 he joined the navy as a volunteer, serving in the Mediterranean. Later he was in India, round the coast of Africa, and in the West Indies, attaining Lieutenant's rank in 1822 and being promoted Captain in August 1828. Still only 27, Elliot retired from the navy, accepted a job in the Colonial and Foreign Office, and later served in Guiana (now Guyana) until 1834. With reluctance he took the post of Master Attendant offered in Napier's mission, which he felt was too humble a job for a man of his experience. In a letter to the Foreign Office written before Elliot's departure for China, Davis had put his seal of approval of Elliot's abilities in somewhat fulsome words: 'The talents, information, and temper of that gentleman would render him eminently suited to the chief station in this country.'
Elliot enters the story of Hong Kong on 1 February 1835 at the gates of Guangzhou, roughed up by the guards as he tried to present a report on an incident on the Zhu Jiang. His principal duties as he saw them were to oil the wheels of trade, to conciliate the Chinese authorities, to act in accordance with the regulations, and to respect Chinese sovereignty. To the Chinese he was something of an anomaly. For all his even-handed dealings with them he appeared as the protector of the opium smugglers. Elliot himself invented a new Chinese term, calling himself yuan chi an employee from afar. Lord Palmerston in London had laid on his shoulders the impossible task of addressing the Chinese authorities directly, not through the Hong merchants,
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petition
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The Origins of Confrontation 15
and of refraining from superscribing his communications with the offending word pin
both instructions contrary to established Chinese regulations. Elliot continued his courteous diplomatic attempts to com- municate directly, but in the end he realized he could not win and retired to Macau. He asked for vessels from India to come to his assistance.
On 3 December 1838 a consignment of about three hundred and fifty pounds of opium was seized by the Chinese as it was being landed at Guangzhou in front of the factories. The event brought Elliot swiftly up-river bearing a document inscribed with the character pin. Elliot claimed that he had attempted to put a stop to British opium smuggling but that his lack of authority had prevented him from succeeding. The upshot of the affair was that the Chinese emerged from the exchange with only the slightest dent in their armour of rules and regulations, and the pin stayed. Elliot informed them that he had sent away all 1 1 opium ships from the Huangpu (Whampoa) anchorage, an island 10 miles down-river from Guangzhou. Normal trade was resumed.
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The vehemence of the British merchants' feelings, echoed by Elliot and all the other officials, on the subject of equality between the Chinese and them- selves must seem even frivolous matter on which to insist when the stakes were not only opium but the continuation of the whole highly lucrative China trade. Such senti- ments were founded on an inbuilt sense of British superiority, a belief which had an almost precise mirror image in the Chinese conviction of their own superlative greatness. Unfortunately for the Chinese, although they had every right to exclude opium imports, and while they assuredly possessed greatness as a civilization, power to control the foreigners had long slipped from their hands. This was soon to be resoundingly demonstrated.
a century and a half later a somewhat inconsequential,
A policy of strict enforcement against Chinese participants in opium smuggling and against opium users had been in operation for some time, and at the end of January 1839 Elliot reported that 'the stagnation of the opium traffic at all points [has] been nearly complete for the last four months'. And, a week later: 'The stagnation of the opium traffic ... and the conse- quent locking up of the circulating medium is already producing great and general embarrassment.' The Chinese anti-opium drive seemed to be working. ‘There seems', wrote Elliot to Palmerston, ‘no longer any room to doubt that the Court has firmly determined to suppress, or, more probably, most extensively check the opium trade.'
Gradually, it became obvious to the merchants that a new wind was blowing. Russell and Company, large traders, actually issued a circular in February 1839 to their clients informing them that the firm 'had resolved to discontinue all connection with the opium trade in China'. And they wrote to their London agent: 'If the export of teas is to be kept up, new sources must be opened to produce the means of paying for them.' They hoped ‘that the
16 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
British government, seeing the danger likely to occur to their revenue from tea will discourage the culture of opium, and in this way only can the trade be cut off'. But most opium traders saw it as the most cost-effective item in the China trade. They waited for the wind to change.
The Chinese government had for some time realized that, its edicts having failed to stem the narcotic tide, new measures were necessary. Added to the economic and social ill-effects of opium, unusually severe droughts, floods, and famine, with consequent civil unrest, had raised the cost of living and sapped army morale. But within the Western community at Guangzhou the new Chinese enforcement measures were regarded with derision. Matheson, a leading dealer in opium, remarked cynically that edicts against opium were so much 'waste paper'. And the Canton Register told its readers what they wanted to believe that China was ‘infinitely inferior to Europe in the art of man-killing'. Even if armed conflict occurred, at most it would make only a temporary break in trade. Jardine, now in London, through parliamentary activities, and Matheson, through his influence with Palmerston, were vociferous spokesmen for freedom of trade and equality of address between British and Chinese authorities: and for what amounted to legalization of the opium trade.
―
But Chinese opinion was hardening. A wide-ranging debate, touched off by an imperial request to provincial authorities to offer views on opium suppres- sion, narrowed the matter down to a policy of drastic action. Details of the massive scale of the Chinese debate, involving large numbers of officials all over the country, make interesting reading, revealing an official China on the whole unaware of the country's vulnerability, still confident of its immemorial sovereignty and the efficacy of its remedies against the barbarians. On the conclusions reached by the Chinese in the great debate, and on the British reaction to the measures instituted as a result, hung in large part the future of China. Not for several centuries had the Chinese known a serious threat to their sovereignty. The climacteric looming in the 1840s was apparent neither to the Chinese nor, in any precise understanding of its portents, to any other nation involved at that time.
The immediate outcome of the Chinese debate was to thrust Lin Zexu under the eye of history, and to lead to the enactment of a new statute under which beheading was decreed for the principals, and strangulation for the accessories dealing with foreigners in opium, while those surrendering illicit stocks before 18 months elapsed would merit pardon. Lin was recalled to Beijing from his post as Governor of Hubei and Hunan, and appointed Imperial Commissioner charged with the suppression of the opium trade. He arrived to take up duty in Guangzhou in 1839. The stage was set for the coming drama.
2. First Clashes
LIN ZEXU was born in 1785 to a family whose Ming ancestors had included many a prominent statesman. At the age of 36 he reached the highest ranks of the mandarinate and thereafter was entrusted with a succession of important positions, culminating in his appointment to the governorship of the prov- inces of Hubei and Hunan.
Lin had taken a leading role in the debate on the opium question during his governorship and was a natural choice for Imperial Commissioner at Guangzhou. Both before he arrived there and after, he attempted to gain as much knowledge as possible of those concerned with the opium trade and of the events connected with it. He reached Guangzhou at eight in the morning of 10 March 1839, was greeted by high officials and observed by, among others, an American, who wrote that Lin had ‘a dignified air, rather a harsh or firm expression, was a large corpulent man, with heavy black moustache and long beard, and appeared to be about 60 years of age'.1 He was in fact 54, stout but of average Chinese height.
it
The core of his plans lay in an aggressive policy towards Chinese addicts and 'pushers', combined with a firm line in dealing with foreign merchants. He at once reinforced measures which had already had some effect in pre- venting the landing of opium, demonstrating his considerable abilities. Where he was less capable was in his inaccurate knowledge of Westerners. He had no personal experience of them, relying on Chinese opinion. He supposed that tea and rhubarb were essentials of their diet and that to stop supplying them would result in the foreigners' submission. Bizarre as that may seem, could be matched by many a Western misconception about China. Lin also thought that foreign merchants were under orders from their governments, and he failed to comprehend that profits from opium financed purchases of tea. But quite correctly he upheld the principle that foreigners on Chinese soil must obey its laws. 'Having come into the territory of the Celestial Court, you should pay obedience to its laws and statutes, equally with the natives of the land.' He informed the emperor that it would only be as a last resort that he would employ force. But, secretly, prudently, he had drawn up plans for
an emergency.
18 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
After taking stock of the situation in his first week, he upbraided the Hong merchants for involvement in the illegal trade and issued a decree to all foreigners: 'How can you bring hither opium which you do not use in your own country to defraud others of their wealth and to undermine others' lives.' He required them to remit to him their stocks of opium, calling on all foreign merchants to sign a bond that they would refrain from importing it in the future.
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He was unsure that with the naval force at his disposal he could remove the opium fleet at Lingding 'amidst the gigantic waves and billows'. Never- theless, on 24 March he ordered all trade with Westerners to cease and with- drew the Chinese working in the factories, confining the merchants to their premises on the banks of the Zhu Jiang until they delivered the opium. The 800 Chinese servants left ‘as if they were running from a plague'. It was to be 47 days before the blockade was lifted.
Captain Elliot, now bent on force rather than negotiation, had no option and capitulated, agreeing to surrender the stocks. 'There can be neither safety nor honour for either government until Her Majesty's flag flies on these coasts in a secure position.' On the morning of 27 March he notified Lin that 20,283 cases of British-owned opium would be delivered. In fact this was less meaningful than it seemed, for as Matheson had pointed out before Lin had demanded it — 'not a chest of opium had been sold in Guangzhou for the last five months'. Chinese action to prevent smuggling had taken effect. The situation was now a direct confrontation between the Chinese and British governments in the persons of Lin and Elliot.
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Meaningful or not, Lin at this point must have felt that he was winning the day. He publicly destroyed the opium by mixing it with lime and salt and flushing it from specially dug trenches into the sea, a not inconsiderable task since the quantity involved amounted to over four million pounds. Being a literary man, he composed an Address to the Spirit of the Sea
'you who wash away all stains and cleanse all impurities'. He explained: ‘If it [the opium] had been cast into the flames, the charred remains might have been collected. Far better to hurl it into the depths, to mingle with the giant floods.' And he added that he was telling the 'Spirit of the Sea' all this so that his watery subjects might be warned and keep away.
The opium stocks were no more; but this was only half of the task with which the emperor had charged Lin. The more difficult part was to prevent more from being imported. None of the merchants would sign his bond, and in this Elliot supported them, meanwhile making overtures to the Portuguese in Macau to allow the British to reside and trade from there. Before a reply could be received from the Portuguese to this rather importunate request (which would, had it been acceded to, have meant their virtually surrendering sovereignty over the peninsula), Elliot issued an order on 11 May to all the British in Guangzhou to leave. Then, on 24 May, he notified the Chinese
First Clashes 19
authorities that he was leaving the scene because of ill health. And in the afternoon he set out for Macau with all the British subjects who had been detained in their factories. Between the determined acts of Lin and the unruly merchants he was a sorely tried man.
A month before, Elliot had put in a request for warships from India, predicting that the upshot of the confinement of the British at Guangzhou would prove the downfall of the Commissioner at the hands of 'Her Majesty's prompt, powerful, and measured intervention'. To Palmerston he wrote that to miss such an opportunity for intervention would be to sacrifice the trade with China. The merchants themselves, a matter of a day after their release from the siege of the factories, sent a deputation to London to press for compensation for their lost opium, which Elliot had rashly promised them would be forthcoming from the British government.
In London, in times when political issues were still debated in powerfully slanted pamphlets published by interested parties, there was much agitation on the subject of the insult to the British flag at Guangzhou and the 'un- justified' imprisonment of merchants in 'appalling conditions', deprived of food and water, and threatened with death. The fact that the merchants were not so deprived, were supplied with food, water, and even, secretly, Chinese servants, and that they suffered little or no hardship during the seige went
Henry Temple Palmerston, 3rd Viscount (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary in 1830, and Prime Minister, 1855-8 and 1859-65. The portrait is by John Partridge, Court Painter to Queen Victoria.
20
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
unheeded. Three hundred concerned companies in the British cotton trade applied pressure on Palmerston, complaining bitterly that the interruption in the opium trade had rendered their Indian customers
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—
growers and shippers of the drug unable to pay for cotton goods from England. Palmerston himself appeared to be dependent on Jardine and his London agent for information on the Guangzhou situation, and in late September 1839 Jardine offered the Foreign Secretary his own views. China's principal ports should be blockaded, he advised, and an apology sought for insults to the British; payment should be demanded for the surrendered opium; an equitable trade treaty should be negotiated as should the opening of other Chinese ports to foreign trade; and various islands on the China coast should be temporarily occupied so as to achieve these ends. He further suggested that it might be necessary to take permanent possession of some island with a safe anchorage. And he put forward Hong Kong as one such island.
Not long after receiving Jardine's suggestions, in October 1839, Palmerston wrote a top secret dispatch to Elliot informing him that he had ordered a naval force to sail, its object the blockade of Guangzhou and the Hai He (the Pei Ho River) leading to Beijing. It was scheduled to arrive in Chinese waters in March 1840.
The decision to go to war with China was taken by Palmerston alone under the heavy influence of Jardine and the suggestions of Elliot and others. Parliament and the British people had no knowledge of his intentions or action until the fleet was on its way to China. There was then no way by which it could be recalled. Palmerston appears to have been wholly convinced that his was the sole method of securing agreement with China on all the relevant issues. Long after, when Palmerston's Chinese war was over, he was to write: 'There is no doubt that this event, which will form an epoch [sic] in the
progress of the civilization of the human races, must be attended with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.' It was; but as to the progress of civilization, he was mistaken.
Elliot now forbade the British merchants to trade. Commissioner Lin, surprised at his own misjudgement of the situation, urged them to trade. He was also discomfited by the murder of a Chinese by drunken British sailors in a brawl on a visit ashore in Tsim Sha Tsui. Lin demanded, justifiably, the surrender of the culprit. But Elliot could find no clearly guilty man. He explained this and refused to make a scapegoat of any one man. Equally, it was firm Chinese custom that a murder should be expiated by a death sentence the assumption of collective responsibility being paramount, it need not be carried out on the actual murderer. For Elliot, the issue was one of extraterritoriality, the principle that in litigation between foreigners and Chinese, the law administered shall be that of the defendant's own country. His only possible course was to punish the members of the group for brawling, which he did.
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First Clashes
21
Commissioner Lin now ordered the Portuguese in Macau to expel the British. The Portuguese did not ask them to stay, and on 26 August 1839 they left in their ships and anchored in Hong Kong harbour, in hot, cramped conditions in midsummer. Lin then forbade the Chinese to supply them with food and water. At the end of the month, HMS Volage appeared over the horizon from India with news that the frigate Hyacinth was on her way. That same day, ironically, Lin was writing to the emperor: 'the mere fact that they [the British in their ships] will be prevented from going ashore and getting fresh water is enough by itself to give power of life and death over them'.
Some fifty vessels sheltered the British civilians and several thousand men in Hong Kong's August and September heat and high humidity. Elliot's continued refusal to hand over a culprit in the affair of the murder effectively stopped the flow of food and water. Lin ordered all springs near the sea to be poisoned, and threatened dire penalties to villagers tempted to make a little money out of the British. By 4 September the food and water situation was serious. Elliot and Captain Smith of the Volage took the cutter Louisa with the schooner Pearl and a pinnace and sailed over to Kowloon. They arrived off the town at midday, confronted by a strong battery and three war junks. With Elliot was the missionary Charles Gutzlaff sometime spy and paid employee of opium merchants as interpreter. Two letters were offered to the Chinese officials. One threatened dire consequences should the British be further deprived of food and water. The other urged the local Chinese not to poison the springs. The letters were refused.
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Then, in this apparently run-of-the-mill encounter, there were fired the first shots in what proved to be a century of British gunboat diplomacy. The scene is captured brilliantly if with idiosyncratic use of the language by the brother of Elliot's secretary, A. W. Elmslie, in a letter he wrote to London.
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After a long interview with the mandarins [we] anchored a short distance from the Junks. At 2 p.m. Capt. Elliot sent a message
and told them that if they did not get provisions in half an hour, they would sink the Junks, The half hour expired, and no provisions arrived. Captain Smith ordered his Pinnace to fire... The Junks then triced up their Boarding nettings, and came into action with us at half pistol shot; our guns were well served with grape and round shot; the first shot we gave them they opened a tremendous and well directed fire upon us, from all their Guns (each Junk had 10 guns, and they brought all these over on the side which we engaged them on)... The Junk's fire, Thank God! was not enough depressed, or . . . none of us would have lived to tell the Story. 19 of their Guns we received in mainsail, the first Broadside I can assure you was not pleasant... The Battery opened fire ... at 3.45 p.m. and their fire was steady and well directed... At 4.30, having fired 104 rounds, the cutter had to haul off as she was out of cartridges. The junks immediately made sail after the Louisa and at 4.45 they came up with the English vessels. We hove the vessel in stays on their starboard Beam, and the 'Pearl' on the larboard Bow of the van Junk, and gave them three such Broadsides that it
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22
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
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We loaded with Grape the fourth
gun for gun. The shrieking on board was dreadful, but it did
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made every Rope in the vessel grin again. time, and gave them not frighten me; this is the very first day I ever shed human blood, and I hope it will be the last.2
Commissioner Lin reported two Chinese soldiers killed, two seriously wounded, and four slightly wounded. On the British side, Captain Douglas suffered a flesh wound, and two seamen were seriously wounded. Lin, however, reported to his emperor that at least 17 British were killed and one of their ships sunk. In fact it is doubtful whether Lin ever knew what actually happened for the commander on the spot had the habit, almost universal among Chinese officers, of inflating the glory of his actions to curry favour and gain promotion. Chinese reports of action in this and the following year were mostly fallacious, and the emperor was deceived.
After the shooting, after the Chinese-reported victory, the provisioning of British ships speedily returned to normal, even if the prices were higher than before. On 27 October Elliot moved the ships to Tongkoo Bay (Deep Bay) on the east side of the estuary leading to the Bocca Tigris, a safer anchorage. He had been informed that the fleet of Admiral Guan Tianpei had been reinforced and might attempt to take a captive as token culprit for the murder in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Meanwhile two British merchant ships had signed Lin's bond, and when one of them started off up the Bocca Tigris against Elliot's prohibition the Volage tried to intercept. Since the ship was being escorted by Chinese vessels, the warning shot that was fired across her bows was naturally mis- interpreted by the Chinese. The engagement that resulted was 'the most serious collision that has ever taken place between Her Majesty's forces and those of this Empire', in the words of Elliot. From the Volage the barrage directed at the squadron of 29 Chinese junks holed one and sank another.
Once more, Lin's version of the engagement differed from Elliot's. Both were mendacious in varying degrees. The brief Battle of Chuanbi, as it came to be known, demolished any hope that may have remained in Commissioner Lin's mind of conducting affairs in his own way and of bringing the opium problem to a conclusion. British trade now passed into American hands for almost a year, and in the nine months until mid-June 1840 almost twenty-five million pounds of tea were shipped to England by the Americans, and a further one-half of that weight to Singapore for trans-shipment there.
There things rested, static, deadlocked, until the arrival in June 1840 of the first vessels of the British expeditionary force dispatched surreptitiously by Palmerston. Among the ships, Lin noted in his diary on 13 July, were 'three cart-wheel ships that put the axles in motion by means of fire, and can move rather fast'. He was reminded of the first example he heard of, which had been up at Guangzhou five years previously — the steamer Jardine. What he
3
First Clashes 23
failed to comprehend was that with these paddle steamers lay the means of victory for the British over any junk fleet that he could send against them. Instead he assured the emperor that the defences of Guangzhou were excellent.
Meanwhile the ships of the expeditionary force had not been idle, four of them having sailed up the coast to Zhoushan island whose surrender they demanded. When it was refused the flotilla bombarded the place and troops landed without further opposition. The next day they advanced on Tinghai. 'All the houses were shut up,' a British interpreter reported, ‘and the silence of death reigned through all the streets!' In London, The Times surrendered to what might be termed an outburst of patriotic glee. 'The British flag waves over a portion of the Chinese empire for the first time!'
Most of the expeditionary force sailed on north to the Hai He, arriving with Elliot aboard on 9 August. Palmerston's letter to the emperor, carried by the fleet, dealt with his complaints about Commissioner Lin's actions at Guangzhou, and this was understood by the Chinese to be the principal British grievance. Mistranslation of the phrase 'to demand from the emperor satisfaction and redress' as 'to beg the emperor to settle and redress a grievance' distorted British intentions. In fact the emperor had given imperial approval to all Lin's actions, but just before the arrival of the fleet changed his mind, ordering the Viceroy of Guangdong-Guangxi, Qishan, to accept all communications from the foreigners, no matter how they might be addressed or in what language. And on 21 August 1840 he angrily addressed Com- missioner Lin: 'You speak of having stopped foreign trade, yet a moment after admit that it is still going on. You say you have dealt with offenders against the opium laws, yet admit they are still at large... So far from doing any good, you have merely produced a number of fresh complications...". The unfortunate Lin was referred to the Board of Punishments on 28 September, and Qishan appointed as his successor, arriving in Guangzhou on 29 November 1840. Lin was kept in Guangzhou after his dismissal, ostensibly as a consultant although he was never consulted.
Commissioner Lin has earned an honourable place in history. He was burdened with an impossible task, that of trying to force foreigners to accept Chinese laws, of suppressing opium smuggling, and of treating all non- Chinese as tributaries. He did not realize that Britain was by far the most powerful country in the world. And he was faced by Elliot whose intent was to secure a new trading relationship with China and to have his country treated on terms of equality quite apart from the thorny question of opium. The two men, each sincere enough in his own way, both saddled with unrealizable goals, could never have come to terms. Lin Zexu was exiled to Ili in Xinjiang on 28 June 1841. After many a tribulation he was eventually restored to his rank and served with great credit until his death in 1850 at the age of 67, while on the way to attempt the suppression of the Taiping rebels.
-
24 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
His replacement, Qishan, had had an equally distinguished career and was armed before his arrival in Guangzhou with the elements of a very different Chinese policy. He and Elliot entered into negotiations without advancing much towards an agreement. And in the end Elliot tired of what seemed a fruitless process. On 6 January 1841 he sent Qishan an ultimatum to the effect that unless some basis for negotiation was reached by the following morning he would take possession of the twin forts at the Bocca Tigris.
No reply was received. The forts were attacked from the sea while about 1,500 troops were landed and took them from the rear by assault. Chinese resistance was brave and they fought doggedly with the loss of 500 men. On 20 January the Convention of Chuanbi was signed by Qishan, its terms humiliating in the extreme. An indemnity of six million dollars was to be paid by China; Hong Kong island was to be ceded to Britain; British merchants were to be re-established at Guangzhou; there was to be direct official contact between Britain and China on terms of equality. In return, the British promised to evacuate Zhoushan.
Not surprisingly, the Convention was at once repudiated by the emperor. Qishan was summarily dismissed and deported. He failed to appear for the formal signing of the Convention in February, and the forts were retaken. The Guangzhou factories were reoccupied, and by 21 May 1841 all the tea had been shipped out. Qishan's successor unwisely mounted an attack on British shipping at Guangzhou, but Elliot spared the city the shame of occupation. The British sailed away to Hong Kong. Elliot had the dispiriting experience of learning, from the pages of a Macau newspaper, that he had been dismissed from his post. Palmerston had received news of the Con- vention of Chuanbi and found its terms too soft. Elliot had used 'too much refinement in submitting to their [the Chinese] pretensions'. He continued, in terms hauntingly reminiscent of those used by the emperor in'his castigation of Lin:
You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions; you have deliberately abstained from employing the force placed at your disposal... Throughout the whole course of your proceedings you seem to have considered that my instructions were mere waste paper which you might treat with entire disregard.
Palmerston's fury was perhaps a reaction to the failure of his expeditionary force sent without the consent of Parliament to extract a satisfactory treaty from the Chinese.
The facts of the matter were somewhat at variance with the accusations. Palmerston had never succeeded in reaching any clear understanding of the situation which he was attempting to control from afar. His instructions looked good enough on paper, but his penetration into the impasse of opposing convictions held by the two sides was slight. He also seemed to
First Clashes 25
think that he could scare the Chinese more easily than was the case. The rooted ‘pretensions', as Palmerston saw them, of the Chinese to their superi- ority, their dismissal of the idea of equality with foreigners, together with the nature and processes of decision-making in the government of China — all these were but hazily perceived notions which the Foreign Secretary dis- counted. Unfortunately it was precisely these factors that animated the Chinese resolve, and which formed the everyday constraints of Elliot's dealings with the Chinese. He was also saddled with the grievances and indignation of a pack of tough traders, few of whom had any interest other than making money, and none of whom had a lesser opinion of their British compatriots than the Chinese had of themselves.
T
3. The Treaty of Nanjing
THE most significant result of those skirmishes over the illegal import of opium was the demonstration to the British authorities, and to the govern- ments of other Western nations, that China – huge, monolithic, mysterious, with its vast population and sprawling pre-industrial way of life now lay virtually defenceless against the deployment of a comparatively small naval force, one which, moreover, operated from no permanent base and many thousands of miles from home. It was suddenly obvious to all that the ancient realm of China could without great effort be made to dance to a West-
ern tune.
The Convention of Chuanbi, despite its official repudiation by both Britain and China, was considered valid by Captain Elliot who quickly announced its terms, the most immediate of which was the demand for the cession of Hong Kong. This article, however, was encumbered by the unworkable provision that, while holding sovereignty, the British would permit the Chinese customs to levy their dues as if trade were still being conducted on Chinese soil at Huangpu island downstream from Guangzhou. And there were other arrange- ments to be worked out — trading relations, exchange of criminals, com- pensation for the seizure of the opium, and — trickiest of all the equality of British and Chinese officials, and the elimination of the humiliating word 'petition'.
Airily setting aside these problems, and disregarding the absence of agree- ment to the Convention from London, Commodore J. J. Bremer (a relation through Prince Albert of Queen Victoria) sent a detachment of sailors under Captain Edward Belcher to claim Hong Kong island. Belcher raised the flag at Possession Point. Hong Kong was declared a British possession. Captain Belcher of HMS Sulphur, one of the British squadron sent by Palmerston, recounts the event in his two-volume Voyage Around the World which appeared two years later in 1843.
The only important point to which we became officially partners was the cession of the island of Hong Kong, situated off the peninsula of Cow Loon [Kowloon] within the island of Lama... We landed on Monday the 26th January [actually 25 January] at
|
ཀྭ
The Treaty of Nanjing 27
fifteen minutes past eight, and being 'bona fide' possessors, her majesty's health was drank [sic] with three cheers on Possession Mount.
More formal possession was taken on the following day, 26 January 1841, by Commodore Bremer at the same site to the accompaniment of the first Royal Salute to be fired from all the ships in Hong Kong harbour.
The exact location was a minor eminence on the scrub-covered slopes rising to what was to be called Victoria Peak, from which much of the northern shore of the island could be seen. Here the flag was raised some two and a half years before the new colony was recognized by the British government. The notion of Hong Kong island as a suitable site for a British possession had perhaps first been mooted in the pages of The Canton Register of 25 April 1836 the newspaper founded by Matheson with a circulation among the foreign community of Guangzhou and Macau.
―
If the lion's paw is to be put down on any part of the south side of China, let it be Hong Kong: let the lion declare it to be under his guarantee a free port, and in ten years it will be the most considerable mart east of the Cape. The Portuguese made a mistake; they adopted shallow water and exclusive rules. Hong Kong, deep water, and a free port forever!1
Eitel avers that the seizure of Hong Kong took the merchants by surprise, 'unexpected as the birth of a child into a family generally is to the rest of the children'. And he quotes a memorial written by them some years later: 'Such a settlement as Hong Kong was never actually required by the British merchants.' Endacott is of the opinion that Elliot chose the island because he envisaged trade continuing to be concentrated in the Guangzhou area, and he points out that for just this reason Elliot did not press for the opening of other treaty ports. The sole difference between Guangzhou and Hong Kong was that at the latter the traders would be on their own soil. It would seem at least likely that if Qishan suggested Hong Kong as a British base, it was to get rid of the foreign merchants from Guangzhou while at the same time keeping them in almost visible distance, and thus more susceptible of surveillance.
At first sight the island was scarcely an ideal place on which to establish a trading post and a community. A narrow strip of sloping land on the northern shore lay at the hem of the steep skirts of hills, an improbable site for a settlement of any size. At few other places round the coasts where deep water could be found were there any more hospitable areas on which to build. Most of the island consisted of scrub-covered hills enclosing sharp valleys.
In London, Palmerston had repudiated both the Convention of Chuanbi and the annexation of the island. He was in any case sceptical about Hong Kong as a possible 'mart of trade' and disinclined to believe the merchants
28 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
would desert Guangzhou for it. To Elliot, dismissing him from his post, he wrote in scathing terms of Hong Kong as ‘a barren island with hardly a house upon it'. This was essentially true, but also irrelevant to those traders who wanted to found a trading port on the shores of a deep-water harbour offering a certain amount of shelter from the elements as well as propinquity to the Zhu Jiang and Guangzhou, still the sole port of access to China. Some merchants preferred to wait and see how the settlement might develop.
Unlike Chishan who was sent to Beijing in chains, Elliot was merely recalled and Sir Henry Pottinger appointed in his place. Pottinger arrived with Admiral Sir William Parker in Macau on 10 August 1841, and less than ten days later departed up the coast in HMS Nemesis for Xiamen and Ningbo which he captured an action that affords an immediate clue to his character. There was no absolute need for speed. But even his journey outward from England had been accomplished in record time via what was termed the 'overland route' — by sea to Alexandria, then overland to the Red Sea to connect with a ship sailing eastward. He had arrived in Macau in only 67 days.
Sir Henry Pottinger, Bt. (1789-1856) by Sir Francis Grant, PRA. The fashionable portraitist alludes to Pottinger's activities in the Far East by including beyond the window a scene with a pagoda. Pottinger's strong Irish accent greatly amused the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen.
+
The Treaty of Nanjing 29
Parker came out as the new Commander-in-Chief Far East, while Pottinger held the position of British Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade. Palmerston, having sacked Elliot, had chosen as replacement a man of quick decisions to pursue the war against China. The British and other foreigners were delighted to welcome him.
Pottinger was born in Ireland in 1789, and had left school in Belfast at the age of 12, and gone to sea. His education was therefore sketchy. He served in several demanding positions in India with the East India Company, learned languages rather easily, went on a derring-do spying expedition from Sind to Persia, played a prominent role in the first Afghan War, and returned to England in 1840 after 27 years continuous service abroad. He was then rewarded with a baronetcy.
His first official act at Macau was to refuse to receive any Chinese who was not empowered by the emperor to negotiate. Finding none, he sailed away north to best the Chinese on their home ground. In six days he reached Xiamen. Ningbo fell to his forces and was lucky not to be razed. Returning to Hong Kong in December 1841, he was off again in June 1842, accomplish- ing the fall of Shanghai and arriving in Nanjing in early August where the Imperial Commissioners Qiying and Yilibu doggedly attempted to open negotiations. Pottinger, intractable, simply stated his terms for settlement, willing only to deal with those who held absolute power to agree. A letter from one of the Commissioners describes the attitude: 'The barbarian Pottinger just knits his brows and says no.' Pottinger himself wrote: 'The basis on which peace between the two countries can be negotiated, has been
The signing of the Treaty of Nanjing aboard HMS Cornwallis on 29 August 1842. It seems likely that Pottinger is the figure seated immediately behind the table and to the left, with Qiying (wearing a mandarin hat) on his left.
30 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
too frequently notified... to be misunderstood, and it remains unchanged.' Entirely at variance with his latest instructions from London, Pottinger held out for the opening of several ports to British trade besides Hong Kong. Against this stone wall of demands, backed by what the Chinese by now knew to be a military and naval force not lightly to be ignored (and threatening Nanjing), the Commissioners gave in. The signing of the Treaty of Nanjing took place on 29 August 1842 aboard one of the expedition's ships, HMS Cornwallis.
Pottinger had gained for his Queen and country a resounding victory — the second round in what was to be a succession of victories by gunboat diplomacy. The provisions of the Treaty were harsh:
(a) The ports of Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai to be
opened to foreign trade and residence.
(b) Consuls to be appointed to these ports and to be able to communicate
freely and in conditions of respect with the Chinese authorities.
(c) Hong Kong island to be ceded to Britain.
(d) China to pay six million dollars in compensation for opium 'surrendered as ransom for the lives of British subjects' (despite the fact that everyone knew this was not the reason for its surrender).
(e) The Co-hong monopoly to be abolished and foreigners to be permitted to trade freely. Three million dollars to be paid by Chinese merchants in settlement of debts to British merchants.
(f) $12 million to be paid to offset the costs of the war (which had not been
of Chinese making).
Treaties imposed by victors in settlement of their wars are seldom free from a retributive or punitive element, but the Treaty of Nanjing remains one of the most harsh and unfair. It was to be followed by others of a like kind, later to be collectively termed by the Chinese the Unequal Treaties.
The home government was delighted to have achieved its objectives in China. Pottinger received a decoration — Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. On arrival in the East, Pottinger had not made up his mind about the desirability of Hong Kong as a colony. But by the time the Treaty was signed he was enthusiastic. After all, it was he who had won it for the Crown. In a letter to London he wrote:
•
The retention of Hong Kong, is the only single point in which I intentionally exceeded my
instructions, but every single hour I passed in this superb country convinced me of the necessity and desirability of possessing such a settlement as an emporium for our trade, and a place from which our subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled.
A Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, signed in 1843, heaped further humiliations on the Chinese. A 5 per cent tariff was to be charged on all
і
4
I
The Treaty of Nanjing 31
goods, British subjects committing offences in China were to be tried under
1 British law, and the 'most favoured nation' provision was introduced whereby any privileges subsequently granted to other nations by China would be automatically enjoyed by Britain.
What Pottinger, the conquering hero, did not understand, and what a trained diplomat would have realized, was that such conditions virtually ensured that the Chinese would soon disregard them. And this was precisely what occurred. Easy victory had tended to father precipitate decisions. The treaty was ratified by both governments, the instruments exchanged in Hong Kong on 26 June 1843. A new British colony came into being.
•
·
After the signing of the Treaty Pottinger entertained the Imperial Com- missioner Qiying, who had been described with marked disdain by The Friend of China as resembling a 'boiled turnip considerably obese dressed just like one of the nodding figures in teashop windows at home'. No Government House existed, and Pottinger used accommodation in the Record Office standing a little way uphill from the bay. Two bungalows had been added to it, and it was here on the evening of the signing that Qiying was received. The dinner, described by The Friend of China as having been attended by the 'Chinese Commissioner, who with his suite enjoyed themselves merrily', seems to have been a success. It was said that Qiying went so far (it was very far indeed for a Chinese plenipotentiary) as to sing Manzhu songs, to which Pottinger responded with some of his own. If Pottinger's reactions on signing the Treaty were hearty, those of Queen Victoria were jocular. She wrote to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, 'Albert is so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong, and we think Victoria [their eldest daughter] should be called Princess of Hong Kong in addition to Princess Royal.'
there is no
The Treaty of Nanjing contained one notable omission mention of the illicit opium trade, the fundamental issue over which the two signatories had come into collision. In Britain, vacillating public and parlia- mentary sentiment inclined on the whole to turn a blind eye to the trade. The sophistical government view that it was up to the Chinese to eradicate it by controlling the acts of their own nationals adroitly side-stepped the whole question. The British flag had been raised, as Gladstone later remarked, ‘to protect an infamous contraband traffic'. When Pottinger warned the merchants against trading in opium in the new Treaty Ports before the Treaty was ratified, Matheson, of Jardine, Matheson and Company, wrote that 'the plenipotentiary has published a most fiery proclamation against smuggling, but I believe it is like the Chinese edicts only intended for the gratifica- tion of the Saints in England'. He promptly bought three American vessels in case Pottinger tried to force his will on British ones. In a climate of overt buccaneering the merchants generally got their own way, governors notwith- standing.
4. Early Hong Kong
JUST three days after Elliot annexed Hong Kong in January 1841, he issued a proclamation vesting the government of the island in the Chief Super- intendent of Trade. All Chinese who lived there were to be governed by the laws of China, and this applied equally to Chinese from other places who might resort to the island. There was only one proviso, that ‘every description of torture' be excepted. British and other non-Chinese were to be under the protection of British law. The Chinese were promised 'free exercise of their religious rites, ceremonies, and social customs', to be governed according to the laws, customs, and usages of China, subject to British control. In the same month foreign merchants began to arrive in Hong Kong and size up its possibilities, keeping their bases at Guangzhou and Macau for the moment. And by June when Elliot declared Hong Kong a free port, a rash of un- controlled construction had already begun to spatter the northern shore of the island with buildings.
One month after the annexation Matheson put up a matshed godown right in the middle of the shoreline below present-day Flagstaff House (now the Museum of Tea Ware), and quite soon after converted that to the first stone structure on the island. There were existing stone quarries to the east at what was to be called Quarry Bay, the source of the foundations laid to support the matshed or wooden buildings that sprang up to form the beginnings of a little township. Construction followed the existing bridle-path which ran along the north shore a few yards from the water's edge, all the way from East Point (in today's Causeway Bay) to West Point (where Western Street now runs). The first Chinese settlements were at Wong Nai Chung (now Happy Valley), and to the west of the central district, later to develop into Taipingshan, an area of dense occupation below Possession Point in today's Possession Street. Soon, Elliot had to consider the validity of this mushroom development. Before matters got more out of hand he decided to demarcate plots of land and define their boundaries.
Captain Belcher, who had raised the flag, had made a quick survey of the coasts and principal hills, and soon after the annexation a start had been made on a road along the line of the bridle-path, which was to be named
In 1839, just before Hong Kong was annexed, the French painter Auguste Borget briefly visited the area, and later made this engraving of a pastoral scene with a bamboo aqueduct.
A view by an unknown Western painter in the early 1840s looking north from Wong Nai Chung Gap over Happy Valley and across the harbour.
:::
34 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Queen's Road. But plots were taken over in what was virtually a free-for-all and land was being sold by Chinese who had no apparent title. A chaotic situation was aggravated by all parties attempting to seize the main chance, and by the more shrewd who wanted to stake claims to land which, in the event of the island's becoming legally British, would dramatically increase in value.
Elliot had the best intentions when he conducted the first sales of land on 14 June 1841. He intended to offer 200 lots of measured land, half of them on the harbour side of the new road the marine lots and half on the inland side the suburban lots. Because of difficulties in completing the surveys only 50 lots were offered, each with a 100-foot frontage to the water and a varying amount of land between it and the road due to the irregularity of the coastline. Some were not worth bidding for and remained unsold, while others went for between £20 and £265. The provisions of sale were that a structure costing at least $1,000 must be built on the land within a limited time (the rate being 4s. 4d. to the dollar). The title to the land was to go to the purchaser outright after a couple of years, a proposal later countermanded by the home government and to be the cause of future problems.
The action took place against a background of uncertainty due to the unresolved situation in regard to China. But Elliot pressed ahead with measures to form the skeleton of an administration, appointing first Captain William Caine, 26th Regiment of Infantry, as Magistrate with wide judicial powers but narrow powers of punishment, the aim being largely to preserve the peace. Serious crime was to be reported to Elliot who would decide the penalty according to British law, while Caine could only levy fines of up to $400, and mete out terms of three months' imprisonment, or 100 lashes. Also appointed at this time were Lieutenant W. Pedder, RN, as Harbourmaster and Marine Magistrate, and J. R. Bird as Clerk of Works responsible for public works. His burdens included the problems posed by the army having established itself at three places Sai Ying Pun, West Point, and on the east side of a nullah by what is now Garden Road all sites at which no intelli- gent planner would have permitted them. There were to be similar prob- lems with both the army and navy retaining sites in the urban area, thus making nonsense of rational city planning throughout the history of Victoria ·
town.
—
a shanty town
weather was an
In a settlement of flimsy shelters important factor. Being in the subtropical belt, between a vast land mass and the Pacific Ocean, Hong Kong's summer months bring the hazards of nature's more violent whims (see Appendix 2). In the 1840s there was little means of predicting the weather other than Chinese nostrums about cloud colour and clarity or the lack of it. Those indicators and the rapid fall of the barometer were in fact to prove poor predictors of approaching typhoons. On 21 July 1841 a typhoon struck and the seedy lines of matshed and wooden structures
Early Hong Kong 35
that constituted the town were for the most part flattened, some of them even vanishing, never to be seen again. Elliot's deputy A. R. Johnston's own house suffered with the rest, and shipping in the harbour was seriously damaged. A second typhoon four days later completed the destruction, upon which the second of Hong Kong's perennial scourges struck, as fire consumed the huts of the settlement inhabited by the community of Chinese artisans and labourers. Elliot himself, together with Commodore Bremer, was lucky to escape alive when the typhoon struck the cutter in which they were travelling from Macau to Hong Kong. It was time for the settlers to start again.
Pottinger, when he arrived on 10 August 1841 to take over from the dis- graced Elliot, at once made it known that nothing should be altered until the decisions of the home government were known. In the brief time he spent in Hong Kong (24 hours) he forbade any further allotment of land, agreed to the building of a barracks and a road to Tai Tam on the eastern tip of the island, and ordered the evacuation of the Kowloon shore where artillery had been placed the weapons to be resited on Kellett island for harbour defence. He then set out for Xiamen and Ningbo, leaving Johnston in sole charge.
—
In one respect this proved to be a mistake. An element of self-importance is discernible in Johnston's character and this perhaps prompted him to initiate a correspondence with the Governor-General of India in Pottinger's absence. Almost incredibly, against Pottinger's express order, he recommenced the sale of land. In October he announced: 'It is now found desirable that persons applying for lots of land for the purpose of building upon, should be at once accommodated.' This presumed the sovereignty of Britain despite the repudiation of the Convention of Chuanbi, and defied Pottinger's order which can hardly have been so vague (as Johnston afterwards pleaded) as to mean the reverse of what was intended. It has been suggested that Johnston capitulated at the urgent demands of the importunate merchants. But in fact both Johnston and Caine were speculating in land and the strong suspicion remains that the former used his temporary position to further his own ends. The October announcement set out a new method of classification for lots into marine, town, and suburban. Marine lots were defined as those not further than 200 feet from the high-water mark, and town lots those in specified other sites on the island Wong Nai Chung (Happy Valley), Chek Chu (Stanley), and Shek Pai Wan (Aberdeen). All the rest were suburban lots. Specified areas were to be reserved for Chinese habitation.
—
Pottinger's reactions were predictably disapproving when he heard of all this in November 1841, and he accused Johnston of entirely exceeding his brief. Undeterred, having apparently got the bit between his administrative teeth, Johnston played the great man. In November, Pottinger still away, he sent an account of his actions. A goodly section of Queen's Road had been completed, as had the prison; the Magistracy was being built and so was the Record Office for the use of the Land Officer. A wooden barracks was rising
36 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
at Stanley and a bridle-path was being cut towards Shek Pai Wan up the steep hills. The Chinese were frenziedly building houses for themselves and it had become essential to lay down building regulations streets were to be at least 20 feet broad, houses to be set back five feet from the road and to have verandahs. Each Chinese occupant of the area was to have a vote in order to elect three headmen who would make rules for discipline in the bazaar Westerners were accustomed to call any native area.
―
as
Such had been the fever of construction that Pottinger, returning in December 1841, must have found a very different place from the ragged line of structures he had left a mere five months previously. The population had risen to about 12,000 Chinese residents. 'This settlement', Pottinger gave it as his opinion, ‘has already advanced too far to admit of its ever being restored to the authority of the Emperor.'
It was indeed growing fast. The snide Canton Register, reacting to Matheson's construction of a house for himself, took the opportunity of remarking that 'on entering the harbour, you perceive the most commanding site, disfigured by a hybrid erection, half New South Wales, half native pro- duction'. Matheson did not keep the structure for long. The army, already occupying the surrounding terrain, offered cash for the house, and other sites in exchange. Jardine, Matheson and Company selected two sites at West Point but their principal depot remained at East Point where it was to remain well into the twentieth century. Pottinger relates how on a spot where in mid- 1842 he had seen only a ‘chaos of immense masses of granite ... [so] that it was hardly accessible' either on the land or the water side, Jardine's 'by the application of science and extraordinary labour and by an expenditure of about £100,000, have not only made it available for their vast mercantile concerns, but have rendered it a credit and an ornament to the Colony'.1 By 1843 the godowns were accompanied by two large houses about which one of the Jardine family was later to write with all the smugness of colonial social status:
―
-
As you are aware the Governor and the General have generally the finest [houses], here it is not so, 'who then?' Jardine's their house is situated on a Point which overlooks the greater part of the Town, the rooms here are much larger than most houses.2
There are few descriptions of Hong Kong at this early stage of its growth. Lord Saltoun, Commander of British Forces in China, who took over the Jardine bungalow, gives an English gentleman's account of his life there, formed as it was in the best imitation of life at home.
I am to pay 1000 dollars for furniture and pictures and forty dollars a month for rent. The plan is to engage a comprador, a major domo in fact. He finds cook
·
•
Early Hong Kong 37
and helper, wine coolies, table decker... We breakfast at eight, lunch at one and dine at half past six, and ...
past six, and . . . we generally sit down eight or ten to dinner. other things we have a sheep club a certain number of us subscribed and sheep
Among
are bought from Bengal and also from Sydney... We graze them here on the hill and feed them with grain and at one killing you get a hindquarter, and the next a forequarter...
3
―
The rapidity with which an urban milieu - if a small one had been created may be inferred in part from a sentence in Eitel:
The spirits of the community [which had flagged under the onslaught of recent outbreaks of fever and other tropical diseases] were considerably cheered by the appearance, on the new Queen's Road, of the first carriage and pair imported from Manila, as a sign of the coming comforts of civilization.
Further signs can be gleaned from newspaper advertisements of the time. By the middle of 1845, the colony a mere four years old (only two from its official recognition), The Friend of China carried the following:
A substantial house consisting of two sitting rooms, each 30 by 20 feet and in height 17 feet, separated by folding doors, five good size bedrooms, with dressing and bathroom to each; a front and back verandah, closed with venetians, each 100 feet long and 12 feet wide, flat roof convenient for exercise and affording a fine view of the harbour... Commodious outbuildings for servants, store room, and offices: a large compound, garden, etc ... surrounded by a good fence..
Yet, appearances and accommodation apart, the colony was only slightly removed from lawlessness. Caine, now Major Caine, Chief Magistrate, assumed the title of Sheriff and Provost Marshal in 1844, and was also Justice of the Peace. Eitel comments on this issue:
As pirates ruled the sea all round Hong Kong, so highway robbers and burglars seem to have things their own way all over the Island. Government House even was entered by robbers (April 26, 1843), three mercantile houses (Dent's, Jardine's, Gillespie's) were attacked in one and the same night (April 28, 1843), The Morrison Institution was plundered by robbers who carried off the Chief Superintendent's Great Seal (May 19, 1843)... No European ventured abroad without a revolver... The principal merchants kept armed constables ... for the protection of their prop- erty, having no confidence whatever in the Colonial constables... Every private house inhabited by Europeans had its watchman going the round . . . all night and striking a hollow bamboo from time to time in proof of his watchfulness. The scum of the criminal classes of the neighbouring districts looked upon Hong Kong as their Eldorado and upon English law as a mere farce... Imprisonment in the Gaol ... appeared to the half-starved gaol-birds of Canton a coveted boon.4
38 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Caine met with severe criticism of his methods of administering justice. One newspaper commented that he and other magistrates 'mete out justice according to the judgement which God has been pleased to grant them; equitably in their own opinion no doubt ... law, there is none'.
Doubtless, as Endacott says in his brief biography, Caine was 'as ignorant of British law as he was of Chinese laws, customs, and usages'. But in a mushrooming colony for which the British government had refused to recruit a police force (except for three officers) he was forced to rely on untrained troops and his own policies of deterrence. Caine treated the problem with 'ruthless application of flogging with the rattan, with or without imprison- ment; indeed flogging was so prevalent that questions were asked in the House of Commons'. He was a hard worker and could be found out on patrol at nights, doing what the home government was too penny-pinching to send officers to perform. 'He remained dignified, and his efficiency was always gentlemanly... The result was that though he was feared he was respected; he was never actively disliked.' Caine himself commented on ‘the unpleasantness of my duties' in Hong Kong. 'Nine-tenths of our Chinese subjects and about half of our low European inhabitants have been in the most depraved condition.' Such a sentence from an official, in a report written for Whitehall to read, must constrain the reader to credit it. And in fact Johnston in the previous year had said he ‘lacked the means of visiting adequate punishment'. Johnston's prison was full and his powers of sentencing quite inadequate for the nature of the crimes he had to deal with.
The picture of a haphazard, scarcely planned or plannable settlement growing raggedly along a miserably inadequate strip of shelving shore, and administered by a set of amateurs stumbling in the wake of problems they were too few and too inexperienced to solve, is all but inescapable. The dilatory functioning of the home government hampered Pottinger too. In the absence of appointed officials from Britain he was forced to appoint local stopgaps, and in the heated commercial and monetary climate many of the best men for the jobs preferred to make a quick fortune in commerce than a competence in government service. Pottinger's cross was his requirement to serve two masters: the Colonial Office as Governor, and the Foreign Office in his capacity as Plenipotentiary. A further misfortune was that, more than competent in military affairs, he was less than comfortable as an adminis- trator, too impatient for the deliberations and accommodations of bureau- cracy with its snail's-pace action.
Pottinger tended to quarrel rather than to coax. Thus he fell out with the navy which had been allowed to unload stores right in the centre of the town during the hostilities, and which now wanted to change its mind about moving to the West Point location. The navy insisted on retaining this central position despite the inconvenience to the community. Pottinger described the depot as a 'perpetual and irreparable detriment to the Colony'.
Early Hong Kong 39
Not only the navy, but the army too hatched schemes inimical to town planning. The Aldrich plan of 1843, which envisaged a fortified cantonment housing a suggested force of 4,500 men right in the centre of the town, was one. Pottinger rightly felt it certain to arrest all future development. It would, he said, ‘turn this face of the island [into] a mere military position in lieu of.
a vast emporium of commerce and wealth'. He pointed out the absurd- ity of the plan in the light of the fact that Hong Kong was indefensible against an enemy with a superior naval force.
·
Pottinger was to fall foul of the army again on the subject of Hong Kong's climate. During the fever epidemic of 1842 the troops were removed to ships in the harbour in an effort to reduce the ravages of the disease, and the commanding officer put all the blame for fatalities on the weather. Pottinger replied with hauteur that he had been ‘in some small degree the instrument of [Hong Kong's] becoming a possession of the Crown of England', and 'I am forced to record my total dissent to the insalubrity of the climate'. Sickness among the troops was due in Pottinger's opinion to poor supervision, which permitted them to be out without regard to heat or rain, allowed them to bathe for extended periods, and to drink large quantities of sam shui (Chinese spirits). Pottinger was doubtless largely right, but he had omitted to do much about the main culprit in public health matters sanitation. And in this he set the pattern for many a future administration which cut corners in that fundamental branch of government, with dire consequences, until the very end of the nineteenth century.
Pottinger's troubles were not confined to disputes with the armed forces. He came up against the exacerbated tempers of the merchant community who, under Elliot and abetted later by Johnston's high-handed sale of land, were convinced that purchase conferred perpetual ownership, or at least that it ought to do so under the legal structure in the colony. The home govern- ment had other ideas. Pottinger took the brunt of the ensuing wrath, writing ruefully that he had been held up ‘not only as the immediate cause of all private dissatisfaction ... but as the originator ... of all the public mistakes and oversights'. In a situation in which what Eitel calls ‘land-jobbing' was rife, Pottinger was the natural butt when owners discovered their tenure was for 75 years for land to be built on, and for less if not. No grants of land made prior to 26 June 1843, the date of legal cession, were to be recognized as of right. This ignored the fact that grants of land had had to be made in order that administrators (for example) could have sites for houses in place of matsheds. Pottinger, rashly, before the contents of the Colonial Office order were known, had made tampering attempts to clear up anomalies, thereby compounding the confusion. Not surprisingly he was unable to do much other than complain to Lord Stanley in London, while in the meantime the 'land-jobbers' made a killing.
Until this time the little town on the northern shore of the island had been
40 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
called Queenstown. Pottinger now asked London for approval of the name Victoria, and a proclamation of 29 June 1843 affirmed the name along with the appellation ‘the Colony of Hongkong', not ‘Hong Kong' as formerly. This style is perpetuated to the present in the names of early institutions such as The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and The Hongkong Land Company Limited. The official name has now reverted to 'Hong Kong'.
The nineteenth century witnessed a vast expansion of earnest Christian missionary endeavour and the new colony was not forgotten. Funds had been raised in 1842 to build a colonial church, a union church 'for both Church- men and Fundamentalists'. A chaplain had been appointed in England but the authorities did not approve of the proposed union church, and services continued to be conducted as before by naval chaplains in the interim matshed church, the first sermon being preached there on Christmas Eve, 1843. The construction of St John's Cathedral was ordered at government expense, actual building being put off for several years as London withheld approval. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic prefect apostolic, Antonio Feliciani, consecrated the Church of the Conception on 18 June 1843, situated at the corner of Wellington and Pottinger Streets, and a seminary for Chinese clergy was opened. Shortly after, the Muslim community set up their mosque on the hill called thereafter Mosque Gardens (now Mosque Street) Moloshan, Moorish Hill, in Cantonese.
―
Four existing temples served the Chinese, all already between 75 and 100 years old, at Ap Lei Chau, Stanley, Spring Gardens (at present-day Spring Garden Lane), and Causeway Bay (Tung Lo Wan). And now a fifth was begun on the site of present-day Queen's College. In 1843 the American Baptist Mission started a Chinese church at Sheung Wan market, and the Morrison Education Society school was opened, having been transferred from Macau. Dr Legge of the London Missionary Society transferred the Society's college from Malacca to Hong Kong and opened a seminary and school for training Chinese ministers, naming it the Anglo-Chinese College. The Colonial Chaplain made similar provision for the Church of England at St Paul's College, still in existence. Not the least of all this godly activity was the beginning, in autumn 1843 by the Protestant missionaries of the colony, of the translation of the Bible into Chinese. Known as the Delegates Version, ́ this work was said by Eitel to be 'the best in style though not in literal accuracy' that had appeared until his own day.
Pursuing what must have at times seemed to him an elusive goal order in the administration Pottinger attempted to set up councils in mid-1843. The Legislative Council consisted of three members: Caine, J. R. Morrison, formerly a secretary in the Guangzhou Superintendent of Trade's office, and Johnston, with R. Burgass (the Governor's legal adviser) as Clerk of the Council. Pottinger was greatly hampered in the setting up of both Executive and Legislative Councils by the acute scarcity of men willing to serve who
Early Hong Kong 41
were reliable and capable of such civic duties as service implied. The necessity of these bodies had been laid down in a proclamation of 5 April 1843 in the so-called Hong Kong Charter. The Governor was to be allowed, on the advice of the Legislative Council, to make laws for peace, order, and good government subject to these not being disallowed by the home government. Among other matters he was entrusted with the seal of the colony, and empowered to make temporary appointments and suspend public officers pending Her Majesty's pleasure. And his was the prerogative of pardon for convicted criminals as well as power to suspend or remit fines. Also laid down was a rule which in due course brought trouble: in the Governor's absence or incapacity, authority was to be vested in the Lieutenant-Governor or, failing him, in the Colonial Secretary. Guidance also came from Whitehall on the Governor's duties and powers in the working of the administration, and stated that:
in the very peculiar circumstances of Hong Kong, H. M. Government have thought it right to confer upon you the extra-ordinary power of passing laws independently [of the Legislative Council] should the necessity for such a proceeding arise.
If it did, the Council had the right to dissent and send their reasons to London.
Pottinger was firmly given to understand that Hong Kong was an anomaly of a colony in that its purpose was not to be colonized so much as to be used for diplomatic, military, and commercial purposes. The Governor had three functions: negotiation with the Chinese emperor; superintending the trade of British subjects with China; and regulation of the colony's economy. These functions and other matters made it necessary that 'methods of proceeding unknown in other British colonies must be followed at Hong Kong'.
The powers of the legislature were to include the administration of civil law, police and prisons, lands and their transfer, and the authority to levy taxes. In due time the legislature would have to set up other elements of government such as a Supreme Court. The numbers in the two councils were to be kept small so that the Governor could exert his personal influence, and there was no elective element. Members would be chosen by the Governor although confirmation of appointments lay with the home government.
The thorny topic of legal repugnancy, by which the laws of colonies were required to conform to those of Britain, was not to be strictly applied in Hong Kong where the Chinese were so numerous and had their own traditional ideas and usages. 'It will be necessary that for the government of the Chinese ... the laws and customs of China should supersede those of England', except where Chinese law was in conflict with the 'immutable principles of morality which Christians must regard as binding on themselves at all times and in all places'.
42
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The four-man Legislative Council consisting of Johnston, Morrison, Caine, and Burgass began its duties with gusto in January 1844, ‘grappling boldly rather than wisely' (as Eitel has it), before the sudden death of Morrison and the loss of Johnston on sick leave, with problems of Chinese custom. The Council attempted to pass anti-slavery legislation but the ordinance was disallowed by London on the grounds that Britain already had anti-slavery laws which should apply to Hong Kong. The fact that they did so only partially meant that the Chinese custom of bond-servitude was to continue legally for many a decade. Successfully passed ordinances included those dealing with the possession and use of printing presses and the publication of books and papers, which remained on the statute book for over four decades. Legal interest rates were limited to 12 per cent, unlicensed distillation of spirits was prohibited, and rules on the licensing of public houses and for the sale of spirits were laid down.
Whatever regulatory laws were passed to lend a veneer of legality to the opium trade, the fact remained that before Pottinger left the scene Hong Kong had become a much larger version of Lingding island round which the opium ships of the British merchants clustered and from which the drug was stealthily distributed for sale up and down the coast of China. The situation was both fluid and hazardous, potentially inflammable. Legal trade had fallen sharply for a variety of reasons. The Foreign Office had decided that to forbid opium ships the use of the harbour would merely drive the trade elsewhere. But the canny merchants voluntarily removed their ships to neighbouring anchorages and continued with their lucrative trade away from direct sight of the town. Pottinger himself seems to have pinned his hopes on some sort of agreement on legalization of the drug by China, and his popularity with the trading community waned. The root cause of this was a resumé he published of parts of the Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, signed on 8 October 1843. This partial translation omitted certain important clauses, under which permits to trade in Hong Kong were required by Chinese vessels prior to leaving their home ports; and all Chinese vessels entering Hong Kong waters to trade required a similar permit signed by a British official. The information on these movements was to be conveyed to the authorities at Guangzhou. It was at the time, and is now, unclear why Pottinger omitted translation of those clauses in his version. He did so at his peril, as he rapidly discovered. When the merchant community, through its Chinese compradors, learned the truth it seemed to them either that Pottinger had had the wool pulled over his eyes by Imperial Commissioner Qiying, or that he had deliberately con- cealed the clauses since they contravened the colony's free port status. In a surge of public obloquy Pottinger's stock hit zero overnight. He was accused of applying a tourniquet to the principal artery of the colony's trade.
No British official was appointed to register Chinese vessels and the offend- ing clauses were simply abandoned. But trade got off to a very poor start, traders beginning to fear that it might turn out to be an ‘egregious failure'.
Early Hong Kong 43
Pottinger was guilty of one other mistake. However unlikeable his subjects. may appear to him, no governor can afford to let them see it. Pottinger made it obvious that he regarded the merchant community as little better than a bunch of insalubrious opium purveyors. Such, by and large, they were, but the first Hong Kong Governor succeeded in polarizing society, something which in a still tiny community was unhelpful. The trading community made common social cause with the army and navy against the government.
This in itself would be unimportant were it not for the fact that it set a pattern of social division and antagonism which was to plague Hong Kong society for much of the nineteenth century with unfortunate results.
Despite these antagonisms life in the colony had its more pleasing aspects. The Military Commander, Major-General Lord Saltoun, was the popular president of the Madrigal Society, and other officers of the army and navy vied among themselves
in reciprocating the social entente cordiale which reigned everywhere in the colony outside of Government House and Government Offices... The annual races and regatta were still held in Macao, for which purposes a general pilgrimage [there] occupied the latter half of the month of February..
6
A public subscription was raised for the victims of the Afghan War, and there was public grief when one of the heroes of Kabul, Pottinger's brother (and his expected successor) died in Hong Kong. 'The birth of the first British subject ushered into the world in Hong Kong (January 20, 1843) was the occasion of much social humour.'
Pottinger became a somewhat isolated figure. To accord him his due, he was grossly overworked. 'I have stood alone', he wrote in complaint to Lord Stanley. He had had to act on his 'unassisted judgement' while being unfairly blamed for everything that went wrong. He resigned in July 1843 but had to stay until the following May when his replacement arrived. He had had some of the worst conditions to deal with, and for staff a motley group of amateurs. 'His secretary', a legal historian wrote, 'was an assistant surgeon in the Bombay army; his financial secretary the mate of a ship; his judge an Indian soldier; his assistant judge the second mate of a country ship.'
,8
But Eitel's harsh judgement of Pottinger is not quite merited in any sober view. He was no administrator: he was a successful soldier. It was he, much more than his vociferous critics among residents, who upheld with tenacity the interests of the colony as a whole among a citizenry whose dedicated self- seeking has left in its own record much that is less than pleasing to con- template. The verdict of a contemporary, the Revd James Legge, the early nineteenth-century sinologue, is perhaps fairer: 'Sir Henry Pottinger was governor of the colony when I came to it, and I was surprised to find that he was not by any means popular. He was a good man, people said, to conquer China, and a bad man to rule Hong Kong.'
5. Governor Davis
One against All
IN Anglo-Chinese relations during the period between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing and the spring of 1848, the principal figures were Qiying, the new Viceroy of Guangdong-Guangxi, who acted as Imperial Com- missioner, and Sir John Davis, Governor of Hong Kong, whose term there ended in May of that year. Of the two the more important and influential in the evolving situation was Qiying. The lengthy correspondence carried on between them over the whole period, following on from Qiying's numerous dispatches to Pottinger, makes interesting reading.1 Innumerable matters large and small are introduced many potentially explosive in the delicate state of the relationship between the two countries. These are then discussed and opinions exchanged on their resolution on Qiying's part almost invariably with aplomb and diplomatic finesse. The picture that emerges is of a patient and practised negotiator coping with a somewhat irascible governor possessing much less skill in his task.
Mr John F. Davis, as he was on arrival in Hong Kong on 7 May 1844, was knighted in July the following year for his services in reorganizing its govern- ment. The home government evidently thought highly of him, but that was an opinion totally at variance with the estimation of his character and governor- ship held by the majority of Hong Kong residents.
Taken at face value, Davis's qualifications for appointment as Governor of the colony were compelling. Born in 1795, Davis was the son of an East India Company official, and at the age of 18 he joined that company and was posted to Guangzhou. The youth was of a scholarly disposition and immediately began to learn Chinese there. Within two years he published his first translation from that language and continued throughout his long life to publish further volumes including poetry, a novel, and other Chinese works. He eventually wrote (in 1836) The Chinese: a general description of China and its inhabitants, which for long remained the standard work on the subject.
Davis worked his way up to the chairmanship of the Company's Select Committee at Guangzhou, later acting as second Superintendent of Trade under Napier, and succeeding him in October 1834. He resigned after three
A portrait of Sir John Davis by a Chinese painter, 1845.
months, alleging his powers to control 'the ill-conduct of British subjects in China' were too slight and that he left ‘in despair'. In fact these words were written 10 years later, just before he became Governor of Hong Kong. They perhaps indicate his feelings on the appointment. Davis was a conservative, regretting the end of the Company's monopoly and the free-for-all which ensued of which Hong Kong merchants appeared to him a later incarna- tion. Like Pottinger, he was to serve two masters in London, while living in a community of disaffected merchants who felt cheated over land ownership and also over the missing clauses in the English version of the Supplementary Treaty. Trade was in the doldrums and there was little that any governor could have done about it.
-
With him Davis brought a team of professionals to replace some of Pottinger's amateurs. Socially, the most distinguished of them was Frederick Bruce, son of the Earl of Elgin. He was appointed Colonial Secretary, but served only 15 months before leaving. His successor was William Caine, formerly the first Magistrate and destined to be a hardy perennial in Hong Kong. The new Colonial Treasurer was Robert Montgomery Martin, given the post as a reward for serving as a doctor in other colonies and for con- tributing to the 10-volume History of British Colonies. In a matter of two months after his arrival he tendered two lengthy reports, one on the colony's finances and another on everything else he thought was wrong
with con-
sequences which will appear later.
Also among Davis's suite was William T. Mercer, his nephew, acting as private secretary. Twenty-two on arrival, Mercer had studied law without
46 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
taking the Bar examinations and although, as Endacott says, 'nepotism gave him his chance', his subsequent successful career of 20 years in Hong Kong was due entirely to his own brilliance.
R. D. Cay came out as Registrar of the Supreme Court, and J. Pope, the Civil Engineer, who is thought to have been the author of an early design for St John's Cathedral, Government House, and government offices. A month after their arrival, J. W. Hulme arrived to fill the post of Chief Justice
a man of ‘excitable temperament [who] may be led on convivial occasions to transgress the limits of ... decorum'.2 He was to be constantly at logger- heads with Davis, and their relationship was to lead to one of the colony's most appalling scandals.
A. F. Shelley arrived soon after Hulme and was made Auditor-General, while the post of Attorney-General was given to Paul Ivy Sterling after seven other barristers had refused it because of the colony's evil reputation in matters of health. And he only accepted when the salary of £1,500 was raised to £2,500 with the right to engage in private practice. He stayed for a decade, becoming an Executive Councillor.
-
With this mixed but generally competent team Davis settled in, his first substantial step being to enlarge both Executive and Legislative Councils in spite of the Colonial Office ruling that they were to have only three members each. On orders from Lord Stanley in London, he had to undo this action. The Commanding Officer, Major-General D'Aguilar, the Chief Justice, and the Attorney-General were appointed to the Legislative Council, while the Commanding Officer, the Colonial Secretary, and the Chief Magistrate, Major Caine, formed the Executive Council the Governor chairing both. There was a firm British policy, which Davis was charged to carry out, that no colony should be dependent on the British taxpayer for support. Quite correctly Davis instituted the processes through which this might be achieved. When he arrived, the home government was acting as financial parent to a dubiously legitimate colonial child. Sir James Stephen, Permanent Under- Secretary in the Colonial Office, in London voiced the warning: 'This promises to be a very expensive colony.' Expenditure in the first Davis year in Hong Kong was £72,841 against the sum of £22,242 that he had managed to squeeze out of the reluctant community which until then had never paid a cent in tax while expecting as of right the utmost freedom from official interference and demanding government help as soon as trouble arose. 'It is much easier', Davis was to write to Lord Stanley in November 1844, 'to govern the twenty thousand Chinese inhabitants of this Colony, than the few hundreds of English.' Given the unpopularity of the measures he had to take it was hardly surprising that he came in for heavy criticism; but his disdain of the merchant fraternity did nothing to improve his image.
Raising revenue in those early days posed a problem. Davis could not impose customs duties because Hong Kong was a free port. His answer was
Governor Davis One against All 47
-
to levy land rents as his main source of revenue, and to supplement these by farming out to the highest bidder various monopolies, and by the sale of licences. The monopolies were for the sale of opium, generally called the ‘opium farm', quarrying stone, and handling salt. Wine and spirit merchants, pawnbrokers, and billiard-room operators had to pay for their licences. A percentage tax was levied on goods sold at auction. A proposed duty on the consumption of wine and spirits had to be dropped (at the unanimous request of the Legislative Council). A tax on all property was introduced to pay for the police force.
With the imposition of 75-year leases on all land already in force, the demand for rates and taxes on property sparked off a furore. The home government held that residents should assess themselves through some form of municipal organization, the assessment to yield $325,840, but Davis thought it prudent to reduce this by 40 per cent. His ingenuity in fabricating schemes to raise money was considerable. He tried developing the roads so as to open up new sites for building, and allocated land for the Chinese in an attempt to stop them squatting. He even invited Australian colonists to come and settle the south of the island and graze sheep and cattle there, a scheme vetoed by London. He made a valiant effort to end land speculation by finding out what land was held by those who appeared to have no intention of building on it; and by charging a 10 per cent deposit on all land sales. The figures achieved in those ways were quite impressive: the colonial revenue of £22,242 in 1845 rose by 1847 to £31,078 against expenditures of, respectively, £72,841 and £50,599. The deficit made up by Britain fell from £49,000 in 1845 to £36,900 in 1846, £31,000 in 1847, and £25,000 in 1848.
To his credit also, Davis was energetic in his efforts to put the policing of the colony on a sounder basis. As Pottinger's requests for manpower had been refused, Davis turned to the Indians in the army, and in November 1844 one havildar, two sergeants, and 20 rank and file were taken on, and more were to join them later. Urgent requests to London in spring 1845 produced Charles May, a London police officer, as Superintendent of Police, accom- panied by two inspectors. May faced a situation in which only 47 of an original force of 90 European recruited seamen and soldiers remained. Selecting 41 of those and adding 30 more from the army, his total force was 168 in all. For them he 71 Europeans, 46 Indians, and 51 local Chinese asked for more generous pay and pensions, together with better housing for the Indians. He then put together a small unit of marine police to patrol the lawless waters of the harbour.
―
For years the home government complained about the expense of the police force, urging economy and objecting to the cost of pensions. When the police were offered pensions on half pay after 15 years service or a 20 per cent pay rise, they all elected for the latter. Rapid turnover of personnel meant low efficiency and morale, and drunkenness and corruption were common, so
48 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
that an announcement in 1848 warned that it was unsafe to wander out of town after dark. It should perhaps be recalled that a police force was still a novelty in Britain at this time and Hong Kong was possibly better off than some places there. In the face of continued immigration of every criminal Tom, Dick, and Harry from Guangzhou, the task of any police force would have been hard. During Davis's temporary absence up the China coast in September 1844, the Lieutenant-Governor, D'Aguilar, cancelled what was termed the 'Bamboo Ordinance' under which householders' watchmen beat bamboo poles at intervals in the night. The ensuing silence permitted all to sleep again, including the watchmen. Government House was burgled once more. Flogging appeared to have little effect and, after questions in the Commons, was stopped. For four months criminals had an easier time, before it was reintroduced.
Piracy round the coasts was rampant and endemic. Charles May's heavily armed police boat did good work until wrecked in late 1848, and then the pirates preyed on every junk they could catch, and were even joined in their exploits by European sailors. One police headache was the difficulty of telling a pirate junk from a peaceful trader, both being heavily armed. Deportation was tried and, irony of ironies, one convict ship conveying prisoners to Penang in January 1848 was taken over by the convicts on board.
Pottinger had suggested that one way to reduce crime might be to register all citizens. Now Davis took this up, displaying his egalitarianism and his equal lack of understanding of those he governed. He proposed to register not only the Chinese but Westerners as well. The Chinese opted for passive resistance: indignant Europeans held the first public meeting to take place in the colony and condemned the idea as ‘iniquitous, unconstitutional, and un-English in principle'. Davis responded to their written protest by calling them 'this ill-conducted opposition'. Worse still, the translation of the ordinance into faulty Chinese convinced the rest of the population that the payment levied for registration ($1 for them, $5 for Europeans) was a monthly due and not an annual one. Westerners saw in the proposal the sole difference between them and the Chinese being couched in humiliating monetary terms. The whole idea was a century ahead of popular thinking and the Western community 'rose up in wrathful indignation, feeling their personal respect, their national honour, the liberty of the subject trampled under foot ...' according to Eitel who must have known some of them.
3
Hong Kong came to a standstill as all Chinese clerks and servants walked out. The Chinese population prepared to leave in a body, The Friend of China reporting them liable to ‘bear squeezing to any ordinary extent' but not to that of extracting from them half their monthly wages, as in the 'blundering translation'. Davis then informed the Europeans that the measure would not be enforced for another two months, and tardily began a process of con- sultation. The brilliant but entirely scholarly intelligence of the Governor was
Governor Davis One against All 49
―
quite unsuited to the evaluation of public opinion, and therefore of forming judicious policies where it was involved. On 13 November 1844 the Legis- lative Council passed an amending ordinance requiring registration only for those whom Eitel calls 'the lowest classes'. Eventually, only those earning less than $500 were registered virtually only Chinese. The Chinese doubt- less assessed the dubious quality of the Governor and government responsible for the episode.
Another area of dispute insufficiently clarified by the Colonial Office was the question of whether the Chinese in Hong Kong should be judged (and if guilty punished) under Chinese or British law. Davis thought that since the Chinese came voluntarily to the colony to work they should be subject to British law. But the ordinance of 1844 setting up the Supreme Court gave it powers to punish them under Chinese law, as did that governing the magistrates. Davis pleaded that Chinese punishments such as amputating the queue, wearing the cangue, and flogging, had all been tried without much effect. The Chinese had no money to pay fines and seemed undeterred by imprisonment. The Colonial Office was wary. The dilemma is between ruling Chinese people by English law and requiring judges to administer in H. M.'s name the law of China.' Sir James Stephen thought that ‘effective restraint ... and a government not to be trifled with' were fundamentally important and ought to be attained ‘even at the expense of adopting a policy the most opposed to our feelings and prepossessions'. A large grey area remained. In practice the Chinese were at liberty to conduct their lives according to their own customs and laws. Only when they came into conflict with law and order and the British criminal code did British legal processes apply. An ordinance of 1 January 1845 prescribed for second-offender triad society members the barbaric punishment of branding on the cheek (unaccountably termed 'painless' by Endacott) and expulsion to China. The Colonial Office rejected this. Qiying, Imperial Commissioner and Viceroy of Guangdong-Guangxi, objected to criminals being sent into his domains, urging that they should be judged by Hong Kong Chinese officials. Davis parried by stating that no one had compelled the Chinese to come to the colony and that if they wanted to live in Hong Kong they must expect the treatment meted out to other citizens and the same protection. In rejecting cheek branding, the Colonial Office suggested (amendment 12, 1845) branding under the arm instead. Such were the common opinions held by otherwise quite reasonable men, and such the status of those who had the misfortune not to be born British, in early colonial Hong Kong.
—
The whole question was much too knotty and disputatious to be success- fully tackled at the time. An ordinance of 6 May 1846 laid down that all the laws of England when the colony first obtained its legislature (on 5 April 1843) should be deemed in force 'when applicable'. And it was probably wise enough to leave the matter like that for the time being.
50
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
4
The Chinese government, however, continued to claim control over the Chinese living in Hong Kong. All unknown to the British administration (it would appear) a Chinese official regularly sold fishing licences at Stanley. Davis took the matter up with Qiying in several dispatches, and the latter eventually disclaimed such rights.
The old problem, opium, still festered. China had almost given up attempting to stop its importation. Davis had written to the Colonial Secretary before he left England that opium could not be tolerated in the colony. The opinion in British government circles was that China should make up its mind to control, or (possibly) legalize imports, and that the British government had no obligation to assist in the execution of Chinese law. Soon after his arrival in Hong Kong Davis wrote home that ‘opium is now tacitly tolerated by the Chinese government', adding that Qiying admitted the Chinese policy on opium could be disregarded. ‘Under the circumstances,' wrote Davis, 'any scruples on our part
-
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appear to me to be more than superfluous.' He sold the monopoly for sales of opium in the colony on a yearly basis. Lurking behind all the considerations on the British side of the opium question lay the fact that the government of India depended substantially for its revenues on sales of opium which was mostly grown in its territories.
There were isolated protests from the Legislative Council about ‘taxing vice for revenue'. But Davis reported to London in 1844 that ‘almost every person possessed of capital who is not connected with government ... is employed in the opium trade'. By 1845, some 80 Hong Kong vessels were carrying opium, 19 of them belonging to Jardine, Matheson and Company. Clearly if Davis wished for legalization in China he could hardly press for abolition in Hong Kong.
The man who made the remark about taxing vice for revenue was Martin, the Colonial Treasurer, who now vigorously opposed government policy on opium. The Governor, supported as he was by the Colonial Office, must have wished he had never brought him to Hong Kong. Davis sold the 1845-6 opium monopoly to a notorious land speculator, George Duddell. But this, like numbers of Davis's actions, proved financially a failure, covering only local sales of the drug. Chinese dealers at once circumvented the regulations by buying opium which they swore to export, and then selling it locally. Davis then amended the ordinance and raised £4,275 by selling the monopoly to a group of Chinese business men. They, more realistic than the Governor, employed their own enforcement squads and an armed vessel to maintain their monopoly intact. Even so, profits declined and Davis replaced the monopoly in 1847 with a system of licensing.
Martin continued to be a thorn in his flesh. His estimate of the colony's financial viability was one of extreme pessimism. Annual expenses in 1844, Martin calculated, were £50,000, excluding defence and public works, and
6
Governor Davis One against All 51
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income was below £6,000. He foresaw a permanent deficit budget — trade increasingly favouring other ports. Hong Kong, he said, was a ‘small barren unhealthy and valueless island'. The two men quarrelled over China policy, and when Martin announced his intention to go to London to put his point of view Davis refused him leave. Martin went of his own volition, causing Davis to say he had in effect resigned. Martin's crusade in London against Hong Kong had only one effect it was a factor in the setting up of a Parlia- mentary Select Committee of Enquiry into the China Trade in 1847.
There had been no way for Davis to dissuade Martin from his headlong rush into criticism and disparagement of the government. But in another incident in which judgement was required, Davis can be squarely faulted. Admittedly his opponent this time had the wholehearted backing of the mercantile community, a fact that should have forewarned the Governor.
J. W. Hulme had come out to Hong Kong to enjoy the benefits of a generous salary which allowed him to provide for his large family, and to indulge his strongly convivial nature. Hulme and Davis were early set on a collision course when the former realized that the Police Magistrates Caine, in his second capacity, and C. B. Hillier, appointed by Davis, considered themselves as executive officers reporting directly to the Governor. Hulme remonstrated with Davis, holding the view that it was unethical for agents of the law to report directly to a political figure. Soon, in Eitel's words, 'the community began to take sides' in fact to come down on Hulme's side of the dispute. An incident in the summer of 1846 brought matters to a head. An obstreperous Englishman in Guangzhou pushed over a hawker's stall allegedly causing a riot, and was fined by Davis (in his capacity as Super- intendent of Trade) $200 for damage estimated at $46,000. The offender, Charles Compton, took his case to the Supreme Court and Hulme, as Chief Justice, gave judgement in favour of the plaintiff, pronouncing Davis's sentence ‘unjust, excessive, and illegal ... evincing a total disregard for all forms of law... The whole proceedings were so irregular as to render all that occurred perfect nullity'. The two Magistrates, perhaps with Davis's con- nivance, then began systematically to refer to the Supreme Court even the most trivial offences.
The ensuing public and unsavoury squabble, one of the more scandalous of that series of atrabilious disputes which were periodically to rock Hong Kong's administration and society, remains perhaps unequalled in its vitu- peration in colonial records. Davis wrote to the Colonial Office in indig- nation: 'It will never do to have two plenipotentiaries in China, one doing justice to our ally [China], and the other immediately undoing it.' As long as Hulme was in his post, the English in Guangzhou 'would feel they can shoot the Chinese with impunity'. In his mind there was no turning back. He had to rid of the Chief Justice. A letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London put his point of view officially; another, to Lord Palmerston,
get
52 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
privately alleged that Hulme was a habitual drunkard. Palmerston sent this letter to Lord Grey (the Colonial Secretary), despite its private nature. Grey, although the letter was private and not addressed to him, insisted that the charges were too serious to pass without public notice. He ordered Davis to allow Hulme the chance to refute them. Davis, who had never intended to bring Hulme's bibulous proclivities into the open, merely to use their existence privately to back up his case for getting rid of him, was completely nonplussed. He resigned in August 1847 but had to stay on as Governor.
On Hulme's side of the affair there was a background animosity of an equally personal and petty kind. He and his family had taken passage to Hong Kong in the same ship as Davis, and when the whole party had to change vessels at Bombay, the Spiteful which was to take them onward was found to be too small to accommodate the Judge and his family as well as the Governor and his suite. Hulme had to follow in another ship which he said cost him an extra £250. Doubtless that rankled alongside the later encounters with Davis's disdain of a community whose sympathies were all with Hulme. The public enquiry was held in November 1847 in an atmosphere dangerously charged. Davis had little to do with it and the proceedings were perfunctory and irregular. There were three specific charges against Hulme: that at a public entertainment on 22 November 1845 aboard the flagship HMS Agincourt in Hong Kong harbour, he was in such a state of intoxication as to attract public attention; that on 23 July 1846 in the house of Major- General D'Aguilar, the Commander-in-Chief, he was intoxicated and unable to look after himself; and that he was a habitual drunkard. D'Aguilar, believing the Englishman's home to be his castle, sprang to the defence. Two members of the Executive Council, before which the hearing was held, who were called to give evidence against Hulme were therefore both his accusers and his judges; other witnesses were no longer in Hong Kong. Hulme explained his unsteady gait on the precarious grounds of his varicose veins. The outcome was that he was judged guilty of the first but innocent of the second and third charges. He was suspended from office. He left Hong Kong in the following month in a blaze of glory, replete with a gold snuff box and testimonials from the citizenry, firecrackers, and libations of champagne. Davis appointed his secretary, W. T. Mercer, in Hulme's place.
But that was not to be the last of Hulme. The Colonial Office (with some wisdom) declared the charges against him not proven. Hulme returned to the colony, to the great satisfaction of Hong Kong society.
The Compton affair and other ‘indignities' suffered by the British at the hands of the Chinese at Guangzhou, and the arrival of a dispatch from London, dated 12 January 1847, urging the punishment of the Chinese guilty of such 'outrages', put Davis on his mettle. The Secretary of State assured him that:
Governor Davis
One against All 53
the British government will not tolerate that a Chinese mob shall with impunity maltreat British subjects ... and that, if the Chinese Authorities will not ... punish and prevent such outrages, the British government will be obliged to take the matter into their own hands.
Davis seems to have taken this almost as a declaration of war. Eitel opines that he ‘lost his head completely'. And certainly the champion of fair dealing for the Chinese now embarked on a strange course. Davis persuaded his Commander-in-Chief, D'Aguilar, secretly to reconnoitre the defences of the forts guarding the mouth of the Zhu Jiang. Finding that they were virtually unmanned, he mobilized a force of 1,000 men and on the morning of 2 April 1847 three naval vessels and a chartered steamer, with the Governor and the Major-General on board, set out for the Bogue. They took the forts and sailed up-river. The following day they landed the troops at Guangzhou.
After an interval, perhaps required to regain some composure at this totally unexpected turn of events, Qiying met Davis. The ensuing exchange of letters between them affirms what was demanded by Davis and what con- ceded by Qiying. Eitel, unjustly, states that Qiying 'as usual satisfied [Davis] with empty promises'. In fact certain privileges were accorded to the British at Guangzhou, and Qiying did indeed mete out punishment to the various Chinese involved in assaults on British subjects there. His was a strong and subtle hand and he played it well, for he knew that short of all-out war the British could not impose their will in any but minor ways.' Qiying's policy was based on this. In one sense, however, Davis had won his private war and gained at least on paper the result that the British government wanted.
7
Davis, an isolated figure, sincere, often misguided in practical matters, seldom deigning to consult informed or popular opinion, surprised when he found himself in an erudite minority of one, must have found his last months in Hong Kong a disappointing end to a frustrating term of office. The obloquy accorded him was all but unanimous and was clearly demon- strated when he presented a cup for an event at Happy Valley racecourse, a race for which not a single horse was entered.
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To an extent he was unjustly maligned. His was not the fault that trade declined, but the community blamed him for it. His achievements in putting the colony's administrative structure on a firmer basis were overlooked. He was too much the scholar to find acceptance among that raw community in Hong Kong. And, at his going the community pointedly ignored him. The comment in The Friend of China echoed popular opinion. 'Never, surely, in the Heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, did there ever exist, embodied or disembodied, such a pleasant little gentleman as Sir John Davis.' If the sarcasm is laboured, the message is loud
54 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
and clear. Another paper preferred a more direct approach, stating that the Governor evidently preferred to walk out rather than to be kicked out.