Sir John, however, went on to an illustrious career in Chinese studies, founding a scholarship at Oxford for the study of the language, and receiving a baronetcy in 1876. He died at the age of 95.
6. Early Victoria
Fabric and Society
FEW substantial accounts of what Hong Kong was like as a place at the time of Davis's departure have survived. Perhaps few were written. Murdoch Bruce, Inspector of Buildings since Pottinger's time and a draughtsman of considerable accomplishment, has left among his other work a delightful picture of Spring Gardens in Wanchai (where there is still a lane of that name). The pillared verandahs of the houses face the harbour and boats drawn up at the quay, with Jardine's godowns in the distance. Women and children seem just to have landed and are talking to a bowing Chinese while another lady walks her dog. Not a whiff of opium sullies the air. We are far from the stews of Taipingshan and from the disorderly disputes of ant- agonistic civil servants. This, on the surface, is a politer world.
The mild and learned missionary, James Legge, who served in Hong Kong for 40 years, losing his wife and four of his six children to its endemic fevers, gave an account of the place as it was during the time of Davis. 'The hillsides now occupied by the graceful terraces of our city then presented a very different appearance...'. From a little to the west of Possession Point 'the streets running down from [Hollywood Road] to the Queen's Road, were indicated in rudimentary fashion... Eastward there was little but a naval store and tents and huts peopled by the 55th Regiment'. East of that:
all was blank to the bluff where the civil hospital rises... On the other side of the road were some godowns... The next European buildings were Gibb, Livingstone & Co's premises, enclosed within a ring fence ... where partners and employees still managed to reside.
Running up the sides of the Peak were
thread-like paths with a Chinese house here and there, but the ground was mainly boulder and sandy gravel. Turning to the west where Wellington Street turns into Queen's Road you could see a few Chinese houses, and Jervois Street was in the
56 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
course of formation, [the houses to the north of it] having the waters of the bay [harbour] washing about among them.
From there eastward, Legge continues,
on to Pottinger Street, Queen's Road was pretty well lined with Chinese houses; the Central Market was formed; and on the other side were some foreign stores and a tavern or two. Looking up Pottinger Street you could see the Magistracy and the Gaol of the day [where later buildings with the same functions stand today] where the dreaded Major Caine presided.
Eastward a little:
a few English merchants had established themselves, and ... the Commercial Inn was a place of great resort on the west of D'Aguilar Street, not then so named and just opposite it was a small house called the Birdcage out of which was hatched the Hong Kong Dispensary. All the space between Wyndham Street and Wellington Street was garden ground [with a house belonging to Mr Brain of Dent and Company]. That great firm had its headquarters where the Hongkong Hotel now is [where Central Building now stands]. On the Parade Ground [site of the present Hilton Hotel] was a small mat building ... the Colonial Church: about where the Cathedral and Government Offices now stand [and still do] were the unpretending
Lieut. Walford Thomas Bellairs, RN (c.1794-1850), pictured the young settlement of Victoria in June 1846.
===
TVE
1771
An English school artist painted the same scene in the late 1840s.
Government Offices of that early time and the Post Office. Far up might be seen a barracks, out of which have been fashioned the present Albany residences [today's high-rise building still bears that name], and beyond the site of the present Govern- ment House was a small bungalow where Sir Henry Pottinger and Sir John Davis after him held court... On the right was the General's House, looking much as it does now [Flagstaff House, as it was later named, remained the residence of Commanding Officers until a century after Legge was speaking, and later became the Museum of Tea Ware].
The missionary goes on: 'Following the bend of the road
D
we came to
Spring Gardens.' Then eastward there was 'little Morrison Hill' where the Education Society 'was in vigorous action'.
·
Arrived at the Happy Valley there were to be seen only fields of rice and sweet potatoes and on the heights above it were rising two or three houses built by Mr Mercer of Jardine, Matheson & Co. All those proved homes of fever and death, and were soon abandoned. Beyond the valley came the offices of the great firm
[Jardine's] with workmen still busy about them.1
The Revd James Legge, the distinguished Scottish-born missionary and Chinese scholar, shown here with his assistants.
A glance at the maps opposite shows decisively how the pattern of Hong Kong's central area was thus haphazardly formed and how the plan of the late-twentieth-century city has scarcely changed in basic layout.
A radically different view of Hong Kong at this time is to be found in one of the two reports by Martin, the Colonial Treasurer, which Davis treated lightly but was later forced to reconsider. The climate was unhealthy, he wrote, the nature of the terrain would prevent the growth of a sizeable town, the decomposing granite on which the place stood gave out fetid odours productive of disease, the mandarins prevented respectable Chinese from coming to Hong Kong. The conditions for commercial prosperity were absent, and in any case the harbour was filling up with silt. 'I have in vain sought for one valuable quality... I can see no justification for the British government spending one shilling on Hong Kong.'
The British government, from time to time, then and later, was half- inclined to agree. The Colonial Office wrote in Davis's time that 'the mer- cantile body have altogether mistaken the object of Great Britain in the occupation of Hong Kong ... [a place that] except for the security of commerce is unnecessary'.
The population of this 'unnecessary' place at the annexation had been estimated (in May 1841) at 7,450 villagers and fishermen. By October of that year local papers were suggesting that it had risen to 15,000. In mid-1845 the Clerk to the Magistrate's Court, Samuel Fearon, reported that the first six
Early Victoria Fabric and Society 59
―
months of the Registration Ordinance showed a total of 23,817 persons in various categories (see Appendix 3).
VICTORIA IN 1845
THE ROYAL BATTERY
VICTORIA IN 1848
WEST POINT
QUEEN
VICTORIA PEAK
WELLINGTON BATTERY
00
108
KELLET'S ISLAND
MORRISON HILL
EAST POINT
CAUSEWAY BAY
POLICE STATION,
GRAVE
YARP
HAPPY VALLEY
އ
7777
•k ckki
KELLETS ISLAND
MARKET 1842
BANK
VICTORIA HARBOUR
P.O. LANDING PLACE 1942
GOVERNMENT
HOUSE
MOUNT GOUGH
MILITARY
HOSPITAL 1845
EAST POINT
N'S
ROAD
MORRISON EDUCATION SOCIETY
HOSPITAL
1842
CATHOLIC HOSPITAL
1842
JARDINES 1841
1842
3. Victoria in 1845 and 1848. From the haphazard scatter of buildings in the first few years of the settlement, a pattern of streets has taken shape. Major changes to the pattern took place only as later reclamations were made.
60 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Fearon noted that British occupation had brought thousands of Chinese to Hong Kong, the majority Hakka, whom he describes as 'careless of moral obligations, unscrupulous, unrespected'. Such snap judgements made by Westerners are a constant feature throughout the history of the colony. They were made by men with no knowledge of the Chinese language, only the haziest idea of the structure of Chinese society, and almost no knowledge of the fundamentals of Chinese belief and custom: yet they were all automatic 'China experts' on setting foot in the colony. Their pronouncements were seldom consonant with the facts, and even more rarely in line with the opinions of people who understood the Chinese language and dealt face to face with the people so casually condemned.
One conclusion to be drawn from the population figures is that a great influx of Chinese immigrants occurred soon after the British arrived, but no estimate of turnover of the population is attempted. The population statistics reveal a startling preponderance of males over females in all sections of the community. Other figures spell out the context of life in a settlement under active construction. One report of 1844 mentions 100 houses being built, and in the 1845 Registrar's report the number of stone and brick buildings is put at 264 European and 436 Chinese, which allows more deductions to be made, given the large number of Chinese and the few foreign residents. Shortage of accommodation had prompted Pottinger to build housing for his principal officials (the Albany, mentioned by Legge), to which the Colonial Office objected. Future officials were to fend for themselves like the rest of the community a source of conflict since they had not the means of earning the sums common among the merchants.
―
Government House when Davis had arrived was still the suite of three rooms by the Record Office, hastily erected for the reception of Qiying after the Treaty of Nanjing. Noting this, he wrote to Lord Stanley:
•
No residence at present exists for the Governor beyond a detached ground floor of two or three rooms... Behind this is another in which the Private Secretary sleeps. The inconvenience as well as the unhealthiness of such an abode might tempt me to incur an outlay of more than £10,000 on account of a Government House, according to a plan now preparing: but I feel great reluctance to proceed on this without Your Lordship's approval, and until the lapse of this summer shall have determined whether the sickness and mortality of last year proceeded from ... the public residence having been fixed on the north side of the ridge of which this island consists.
•
He toyed with the idea of moving the town to the southern shores which might prove more salubrious, but there was no deep water for a harbour there. Soon he moved up the hill to what had been Johnston's house, at one time rented by Pottinger. This was a two-storey building with large rooms
The formal reception of Qiying, the Chinese Imperial Commissioner, by the British authorities in Hong Kong in November 1845 (left to right, as inscribed on the painting): 'The Honble F. M. Bruce; Major Caine, Chief Magistrate; Lord Cochrane, ADC; M. General D'Aguilar; attendant Mandarin; Keying [Qiying] (quite unworthy of him); Chaou Chongling, Keying's Secretary; Mr Gutzlaff, Interpreter; Sir John Dent; Adml. Sir Thomas Cochrane; Capt. B. Tung, Prefect of Canton; attendant Mandarin'. Inscriptions for two further figures are missing from the right-hand margin.
and a verandah round three sides. In August 1844 he wrote to Stanley: 'My own present residence (lately the Land Office) is quite commodious enough to enable me to dispense with any other one until order shall be received from home for its erection, but the actual condition of the public offices' might necessitate permanent ones being built soon.
The plan for a Government House which Davis received did not please him, and he thought little of its draughtsman, the Surveyor-General Gordon.2 In May 1845 he submitted to London that 'the principal remaining sources of extraordinary expenditure are the church, the Government offices and court of justice, and the Governor's residence which last I am quite content to postpone until all others are completed'.
By the autumn of 1846 tenders were finally called for both Government House and government offices. The Commander-in-Chief, who had been building at his own expense, moved into his handsome Head Quarter (later Flagstaff) House. Davis then appears to have given up, as did the Colonial Office. In March 1847 the required buildings had all been finished except a court house and Government House. With those exceptions Government Hill, as it came to be called (flanking what is now Garden Road), was sub- stantially complete from the parade ground at its lower end up through the site of the government offices to the Government House site.
n
St John's Cathedral, the Parade Ground with troops drilling.
Under Davis a start had been made on roads, even if they were rudimentary and after rain frequently impassable. Little more than paths, they wandered over the hills to Aberdeen and Stanley, and west towards the military camp at Sai Ying Pun. The eventual aim was to construct a ring road around the island. Once roads reached the various villages, police stations were built in the more important ones Aberdeen and Stanley. A cemetery had been laid out on the western side of Happy Valley in 1845 with a small chapel. The prison that had been put up was quite inadequate for the number of prisoners, with only 15 cells, and from it the chain gang emerged at dawn to work on road-building.
-
While crime was one continuing bane of the colony, another was disease. The annual summer fever epidemics varied in severity, giving the place an evil name. The year 1843 was particularly bad, one regiment losing 100 men between June and mid-August. A Committee of Public Health was set up but it achieved little. With such a flurry of construction, some essential drainage was installed and after this there were years when fever, malarial and other, was a less serious killer. It was universally believed that its cause was the combination of heat and offensive smells a thesis which hot, watery Happy Valley's death toll appeared to confirm. Its paddy fields having proved so unfavourable to health, the early houses there were soon empty. The siting there of the cemetery was perhaps an unconscious comment on the in- salubrious location. By 1846 the rice farmers were bought out, the valley drained, and the chain gang set to build a road around it for recreational purposes.
-
....
Early Victoria · Fabric and Society 63
-
―
One of the first Western institutions the foreigners brought to China was the hospital. An American ophthalmic surgeon, Dr Peter Parker, had estab- lished one at Guangzhou in 1835 which proved popular
he even pre- scribed a truss for Lin Zexu's hernia. In Hong Kong a Parsee merchant named Herjeebhoy Rustomjee offered $12,000 for the construction of a seamen's hospital, but in the fragile state of Hong Kong trade he became bankrupt before he had paid up. Later, in 1844, several commercial companies got together with subscriptions and a hospital was built on high ground near Morrison Hill. Davis had been refused a Colonial Surgeon on the grounds that only if 'private benevolence' proved insufficient could such an appoint- ment be made. But a Dr A. Anderson was employed to treat the police and lower-grade government servants.
The beginnings of Western-style education may be traced to the transfer from Macau to Hong Kong of the Morrison Education Society School whose aim was to gain converts to Christianity by this means. The results were mixed. In part, the requirement of absorbing a Christian ethic in place of the traditional Chinese one tended to create a class of Chinese who, when they grew up, were inclined to despise their fellow men, whom they began to see (as Westerners at the time did) as inferior beings. The School principal, the Reverend Samuel Brown, noted that he had 'overheard students who had noticed an instance of "falsehood and low cunning" among Chinese, say with a look of disgust, "this is Chinese".3 He had begun the process of Western- ization that was to produce a group of Chinese whose superficial under- standing of the West and of the English language fitted them for the mostly minor jobs in Western businesses which they filled with such acumen. Brown
wrote:
To have a class of young Chinese men on whom we may depend for truth, even though partially educated, living among us in our public and private office, will assuredly be worth to the community all their educational costs. Nor will it be to our comfort and advantage alone, for such a class will influence others that have not enjoyed equal advantages with themselves.4
—
—
These solemn predictions were fulfilled in the future when just such young Chinese were to succeed (if unintentionally) in the task not of evangelizing China but of introducing revolutionary ideas from the West. What in effect happened was the implantation of the idea in impressionable Chinese minds that China Chinese civilization lacked some ingredient of crucial value which only Western philosophy and religion could supply. It was inferred that the duty of those 'enlightened' Chinese was to pass that knowledge on. They did. A century of Western influence, sacred as well as secular, was to mould the Chinese and segments of China in ways that the Reverend Brown could not have envisaged and would have deeply disliked.
64 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Accounts of Hong Kong in the 1840s reveal a community divided into virtually non-communicating groups. The few scores of wealthy traders formed one such exclusive group of Westerners. They had little or nothing in common with other groups save that they all had to exist on a smallish island with few recreational outlets. They had little inclination for mingling with the Chinese although some had Chinese mistresses. There was a small but growing group of poor whites, mostly seamen who had settled in Hong Kong, characterized by Endacott in a resounding phrase as 'the off-scourings of the port', who made a living as best they could and tended to marry or live with Chinese women in Chinese residential areas, all but totally cut off from inter- course with other Westerners. A large Parsee community kept itself to itself and had its own graveyard at West Point. Other Indians formed a tight group. And by Europeans and others the large Chinese community was treated with the thoughtless contempt due to people seen as natural inferiors. Hong Kong resembled some outlandish ant-heap inhabited by several species who closely resembled each other anatomically, but whose customs and habits inclined them to ignore each other most of the time so as to perform their separate functions one dominant but numerically small species having the means to inflict its will on the others, who had little means of retaliation.
―
The Chinese were subject to laws which discriminated against them. Forbidden to go out of doors after nine in the evening unless bearing written permission, they were required even then to carry lanterns to signal their presence. The first Bishop of Victoria, the Right Reverend George Smith, on an exploratory visit in 1844-6, expressed his view that the colony was quite unsuited to his intended missionary plans. Westerners, he wrote, were hated for their 'moral improprieties and insolent behaviour', which he saw even in their conduct in the streets. The Chinese, whose behaviour he also castigated, were ‘treated as a degraded race of people'.
5
In the Hong Kong of those years could be seen in microcosm the beginning of what was to become 'the European century in China'. The macrocosm of great China brought, to use a Victorian phrase, to its knees, began with the insistent Western traders at Guangzhou and their demonstration of power in the annexation of Hong Kong and the exacting of treaties whose terms the West dictated at gunpoint. The passivity of the Chinese response was in part a traditional reaction to what could not be avoided, and in part the seizing of the opportunity to co-operate with the foreigners as a means of self- advancement. Thus the Chinese who most successfully understood the needs and ways of the foreigners became the most successful in financial terms, and often the leaders of Chinese society in places such as Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports.
With legitimate trade in the doldrums since it was confined to the Treaty Ports, Hong Kong got off to a shaky start. To offset this, traffic in opium became the mainstay along with the smuggling of salt (an imperial monopoly
Early Victoria
Fabric and Society 65
in China), and of tea. Davis had written in 1845 that Chinese small boats came in numbers loaded with cargoes of tea which had not passed through the Chinese customs.
Since it was a free port there are no reliable figures for trade at this time, no record being kept on a colony-wide basis of imports and exports. While the Harbourmaster kept shipping returns, these are no more than indications of trading volume (see Appendix 4). Ships called at Hong Kong for reasons other than trade for the latest information on conditions in the area, for water, food, and other stores. All were included in the lists.
―
British exports to Hong Kong were largely beer, gin, wines, earthenware, cotton goods, coal, meat, and iron bars. From India imports were mostly opium and cotton. The export of British manufactured goods via Hong Kong to China was less by about half a million dollars in 1850 than the 1844 figure. Chinese consumption of opium increased from 28,508 chests in 1842 to 43,075 in 1849. By 1850 a memorandum from the Governor noted that at least three-quarters of the entire Indian opium crop from 1845 to 1849 was off-loaded at Hong Kong and re-shipped from there, most of the foreign vessels proceeding empty up the coast to engage in lawful trading at Shanghai, Tianjin, and Ningbo. On their return journeys they bypassed Hong Kong, one inducement being that at Huangpu island up the Zhu Jiang there were facilities for repair, whereas Hong Kong had none until the construction of the Lamont Dock at Aberdeen in 1857.
On the whole, trade remained sluggish until the end of the decade, when a turn came in the economic tide. One factor was an increase in the river steamer trade with Guangzhou which offered faster transport and insurance for cargoes carried in the safety of large steamers. Another factor was the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the 'gold rush' which, along with the cataclysm of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) in China, sent waves of the homeless and starving to join the immigrants to America. Passage money for the Chinese at $50 a head was paid to the owners of ships and consignees in Hong Kong, materially assisting the economy.
As a result of large numbers of Chinese taking up residence on the other side of the Pacific, demand arose there for Chinese goods of many kinds, and ships began to be loaded with such commodities as rice, ginger, and other foodstuffs, as well as Chinese furniture and other household goods destined for the United States. The first reports of vessels with such cargoes came from the Harbourmaster in 1849, rising from 23 in that year to 34 in 1852.
In the wake of massive upheavals as the Taiping forces swept through wide areas of southern and central China, the Chinese population of the colony grew rapidly. From 1853 to 1855 the numbers rose from 39,017 to 72,607. There was even a transitory period when, to escape the Taiping threat to Guangzhou, the junk trade of that port transferred itself to Hong Kong. Through all this, smuggling became ever more extensive and intensive due to
F
66 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
the paralysis of the Chinese Imperial Customs. A downturn in this boom occurred when the Taiping armies cut through the great tea-growing and silk- producing areas of China disrupting production for a time.
A Select Committee of Parliament set up in 1847 'to enquire into the present state of the commercial relations between Great Britain and China' produced a report whose preamble made the point that so far as Hong Kong was concerned no great commercial advantage had been achieved. Rather, the treaty stipulations opening the Treaty Ports, thus encouraging shipping to sail directly to them and bypass Hong Kong, debarred it from performing its function as an entrepôt to the region. Hong Kong also 'appears to have laboured under other [disadvantages], created by a system of monopolies and petty regulations, peculiarly unsuited to its position and prejudicial to its progress'. These had been the result of action taken to maintain security and order ‘in the midst of a vagabond and piratical population' and also from an intent to raise revenue for the maintenance of its civil government. The report thought this to be contrary to the true interests of the settlement. 'Nor do we think it right,' the report stated, 'that the burden of maintaining that which is rather a post of general trade . . . than a colony in the ordinary sense, should be thrown in any great degree on the merchants or other persons who may be resident upon it.' A revision of the administrative structure was advised. The report also criticized the predicament of the Governor, responsible to the Colonial Office as Governor, and to the Foreign Office as Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade.
The merchants were mollified by the implied agreement with their anger over the vague nature of the initial land tenure agreements, which seemed to point to there having been a breach of faith. Another important recom- mendation was that ‘a share in the administration of the ordinary and local affairs of the island should be given by some system of municipal govern- ment to the British residents'. And they were reminded that the best interests of commerce between Britain and China would be served 'by studying a conciliatory demeanour'. The formerly disgruntled merchants were pleased, viewing the report as heavy censure of Davis's policies.
Most of Hong Kong's inbuilt inadequacies and problems, natural and man-, induced, had by this time reared their contentious, implacable, unlovely heads in a society frequently, and singularly, at odds with itself. The colony was more than ready for a new Governor.
7. Governor Bonham
―
IT was in the baleful grip of economic stringency that Sir Samuel George Bonham began his six-year governorship of Hong Kong. All who were connected with the colony whether in the Colonial and Foreign Offices in London, in Parliament where the Hong Kong vote had to be annually approved, in India where the funds of the administration were largely dependent on the sale via Hong Kong of opium, or in the merchants' houses and ruling circles of the colony itself all knew by the end of Davis's reign and the arrival of Bonham in March 1848 that the economy was in exceedingly poor shape. It was no longer possible to see Hong Kong in that hopeful light mostly thrown on its prospects in years past, and there were few who now felt the colony was a viable entity. One significant point came in December 1848 when 130 persons returned their landholdings. Forty-nine were speculative, but the remaining 76 belonged to genuine buyers des- pondent at the failure of the bright prospect of former years. The present was uncertain, the future opaque. The revenue from land dropped by one-fifth.
It was said at the time that if Hong Kong were to receive an angel as governor it would still be dissatisfied. Bonham, no angel, managed however by means of a cordial, outgoing nature to be its first popular Governor. A Frenchman of the time described him as a bon vivant who performed his function tranquillement. He combined that aspect with the caution, pru- dence, and disinclination to do anything imaginative which characterize the more conformist British civil servants. Whitehall, for once, seemed to have made the right choice.
Born in 1803, son of a captain in the East India Company's Maritime Service, Bonham was given a legal training before leaving for the East to join the Company's administrative arm. By 1837, barely 34 years old, he was Governor of the Straits Settlements, Singapore, Malacca, and Penang. A decade later he was appointed to Hong Kong and set out, honoured with the Order of the Bath. As his career demonstrated, Bonham was not lacking in talent, but perhaps his meteoric rise reflected more the punctilious carrying out of Whitehall's orders than real brilliance. Eitel calls him 'this model Governor ... of the Colony',1 but Endacott offers as comment only that he
Sir Samuel George Bonham - a contemporary photograph which catches something of the Governor's
character.
had ‘a nice sense of what was better left alone'.2 Palmerston thought Bonham's 'practical common sense'3 was his chief quality. Taken together, these sentiments sum up not only the man but his work in the colony.
He arrived, in stark contrast to the exit of Davis, to cheers from the community. His first priority, one which was to remain a major preoccupa- tion, was to implement the decisions of the 1847 Select Committee. Inherent in any solution he might discover for the problems`it posed was the financial crisis. Without financial stability nothing could be tackled in a realistic manner. The gravity of the situation emerged in the first summer of Bonham's time when revised estimates showed even less revenue and higher expenditure than had been anticipated. This forced a request to London for funds, to which Earl Grey, Secretary of State, responded by pointing out that the Hong Kong vote had already gone through at £25,000 and that was all that could be sent. Expenditure would have to be cut ‘at whatever inconvenience’. He insisted on a 'rapid diminution in the parliamentary vote in future years'. The colony, in short, would have to pay its own way.
To make matters worse, the Board of Audit for the colonies now dis- covered expenditure of £23,000 in Hong Kong's early days which had never been accounted for Elliot and Pottinger having apparently drawn from military funds for government expenses. The ensuing financial tangle took five years to sort out, with an anxious Colonial Office fearing future Hong Kong votes might be in jeopardy. Earl Grey's attitude stiffened further.
Governor Bonham 69
In haste, Bonham cancelled all public works other than those in hand. And in a gesture of magnanimity unparalleled in all colonial history, he balanced the budget by delaying payment of his own salary until the following financial year. Little could he have expected the next blow from London. Earl Grey demanded that a rigorous investigation be made into every aspect of expenditure so as to make permanent rules for the better financial manage- ment of Hong Kong.
The outcome of Bonham's investigations was a root-and-branch reorgan- ization of the administration, involving the abolition of several positions and combining of two or more others as a single appointment. Thus, the offices of Treasurer, Colonial Surgeon, Surveyor-General, and Assistant Harbour- master were abolished. The duties of Surveyor-General and Colonial Surgeon were to be performed by military personnel working part time, and the Chief Magistrate was to take on the work of Registrar-General with an increase in salary. The job of Treasurer was to be done by the Colonial Secretary and his salary reduced. The suggestion was made that the Foreign Office might pay one-third of the Governor's salary (for his work as Plenipotentiary). Police expenditure was to be reduced. Bonham described the Judiciary as 'the most overpaid and underworked department' and suggested stinging cuts in salaries. Not surprisingly, some officers at once resigned on account of their now uncertain future.
In the outcome, the post of Treasurer was not abolished, and the Colonial Secretary's job was combined with that of Auditor. The able Registrar- General succumbed to the lure of the Californian gold rush of 1848 but was soon back in Hong Kong, down on his luck. Many of Bonham's drastic cuts in manpower, which were to take place as the posts fell vacant, proved unnecessary.
Bonham then tackled the military. His basic concept was that 1,200 men forming six companies of British and three companies of Ceylon Rifles would be a sufficient garrison, its senior officer a colonel whose salary would be less than that of the usual major-general. He had intended to reduce numbers in the Artillery, Engineer, and Ordnance Corps, but such cuts would have meant that his own proposals to use military personnel part time in civil offices would be invalidated.
These swingeing cuts had the desired result. The expenditure of £62,658 in 1848 plunged to £36,418 in 1853 and, on Bonham's retirement in 1854, to £31,509. The parliamentary grant tumbled from £25,000 in 1848 to £8,500 in 1853. The cost of the army and navy, a charge on the British taxpayer, fell almost as dramatically from £80,778 to £50,346 in the same period. Yet Britain remained dissatisfied at the cost of maintaining Hong Kong. Bonham was seen to have done well, but the colony was regarded as a dubious asset. As he took measures to alleviate Hong Kong's financial problems, Bonham began to implement the Select Committee's wish to straighten out the tricky
70 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
question of land. The mercantile community had pointed out how unjust was the 'questionable policy' of making a small part of the community foot the bill for a colony maintained on behalf of all, and of British trade in general. They complained that rents were too high because at the original land auctions too few lots had been offered, causing unwarranted competition for them, rents thereby being driven up. They wanted lower rents on rented property, and revision of lease agreements.
Bonham's response was to set up a Land Committee in 1850 and he asked aggrieved lot-holders to place their claims before it. In spite of the vehemence with which they had made a case to the Colonial Secretary in London, only II of them complied. Of those, five had their claims about excessive rents recognized half of the land involved belonging to the notorious land speculator George Duddell. Eventually the land question burned itself out. Later a single payment secured ownership and an annual ‘rate' was set.
On taxation Bonham took the pulse of the people and said no to any fundamental change. The merchants, however, were not satisfied. In January 1849 they sent a petition to Parliament regretting that apart from the land problem, little had been done to implement the directives of the Select Committee, most importantly on the question of giving citizens a say in the affairs of the colony. They again pointed out that since the island was essential for the conduct and protection of the China trade as a whole, the cost of its administration should not fall on them alone. Some sort of juris- diction should be theirs. But this produced no tangible result.
Bonham, discovering that there were only 23 persons in the colony fit under the property qualification to serve as jurymen, reduced the sum involved from $1,000 to $500. In January 1849 he published a draft ordinance designed to regulate the flogging of prisoners. At this the residents rose up in protest, insisting that flogging was the only means to punish Chinese criminals. Prudently, faced with this unexpected hitch, Bonham mothballed the measure and turned to weightier matters.
He now made an attempt to remove the friction between the Police Magis- trates and the Chief Justice which had so inflamed Hulme and cost Davis his last shred of credibility. He created a bench of magistrates to be independent of government, with powers greater than those generally accorded, by estab- lishing a Court of Petty Sessions. This was a failure. The low level of expertise displayed by the Court was not conducive to the aims for which the Court had been set up, and Hulme, the Chief Justice, apparently still sensitive to possible slights to his authority, was unhappy about it. As ever, the ground- swell of bitterness and jealousy that seemed as endemic as Hong Kong's fevers took charge of saner councils.
Lord Grey had asked Bonham to suggest two men who would make worthy additions to the Legislative Council. The Governor asked the unofficial Justices of the Peace to nominate two persons, the decision to be
Governor Bonham 71
officially his own. They were sworn in. He then asked the Justices if they would take control of the Police provided they could raise additional revenue to make up the deficit in the Police rate. They refused. But Bonham was unjustly accused of establishing the Justices, at the stroke of a pen, as a new 'untitled commercial aristocracy'. Hulme was delighted at this failure and remained wary of Bonham. Hulme retired in 1854, replete with a document testifying to the community's high esteem and to his 'undeviating impartiality and uprightness', a commendation which Eitel quotes without comment.
4
Yet another administrative conundrum, for which no precise model existed in other colonies, was how to deal with a Chinese population often exploited on account of their ignorance of British law, and subject to abuse by their fellow men who secured Supreme Court affidavits, alleging some civil mis- demeanour by newly arrived persons, and then extorted money from them. The Chinese petitioned Bonham for permission to settle in their own way those cases in which the participants were all Chinese. The truth of the matter was that the petition was designed to regularize what had for years been fact no such cases had come before the Supreme Court in the past six years. The thirty thousand or so Chinese residents of the colony were now a force and a voice to be harkened to their activities accounted for about one- quarter of all trade
and Bonham complied. He put through an ordinance empowering Chinese headmen to settle civil disputes provided that all parties were willing to abide by their decisions. The headmen were to be salaried, the money coming from special rates collected from the Chinese, who were to set the level of such taxes themselves. The ordinance was a voluntary one, to operate only in those Chinese districts which asked for it.
―
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Whatever the cause, the crime rate did fall during Bonham's term of office. The 674 felonies of 1850 dwindled to 471 in 1853. Yet the colony was far from tranquil. Piracy was still an everyday occurrence. A series of engage- ments between the navy and pirate fleets resulting in naval victory was greeted with great joy in 'commercial circles', their gratitude taking the form of presentation services of silver plate with £200 each to the two captains involved. The pirate menace was, however, not susceptible to eradication at this time, however effective naval action might now and then be.
The Taiping Rebellion, begun in 1850 and not suppressed until 1864, was led by a deluded Chinese who had elaborated his own version of Christianity. The repercussions of the Rebellion in China, whose ravages eventually cost the lives of an estimated twenty million people and the almost total destruc- tion of livelihood in several provinces, made for pandemic lawlessness which spilled over into Hong Kong as it did into other areas of China itself. Bonham, as he left the colony, remarked that 'to suppress [piracy] is im- possible without the co-operation of the Chinese government. This . . . I have repeatedly requested without avail'. And in the current lawless state of China he was correct in supposing that it would not be forthcoming.
72 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
As ever when trouble erupted in China, the population of Hong Kong swelled. The 1848 total of 21,514 became 39,107 by 1853. And one interesting detail emerged the percentage of females among the Chinese population grew from one-fifth to one-third, a clear sign that more families were taking up residence in contrast to the former immigrant gangs of male labourers. The European population showed a much smaller increase — from 642 to 776, excluding the armed services. The murder of J. M. F. Amaral, the Governor of Macau, in late 1849 sent a wave of Portuguese flying to the security of Hong Kong. The housing situation for this swelling number of people improved with the construction of more houses, and by 1853 there were 491 European and 2,416 Chinese houses recorded. In the Chinese residential area of Taipingshan the great fire of 28 December 1851 resulted (apart from the tragic casualties) in the clearance of the area, in reclamation of land from the harbour, and in the construction of Bonham Strand, pro- viding more space to build on a project under the Governor's liberal
influence.
As trade gradually improved, confounding the merchants' pessimism, financial retrenchment became less important, permitting the completion on 1 October 1855, to a design by Charles Cleverly, of Government House at a cost of £14,940. But the delays had been so long that Bonham never lived in it. He spent the remainder of his term in Spring Gardens in a house with a 'fine well of spring water'.
The trend towards financial improvement was not, however, accompanied by sustained diminution in another of the colony's hardships — the epidemics of various fevers. Life cannot have been carefree in a community which, in 1848, had a mortality rate from fever among Chinese civilians of 1.14 per cent, among non-European (Indian) troops of 5.14 per cent, and among European military personnel of 20.43 per cent. The next year was better, but in 1850 the European civilian death toll amounted to 10 per cent, and the rate among European troops was 23.94 per cent. Incredible as it may appear, the Colonial Office stubbornly refused money for a hospital for civilians. Bonham, on his own initiative, took a house for the purpose. Disease, fluctuating in severity from year to year, continued sporadically to threaten the life and serenity of the colony.
The presence of the Taiping rebels at Nanjing, where their headquarters had been established in March 1853, cast doubts over the always fragile relationship between China and Hong Kong. Bonham had no intention of exacerbating relations between Beijing and the Tian Wang or Heavenly King (as the leader of the Taiping rebels styled himself) now enthroned at Nanjing. He tried in fact to maintain strict British neutrality. Yet he was anxious to see for himself the realities of the situation. With the backing of the merchant communities of both Hong Kong and Shanghai, he left on HMS Hermes in March 1853 for Nanjing. The home government withheld approval.
Governor Bonham 73
The Taiping Rebellion in China presented something of a mystery to Westerners in Hong Kong and elsewhere. It had been set off in 1850 by a Chinese who had absorbed a garbled version of Christianity from missionary activities in Guangdong Province. The army which he gathered together, in order to impose his version of the Christian faith on China, was at first well disciplined, but later turned into a scourge, a marauding rabble, looting and killing, razing whole towns as it swept through the country. There was some hope in foreign minds, at least in the beginning, that the Manzhu govern- ment might be unseated by this 'Christian' force 'which would be more likely to bring about that moral regeneration of the nation without which China would never fully enter into the comity of nations'. Eitel, whose pronounce- ment this was, shared the general opinion that the Chinese were uncivilized and that only Christianity could convert them into one of the right-thinking peoples of the world. It was an opinion that powered almost the whole of nineteenth-century Western thinking not only about China but about the rest of the world, and which was responsible for many a bizarre policy.
Bonham went to Nanjing to explain to the Taiping leaders the concept of British neutrality, just as he and others had tried to impress this on the Imperial government of China. The proposition was viewed rather differently by the Chinese who had discovered that such neutrality was non-existent except when it was to British advantage. Bonham discovered in Nanjing that any hope of a stable (far less truly Christian) regime in China in the event of a major Taiping victory over the Imperial Qing government was mere illusion. The Taiping were as anti-foreign and un-Christian as the Manzhu. He returned a wiser man, unfairly castigated by the home government for having gone at all.
The Bonham years, as all agreed when he retired in 1854 at the
age of
of 50, had proved much better than those of Davis. Trade had picked up with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, Chinese immigrants to both areas passing through Hong Kong, and the depredations of the Taiping rebellion produced a continuing flood of immigrants to the territory. Japan was just beginning to open up to foreign trade at American prompting, and Hong Kong was now regularly visited by flotillas of square-rigged American whalers. An ice-house had been built at the foot of a street in central Victoria, to the gratification of Westerners boiling in their heavy Victorian British clothing in the heat of the colony's summers. Ice came from Alaska packed in straw or sawdust, and was dragged up from the shoreline to the ice-house on Queen's Road where Ice House Street, still so named, met it at the water's edge. Regular steam-ship sailings between Europe and the colony were established, the telegrams they carried from Hong Kong being sent off by wire when the ships reached Trieste or Gibraltar. Yet, oddly enough, this quickening in the pace of communication was not entirely welcomed by the merchants since it also heightened the competition. The formerly leisured life
74 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
in which fortunes were made in a year or two became marginally more taxing. It now took a decade to make a fortune.
It was during Bonham's time that the Governor's jurisdiction over the consuls in the Treaty Ports, established at the Treaty of Nanjing, was abolished, but the separation of gubernatorial powers from those of Superintendent of Trade was to take several more years.
Bonham was on the whole a reasonable man, and his term of office reflects that. His one curious failing was a firm belief that the study of the Chinese language warped the intellect and undermined the capacity for good judge- ment. This belief caused him to appoint and promote men who had no knowledge of the language, something hardly conducive to a better under- standing of the majority of the colony's inhabitants.
8. Bowring's War with China
THE next Governor of Hong Kong was a man of restless energy, great conceit, and brilliant mind. The complexity of his character was such that he defeated his own cherished ambition to attain the status of an inter- nationally known and respected figure. An appraisal of his character and career is relevant to the consideration of his work as Governor in early Hong Kong, at a time when governors and their actions exercised a more telling effect on the colony than in later times.
Sir John Bowring was 57 when he first came to the East. He would not have done so but for his ill luck in losing his fortune by injudicious investment in an ironworks which failed in a trade depression, forcing him to seek an income-producing appointment. Bowring had been privately educated and apprenticed to an Exeter merchant, later working in London as a clerk and gaining experience during the course of business journeys to various European countries. He then set up in business for himself and acquired a smattering of various languages,1 coming to see his role in life in promoting the dominance of ‘commerce and Christianity in natural and necessary alliance' ously English nineteenth-century concept.
a curi-
At 32 he became editor of the Westminster Review whose championship of radical views under Jeremy Bentham was much to Bowring's taste. He began making translations from various languages and was awarded a doctorate by Gröningen University in Holland in 1829. Eitel, with some justification, comments: 'to use his own epigrammatic critique of Byron ... more could be said of his genius than of his character... His natural abilities were marked by great versatility but appeared to lack in depth'.2
Standing for Parliament for Bolton, he was elected in 1841, and took an interest in Hong Kong affairs, perhaps, as Endacott suggests, because his son was with Jardine's. Bowring then took the post of Consul at Guangzhou in 1849, where he seems to have aroused unfavourable comment from the merchants there from the start. His own remarks a little later when he was appointed Governor of Hong Kong bear out the impression of conceit in his character: 'To China I went ... accredited not to Peking alone but to Japan, Siam, China, and Corea, I believe to a greater number of human beings
Sir John Bowring, an engraving by W. Holl from the portrait by Bryan Edward Duppa (fl. 1832–53).
(indeed no less than one-third of the human race) than any individual has been accredited before."3
Bowring left Guangzhou on medical grounds and returned to England where he was knighted and secured the governorship of Hong Kong. 'Thus', writes the sarcastic Eitel, ‘bearing his blushing honours thick upon him, he sailed to China with the sound of glory ringing in his ears.'
Within a fortnight of his arrival on 13 April 1854, Britain declared war against Russia, and Hong Kong feared that the Siberian fleet might attempt intervention in its waters. Bowring rushed off northward in an effort to inter- cept the fleet, but this turned out to be a wild-goose chase since the Russians had already departed. Still, fear of sea-borne attack lingered, rising to panic proportions in June 1854 when the Lieutenant-Governor summarized the defenceless state of the colony. Batteries were put up at once. Hong Kong patriots subscribed £2,500, and sent it to London to aid 'the noble struggle against Russian Aggression' in the Crimean War.
The question of separating the governorship from the other functions attached to it arose again at this time, in 1854, a solution being adopted by the Colonial Office in the form of a reprehensible compromise, with Bowring the hapless victim. It was decreed that he was to act as Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade, but to be Governor in name only. William Caine became Lieutenant-Governor with the clear understanding that he and he alone had control over the local colonial administration. To give him his due, Bowring, his salary cut in half, at first tried to make the best of a ludicrous position and, seated as he was in the new Government House, must have felt it keenly. 'I have China, Corea, Siam. I have no time for Hong Kong', he said.
Bowring's War with China
77
Inevitably it was not long before he began to interfere with Caine's juris- diction and encountered the latter's justified resentment. When the matter was referred home, Lord Palmerston put an end to the anomalous situation and made Bowring Governor in fact, but with no rise from half pay.
How this came about is worth recording, a typical instance of the way the affairs of the colony turned into acrimonious confrontations between admini- strators and others. In February 1855 a temporary Colonial Chaplain was appointed in the person of the Revd William Baxter who came out from England. Belatedly it was discovered that he was a fugitive debtor. Bishop Smith refused to countenance him. An army chaplain was then appointed as a stopgap, but Bowring objected, demanding to know who had authorized the appointment. Caine replied that he had first consulted both the Bishop and members of the Executive Council, and presumed Bowring would agree. This precipitated a divergence of opinion about who should preside over the Council - Bowring saying that he should always be chairman, even if what was under discussion related solely to Hong Kong (over which Caine ruled). Palmerston, tardily, saw the position was ‘an administrative solecism'. It may perhaps be wondered why he had not seen that in the first instance. Bowring then suggested that Caine should be retired, but Palmerston declined that since Caine had not been the cause of the problem. Caine remained, power- less, in the sinecure post of Lieutenant-Governor until his retirement in 1859. For a candid look at Bowring's Hong Kong at this time, a certain Albert Smith, an entertainer from London, offers a forthright note. 'To breakfast with Sir John Bowring, walking up pretty winding paths with wild con- volvulus and bamboo blooming all the way. Found him in the garden with a native cutting flowers for the table."4 Smith had a good eye for his unfamiliar surroundings.
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As we drove along the Happy Valley [we] passed Mr Jardine's at East Point ... the granite rocks coming nearly down to the sea water rills falling Chinese graves and fishing stations all the way. Many people out in carriages, and some Yankees in light iron four-wheeled trotting gigs; and also a string of Mr Jardine's horses led out for airing by black grooms.
5
Albert Smith continues, remarking that the local 'journals are mostly filled with infinitesimally unimportant local squabbles, in which the names of Mr Anstey, Mr Bridges, Ma-chow-wang, Sir John Bowring, and Mr Caldwell are pitched about here and there'."
Bowring was nothing if not busy. His policy towards China was to result in war, yet in England he had been the vociferous president of the Peace Society, whose aims were the abolition of war and the settlement of international disputes by conciliation. The inherent contradiction between his policies and his philosophy is evident in his attempts to make friends with Hong Kong
78 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Chinese by talking with them in Cantonese, and by attending their parties and theatrical entertainments. At the same time his attitude to problems with the Chinese authorities in China was to approach in summary fashion with the threat of force. Yet he tried to be fair to all, rescuing a wrongfully imprisoned British subject from the Chinese, and being conspicuously even- handed to Chinese involved in Consular Court cases at Guangzhou. The Hong Kong Chinese thought him fair-minded and often tried to enlist his services. But he combined mildness towards them with total inflexibility when it came to the slightest infraction of the treaties between Britain and China.
Bowring's instructions on China were to avoid the use of force: yet he was ready with threats to get his way in a situation which he must have known had existed ever since the treaties were signed. This concerned British nationals in Guangzhou. In theory they had freedom of movement there, but were often molested, sometimes on account of their own high-handed attitude to the Chinese; and their right of residence had now and then been denied. As Governor, Bowring dealt with the Imperial Commissioner Yeh Mingchen, to whom he wrote on 17 April 1854 (four days after his arrival in Hong Kong) requesting a meeting. Yeh replied on 25 April that he would be glad to see Bowring but that military campaigns were taking all his time. On the same day Bowring wrote again to the Commissioner, saying that he had been instructed to revise the Treaty of Nanjing, to gain entry to Guangzhou, to obtain the abolition of the tea commission, to establish regular meetings with Chinese officials, to lease land for merchants in Henan, and to obtain redress for Britons attacked by Chinese. He insisted that meetings be held in Yeh's yamen (official residence). Two days later he wrote again, to the effect that such meetings should take precedence over Yeh's military affairs. And on the following day he wrote once more urging payment of the debt of a Chinese to an Indian merchant. On 7 May Yeh replied that he could not force the people of Guangzhou to admit foreigners into the city; that the tea commission was introduced not by his government but by foreign tea merchants; that leasing land should be agreed between the parties concerned; that Chinese officials were not trying to avoid foreign envoys. He promised to write separately on the proposed meeting. In a separate letter on the same day Yeh proposed to meet the Governor on 22 May outside Guangzhou. The furious pace of this correspondence was one set by Bowring.
This situation continued until an incident, in itself trivial, brought war. The makings of the trouble were simple. Chinese owners of ships who were lessees of Crown Land in the colony were allowed, under an ordinance of 1855, the protection of the British flag as if their ships were British-owned. To achieve this all they had to do was to inscribe the names of their vessels on the colonial register. Not surprisingly, with piracy rife, many did so. One of these ships was the lorcha Arrow, Chinese-owned and with a British captain. Un-
Bowring's War with China 79
fortunately when the incident occurred its registration had expired. When boarded at Guangzhou by the Chinese authorities in the autumn of 1856, the crew were imprisoned, charged with piracy. Typically, the Governor went on the attack at once, on 12 October. He defended the Guangzhou Consul's (Harry Parkes) demand for an apology and the swift return of the crew. He then wrote that, his two-day ultimatum having expired, the navy had taken an imperial junk hostage. On 21 October Yeh replied that no flag was flying when the Arrow was boarded, that its crew testified to its Chinese ownership, and that the registration had been bought at Hong Kong. He requested that further sales of registrations should cease, as laid down in the treaty. In a subsequent letter Yeh asked by which section of the treaty was it permissible for the navy to take Chinese ships hostage in the Zhu Jiang.
Sir Harry Parkes, British Consul at Guangzhou, taking his leave of the old Co-hong merchants.
This minor incident was made by Bowring the excuse for hostilities. The real cause was the underlying grievance that the Chinese would not consent to treaty revision. The Treaty of Nanjing in fact contained no clause relating to revision, and the Chinese were entirely within their rights in refusing it. They were, however, foolish not to have learned the lesson taught them by the Royal Navy in previous confrontations.
80 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Bowring saw the affair as his chance to settle once and for all the question of his right to official meetings with Chinese representatives at Guangzhou, and to secure safe entry for British personnel into that city. His advisers, Parkes and Thomas Wade, an interpreter at the Supreme Court trained by Gutzlaff, saw it (and Parkes stated this) as the inevitable conflict between Christian civilization and semi-civilized paganism. Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, Senior Naval Officer, Hong Kong, then bombarded and demolished some Chinese forts and the Commissioner's house in Guangzhou. But Yeh had already moved out. Seymour continued with more bombardments, but Yeh did not give in. He was in a strong position, able to command large reinforcements. Whereupon Bowring's policy was upheld and an expedi- tionary force was dispatched from England. The force was diverted to deal with the Indian Mutiny, and it was not until the final month of 1857 that Britain, joined by France which had grievances of its own, was ready for war. In the long interval, a continuous stream of letters passed between Bowring and the properly obstinate Yeh, and between Bowring and the Viceroy of Guangdong-Guangxi. The politeness of the Chinese in their missives is remarkable; they never give an inch and continue stone-walling in diplomatic language, even congratulating Bowring for not assisting the rebels when the Taiping threat to Guangzhou was at its most hazardous.
Palmerston now decided to sever the powers of Plenipotentiary from the governorship of Hong Kong, removing Bowring from the former and sending out Lord Elgin as Plenipotentiary in July 1857. Negotiations with the Chinese were continued by Elgin, totally ignoring Bowring. Guangzhou was taken in early 1858 and the allied forces moved north where a treaty was signed in June at Tianjin. Separate treaties were signed by China with Britain, France, the United States, and Russia. These may, however, be regarded as one settle- ment because of the operation of the most-favoured-nation clause, by which what China granted to one nation she must grant to others.
The treaties contained provision for the exchange of ministers, granting them right of residence in Beijing, and excusing them from performing the kowtow. Foreigners were permitted to travel within China with their pass- ports countersigned by local Chinese authorities; the opening of 10 ports to trade was projected, with foreign ships allowed to trade on the Yangzi (Yangtze River); warships could call at any Chinese port for supplies and repairs; missionaries were to be allowed into China and protected by the Chinese government; British Consuls were to have jurisdiction in disputes between British subjects, while a mixed court of Consul and Chinese Magistrate would settle those between British and Chinese; in criminal cases the accused would be tried under the laws of his own country. Four million taels each were to be paid to Britain and France as reparation (for a war they had carried into China). The use of the character yi (barbarian) was forbidden.
The signing of the Treaty of Tianjin on 26 June 1858. Lord Elgin is seated centre, and Admiral Seymour is at the table on the right with Gui Liang. He and Hua Shang (left) were Imperial Commissioners.
A supplementary agreement was worked out at Shanghai in October in which, for Hong Kong at least, the most significant change was the im- position of a tariff duty on the importation of opium. In effect this legalized the opium trade, and the hopes of decades of merchants at last became a reality. The duties were to be collected by the newly formed Chinese Mari- time Customs Service, established in 1854 and headed by its first Chinese Inspector, the bravely named Horatio Nelson Lay.
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The Imperial Commissioner (and stubborn patriot) Yeh met a sad fate. He was captured in the taking of Guangzhou in January 1858 'when his apart- ments were burst into by blue jackets of HMS Sanspareil and he was, while climbing over a wall, caught in the strong arms of Sir Astley Cooper Key whilst Commodore Elliot's coxwain "twisted the august tail of the Imperial Commissioner round his fist". The temper of the times implicit in this is evident in the combination of schoolboy glee and the total inability to see the Chinese side of the coin.
8
Yeh was sent into exile in Calcutta where he died. While in Hong Kong en route, Bowring at last had the chance to see him aboard a naval vessel. But Yeh, unbowed in defeat, refused to talk, and the Governor's little triumph in the meeting rang somewhat hollow. Guangzhou was now governed by a mixed commission consisting of Harry Parkes, the Consul, a Royal Marine officer, a French naval officer, and Governor Pi Chengzhao.
82 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The Chinese refused to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin, an act of foolhardiness as disastrous as it was brave. The treaty made China the plaything of Western political and commercial ambitions. To ratify it was to hand over the country to foreign control. Ratification was only obtained after the Anglo-French occupation of Beijing and the sacking and burning of the Imperial Summer Palace in 1860. The eventual treaty contained yet further provisions favour- ing the Western powers. Tianjin became a Treaty Port; at Hong Kong, Kowloon Point and Stonecutters island were ceded to Britain in perpetuity, and the recruitment of Chinese labour for work abroad was permitted. The direct gains for Hong Kong were the de facto legalization of opium, the acquisition of strategic territory, and the profits which would accrue from the traffic in coolies passing through the colony.
Bowring, lately shorn of his appointment to the millions of whom he had boasted, was now in charge solely of the few thousands in Hong Kong, and the Supreme Court was soon to cease to be the appeal court of British subjects in the Treaty Ports. The post of Superintendent of Trade was given to the British Minister in Beijing.
In the period leading up to the Treaty of Tianjin, Hong Kong was intimately embroiled in the conflict. Bowring, having instituted a policy, found, after the first attack on Guangzhou in November 1856, that he was unable to press it home. Commissioner Yeh perceived Admiral Seymour's withdrawal with his small force as a Chinese victory, and ordered no co-operation with the British. Setting fire to the Guangzhou factories, he also destroyed the port facilities at Huangpu island. And then placards began to blossom in Hong Kong urging the Chinese to struggle against the foreigners.
There can be no doubt of the depth of Chinese resentment. A month or so after this exchange of letters,' in January 1857, Westerners eating their fresh breakfast bread, baked by the E Sing Bakery owned by a Chinese named Cheong Ah Lum, became suddenly ill, some of them seriously. It was soon discovered that the cause was a plentiful dosage of arsenic added to the bread. Luckily enough, the quantity was so generous that most people quickly vomited their breakfast and absorbed little of the poison. Prudently, Ah Lum had left with his family for Macau before breakfast. Brought back, he alleged that he too had been poisoned. He was tried and acquitted, but 52 of his employees were thrown into gaol. That facility being temporarily full, their actual destination was a 15-feet-square room in a police station where they were to remain for four days. Ten of them were then tried, but the rest suffered for another 15 days in that Black Hole of Hong Kong before release. It says much for the residents, European and Chinese alike, that their vigorous protests were what secured the prisoners' release, although with the proviso that they leave the colony.
Hundreds more Chinese were deported. The baking of bread was taken
Bowring's War with China 83
over by George Duddell, one of the colony's most devious crooks. Shortly after, his bakery burned down, doubtless on Chinese orders.
The story was not yet ended. William Tarrant, editor of The Friend of China, took it upon himself to sue Ah Lum for damages, and was awarded $1,000. Prudence once more prompted the baker to quit Hong Kong before Tarrant could collect his winnings. Not to be cheated, Tarrant then accused Dr T. W. Bridges, the Acting Colonial Secretary, of letting the culprit escape. Bridges then brought a suit for libel against Tarrant who was forced to pay £100 compensation a sum subscribed by sympathizers. This was the 'infinitesimally unimportant' squabble that Albert Smith read about during
his visit.
Before the ratification of the treaty, Hong Kong was a tense place. The poisoning was but one incident heightening the nervousness that people felt and tending to exacerbate the series of public scandals and bouts of out- rageous behaviour during the years of Bowring's governorship. One source of dispute was the Attorney-General, T. Chisholm Anstey, a rabid, prejudiced man who seemed incapable of minding his own business and was frequently overcome by the desire to mind others' for them. The Times, with commend- able restraint, called him ‘a man of imperfectly regulated energies'. His first target in Hong Kong was the barrister, Dr T. W. Bridges, whom he indirectly accused of extortion and malpractice. Bridges was a colourful character, a barrister who advertised his services in two brightly coloured signs in English and Chinese outside his office in Queen's Road. He lent money at exorbitant rates of interest, and his chambers were often stacked with goods left as security. Accusations were levelled at him of having had financial dealings, while he was Acting Colonial Secretary, with the man who obtained the opium monopoly at that time. A committee of enquiry found that, while Bridges accepted a 'retaining fee' from the monopolist, this could not be regarded as cumshaw the local term for a bribe.
Escaping once from Anstey's zeal, Bridges was soon implicated in an enquiry into the affairs of Daniel R. Caldwell, Registrar-General and Pro- tector of the Chinese. Caldwell was accused of irregularities in the licensing of brothels, and of consorting with Ma Chow Wong, a notorious informer on pirate activities who in the end turned pirate himself. The scandal of succulent quality which then convulsed colonial society formed another part of the newspaper reports that amused Albert Smith. The commission of enquiry found Caldwell guilty of four of Anstey's 19 charges, yet by some process of chop logic at the same time found that his guilt was not such that he should be dismissed. Nor was guilt sufficient to prevent his continuance as a Justice of the Peace.
The depths to which members of the administration could sink were demonstrated when, during the enquiry, it appeared that documents found at
84 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Ma Chow Wong's house implicated Caldwell, and that these had been burnt by Bridges to whom, conducting an enquiry on Caldwell's behalf, they were taken. Tarrant, irrepressible, offered the opinion in his newspaper that Caldwell had been cleared by deception, by a 'contemptible and dramatic trick on the part of the Government'. For this he was charged with libel. At his trial Bridges admitted having destroyed the papers, and to being a close friend of Caldwell. Tarrant was then acquitted and even managed to extract damages from the government.
Tarrant continued to write of Caine's 'compradoric methods'. Caine, about to leave the colony for good, judged it time to clear his name, in- stituting proceedings for libel after a 'particularly sharp comment' in The Friend of China in August 1859. Shrewdly, Caine retained the services of every barrister in the colony to conduct his defence, forcing Tarrant to conduct his own. Tarrant was found guilty, fined £50, and sent to gaol for a year. But questions about the case were asked in Parliament and his release ordered. He was at once gaoled again for debt to Bridges but once more saved by public subscription. There was no doubt that public sympathy lay with Tarrant. His zeal in upholding the public good, however, was heavily admixed with the desire to sell more copies of his newspaper.
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•
The Times in London summed up the situation in Hong Kong during these days: 'Every official man's hand in Hong Kong was against his neighbour and any attempt to deal in London judicially with these congeries of intrigues, accusations, and animosities must fail.' With a nice turn of wit, the Colonial Secretary, Bulwer Lytton, when asked in the Commons to lay the papers dealing with the accusations on the table, replied that he ‘shrank from the responsibility...'. He 'would rather lay the table on them'. They revealed, he said, ‘hatred, malice, and uncharitableness in every possible variety and aspect' of Hong Kong life.
How much of this profound social disarray was to be traced to the tensions and unease generated by the situation vis-à-vis the Chinese, and how much to the inability of Bowring to take firm control of his administration, must remain a matter for argument; but assuredly the Governor was at odds with the majority sentiment in the colony. The legislation he introduced affecting the Chinese conflicted sharply with the liberal sentiments he expressed at other times. The need to cope with a situation which he had basically failed to control caused him to over-react, and this in turn induced popular counter- reaction of some strength.
Bowring had plans to add an elected element to the Legislative Council by giving the vote to holders of Crown Land, irrespective of race, who were paying a minimum of £10 annual rent. In public works his schemes were ambitious and included the reclamation of land and construction of a praya at Happy Valley. He pieced together the ground for the Botanical Gardens up the hill from Government House for public recreation. His schemes for the
Bowring's War with China 85
education of poorer Chinese were far ahead of his time, and he recognized that the needs of 'a large population of children of native mothers by for- eigners of all classes' were 'beginning to ripen into a dangerous element out of the dunghill of neglect. They seem to be wholly uncared for.'
Bowring turned to the problem posed by extortion and illicit fees, setting up a commission. But immediately the fact had to be faced that those who paid such fees to obtain access to officials were quite unwilling to come forward and disclose details of any actual case. Bowring had, in this, to admit defeat. 'We rule in ignorance,' he remarked, 'they obey in blindness.' And with that pretty epigram he perforce shelved the question. The cadet training scheme1 would, he felt sure, in the fullness of time produce a body of incorruptible administrators skilled in the Chinese language, able to act as a sound bridge between populace and rulers. Foreign Office approval for the scheme to supply the Consular Service in China with cadets was eventually forthcoming, but it fell to a future governor to implement it in the colony.
Most of Bowring's other plans, given the state of the colony, were scarcely susceptible of implementation. The Governor was at heart a reformer faced with a situation over which he failed to find the means of control. In London the Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, remarked with some rightness but with little sympathy that Bowring 'was rather wild on all subjects'. That is perhaps a characteristic of reformers.
In a further attempt to ameliorate the situation between governed and administration, Bowring revived what Bonham had abolished the office of Registrar-General, to which he added the title Protector of the Chinese. To this office he appointed Caldwell, who was a good linguist. Given the character of this official, widely held to be in league with the pirate Ma Chow Wong, the Colonial Office was reluctant to concur.
This liberal aspect in the Governor's outlook appeared in many of his actions but was flawed in detail. His idea that Chinese ought to have the chance to fill responsible positions in the administration was frowned on by London, the Secretary of State remarking:
If
you should hereafter be able to select from the Chinese inhabitants persons deserving of confidence whom you may think fit to hold this [Justice of the Peace] or any other administrative office I should be willing to assent... The experiment, however, should be very cautiously made... I should not think it wise to place a Chinese in any position in which he would exercise authority alone without a check on the part of British officials.
So Chinese working as clerks and student interpreters in the Magistracy and other departments, a first step to higher posts, were in fact denied promotion to any important appointment in Bowring's time.
In the wake of a revival in trade and public demand for a voice in the
86 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
colony's affairs, the question of enlarging the Legislative Council by means of increased unofficial membership, and even of introducing an elective element, came under scrutiny. Public meetings in support were held, and in response Bowring proposed that three unofficial members be included, elected tri- ennially from the ranks of the Justices of the Peace. London vetoed the scheme, saying that simple nomination would do the same job. The Secretary of State had no objection to a small increase in numbers in the Council, but 'I shall ... rely on your continuing to administer the Government in con- formity with the principles on which it has been Established, and not parting with due Authority, which [is] best calculated to secure the general welfare of a Community placed in such exceptional conditions.' The Council was in- creased by adding one unofficial and one official member. The Legislative Council then consisted of: the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Chief Justice, Colonial Secretary, Attorney-General, Surveyor-General, Chief Magistrate, and J. F. Edger, J. Jardine, and G. Lyall.
Unlike many another Governor, Bowring showed some concern about sanitation, appointing an army doctor, J. Caroll Dempster, on the death of Dr William Morrison. Dempster turned out to be a harsh critic, his first re- port noting regretfully that in 1854 Hong Kong presented 'so much filth... Cowsheds, pigsties, stagnant pools' in Taipingshan. He wanted drainage, sewerage, the laying of pavements, efficient scavenging. He noted the crowded, miserable housing. His next report stated that nothing had happened except the construction of a few dustbins, and these were being used by the Chinese as latrines. Having seen as many as 16 men in one cell he condemned the inhuman overcrowding in the gaol, and in his 1856 report he again complained of no action being taken, and of being fobbed off with the statement that things were 'under consideration'. He underlined that phrase. Dempster's justification in his strictures came in the cruel form of a cholera epidemic in the following year, 1857.
The Surveyor-General attempted to defend his position, but the ultimate culprit must be seen in Bowring whose ineptitude permitted the growing menace of the sanitary hazard. He responded with the Buildings and Nuisances Ordinance of 1856. And therein lay another quagmire of disputed authority. The Magistrates found it hard to interpret, and the Justices handed down decisions quite contrary to its spirit. To Bowring's remonstrances they replied with tart comments on interference by the administration with the due process of justice. In law, the Justices were correct, if unhelpful. Bowring referred the matter to the Colonial Office which did not favour his approach. Then, boldly, he created a post of Inspector of Nuisances, the first step towards the later creation of a Sanitary Department. But the Governor failed completely to grasp the implications of the absence of both a sanitation and a public health authority.
Population, health, and water supply are at all times interrelated, acutely in
Bowring's War with China 87
times of rapid population growth, and even more closely in climatic condi- tions such as those in Hong Kong. The overspill of the Taiping disturbances in China, together with the drift of manpower to service the rising trade of the colony, contributed to population growth in the Bowring years. Between 1853 and 1859 the population more than doubled. It was small wonder that inadequate sanitation was matched by inadequate water supply, com- pounding the gravity of the situation. Many larger dwellings, such as Bowring's old house in Spring Gardens, had wells, but the average Chinese family was dependent on the erratic flow of water from streams and rivulets coursing down the hills. These were little gushers in the rainy season, but most dwindled to a trickle in the dry months. Bowring was neither the first nor the last Governor who took the curious view that provision of water supplies was not the business of government. In Bowring, with his liberal principles, it was more surprising than in some others. He suggested that a private company be formed which could levy charges for supplying water. Here, once again, he came into collision with the Legislative Council who argued for government funding. The enthusiast for a plan to bring water to the town, via a conduit from an existing pool at Pok Fu Lam round the western slopes of the Peak, was W. T. Mercer, the Colonial Secretary. He pointed out that precisely when the streams lessen in volume or dry up, is the time of greatest fire hazard. The scheme was estimated to cost £25,000, but nothing was done about it until the next administration.
Slightly more success attended Bowring's plan to enlarge the area available for building on the north shore of Hong Kong island. He proposed a re- clamation stretching out into the harbour from Happy Valley, achieved by means of draining the swampy ground and filling it in with soil and rubble. This was to continue westward, rationalizing the contour of the shore, to the central district. The praya scheme met with immediate opposition from the majority of those with premises and land fronting the harbour all the way from the central district to Causeway Bay, whose seaward outlets might thereby be blocked. The scheme had commercial potential in the provision of new land for building, and it allowed for public access to the harbour at various points, something that had been restricted by previous haphazard development. The whole problem had been recognized in earlier days by the first Colonial Engineer, Gordon, but not until the time of Bowring were there enough financial resources to contemplate a new praya. And even then the Governor had to accumulate the necessary funds in various ways.
Reclamation as well as construction was involved, finished off by a stout sea wall. The scheme was announced in November 1855. Under it the marine lot holders were to pay rent, additional to that for their original holdings, for the illicit reclamation of land made by them, and were also to contribute to the cost of the new sea wall. Under threat, as might have been expected, they held animated protest meetings and the whole issue was referred to London.
88 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
London endorsed it. But only some of the Westerners agreed; and there were Chinese protesters too.
While this series of confrontations was being sorted out a start was made in areas where there was no objection at Happy Valley where the praya scheme interlocked with the Bowrington Praya scheme extending seaward the area fronting Happy Valley. In central district J. M. Dent, holding land between there and the military cantonment, refused to give way. Bowring drafted an ordinance to apply compulsion, only to be frustrated when the official members of the Legislative Council (contrary to custom) voted against it with the unofficials. The praya was completed long after, and Bowring's name was not applied to it. His name survives only in Bowrington Road in the area of his reclamation north of Happy Valley, and in a canal near by which has nowadays disappeared under Canal Road.
The colony's financial state continued to be healthy, revenue reaching more than £62,000 by 1858, and funds for law and order the 'police rate' rose from a little over £3,000 to somewhat over £13,000 in Bowring's time. The new, legal, status of the opium trade allowed the Governor to reintroduce the opium monopoly in 1858, and that brought in another £4,508, all but equal to the revenue from licences for spirits. Yet he failed to balance his budget. Expenditure in 1858 marginally exceeded revenue, largely through increased spending on public works; and had he been able to push through other schemes that his liberal mind suggested for the well-being of the colony, the deficit would have been much bigger.
For a man so well-meaning as Sir John Bowring, his actual achievements were not great. This was in part the result of his character defects. On arrival he inherited a colony in fragile financial condition, but that soon took an upturn beyond expectations, partly because of his efforts but more im- portantly because of external factors. Bowring inherited, too, a society among which there were numerous self-seeking individuals with no scruples about engaging in social warfare with anyone who crossed their paths or seemed to question their overweening pride or to eye their hypersensitive pockets. To this flammable situation in a house of buccaneers Bowring added the irritant of his high-handed manner, the combustible material of his liberal ideas which were shared by few, a tendency to be far ahead of Hong Kong times, and, anathema to almost all, his treating of the Chinese as equals under the law. A conflagration in society naturally followed. His abilities were striking, but not in the field of administration or personal relations. He cared for the things of the mind setting up a small museum in a room in the Supreme Court more than for the frequently squalid trade which it was his duty to encourage. A liberal man, a political radical, a reformer, and a Unitarian, Bowring was all the things the traders of Hong Kong disliked and distrusted. A man of peace, he none the less brought war to China, and sowed confusion in an administration whose workings he had set out to clarify.
―
Bowring's War with China 89
Bowring, approaching seventy, had lost what he most wished to have the honour attached to achieving a settlement with China. His errors of judgement had impelled Palmerston to send Elgin to replace him. It cannot have been easy to remain at the seat of operations as an impotent spectator in the process he wished to control. But he did so with tolerable grace. Bowring left Hong Kong studiously ignored by the Western population and, like Davis before him, the object of spontaneous marks of respect from the Chinese.
In all this there must, it would seem, have been some fundamental lessons to be learned in London.
9.
Consolidation under Robinson
IN the opinion of The Times when Sir Hercules Robinson took up office as Governor of Hong Kong, it was 'the worst period in the colony's history'. The leader-writer assessed its reputation in accurate if arch terms:
Hong Kong is always connected with some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble, so much so, that the name of this noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented little island may not inaptly be used as a euphonious synonym for a place not mentionable to ears polite.
Sir Hercules, after less than nine months there, appeared to concur, and he was to write to the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies: 'Indeed Hong Kong is totally unlike any other British Dependency and its position is in many respects so grotesquely anomalous...'.
If Bowring had been a small man with big ideas, Robinson was a big man with generally smallish ideas which he proved capable of having carried out efficiently. For once the Colonial Office had sent the right man at the right time.
In reality, it may be suspected, almost any firm, competent administrator not consumed with his own personal theories, any normally balanced, fairly experienced civil servant endowed with a will to govern, could probably have done as well as Robinson. What the 'discontented little island' needed, for once it received. Aged 35 when he arrived in September 1859, Robinson brought with him some experience in government appointments in England, and a spell as President of Montserrat in the West Indies. It was from the Lieutenant-Governorship of St Christopher that he was hurried out to the disputatious colony, with his young wife and infant daughter.
In several ways Robinson had luck on his side. Many of the assorted rogues in government service had left. That smudgy character (the adjective appears by coincidence for the first time in the year of Robinson's arrival) Caine, friend of Bridges and Caldwell, had just retired. Hulme, Chief Justice, was about to remove his bibulous self and his burgeoning family in April of 1860. Anstey, litigious Attorney-General, had left under a cloud the previous January and was to learn on arrival in England that he was not to return.
Consolidation under Robinson 91
W. T. Mercer, a man who had skated fairly gracefully over the thin and sullied ice of Bowring's administration, and who was to administer the government in Robinson's absence, was still in the colony
a perennial from Davis's days who Bonham thought had ‘a capacity far above the office he holds'. Still at work, too, was Charles May whose appointments had all been in the Police Department, and whose dogged efforts to clean it up over the 34 years of his stay went hand in hand with his ownership of a well- known group of brothels, in more or less seemly fashion. And there was D. R. Caldwell, Registrar-General, a character as nefarious and pliant as any in the colony's history, with whom the new Governor had at once to deal.
The collusion between Caldwell and Bridges, and the prosecution of Tarrant, which had left one of the indelible stains on the Bowring era, focused suspicion on both when Tarrant was acquitted. No one seriously believed that they were innocent, and in both Hong Kong and London there was pressure to reopen the case. Robinson was ordered to set up a public enquiry. During the course of it Bridges left the colony and was never heard of again, his fortune doubtless sufficient to support him, in the style to which he was accustomed in Hong Kong, in anonymity elsewhere. The Executive Council, before whom the enquiry was held, now included none of the old coterie of civil servants and merchants, with the exception of Mercer. The hearings,
The Executive Council in 1860, Sir Hercules Robinson seated wearing a top hat. W. T. Mercer, Colonial Secretary, is seated on the left, with Mr Leslie of Dent and Company, and Col. Haythorne, Captain Superintendent of Police, on the right.
92 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
held sporadically, covered a period of 13 months, the Council faced con- tinually by 'equivocation, proved unreliability of witnesses, problems of interpretation and translation, and failure to produce evidence'. Ĉaldwell was suspended as unfit to continue in his office because of his association with Ma Chow Wong. Yet some years later another administration was to find a use for his services. His Chinese wife, a former brothel girl, continued after his death in possession of the brothels into the 1890s. May, Superintendent of Police, who was implicated in the affair, was exonerated.
Possibly even before he left London and certainly after the first few months of his tenure in Hong Kong, Robinson was convinced that the prime need in the colony was broad-based civil service reform. He complained in his first Annual Report in 1859 about the absence of it, and thereafter aimed at achieving a properly organized administration under his control. He revived the cadet scheme. Recognizing another of the chronic ills of the service the opportunity for corruption Robinson raised salaries and instituted a Civil List of offices and their appropriate salaries, obviating the need to re-vote them every year. He also enforced the principle that official members of the Legislative Council might not vote against any action proposed by the Governor, and he forbade communication by any member with the press on official matters. Finally, in this sensitive area, he introduced a pension scheme for civil servants.
It is on the basis of these measures in regard to the structure of the admin- istration and its relations with the public, that the colony's public service has stood ever since. In its establishment may be seen Robinson's prime importance in Hong Kong history. He recognized that to fight against corruption and other endemic abuses in the administration was futile in the absence of trained personnel, financial inducement, and the assurance of a pensioned future.
The new Governor then tackled the press, which had been responsible for stirring the pot of social ill-ease. The hypocrisy of much press activity in Hong Kong to that date consisted of its posing as the guardian of public morals, and then turning to the self-serving dissemination of scandal, and now and then printing outright malicious libel. While adhering to the prin- ciple of press freedom, Robinson now required all editors to pay much larger sums of money as surety of their good faith. And he began publication (from 1862) of the Government Gazette in a Chinese as well as the existing English version, for the first time affording the majority race the chance of reading ordinances and other official matters affecting them.
Robinson's attention to the Chinese majority stands in interesting contrast to the attitude of most of his predecessors and successors who usually made the mistake of ignoring them, or regarding them as a criminal class or as irredeemable savages. On his estimate, at most a mere 500 of the 120,000 Chinese in the colony knew anything about British laws or how they were
Consolidation under Robinson 93
administered. One comical example of that ignorance was the continued payments by the Chinese of salt revenues to extortionist gangs, even though the salt monopoly had been abolished in 1858. Robinson ceased trying to govern the Chinese through their own headmen and made the Registrar- General the channel of communication with the government. But in 1860 he met Chinese opposition when he introduced closer control over pawn- broking. The pawnbrokers shut up shop and went on strike. So, too, did the cargo-coolies, and also the chair-coolies when he wanted to register them in 1861 and 1863. He took a firm line, refusing concessions. Registration took place.
With the Governor no longer responsible to consular officials in China, the island slowly ceased to be regarded as the centre for British trade and in- fluence in the Far East. The Kowloon peninsula came once more to the fore- front, as hostilities with China were renewed in 1860 to force the ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin. Anglo-French forces encamped there before embarking for the north. Bruce, British Minister in China, wanted Kowloon retained as part of the indemnity the Chinese would be made to pay at the conclusion of the treaty. Harry Parkes was entrusted with the negotiations. The result was positive. On 26 March 1860 the area south of a line drawn between Kowloon Fort and a point opposite Stonecutters island was leased in perpetuity to Britain and was handed over to Hong Kong. Charles May was made Special Commissioner, to employ Chinese laws and usage as far as he could. The Convention of Beijing in October 1860 cancelled the lease and ceded it outright as a Hong Kong dependency 'with a view to maintaining law and order in and about the harbour of Hong Kong'. It then came to light that there was no official record of ownership and tenancies of the land. What deeds did exist, did not define boundaries. And there had been neither time nor opportunity to carry out the necessary cadastral survey. At once a swarm of claimants appeared waving spurious deeds and clamouring for com- pensation. The successful ones were to get 999-year leases on the same rental terms as previously. Inevitably justice was rough and ready, and where serious doubts were felt the land was sold, the proceeds being shared among claimants under Chinese official supervision.
The problems were far from solved, however. A dispute boiled up between the Hong Kong government and the military, who claimed the whole area as a cantonment where all the troops in the colony could be housed. Ragged arguments dragged on for four years, pre-empting organization of the land for building or for recreation (as Robinson wished) to relieve what was seen as population pressure on Hong Kong island. The south-west portion of the peninsula, in his view, should be devoted to commerce and wharves since it fronted deep water, and he appointed a commission to sort the matter out. But the members of the commission naval, military, and civil failed to agree. Eventually Robinson managed to reserve the land he wanted for
94 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
commercial purposes, but his scheme for a praya running from the point at Tsim Sha Tsui to the boundary opposite Stonecutters island was never imple- mented. Compensation for dispossessed Chinese (over $29,000) was delayed until 1864; but those not dispossessed received their 999-year leases; others were granted leases only sufficient to ensure they built durable structures.
During the debate the new Secretary of State for War, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, had taken up the cudgels on behalf of the army, and the Kowloon land use controversy was not to be finally settled, with plots marked out for sale and a sea wall built, until 1864. The absurd demands of both army and navy in Hong Kong's early history were responsible for the postponing or even abandoning of many a good plan, and for malformation of what could have been intelligently designed urban areas.
At this time the Colonial Office woke up to the fact that the annual budget of Hong Kong had never been voted by the Legislative Council, as was standard practice in other colonies. And the Council from that time on did so. The local Post Office, previously run by the postal authorities in England, was now taken over and run locally. At first British 'stamp labels' were to be used, but London decreed that Hong Kong should print its own, and various denominations were designed, the colour being chosen by the Postmaster- General, F. W. Mitchell. Robinson tried to get the Legislative Council to agree to an ordinance under which all vessels would carry Hong Kong mail free of charge, but they 'stoutly resisted its passage as interference with free trade'. As in Britain when first introduced, the use of stamps in Hong Kong was 'hailed by the community with little satisfaction' and ‘apprehension of inconvenience'.
A steam-assisted sailing ship in Hong Kong waters in 1860.
Consolidation under Robinson
95
The Governor now began to apply his mind to the predicament of the courts, where pressure of work was excessive due to the number of cases admitted from the Treaty Ports, and also resulting from the colony's in- creasing population. From 1851, when the number of cases heard in the colony was 1,922, the workload had increased fourfold by 1860. Robinson set up a Summary Court and judges to relieve the High Court and Magistrates Courts, at the same time abolishing the offices of Chief and Assistant Magistrate in favour of two Police Magistrates. In this connection a know- ledge of Chinese was seen as important more important even than exten- sive legal qualifications. Robinson's attitude to competence in Chinese brought the offer of $10 a month to any official who would learn - but there were only three takers.
The total inadequacy of the gaol had been apparent for many a year, one of the grey areas in the colony's administration which tended to darken in hue with the passing of time. Under Robinson the whole topic of police and detention resurfaced. Bowring's gaol was too small even before it opened in 1862. Since then prisoners had greatly increased in numbers. A new gaol was urgently needed but, as usual in Hong Kong, the process of getting one was tortuous. Robinson wanted the gaol on Stonecutters island, out of the urban area. But the cost of building it and the time factor worried him. A stopgap in the shape of a hulk named Royal Saxon was bought and moored off Stone- cutters, and filled with 280 convicts. Chinese squatters on the island were compensated and cleared. Then a boat with 38 convicts aboard capsized alongside the Royal Saxon, and an enquiry gave a verdict of accidental death, but was critical of discipline in the prison hulk and of the unseaworthy nature of the capsized craft. The superintendent of the Royal Saxon was dismissed and the vessel brought nearer to the shore so that the inmates could reach land via a gangway. This they promptly did in a mass escape of 100 in 1864. None was recaptured.
Simultaneously, for similar reasons, prisoners were escaping from the old gaol on Hollywood Road, principally by the monsoon drains. A new super- intendent named Douglas was appointed and the situation improved gaol thereafter being commonly referred to as Douglas Hotel.
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the
Yet the colony's crime problem was far from solved. A battle in Kowloon lasting several days between Punti villagers and Hakka settlers had to be stopped. An opium scandal came to light, in which Indian merchants and an Englishman in charge of opium stocks aboard the receiving ship Tropic had defrauded the Chartered Mercantile Bank of two million dollars in 1862. Then the vaults of another bank were entered in 1865 by 'drain gangs' using stormwater drains from which to excavate tunnels under the floors. The bank lost $63,000 in notes and £11,000 in gold ingots, some of the notes being discovered on the following morning floating about the streets.
Perhaps the major failure of the period, partly attributable to Robinson,
96 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
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which fortunately did not result immediately in tragedy, concerned the old trio of interlinked problems water supply, sanitation, and public health. When the Governor arrived there was a period of acute water shortage after poor summer rains. To this he responded, reviving a project shelved in Bowring's time, by offering a prize of $1,000 for the best scheme for bringing an adequate water supply to Victoria town. A civil employee of the Royal Engineers, R. B. Rawling, won the prize for a scheme envisaging the con- struction of a reservoir at Pok Fu Lam on the south-west slopes of the Peak, and a conduit to lead the water round the hills to the north slopes at a level which later came to be named Conduit Road. Modified a little, the work was put in hand with Rawling supervising, at an estimated cost of £25,000 plus another £5,000 to provide for a future extension. The scheduled completion date was 1861-2, and provision was made for a water rate to be levied at 2 per cent of the value of properties supplied. But water from Pok Fu Lam failed to flow until 1864, and then in quantities far from the copious supply promised. An extension to the scheme to furnish water to the eastern parts of the town had to be constructed in the first year of operation at an extra cost of $10,000.
This first major attempt to provide adequate water supplies was a partial failure, and as the population continued to increase it became even less satisfactory. The operation may be seen as the archetype of others repeated ad nauseam in decades to come, with reluctant administrations grudgingly enlarging, modifying, and tinkering with what in the first place had been insufficient schemes. Robinson, although to his credit he got the first scheme going, was no wiser than others in perceiving the future in terms of popula- tion and water. In many ways Hong Kong was still like a small frontier town clapped together in response to the basic needs of gold prospectors. Sanitation was the last priority. But at least the town had a Governor with the relevant facts to hand, even if he did not visit those sections where the problem was at its most gruesome.
Dr L. Murray, a new Colonial Surgeon, arrived in 1859 to take charge of the new civil hospital, and was permitted to take up private practice to eke out his miserable salary. The following year, 1860, his report landed on the Governor's desk with what, when read, must have sounded in retrospect a sickening thud. It was suppressed. In 1861 Murray tried again, making the same charges and recounting the same dire tale. It was returned to him for revision. Perhaps his language was on the outspoken side of tact, but the enormity of the conditions Murray described excused a conscientious medical officer some little intemperance of wording. Drainage and sewerage, he wrote, 'had never received adequate attention, nor been carried out on any comprehensive plan' — hardly surprising since there was only one Inspector of Nuisances, and the police usually did not trouble him with cases that would require his attention. Murray condemned the methods of collection of refuse
Consolidation under Robinson 97
and 'night soil', and suggested it be done before people went out to work. (In later times, until the mid-twentieth century, in parts of the colony where there was no sewerage, night soil was still being collected in the hours of darkness.) The hospital, Murray said, was inadequate, with no wards for infectious (as opposed to other) diseases, no provision for Chinese patients, no baths or means of that ordinary cleanliness 'most often useful to medical treatment'. His sarcasm may have been what Robinson disliked. The prison with its stench and overcrowding, its lack of ventilation, he noted as ‘beyond des- cription'. Staff continually changed. He complained of the severity of floggings and the permanent deformities left by chaining. Yet in his previous year's report he had stated that 'the Chinese thrive amazingly in confinement and after a few months' incarceration are sent out fat and healthy'. A further year's experience in Hong Kong had apparently altered his first impression of this. If Robinson was irked by the style of the reports, it was hardly the mark of a responsible official to suppress them for, sarcasm aside, what they described was a public health predicament teetering on the edge of public calamity.
—
Some reforms were made, nibbling at a monstrously dangerous state of affairs. The civil hospital was enlarged and destitute Chinese were admitted. A medical superintendent was appointed to the hospital (the first one was dismissed for locking his door at night so that he could not be disturbed). The prevalence of cholera in China and Japan, and nearer home on Stonecutters island among the convicts, brought about the appointment of a Sanitary Committee in December 1862. And this committee reported the same appalling state of affairs as had been described by Murray (but in milder language) suggesting radical rethinking about the drainage 'system'. The Surveyor-General stated that the reason for the dismal state of sanitation was the unexpectedly high rate of population growth. He failed to remark on another the extraordinary negligence of the government. The Colonial Office, informed of the cost of improvements, replied coldly that these might not be undertaken until the colony's revenues could pay for them. In spite of these conditions the general health of the population was passably good. But the makings of disaster lurked all around.
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However alarming in terms of public health, the upsurge of the population was a contributory factor in Hong Kong's increasing prosperity. While in 1851 there were only 1,600 foreigners among a Chinese population of 85,330, by 1865 foreigners numbered 2,034, 'coloured' persons (Indians) 1,645, and Chinese 121,825. In the same period the income from land leases expanded just short of a hundredfold to £30,866. The revenue from auctions, largely engendered by Chinese, doubled in 1861 compared to the previous year. So too did levies for police and later water, while government revenues almost trebled to £175,717 in 1865 as did expenditure. The home govern- ment viewing all this with a somewhat acquisitive eye, never keen to spend on
98 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
the 'anomalous' colony, then exacted £20,000 in annual contribution to the upkeep of the military presence in Hong Kong over Robinson's and the Legislative Council's strong protests. Payments began in 1865 and continue down to the present day.
As prosperity increased there came a time to reconsider the old and vexed question of the currency what was legal tender. The problem was a confused and confusing one, product of off-the-cuff decisions in the past, and of making do in the absence of any currency at all other than that of China and the internationally used Maria Theresa and Mexican dollars. Part of the problem was the number and variety of coins allowed as legal tender various types of silver dollar, British and Indian coins, copper Chinese 'cash'. The difficulties had been recognized in Bowring's time but it was not then considered the opportune moment to make changes. Robinson reported that the currency proclamation of 1844, allowing the use of British and Indian silver and gold coins with silver dollars, was now outdated as all commercial accounts were kept in dollars. Little money was collected in sterling. The dollar was valued at four shillings and two pence. Chinese cash were valued in accordance with the weight of silver in the dollar (usually about 1,200 cash to the dollar). The Governor's proposals to mint a Hong Kong coinage in London proved in part unacceptable, because they involved large numbers of low-value coins of considerable weight, implying heavy transport costs.
Eventually the Colonial Office agreed that the colony's accounts might be kept in dollars, a reform introduced on 1 July 1862. Robinson proposed setting up a Hong Kong mint to coin its own dollars, cash, and one- and 10- cent coins. Until such time as the mint could begin operations, the coins were made at the London Mint. These went into circulation in January 1864. The costly project of the Hong Kong Mint was left for the next governor to bring to fruition.
Along with currency reform came the wider question of banks and banking. Hong Kong's first bank was a branch of the Oriental Bank estab- lished in 1845. Twelve years were to pass before its notes were recognized as legal tender; even then the bank was required to provide monthly informa- tion on the state of its note circulation. By the time a competing bank had appeared in 1857, notes in circulation amounted to $342,965. The Chartered and Mercantile Bank of India opened in August 1857, followed by the Bank of India, Australia and China, and by the Agra and United Service Bank; and by that time there existed rules for official recognition of banks.
All the existing banks in the colony were primarily involved in exchange operations. The need was felt for what we would nowadays call a merchant bank. The first step was taken by Dent and Company who in the summer of 1864 announced that they and others were contemplating forming a local bank to oil the wheels of trade between China and Japan. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was set up with a capital of $5 million
Consolidation under Robinson
99
in 20,000 shares. Merchants who formed the original committee included 14 from the largest trading houses in Hong Kong. The first manager, V. Kresser, took up his post on 1 January 1865. The bank was the first to profit under the new limited liability regulations passed on that day, and officially opened for business on 3 March.
The first European staff of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.
Among other novelties in Robinson's time were the setting up of a Chamber of Commerce in May 1861, in an effort to protect commercial interests now that the Governor was no longer Superintendent of Trade; and the abolition of imprisonment for debt in the same year, bringing colonial law into line with that of Britain.
Robinson had arrived in Hong Kong somewhat in the way an emergency service answers a call. He was prepared for the worst in a colony which he described as 'publicly and socially ill at ease with itself'. In his second
By 1861 Hong Kong was only 20 years old but the town of Victoria had grown remarkably, as this Chinese school painting shows. Paddle-steamers, three-masted men-of-war with square ports for cannon, clipper ships, and junks fill the harbour. The town, with the Cathedral and Government House above, covers the lower slopes, with Taipingshan in the right third of the picture.
-
Annual Report he remained sceptical about the idea that it could ever blossom into a considerable settlement, or would ever reach one-quarter of the size of Guangzhou. Nevertheless he developed an affection for the place, and on the whole its residents warmed to him offering him a laudatory address as he went on leave for his ‘indefatigable zeal and efficiency' in promoting public welfare and his ‘kindness and urbanity [in] private inter- course'.2 It is easy to point to his deficiencies. That ‘zeal and efficiency' could scarcely be said to have extended to public health. But those were days of more casual attitudes to mortality from infectious disease of unknown cause. Yet a code of prudent practice in public sanitation was well accepted in Britain as some sort of preventative measure. It was this that Robinson neglected to enforce.
In assessing Robinson's effect on Hong Kong, Eitel is less enthusiastic than were its citizens. While giving the Governor his due for keeping the peace and setting the colony back on its feet after the shambles left by his predecessor, he implies that Robinson was fortunate to have W. T. Mercer, without whom he would have been ‘infinitely less successful'. Bowring had called him ‘one of the most accomplished men in the colony but an unwilling reformer'. That was true. But it was Mercer who had recommended the scoundrel Bridges (a college friend) as Attorney-General under Bowring. He escaped unscathed in the ensuing scandal, writing to the Colonial Secretary: 'I have had a long and friendly but never intimate acquaintance with Dr Bridges."3 Perhaps that was
Consolidation under Robinson
ΙΟΙ
the literal truth. During the absences of Robinson and after he left, Mercer administered the government for a total period of almost three years before leaving Hong Kong in May 1867. He had been in the colony since 1844. But he failed to secure what he really wanted, a colonial governorship.
There were, however, welcome signs of change in Hong Kong, both socially and materially, a new sophistication befitting a more settled place. The picture formerly characterized by quarrelsome men in and out of govern- ment, of a barbarous place filled with unruly merchants and rough Chinese under venal administrators, had by the end of Robinson's governorship greatly altered. This dawning civic pride was to be symbolized by the erec- tion of a clock tower, that epitome of mid-Victorian values. The tower, 80 feet high, rose at the junction of Pedder Street and Queen's Road, vaguely baroque, quite in keeping with the surrounding architecture, holding a white-
The clock tower at the corner of Pedder Street, seen from Des Voeux Road on the waterfront, with Jardine's on the right and the former premises of Dent and Company opposite. The photograph is by Afong, a Chinese who did a thriving trade in local views in the 1870s.
faced clock, the gift of shipping tycoon Douglas Lapraik. Even at the time of its building, this reminder of the need to watch the fleeting hours constituted a slight obstruction to the traffic, and it stood there apparently immovable through a 29-year newspaper campaign to take it down, waged by a member of the Hong Kong Club, M. J. D. Stephens. The clock tower finally suc- cumbed in 1913 when the congestion of rickshaws (introduced from Japan
そ
The Hong Kong Club on the corner of Queen's Road and Wyndham Street was established in 1846. From it were excluded 'shopkeepers, Chinese, Indians, women, and other undesirables'.
after it was erected), carriages, and sedan chairs round its base became intolerable. The clock itself was preserved and appeared with Lapraik's name attached in the new Post Office built in the early twentieth century.
By March 1865 when Robinson left, shade trees had been planted in several streets of the town and, on the first day of January that year, to general amazement, the new gas street lighting was turned on. It seemed to many that a new era had arrived.
An East India Company officer, rolled chart in hand, points to his ship. Chinese school, c.1800.
***
Tea being packed for sale to Western merchants. Chinese school, late eighteenth century.
.<
Opium ships at Lingding Island. W. J. Huggins, 1824.
A street in Guangzhou. William Prinsep, 1838.
A view of the Guangzhou factories. American, French, British, and Danish flags flank the church. Attributed to the Youqua, c.1850.
Admiral Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief, who arrived in Macau in August 1841. Unknown artist.
Howqua (Wu Bingjian), the senior Chinese merchant at Guangzhou, painted by Tinqua, c.1830-40.
A young Chinese merchant at Guangzhou, painted by the artist whom Westerners called Spoilum (Guan Zuolin), early nineteenth century.
An unflattering portrait of Commissioner Lin by a Chinese artist, c.1840.
Macau, where the foreign merchants spent the off season, away from the Guangzhou factories. Chinese artist. Datable to before 1844.
►
Possibly the earliest oil painting of Hong Kong island, showing the path along the north shore (right) as it approaches the early waterfront settlement which became the town of Victoria. The Chinese name, 'Skirt String Island', was derived from the appearance of this path. Chinese artist, undated.
The opium clipper Red Rover, built in Calcutta in late 1829, one of the fastest of her kind ever built. She eventually belonged to Jardine, Matheson and Company and could make three round trips a year to and from India, laden with opium. William J. Huggins (1771-1845), undated.
KIRKEEANDVOONA,
Two medals awarded to Sir Henry Pottinger for service in India and China. Sold at Christie's, London, in 1988.
10. The Growth of Chinese Institutions, and
the Problems of Education
STOCKTAKING is such a complex phenomenon even in a small society that it is not easily accomplished at a given moment of its life. The balance of achievement and failure, the appearance of trends, are easier to discern in retrospect, although then they lack the muscle of contemporaneity.
In 1866 when Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell arrived as its Governor, Hong Kong was not threatened by any immediate problem, other than those perennial ones present since the inception. In its 35 years the colony had produced more than its share of antagonisms between governors and their administrations, between governors and governed, and among the citizens themselves. The existence of a master and menial relationship between Westerners and Chinese of an ancient and proud, if decayed, civilization, could not be expected to result in easy social harmony. Yet the odd thing was that the mix of Western, capitalist, mercantile activity and the Chinese capacity for dedicated, intelligent work, allowed both sides to thrive. Despite insanitary conditions, the Chinese were evidently better off than in China, or they would have returned there; and the cleverer among them were making good money. The two communities went their separate ways in all things save for the common ground of commercial pursuits. Doubtless the Chinese brought with them to Hong Kong many of the detractions of late Qing life in Guangdong Province, and the Westerners the shortcomings of Victorian Britain and nineteenth-century Europe: and these were exaggerated by deracination. These underlay the bitterness of some of the social battles which raged.
The human consequences of the mushrooming of the Chinese population would have alarmed more caring rulers. But the growth of wealth among those who in the nineteenth century might be presumed to have it makes remarkable reading. A.R. Johnston in the Journal of the Royal Geographical
104 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Society lists 388 Chinese traders, doubtless mostly with small capital resources, among them two compradors. The Chinese Directory for 1872 lists 55 general merchants, 17 charterers, eight contractors, 16 gold dealers, seven money-changers, 18 opium dealers, six prepared opium dealers, two coal merchants, 41 marine compradors and ship chandlers, and 45 foreign- firm compradors. It was from among the last two categories that there emerged a Chinese élite. And from their ranks were drawn the people reflected in an earlier set of figures which showed that, among 1,999 persons liable for police rates of above £10, a remarkable 1,637 were Chinese, and only 186 British the rest being other foreigners. Among 773 rated at over £40, there were 410 Chinese. The trend is clear.
The number of Chinese compradors working for foreign companies was a fairly reliable guide to colonial commercial growth, and also to the rise of a Chinese élite. In 1876 there were 142 brokers, 215 trading hong merchants, and 67 marine compradors. By 1881, the figures were 455, 393, and 113 respectively. At the beginning of the twentieth century a visiting Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Norman, could write: 'The Chinese merchant is crowding out the British middleman ... it cannot be long before the bulk of the real estate is owned by Chinese.' The Chinese merchants seemed to him 'among the richest men in the community'.1
The rising affluence of this section of the Chinese, coupled with the need, especially acute for people living under an alien form of rule, to acquire a communal identity, began in the 1860s and 1870s to give birth to such institutions as the Tung Wah Hospital, established by an ordinance of 1870 and opened by the Governor two years later. The response of the Chinese attempting to fit into a foreign system was twofold. First, they tried to adapt to its strange ways; second, they attempted to form some kind of organiza- tion through whose aegis the British authorities could be persuaded that they were responsible members of society. But in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, Chinese society lacked that class of ranking men whose minds had been nurtured and proved in the traditional Chinese Civil Service examinations men who in China were the leaders. In Hong Kong these men, who would have been able to communicate effectively in terms of trained intelligence with their rulers, were simply not there so the Chinese had to form new societies.
—
The first of these were the triads, secret societies which today sound a note of menace, but which in nineteenth-century Hong Kong probably did as much good as harm. ‘On balance,' Maurice Freedman writes, 'the secret societies were essentially movements which, while they may have found some of their leaders among members of officialdom and the gentry, expressed an opposi- tion to the state characteristic of the poor and the peasantry. In the four years 1879–82 the average annual number of Chinese arrested for being out without a pass or a light at night was 1,000. They lived in a society of
,2
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 105
Westerners of whose laws they were either ignorant or uncomprehending, and whose hold over them seemed tyrannical, arbitrary, even at times cruel. No European ranking police officer, for example, in this period was a Chinese speaker. The Chinese had no recourse but their temples or religious associa- tions which cut across dialectal, regional, and other divisions.
The Tung Wah rose to fill a communication gap between Chinese who felt a responsibility for the community as a whole, and the government. Its origins went back to a petition of 1851 signed by 14 Chinese. It asked for a grant of land on which to build a temple where, if they died in the colony, they would have a place to deposit their ancestral tablets, so that later ‘their fellow villagers or connections visiting Hong Kong could carry them home'. The temple, soon constructed, came to be used as a place where dying Chinese were deposited. In April 1869 the Acting Registrar-General visited this temple and found the 'dead and dying huddled together indiscriminately in small filthy rooms'. It was this situation which prompted the opening of a subscription list by wealthy Chinese for the establishment of a regular Chinese hospital.
The Chinese subscribed $40,000 and the government donated $15,000 and a site, together with $100,000 as capital, described as ‘a gift from the Queen
周惠
The reception hall of the Tung Wah Hospital.
106 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
to the Chinese community', but which actually came from the Gambling Fund. The Tung Wah was what the ordinance described as 'a Chinese Hospital for the care and treatment of the indigent sick to be supported by voluntary contributions'. As such it has continued ever since. The first Chairman was Leung Hok-chau, comprador in Gibb, Livingstone and Company. Among the directors were the comprador of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Lo Chen-kong, and Wong Shing who was Dr Legge's collaborator in his translation of the Chinese Classics.
Tung Wah activities on behalf of the poor and the sick expanded. The financial and later business management demands on its Chairman, Directors, and committee members increased so greatly that they came to be recruited only from that segment of Chinese society characterized by wealth and a sense of social responsibility. The Tung Wah in time acquired much property and invested its funds with great skill.
-
Aside from its medical, charitable, and educational activities, the Tung Wah came to represent the interests of the Chinese at large. The composition of its committee always including the wealthiest Chinese in Hong Kong and later on practically always the Chinese on the Legislative Council ensured it a voice. And that voice in several ways took over the duties of the Protector of the Chinese when that office was eventually abolished. The person responsible for the Chinese was the Registrar-General. For him the Tung Wah proved to be his ear on the otherwise hermetic Chinese world; and for the Chinese, knowing that members of the Tung Wah directorate had the ear of the Registrar-General was an important political fact. There existed between the authorities and the Chinese, via the Tung Wah, an unacknow- ledged symbiotic relationship.
By the late 1870s, Lethbridge notes,
the directorate did begin to act as though it had inherited the magisterial function and the trappings of the imperial Mandarinate. At the formal opening of the Hospital in 1872, the full committee, some 70 or 80 in number, were ‘all dressed in Mandarin costume, some even with peacock's feathers attached to their buttons'.3
The late nineteenth century had brought the antique rules of the Civil Service examinations in China so far into disrepute that degrees could be purchased. But what was important was that the directorate and committee members saw themselves in the role of mandarins. Each year at the spring and autumn festivals they went in a body to the Man Mo Temple to participate in the sacrifices to Confucius, the rituals being identical with those carried out by the magistrates of imperial China. The cult of Confucius was encouraged by the Tung Wah by the funding of Confucian schools. Other signs of the Tung Wah's regulatory scope within the Chinese community were such activities as the conveying of corpses to China for burial, sending the sick and
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 107
destitute back to their villages, and collecting money from overseas Chinese for famine relief in China. It became, in Middleton Smith's words, ‘probably one of the largest philanthropic institutions in existence'.4
In this way, on their own initiative, in response to the needs of a population unrepresented in the government of the community, the Chinese made a start on the regulation of their part of that community.
Except in such publications as the journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and the like, and in some scholarly books, the history of Hong Kong has been documented and expounded largely from a Western point of view. Possibly only a Chinese could successfully do otherwise. Europeans take the stage as principals, the Chinese relegated to the role of virtual extras. Only the most powerful moves made by such organizations as the Tung Wah found acknowledgement until very recently. A detailed history of the interaction of such Chinese bodies with officials and official thinking in the government in the one hundred and fifty or so years of the colony has yet to be attempted, and until it is written there can be no balanced history of Hong Kong. Yet it is at least possible to argue that the gathering stability, as well as the more gen- eral evolution of Hong Kong, owed something to such informal exchanges. Government of a majority Chinese population by mostly non-Chinese- speaking officials has certainly been eased by the existence of communicating Chinese bodies, and the interactions have allowed the Chinese some feeling that their way of life has a certain weight in the broadly Western-style management of the colony.
The Tung Wah (that ‘eleemosynary corporation' as Eitel calls it) has had counterparts in at least two other influential kindred societies
the Po Leung Kuk and the District Watch Committee.
—
The beginnings of the Po Leung Kuk lie in an old Chinese custom which tangled with British law and British Victorian views on sexual morality. Gutzlaff's census of Hong Kong in 1844 recorded among the 1,300 Chinese residents only 315 families, and of the 436 permanent houses only 13 were private Chinese dwellings. Chinese houses, that year, were outnumbered by the 32 brothels. In the 1870s this state of affairs was not greatly altered. Charles May, by then Police Magistrate, wrote in 1877 that only one in six Chinese women in Hong Kong lived with one man ‘either in marriage or in concubinage, and all the rest come under the denomination of prostitutes to whom money being offered they would consent to sexual intercourse'. A Chinese doctor who owned a chemist's shop in Taipingshan and had worked in the colony for 23 years, stated that the percentage of 'respectable' Chinese women was in the region of about 25 per cent. The census of 1876 showed 24,387 Chinese women in Hong Kong and 81,025 Chinese men. The in- cidence of prostitution was, not surprisingly, high.
When the Po Leung Kuk was founded in 1878 (its official English name is the Society for the Protection of Women and Girls) it was within this context.
108 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
―
―
There was extensive trafficking in females, most of whom were brought into the colony from China by Chinese living on immoral earnings brothel brokers, brothel mesdames, and pimps. Chinese males were reluctant to expose their wives and families to the abnormal conditions in the colony (in comparison to those in the average South China village, social conditions were abnormal, even if the money was good). A contemporary comment in 1860 argues that 'the dearness of house rents may partly account for this as houses with apartments exclusively for the females are very expensive; out of all proportion to what the Chinese are accustomed to pay in China'. There was little repugnance in Chinese thinking to prostitution. The restraints simply operated less firmly in Hong Kong where there were no village elders. In parallel ran the ancient Chinese custom of buying and selling girls as domestic servants called mui tsai (Mandarin: mei zu) meaning 'little sister'. The custom was open to abuses but it answered the need both for domestic help and the relief of poorer families with numerous girls to feed. Nominal adoption of the girl in return for a fee paid to her parents was the usual way this worked. The Attorney-General in 1878 was of the opinion that the practice was not an offence in law; the Governor, Hennessy, thought other- wise. At the same time there was much kidnapping of girls for transport to South-east Asia. Chinese feeling was strong on this subject, and a petition was forwarded to the Governor for permission to set up an Anti-kidnap Asso- ciation employing detectives. He responded by setting up a committee including Eitel to discuss the matter, and permission was granted. Thus was born the Po Leung Kuk. Its early existence was threatened by the Chief Justice who insisted that domestic servitude was illegal. The matter was eventually referred to England where the Colonial Office, recognizing the deep-seated nature of the Chinese custom, sided with the Governor.
The main function of the new society, the detection of kidnapping of girls for immoral purposes, was energetically pursued by employing detectives who gathered information both openly and clandestinely. But the society, having apprehended kidnappers, then had the job of looking after the kid- napped girls, whom they clothed, housed, and fed until mui tsai employment could be arranged or until suitable matches could be made for them. While no. doubt an element of self-serving entered into the operation, as it produced a stream of suitable domestic servants for the well-to-do Chinese running the society, it would be unfair and incorrect to see its work as only that. The expenses were subsidized by leading members of the community, and the society was aided by the Tung Wah which provided shelter, and by the Man Mo Temple. In time the Po Leung Kuk became a kind of junior associate of the Tung Wah. But it was not an affluent organization and by 1892 an ordinance was drafted to assist it. This came under heavy criticism in the Legislative Council, T. H. Whitehead of the Chartered Bank calling the Kuk a secret society. The ensuing accusations and counter claims among members
Dr Kai Ho Kai and Sir James Stewart Lockhart at the opening of the Po Leung Kuk in 1896.
of the administration and the Chinese and others dragged on until the Colonial Secretary, J. H. Stewart Lockhart, recommended the society be given legal status and a grant. The ordinance of incorporation became law in 1894, establishing a permanent board. This was Lockhart's personal triumph; a second, since it was he who in 1891 had succeeded in establishing the Chinese District Watch Committee.
Between 1888 and 1892, proving its usefulness, the Po Leung Kuk restored no less than 2,412 males and females to their families, married off 218 women, and arranged the adoption of 46 children. The society was also effective in dealing with the provisions of the Protection of Women and Girls ordinance of 1899.
The Registrar-General had in the Po Leung Kuk one more effective channel of communication with and a source of information about Chinese affairs, and the Chinese had the ear of the administration. During Lockhart's time the office of Registrar-General became one of much greater import in the government, the importance of the Society rising with it. The inference must be, with regard to Lockhart and other officials in these years, that they sought in the regulation, recognition, and funding of such societies, to incorporate the opinions of a rising Chinese class of influential men into the counsels of government. But it was initially Chinese pressure that brought about the formation of the societies, which were later seen by both Chinese and British as useful means of stabilizing aspects of a community in need of mutual understanding.
IIO An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Both the Tung Wah and the Po Leung Kuk must be seen as powerful forces delaying any too abrupt Westernization in matters affecting the Chinese at large.
6
The third organization was the District Watch Committee. An American researcher, Lennox A. Mills, after a period spent in the colony, called it ‘in reality the Chinese Executive Council in Hong Kong'. Yet ‘legally, it is merely a committee of fifteen Chinese who meet under the chairmanship of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs to manage the District Watch Force'. At the time he was writing (1941), this was a body of 120 Chinese constables and detectives recruited and funded by the Committee to patrol the Chinese areas of urban Hong Kong island and Kowloon. The Committee, consisting of wealthy Chinese from all walks of life, included the unofficials of the Legislative and Executive Councils, and so exercised considerable political power within the Chinese community. Hence its opinions were listened to by the government. Its origins lay far back in the nineteenth century.
The few inhabitants of Hong Kong, when the British arrived, lived within the traditional structure of South Chinese rural society, bound by kinship, clan loyalties, and (other than the boat-dwellers) by the wider forms of social integration and controls found in any Chinese country community. The British assumed quite otherwise, lumping these people together with the piratical boat-people and with immigrants who arrived after the colony was annexed. The latter were mostly urban Chinese lacking roots in Hong Kong, and soon outnumbered the local inhabitants. They, and the newly arrived Westerners, were in this sense similar to each other and differed from the indigenous people. Soon both were faced with the problems of maintaining law and order in their own communities, and, as to the Westerners, within all communities. Both parties soon discovered that the answer was at least in part to employ their own guards for their property; and some householders, individually or collectively, employed street watchmen too.
The Chinese were rootedly opposed to being regulated by Western standards. Even in the first decade of the colony they had formed their own associations. The committee of the Man Mo Temple, Eitel relates:
rose to eminence as a sort of unrecognized and unofficial local government board... [They] secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbiters, arranged for the due reception of mandarins passing through the Colony, negotiated the sale of official titles, and formed the unofficial link between the Chinese residents of Hong Kong and the Canton authorities.
This preceded the recognition of the Tung Wah committee. Naturally such organizations acted somewhat clandestinely the risk of antagonizing the British authorities being very real.
―
The District Watch Committee was formed after a meeting of the Chinese
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems
7
III
community on 1 February 1866. The Registrar-General reported in 1867: 'After much discussion, the community of the Five Districts to the west of the Parade Ground, agreed to elect a certain number of their body to act as Watchmen, whose pay should be disbursed by themselves'. They petitioned the government for permission to organize a force of Chinese watchmen, claiming that rough elements in Guangzhou intended to celebrate the New Year by coming to Hong Kong 'with the object of committing extensive robberies under cover of a conflagration'. The suggested force commended itself to the Governor, and by an ordinance (No. 7, 1866) the District Watch Committee came into being. Doubtless the rumours of 'rough elements' had been used as a good excuse for forming what was in effect their own police force, paid and controlled by the Chinese. They had every reason. The regular police (if such they may be termed) were corrupt, drunken, and venal — and offered little or no protection to the Chinese. The duties of the new force and its usefulness expanded, and its success may be measured by its longevity it remained intact until 1949. The controlling Committee always included members or ex-members of the Tung Wah and Po Leung Kuk Committees, and the trio of organizations formed a body of considerable power outside the government. It was a force in most aspects benign, solidly advisory, even cautionary, at the elbow of the administration.
The utility, the necessity of such groupings in the Hong Kong context cannot be denied. Where there is no social contact between two sections of a society it is all but impossible for either side fully to understand the other. There was of course, unacknowledged, even unmentionable in that era, the shady world of sexual relationships between Western males and their Chinese mistresses. But that was scarcely a bridge for understanding ordinary Chinese life and opinion. Nearer the mark was another small world the affectionate relationships that flourished between Western children and their Chinese amahs. Many of those youngsters picked up Cantonese, becoming quite fluent, and were able, in the licence allowed to children, to make lasting bonds of friendship which they would recall in adult life with pleasure and some understanding of the Chinese.
In another aspect of life, Victorian British and the Chinese had something in common the thirst for education. The fitful, faltering, muddled process by which Hong Kong's children were accorded an education reflected with fair accuracy the condition of a society more dependent than most, indeed outrageously so in this context, on conditions and influences from other lands. Piecemeal, the structure of the educational system in the colony accommodated itself to the complicated social, racial, and trans-cultural facts of life there. The meeting of an evolving British nineteenth-century social, religious, and educational scene, vociferously conveyed to Hong Kong, with its static Chinese counterpart inlaid in a Hong Kong commercial society of Westerners far from home, resulted in an educational dilemma. The story
I 12 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
of education in the colony reflected (and to some extent still reflects) these facts.
The movement in Britain which culminated in the passing of the Education Act in 1870 was reflected in Hong Kong in the growing emphasis placed by all religious bodies on teaching, along with the faith, simple literate skills to the Chinese. For their part the Chinese were far from unwilling pupils, accustomed as they were to consider that only through education was it possible to reach high rank in the old system. If this meant, in the new one in Hong Kong, that a certain amount of foreign religion had to be imbibed, it was no great matter.
Seen in perspective, the nineteenth-century expansion of education in Hong Kong has to be set against a background of British evangelical fervour which insisted on the depravity of unregenerate human nature and the necessity of Christian conversion. Applied to the Chinese, this tended to elicit from them the response of selecting from the process only what they wanted. This pragmatism meant in practice that the educational aspect of missionary endeavour was sifted out and utilized, while Christianity was often politely, even usually, set aside.
There were numerous differences between traditional Chinese education and that in the West. Chinese characters and their correct pronunciation have to be laboriously learned, each new word a new character, a process which takes much longer than learning to read in a language composed of a limited alphabet. Chinese teaching was mostly on an individual master and pupil basis, not in classes, and was paid for by the paterfamilias or a patron. The reason for attending a Western school is implied in an account by a Chinese of being sent to Mrs Gutzlaff's school in Macau in 1835. Yung Wing was seven when his family sent him.
As foreign intercourse with China was just beginning to grow, my parents, anticip- ating that it might soon assume the proportions of a tidal wave, [took] time by the forelock and put one of their sons to learning English that he might become one of the ... interpreters and ... make his way into the business and diplomatic world.8
But other responses more in line with missionary intent were not un- common. In an essay headed 'Why do you wish to get an education?' set by a teacher in the Morrison Education Society School, a pupil wrote: 'If you convey a heathen boy to a place filled by Christian and delightful boys, he will soon be like one of them; and if you transmit a Christian boy to a heathen village . . . he will soon work the same deeds as they.” The Christian message has not been understood, but the English language has been learned.
In early Hong Kong, Christian schools, and also colleges and seminaries for training Chinese youths for the ministry, were a feature. But there was also a genuine interest in all these institutions in education for its own sake. Oddly
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 113
enough the first government grants were paid to Chinese schools, not to those of the missionary bodies.
—
After sketching the beginnings of schooling in Hong Kong the nine Confucian Chinese schools, and others started by missionary societies in the 1840s Eitel remarks that Sir John Davis
devised early in 1847, in imitation of the English religious education grants then hotly discussed in Parliament, a government Grant-in-Aid scheme to provide non- compulsory religious education in Chinese schools under the direction of the Educational Committee... That ... Davis was to some extent a religious visionary, may be inferred from a dispatch to the Colonial Office... 'If these schools were eventually placed in charge of native Christian teachers, bred up by the Protestant Missionaries, it would afford the most rational prospect of converting the native population of the Island.' Sancta simplicitas! 10
The government-assisted schools were brought under Bishop Smith, chairman of the Educational Committee, and acted as feeders for St Paul's College. The college produced not a single
native minister or any official interpreter, [but] many of the best educated native residents received their training there. The same may be said for Dr Legge's Anglo-Chinese College which also failed to produce a native preacher or teacher but trained some eminent English-speaking Chinese.
There were detractions, it seems, to this educational process. Scholars of the colleges
gained . . . an unenviable notoriety in Police Court cases. Hence the public drew the inference that, in the case of Chinese youths, an English education, even when conducted on a religious basis, fails to effect any moral reform, and rather tends to draw out the vicious elements inherent in the Chinese character.11
The mercantile community then began to withdraw support from missionary schools.
Several schools closed in the late 1840s, but the Roman Catholic missions opened others which gave Portuguese youth an English education, thus beginning the process which 'eventually filled commercial and government offices with Portuguese clerks', a situation which continued until the third quarter of the twentieth century. The paralysis which came over education' disappeared by 1859 when Bishop Smith's wife started the Diocesan Native Training School. St Paul's College took on a new lease of life under Dr J. Fryer and prospered while he was in charge.
Then there was Miss Baxter who, ‘besides much Samaritan activity among
114 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
all classes of the community commenced to labour for the education of the Eurasian children of the Colony'. 12 Previously she had set up schools in Mosque Street and in Staunton Street, and these were eventually amalgamated in Bonham Road in Baxter House. Miss Sophia Harriet Baxter's Diocesan Native Female School used English as the medium of instruction and went well until, to her horror, she discovered that most of her Chinese pupils once they left school became the mistresses of the many European bachelors in Hong Kong. Harriet Baxter inspired both directly and indirectly a string of schools which outlasted her death in 1865 as the Baxter Vernacular Schools,
Pupils and masters at Queen's College. Only one boy is dressed in European style (at the right, second row from the front).
some later taken over by the Church Missionary Society. She was not alone in her work of educating girls in Hong Kong. There were the Daughters of. Charity, the Misses Legge of the London Missionary Society, and Miss Eaton who arrived in 1862, later to marry E. J. Eitel.
The Morrison Education Society, first granted land by Pottinger, had existed in various guises, supported latterly by funds from mercantile houses. And this was to be its undoing. In 1867, Dent and Company failed, depriving it of its principal source of revenue.
The Chinese were equally early in setting up their schools on traditional lines. Gutzlaff, the Chinese Secretary, stated that in 1845 there were eight such schools, two 'supported by foreigners' and all housed in hovels. He proposed each should have a government grant of $10 per month. He also
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems 115
-
asked for free schools to be set up for the Chinese. But the Colonial Office wanted more information — curricula, teaching methods, staffing — before it acted; and in the end it came to the conclusion that the 'most effective, almost indispensible auxiliaries' in colonial education were the missionary societies. At this time the controversy raging in Britain over establishing a national system of education led to great caution being exercised in the granting of public funds for the support of sectarian education there. Grants for Hong Kong were refused for British children's education, but for Chinese schools 'where the contribution required is moderate' and 'no religious differences can arise', and for three schools in Aberdeen, Stanley, and Victoria town, grants of $10 were allowed as requested. Thus, in 1847, the small beginnings of a public education system were put in place.
Further progress towards a rational comprehensive system was marred by
A Chinese artist's painting of the Last Supper. A delightful amalgam of Chinese setting and
reminiscences of Western paintings of the event.
116 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
the indecision of the authorities in London and in Hong Kong on the relative merits of secular and religious society schools and teaching, and about the weight given to various subjects (Chinese Classics, other secular subjects, and Christian instruction), in schools for Chinese pupils. In detail the story is one of begrudged money, miserable teachers dominating the scene, followed by 'native Christian' teachers and the dominance of the Christian ethic in instruction. Yet another fact leading to conflict was the difference in aims of men such as Legge, Smith, and the Revd Vincent Staunton, all active in the schools question. The Bishop decreed that half the pupils' days should be devoted to the Scriptures and to 'books composed under the superintendence of foreigners', and the other half to the Chinese Classics. He wanted the schools to act as feeders to his own St Paul's College. The College prepared its students for the Anglican ministry, received financial help from the Foreign Office to assist in turning out interpreters for the consular service, and appears to have offered some sort of general education as well. Its popularity with the Chinese lay in the economic advantages accruing from a knowledge of English.
The policy of the Education Committee was to encourage the study of English not only for its own sake, but ‘to act as a bond of union between the many thousands of Chinese who have made this place their residence and the handful of Europeans by whom they are governed'. Progress was naturally slow, school buildings 'confined, dirty and altogether unsuitable'. Attendance at all schools was sporadic. Aberdeen and Stanley pupils went off fishing with their parents for days, even weeks, and at a quite tender age left school to work. The 1850 education report remarks on this problem that much as the Chinese wanted education ‘this was secondary to his attachment to gain'. The fact that poor fisher-folk had first to make a livelihood, and that their children had to take part from an early age, was ignored.
•
Under Bowring with his liberal thrust and non-Anglican outlook the attempt to wean the natives from their religious opinions and practices' was opposed. He thought that Chinese schools should be run by laymen. He wrote to London in 1854: 'It is quite monstrous to see a charge of £8,260 for police contrasted with an expenditure of £120 for the instruction of the. people.'13 That, of course, depended on one's outlook on state subsidies for education. But in fact the existing schools in 1854 had places for only 150 of the estimated 8,800 Hong Kong Chinese children of school age. This was possibly not out of step with the situation in Britain. The Education Com- mittee, however, offered four proposals: suitable school buildings ought to be provided; a system of apprentice teachers ought to be introduced; all schools capable of enlargement should have assistant masters able to teach English; an Inspector of Schools should be appointed to make weekly inspections of all government schools.
In May 1856 a German missionary, the Revd W. Lobscheid, was made
Chinese Institutions, and Educational Problems
117
Inspector. A programme of expansion began, and in Bowring's time the number of schools receiving grants more than trebled to 19, while the number of children attending greatly increased. The annual cost of education rose from 1854 to 1859 from a paltry £120 to £1,200. Now there were three schools for Hakka children, and Victoria had five for others. Most other schools were tiny backward places in villages, difficult to supervise. After 1858 girls had a school of their own in Victoria. Bowring complained that while only the missionaries gave active assistance to his schemes, ‘yet they have special objects that unfit them for general and popular education'. Bishop Smith remained at the helm but Bowring's secular ideas had made a dent in the religion-dominated scheme of things. His successor, Robinson, brought back the 1860 Education Committee as the Board of Education, although still under Bishop Smith.
This and similar conflations of Chinese and English educational basics were to remain the model for Chinese education for long enough, although in schools entirely controlled by the Chinese the education followed traditional Chinese lines and pupils for the most part learned individually from a master, classes being the exception.
Legge now suggested that the government schools in Victoria should close and their pupils join a new central school under a European headmaster. In a large and specially designed building, and with a trained master to do the actual teaching, Legge hoped to raise standards. Teaching in English would be given more prominence, the demand for it permitting a fee to be charged, leaving Chinese education free. The headmaster was to take over the in- spection of outlying schools.
This scheme virtually sacrificed what education there was in village schools in favour of a (possibly) efficient central academy in town. It may be that this was the sole choice that offered at the time there is not enough information to tell. Frederick Stewart was appointed headmaster and the Central School opened on 1 January 1862. Legge seems to have edged Lobscheid out in 1860. Within two years the new school had 140 pupils and had to build a new wing for 90 more. The difficulty of supervising village schools remained and some were closed. Headmaster Stewart believed in secular education, and after Bishop Smith retired the Board of Education was abolished (1865), its encouragement of teaching the Scriptures becoming one of his targets. But his hopes that secular government schools would attract more Chinese pupils away from the purely Chinese schools were not fulfilled. The Chinese who could afford to pay for education did not want their children taught alongside those of the poorer classes. They showed their preference for traditional Chinese education free from government supervision and free from Western tendencies. Christian instruction seemed not to be the obstacle since more Chinese attended mission schools than private Chinese ones, and their policies were similar to those of the former Board of Education schools
A Chinese merchant and his son photographed in 1861. The boy has a pocket watch attached to his belt.
equal doses of Chinese Classics and Christianity. They were also non-fee- paying and could experiment in methodology. Schools of several kinds developed to serve a variety of requirements.
The real fillip to education, at least as regards numbers in the mission schools, came after the Treaty of Tianjin and the Taiping troubles, which sent missionaries to China and floods of refugees to Hong Kong. By the mid- 1860s there were fifteen or sixteen schools or groups of schools run by missions, as well as Miss Baxter's establishment which, after its inadvertent training for concubinage, concentrated on boys and Eurasians. By 1865 it was estimated that of the approximately fourteen thousand children of school age, something slightly under two thousand were attending schools of one kind and another. But the whole question of education for the Chinese was far from settled, reflecting to some extent the unsettled state of thought on the subject of education in Britain.
Given the nature of the obstacles in the way of education for the Chinese population — illiteracy among parents, poverty, the need to employ children to augment the family income, Christian teachers whose heart was mainly in evangelism and little in Chinese scholarship, government hesitation on every- thing from finance to curricula it was hardly surprising that the chaos of those years continued. Yet, slowly, the Chinese learned how to place their children to best advantage in the institutions most likely to provide them with the required fluency in English and understanding of Western business methods.
-
II. Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depot'
SIR Richard Graves Macdonnell took over as Governor of Hong Kong in March 1866. Once again it was to prove true that the character of a Governor had a profound effect on the development of the colony during his term. Macdonnell was to require all his administrative skills, all his expertise in argument both within the colony and in the corridors of power in London in order to make his mark.
Successive Colonial Office civil servants and successive Governors of Hong Kong are on monotonous record as having verbally thrown up their hands in despair at the unique situation of the colony. Macdonnell was no exception.
Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell, Governor from 1866 to 1872.
I 20 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
I
Just a year after his arrival he wrote to the Secretary of State in London: 'There is no parallel between this and any other British settlement. It is a mere depot...'. By this time he ought to have been in a position to judge. The problems he had to face were very different from those he had dealt with as Governor in Gambia, in the West Indies, in South Australia, and in Nova Scotia. The majority of people whom he was to govern in Hong Kong did not belong there and did not on the whole intend to pass the rest of their days in the colony. Trade recession and financial stringency were to limit some of his efforts. Piracy, police corruption and ineffectiveness were matters requiring urgent attention
- as was finding means to curb the obsessive gambling of the Chinese. And in these matters he was hampered by the almost hysterical mood of evangelism in England at the time which inspired (if that is the apt word) the counsels of Parliament. Fortunately Macdonnell was not a Bowring or the colony might have come to a dead stop in the late sixties.
The several problem areas with which the Governor had to deal were in their own ways separate entities, but as frequently happened in Hong Kong all were closely tangled in what must have seemed at times an unravellable skein. Macdonnell, unlike Bowring, was dogged in his approach and prag- matic and forceful in his methods. This gained him criticism and abuse from London, but a measure of respect in Hong Kong. The colony itself was the eventual benefactor, and he left it after six difficult years in marginally better shape than that in which he had found it.
The Duke of Edinburgh, the first member of the royal family to visit Hong Kong, arrived on 2 November 1869 aboard HMS Galatea.
Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depoť 121
The 12 months prior to his arrival had seen the colony administered by W. T. Mercer, whose dearest wish had been to be appointed Governor when Robinson left. Unfairly, for he had served Hong Kong well, that wish was not granted. Even when he had attempted to leave Hong Kong he had been thwarted and refused a pension. It was said of him at the time that ‘gentle- manly and scholarly person' as he was, 'he seems discontented and used up'.2 The dark extent of his disillusionment became apparent when the incoming Governor, Macdonnell, and his family discovered that Government House had been left by Mercer unprovided with even the commonest household necessities. The passion of his bitterness was then abundantly demonstrated. Mercer continued in office for another year but the Governor studiously ignored him. Thus departed the last of the old brigade.
Macdonnell's first reaction to the 'depot' was to institute enquiries into every department of government. He found plenty of material to criticize. 'The police are the most ineffective ... that I ever came in contact with.' So much so that 'literally nothing is known of the haunts of pirates who frequent Hong Kong'. Piracy at the time was one of the main topics of public concern. He lambasted the state of sanitation, the prison system, the inadequate water supply, and concluded that the colony, consequent on Mercer's administra- tion, was headed straight for bankruptcy.
None of this was mere expostulation. Nor was the Governor's response half-hearted. After only four months in the colony he had mapped out reform measures covering many aspects increased taxation, control of Chinese vessels, registration of dwellings and servants, methods of controlling piracy and eventually eliminating it, branding and deportation of criminals, moves to improve public order and cleanliness. Such a package added up to a fresh policy intended to be viewed as a whole, as a mosaic rather than as the tesserae of which it was composed.
The Colonial Office, apparently convinced that the Governor intended to usurp its authority, responded by accusing Macdonnell of an ‘entire pre- occupation with his own views'. Macdonnell's was certainly a dominant personality, buttressed by 20 years' experience in colonial government. He deserved more understanding than that.
The corner-stone on which all these measures depended was finance. Beginning in 1866 the great recession had set in. Many a company, under- capitalized and vulnerable, failed to weather the slump. The spectacular crash of Dent and Company with debts of over $5 million brought down others in shock waves that spread up the China coast. Among the dozen or so foreign banks only six survived to the end of the year. Surprisingly, despite Dent's crash, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank stood firm. But a decade of uncertainty in trade and banking followed.
The influx' of Chinese virtually ceased. Revenue from land sales dried up. That rather airily conceived scheme, the Hong Kong Mint, proved, even in its
122 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
construction, a drag on the economy; and when it opened in May 1866 it failed to pay its way
as Macdonnell had foreseen. To cover expenses the Mint had to coin at least $27,000 a day, but output seldom reached $15,000. The Governor estimated it would take the next two and a half years to turn the deposited silver bullion into coin. The banks soon began to withdraw their silver, fearing losses if they held on. Macdonnell's enquiry brought to light a sorry picture: not only had the flow of silver to the Mint ceased, but the very machinery was inadequate; worst of all, it was now impossible to buy silver bullion on terms that would make the minting of coins profitable. With expenses calculated at between $50,000 and $60,000 a year, all work came to a stop. The Mint closed in April 1868, its machinery bringing $60,000 from the buyer the Japanese government.
Macdonnell appears to have been misinformed by the Colonial Office before he left London on the financial state of Hong Kong. He arrived with the idea that it was good. But during Mercer's housekeeping interregnum the situation had changed. Whereas in January 1863 there was a balance of $475,000, by 1865 it had declined to $55,000. Macdonnell had perforce to seek immediate ways and means to rectify the situation. He began by putting a stop to all but urgently needed public works and delaying payment of the colony's contribution to military expenditure. Then he borrowed $80,000 from the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank to meet unavoidable expenses. Sens- ibly he sought means of increasing taxation by means of a Stamp Ordinance. From October 1867 all official documents (banknotes included) were to pay stamp duties calculated in toto to cover the estimated deficit of $120,000 each year. The result was almost immediate: expenditure for that year re- mained within revenue, and in 1868, despite paying off arrears in the military contribution, a surplus of $140,000 was posted. The total revenue in that year stood at what Eitel calls 'an astounding sum' of $1,134,105, with expenditure at $991,811. Eitel continues:
Instead of rejoicing over this result, the mercantile community, engulfed in a slough of despond ... pointed with groans ... to the Stamp Ordinance which had taken $101,000 [out of their pockets in one year.] Sir Richard could boast of having so. regulated the finances, that, during a period of unexampled commercial disasters in China, the Colony emerged from a state of insolvency to one of assured financial stability.3
It was now said that Macdonnell would never have had to introduce the measure had he been allowed a free hand in dealing with the gambling problem. There was some basis for this opinion.
The suppression of gambling was the Governor's next cross. He bore it with flexibility, verve, and inventiveness in the face of narrow-minded, obdurate civil servants in London. To be fair, the mood in Britain at this time
Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depot' 123
was one of resolute piety, abhorrence of all gambling, and stiffening of national (or at least notional) morality. In Hong Kong Macdonnell hardly breathed the same air. The Chinese passion for all forms of gambling was a fact of life; and it was also part and parcel of the question of law and order and of the police corruption he had noticed on arrival. The problem was how to regulate gambling (or legislate against it altogether?), how to end police corruption, and at the same time restore the force of law.
Having said that nothing was known of the haunts of pirates infesting Hong Kong waters, Macdonnell shrewdly suspected the involvement of local interests 'the parties that fit them out'. But dealing with them had to fit into the grand strategy of eliminating other evils. An increase in police efficiency, a special piracy court, close supervision of Chinese ashore and afloat, a prohibi- tion on carrying arms and ammunition aboard Chinese junks
these were the mainstays of action, along with an attempt at closer contact with the Chinese élite.
Macdonnell's ordinance calling for the registration of houses and servants also made the Registrar-General responsible for issuing summonses to Chinese. All householders were to be held responsible for the unlawful acts of members and for payment of fines a system not unlike the traditional doctrine of collective responsibility which had the force of law in China.
More directly aimed at piracy, another ordinance instituted the registration and control of all junks so that, in theory, no vessel could enter or leave harbour without clearance. Anti-piracy measures, directed against Chinese, required the assent of the Colonial Office, given despite their protests. The effect was immediate. Every junk in the harbour hoisted sail and left, together with 2,000 Chinese. But the exodus did not last long. Reassurances brought them back. Soon over two thousand junks had applied for licences and permits. Strengthening of the marine police was to be supplemented by the presence of a steamer which was being built. Until it could be brought into service the Governor fitted out a junk as substitute. Its name, Preposterous, sparked off numerous quips among the wits of whom Hong Kong has always had a good supply. But the piracy court came to nothing in a tangle of legal niceties.
The times were such in the waters of the South China Sea that Chinese and other vessels of all kinds armed themselves in self defence. The result was that it was hard to separate what were peaceable junks from those with offensive intent. By July 1868 proclamations went out in both Guangzhou and Hong Kong under which Chinese fishing vessels were to be disarmed. The Viceroy took no action, whereupon Macdonnell cancelled the proclamation in the colony and refused to disarm junks as planned. A Colonial Office reprimand followed.
Thus, by greater and smaller means, in the face of a reluctant home government, piracy was tackled piecemeal and the incidence gradually
124 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
declined. Involvement of the police in all this brought into focus the corrup- tion in the force centring on illegal gambling houses. This led to Macdonnell's most controversial campaign. Starting from the fact that 'more than half the [police] inspectors were in receipt of monthly allowances' from brothels and gaming houses, the Governor's reasoning told him he must rigidly confine gambling to licensed premises, or give up hope of real police reform.
The public turning point came when a policeman was accused of taking a bribe but was acquitted because there was no ordinance under which he could be charged. Gambling was then seen by those in control of it as an almost legal activity since they could bribe the police with impunity. Macdonnell determined, therefore, to license a small number of places, and in September 1867 the crucial ordinance on Order and Cleanliness appeared. This ap- parently innocuous document contained in clause 17 words that allowed Macdonnell 'to pass such rules, regulations, and conditions as may be deemed expedient for the total suppression or in the meanwhile for the better limitation and control of gambling in the colony'. This clause covered the decision already taken to license gambling, an action which had been refused to Bowring and Robinson.
Macdonnell had thereby nailed his colours to the mast. He was against the evils of gambling but he knew that his first priority was reform of the police and the eradication of corruption within it. With his usual oratorical skill he defended his actions to the Legislative Council, and in written dispatches to London. In July 1867, 11 gaming houses were opened under the Registrar- General's control. (Prior to this, owners of gaming houses had offered between $200,000 and $365,000 per annum for a licence an indication of the profits to be made.) The Colonial Office had grudgingly agreed to the licensing but with the fatal proviso that the fees were not to be considered as part of general revenue but to be used strictly for police purposes.
Macdonnell bent his efforts towards getting round this unreasonable condition; not, as Eitel confirms,
—
to him
because revenue was his real object but because the Chinese [holders] of the gaming licence would, if paying a heavy fee [for it], be compelled by their own interests to form a detective police for the suppression of unlicenced gambling, and these detectives would then co-operate with the Police Force for the arrest and detention of dangerous characters who flock to gaming houses as moths to light.
So the Governor informed the Colonial Office in January 1867 that farming out the licences was the sole means to establish permitted gaming houses, and that with an income from this source of approximately $200,000 per annum the colony might be able to resume paying the ‘Military Contribution'.
The Order and Cleanliness Ordinance received royal assent. Macdonnell was informed by telegraph and disclosed it to the public on 10 July 1867.
Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depot' 125
(The Governor was the first to be at the receiving end of the new electric telegraph which connected the colony with London via the submarine cable to Shanghai and thence via the Danish Trans-Siberian line. Both he and some of his successors were somewhat reluctant admirers of this facility, which deprived them of the freer rein they had enjoyed when formerly separated from London by a couple of months.)
At first all seemed to go well with the scheme, its sole opponents the ‘moral six' clergymen who took their objections as far as Parliament, accusing the Governor of acting in ‘an underhand and unenglish way' and of ‘barefaced hypocrisy' in thinking that licensing led to suppression. Macdonnell's enquiries revealed a daily total of 14,630 Chinese and 204 European gamblers (before he forbade the latter to gamble). But by the end of the year abuses had come to light. Some licensees were illegally trading their licences at high prices. And, acting in concert, licensees had taken on an agent in the person of Mr Caldwell, paying him the 'monstrous salary of $20,000 per annum'. Caldwell, trading on former government connections and his long liaison with the more dubious elements in Chinese society, had found a lucrative post. The Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Buckingham, expressed his 'entire disapproval of those proceedings which your dispatch discloses'.
The incoming Liberal government in Britain in December 1868 was strongly Nonconformist. Lord Granville as Colonial Secretary took the view that the whole exercise in Hong Kong in regard to gambling was only to be countenanced as a step to total elimination. Money derived therefrom must be used solely for the suppression of gambling. The Governor counter- claimed that licensing had aided in crime detection, and that no fewer than 50 criminals had been arrested on the information of licensees. He was nothing if not persistent, feeling that he knew more about how to deal with gambling than did the Colonial Secretary. He was probably right; but he underestimated the strength of the Nonconformist lobby in London.
Granville complained of the tone of the Governor's replies to him and detailed the exact objects for which revenues from gambling could properly be spent. A dispute between them followed, only ending when Granville wrote bluntly: 'You will take these instructions for your guidance.' Granville was in something of a quandary. The only tenable stance in the face of Parlia- mentary criticism was that Hong Kong should not be the recipient of money from licensed vice.
The Governor's numerous reasoned arguments were eventually to no avail against Parliament's new-found godliness, and Macdonnell's final appeal in March 1870 was denied. Granville ordered him to repay $129,701 to the special fund, and to give up the steamer Victoria which he had commissioned for police work (it was sold to the Chinese government). But his last im- passioned plea is worth recording. Of the money from licensed gaming he wrote: 'let the money be thrown into the sea as soon as it is paid, but do not
126 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
let the hold which it gives the Government over the licensees be abandoned. Brave words.
At this point Macdonnell decided to take home leave. Opinion in Hong Kong was slightly turning against the licensing scheme, and in the Governor's absence the Acting Governor, Major-General Whitfield, with the concurrence of the Legislative Council, issued on 1 January 1871 a proclamation closing the gaming houses and withdrawing licences. Granville immediately counter- manded it, allowing no change in the Governor's absence. The Chief Justice put out a statement that in the years 1867-8 almost one million dollars had been staked and lost in government gaming houses. The public, he said, had been the losers.
Chinese opinion now turned against licensing. A Chinese-inspired petition wanted to know why foreigners were excluded from gambling while Chinese were allowed to ‘engulf themselves'. Returning from leave in December 1871, Macdonnell cancelled licences as from 20 January 1872. But he refused to permit the suppression of gambling to fall into the hands of the police, making the Registrar-General and the Captain Superintendent of Police personally responsible. The Governor's basic conflict was with the irrelevance of the Nonconformist British conscience as expressed in Parliament. The problem was neither ameliorated nor solved. It was now simply ignored. A Nonconformist home government had achieved precisely what it aimed to eliminate.
Having failed to root out police corruption in this way, Macdonnell tackled it in another. Finding the Police Captain Superintendent incompetent, he replaced him by a cadet officer, W. M. Deane. He brought in 100 Sikhs as policemen. The Governor thought so highly of these men that he ordered another 100. Sikhs remained for long in the police force and form a significant element in the population even today. Eight British police officers were either dismissed or allowed to resign in a further effort to clean the Augean stables. But the whole matter, fraught with problems and hampered by lack of money, appeared insoluble.
In a slightly improved financial climate before he left, Macdonnell was able to recruit in January 1872 an extra 22 Scottish police, introducing thereby a . body of men as yet untainted by the colony's depraved ways. He thought that the rising crime rate was also due to a 'living wave of crime' washed down from China by disturbed conditions there, and frustrating all his efforts to make Hong Kong 'more habitable'. His efforts were virtually in vain.
A policy of deterrence seemed the most efficient way to deal with cri- minality. But the impeccable logic of flogging and branding (with a small broad arrow on the ear-lobe, inflicted on criminals who opted for deporta- tion, thus making identification easier if they returned) was not approved by the Secretary of State. Yet only six months after Macdonnell arrived the convict population had diminished by 162 and by September 1867 stood at
Macdonnell and the Lawless 'Depot' 127
363 351 fewer still. The idea of deterring criminal persons from entering the colony was naturally approved by all, but the home government frowned on the means, which stood in contrast to the more humane treatment in Britain. The error of the Colonial Office, repeated frequently in Hong Kong history, was to take as the basis of its stance on various issues the approved opinion and moral climate of Britain at any given time, and to apply it in Hong Kong. Soon, the deportation of criminals was abolished on orders from London, and banishment could only be enforced on non-British subjects if they were regarded as dangerous to the peace. Thus, after 1870, crime and criminal violence seriously rose, so much so that the Justices of the Peace demanded an enquiry. In their view life and property had never before been at such risk. Eventually, in the face of the extreme reluctance of the home authorities, Macdonnell was permitted to bring back flogging and branding. And he buttressed these measures by building several new police stations and by ordering that all the police stations in the colony should be connected by telegraph.
The Reform Act of 1867 in Britain, extending the franchise, was reflected in Hong Kong in renewed local demand for changes in the constitution of the Legislative Council. A Reform Association belatedly came into being in 1869, said later by Macdonnell to have 'died out through sheer inanition'.4 Con- stitutional reform, however, had gone ahead when Macdonnell received instructions on this subject in October 1865. The old balance of six govern- ment and three non-government members of the Council was to be retained. The Chief Justice, Colonial Secretary, Attorney-General, Treasurer, and Auditor-General were to be official members ex officio; while four others one government official and three private individuals were nominated as unofficial members, with the official members having precedence. The official members' right to vote as they saw fit was ended.
―
HM Government have the right to consider opposition by official members of the Legislative Council to its settled policy as incompatible with retention of office... I am equally of opinion that they are, if required to do so, to support by their vote and not to oppose by any public act, a policy which may originate with the Governor.5
The Governor had both an ordinary and a casting vote.
The unwillingness of the merchant community to act with a sense of civic responsibility rather than from sheer selfishness resulted in another area of frustration for Macdonnell and the community. One of the more than usually numerous typhoons which hit Hong Kong in this period had almost destroyed the Central Praya in August 1867 (see Appendix 2). Macdonnell notified the lot holders on the affected portions that they would have to contribute a reasonable sum towards the cost of rebuilding. They refused. He called a conference with the Colonial Secretary (C. C. Smith who had been one of the
128 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
first cadets to have Chinese language training under Dr Legge), who told them the Attorney-General had ruled that each of them had a legal liability under the terms of their leases for maintenance of the sea wall. The lot holders, armed with other legal opinion, claimed that the terms referred to drains, roads, and the like, but not to sea walls. The conference broke up in confusion. In a test case (popularly termed 'the Great Praya case'), the jury gave a verdict for the defendant in February 1868. And the Governor had to be content from then on to agree that the sea wall was a public responsibility. The need, identified by Eitel six long years back as Sir Richard Macdonnell arrived, had been for ‘a Caesar'. At his departure in April 1872, the same writer summed up the Governor's term of office, misquoting Shakespeare's line: 'Here was a Caesar! Whence comes such another?' Macdonnell's struggles with the 'depot' and equally with a Colonial Office which often enough failed to appreciate the problems and their sources in Hong Kong, had been valiant indeed. That he had failed in several attempts cannot be attributed to lack of energy, effort, or forethought. There are some problems confronting governments which, at a given time, seem not susceptible of solution, and have to await a more propitious moment.
12. Colonial Appeasement
THERE was no great need for another Caesar. An experienced civil servant was what was required in Hong Kong to continue where Macdonnell left off. Sir Arthur Kennedy was all that. He arrived in April 1872, his background army and then four governorships two in Africa, one in Canada, a fourth in Australia. It seemed that Whitehall had again made a reasonable choice.
Sensibly, Kennedy's first concern was law and order. The Police Commis- sion set up by Macdonnell reported a few months after he arrived in Hong Kong. Its findings were not unanimously agreed, but it recommended an Anglo-Chinese force with more strength and better pay and conditions. This chimed well with the views of Dr Legge who was all for Chinese police as the best means of gaining the confidence of leading Chinese and of the com- munity at large. But Charles May, resident in the colony since 1844 and closely associated with the police, was strongly against this, dismissing the Chinese police in Hong Kong as ‘useless, physically and morally'.
Kennedy sat on the report for a year, withholding comment. Gradually he was coming to the conclusion that a Chinese force was the right answer. He raised the pay scales of constables and set Chinese-speaking cadet officers over them. 'We shall learn to rely on them more than at present', he said. While the Colonial Office protested over the expense, Kennedy stood firm. He kept the Sikhs as gaol guards, but thought the Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Whitfield's idea of recruiting West Indian police ‘little short of insanity' since it would be taken as an affront to the whole Chinese com- munity. Improvement in the efficiency of the force could not be an overnight matter. The number of Chinese police was balanced by an equal number of Indian police until well into the twentieth century. The introduction of Chinese officers in the twentieth century, when gradually they became more numerous than British officers, completed the transformation to a pre- dominantly Chinese force.
Kennedy was far from being a violent or harsh man, yet in his attempts to deal with the high crime rate he evidently felt that branding and deportation were essential; and doubtless the Colonial Secretary would have vetoed their removal since it was he who had forced their reintroduction on Macdonnell.
130 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Kennedy explained in 1873, perhaps in an effort to soften the impact of such procedures, that 'the miscalled system of branding which is merely tattooing with Indian ink, is seldom resorted to, but works well'. The gaol population fell in 1873 to 331, and on Stonecutters island only the chapel was now in use, functioning as a hospital for infectious diseases, predominantly smallpox.
The solution or partial solution of one problem in Hong Kong generally led to, or was at least closely followed by, the appearance of another. While gambling had been more or less suppressed within Hong Kong boundaries, it now grew large in the Kowloon peninsula north of the boundary dividing the British area from the Chinese. In reality this gambling was merely open gambling; in clubs and unlicensed resorts the practice had not been stamped out in Hong Kong, merely hidden from view. An officially closed eye was trained on it.
An upsurge in crime occurred in 1876 from another source. The lowering of fares in a cut-throat price war between the operators of various river steamers plying between Guangzhou and the colony resulted in an influx of undesirables. In three weeks the gaol population rose from 386 to 519. Kennedy reacted by reinforcing the deportation law and by appointing a commission of enquiry. But he also revised outdated gaol regulations. Extra food for prisoners was to be ordered much more sparingly.
The disastrous consequences of 'the most destructive typhoon in the history of the Colony' of 24 September 1874, focused attention on the whole
ti t
The disastrous typhoon of 1874 played havoc with the colonial cemetery at Happy Valley.
―
Colonial Appeasement 131
question of public works. The civil hospital was virtually destroyed, as were 200 houses and three miles of the praya. The central area was left without a praya, to all intents and purposes, and when the wind and water receded the appalling devastation shocked the colony. It was evident that the praya had been of faulty construction, and now that it had been agreed in the wake of the 1867 typhoon damage that repairs were the job of the government, Kennedy was faced with the extremely tricky task of obtaining agreement on details of reconstruction from all those with lots on the waterfront, of finding the money for rebuilding, and of achieving a greatly improved structure. These factors meshed with another a decision on the extent of reclamation that might conveniently be carried out at this time. The Chinese lot holders at the western end of the town were keen to reclaim land and increase their holdings; but their expectations were frustrated by the 1875 board of enquiry which decided against reclamation in the Sai Ying Pun and Sheung Wan areas. Kennedy himself thought that in the central area ‘no reclamations were likely ever to be made' because of the howl of protest from lot holders that would attend any such proposal. The marine lots were by now very valuable, and any reclamation would distance them from the shore. He determined to rebuild the sea wall so that it would be proof against further typhoon damage.
The crucial section as regards town planning was that part lying in front of the naval and military areas. Obviously, for both, access to the harbour was vital. The two cantonments covered much of the hillside descending to the harbour just east of Central District. Queen's Road, running parallel to the water here, was the sole link with Wan Chai to the east, now a growing suburb. Victoria, viewed as a whole, was, as the Surveyor-General J. M. Price said, effectively 'strangled at its waist'. The only other link between the two parts of the town was to be constructed later some distance up the hill and named Kennedy Road. For the moment Queen's Road had no rival (and, although much widened, in terms of through traffic still has none). One other important aspect was the fact that the sea-bed was silting up in front of the naval base, leaving the pier high and dry at low tide.
The natural, indeed the only intelligent scheme was that advocated by Price to extend the Praya in front of the naval base and military area so as to link the eastern and central prayas and ‘ease the unceasing native and foreign traffic through the Queen's Road Central'. Deep water would adjoin such a new sea wall and the planned curve at that point would, because of the currents, have a scouring action and prevent renewed silting. Through the wall there would be entries for smaller craft, and a mechanical swing bridge would permit the passage of larger vessels for refitting in the dock. The military were against this good plan because of the expense. Kennedy strongly advocated its 'adoption hoping, as nearly all Governors have had to hope, for financial assistance from home in this case from both the Admiralty and
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132 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
the War Office. The authorities in London agreed to the plan only on the understanding that the colony would bear the expense. The Executive Council and unofficials of the Legislative Council accepted the proviso, but in the face of the colony's having to foot the total bill, it was agreed to abandon the scheme and merely to reconstruct the central Praya to resist natural hazards. Even this the home government wanted to postpone. Kennedy however, had wisely already gone ahead in order to keep the water out of the town, the record enshrining his opinion that the larger scheme would have to be undertaken some time in the future.
A contributory factor in the failure of the Praya development was the use of the telegraph and the shortened transit time for goods from Europe after the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869. In combination, these two new facilities meant that merchants no longer had to warehouse large stocks in order to take advantage of price changes, for stocks could now be received much more expeditiously. A whole train of events followed from this: the large godowns in Eastern District became superfluous, and as a result the labour force moved from Eastern to Western District seeking other employ- ment; and this in turn prompted the laying out of Kennedy Town, partly on reclaimed land. Further, rental values in Eastern District fell steeply because of the labour migration — by 40 to 50 per cent and those who paid Crown rents sought a reduction, which Kennedy refused. This in turn forced the con- sideration of an alternative east-west route skirting the southern boundary of the military area
uphill from the shore which was first proposed by Kennedy and taken up by his successor.
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—
In public works Kennedy was fortunate in that the inept L. H. Moorsom, Surveyor-General, happened to retire as he arrived, and was replaced by the admirable Price, to whose attention the Governor recommended the sadly inadequate water supply position. Because of appalling miscalculations, the Pok Fu Lam scheme generated only about one-third of the predicted volume. Price now constructed a conduit along the 500-foot contour (today's Conduit Road) to bring an adequate supply to Central and Western Districts, and this came into operation in 1877. Eastern District was however inadequately provided for, and Price then proposed to bring water from the Tai Tam area via a tunnel through the hills a scheme that looked both neat and efficient until it was calculated that the cost would be in the region of £350,000. The scheme was referred to a consultant in England who produced a scaled-down version at an estimated cost of £136,000. Government revenues being good but not abundant, this idea was whittled down to one that would cost £50,000, and which could be enlarged in the future.
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The destruction of the civil hospital by the 1874 typhoon meant that a replacement had to be set up quickly. Temporary arrangements were made. But even before the typhoon, when the new Colonial Surgeon, Dr Phineas Ayres, first arrived in November 1873 he had attempted to hasten the
Colonial Appeasement 133
building of a new one. By now the matter was urgent. Once more the Colonial Office intervened, insisting that the plans for the new building be prepared in London. And when, after considerable delay, these arrived they turned out to be quite unsuited to Hong Kong. Kennedy pressed for leave to start the building at once but was smartly informed by telegraph (how he must have hated the invention!) not to incur avoidable expense. The building of the hospital started in 1874. With the Pok Fu Lam waterworks, a new Harbourmaster's office (1872), and the Central School, it was one of several major public works initiated by Kennedy. The construction of the school was
The old Harbour Office seen from Wing Lok Street, c.1880.
delayed because of some doubt about the structure, which was to cost $52,000. It was built after Kennedy had left. His major memorial must be the Grant-in-Aid scheme through which voluntary schools were financed. In constitutional matters some important changes were made in Kennedy's time. From London his instructions relating to Legislative Council pro- ceedings were amended to give it the power to debate any question if duly proposed and seconded not just on the Governor's initiative, which was now limited to matters of finance. In 1872 a Finance Committee composed of all members of the Council, presided over by the senior member, was set up, to which the Governor was to submit financial business for consideration. This meant that unofficial members had more chance of taking an inde- pendent line ́— something they immediately did. After the typhoon they recorded their displeasure with W. M. Deane, Superintendent of Police, for
134 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
keeping the police in their barracks during the storm. They wanted to reduce his salary and, dissatisfied with the way it was organized, to cut the vote for the fire brigade intemperate demands, and short-sighted, given the
circumstances.
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Membership of the Executive Council was increased to five: the ex-officio members were the Commander-in-Chief, the Colonial Secretary, and the Attorney-General; J. P. Price, the Surveyor-General, and C. C. Smith (one of the first three cadets recruited in England in 1862), who was now Registrar- General, were made members but not by virtue of the offices they held. The office of Acting Governor, whose occupant stood in for the Governor in his absence or incapacity, had been held since the time of Caine in 1854 by the chief military officer of the colony. The exception was Mercer who, after Caine left in 1859, deputized for him as Colonial Secretary until Macdonnell arrived; at which time the Major-General commanding the troops became again Acting Governor. In Kennedy's time the change was made back to the Colonial Secretary administering as Acting Governor. The argument from London was that senior executives should be able to look forward to exercising responsibility in that capacity, and that in any case they were better suited to deal with the administration than was the chief military man. The trigger that activated all this was doubtless the absurd Major-General Whitfield's conduct in Macdonnell's absence. At that time, in the role of Major-General, Whitfield was in the habit of addressing letters to himself in his capacity as Acting Governor 'a whimsical proceeding', as one Colonial Office official charitably put it. The War Office was informed that the senior army officer in the colony must not act as Acting Governor.
At this point Kennedy, his wife seriously ill in England, was invited to come home for consultations, the Colonial Secretary to administer the government as Acting Governor in his absence. Kennedy commented on this change of policy. The news, he said ‘has nearly caused General Colborne [the military incumbent at the time] a fit. He has fairly exploded, and judging from the effect ... he must have had an enormous stock of explosive matter stored up'. Colborne wrote in protest to the War Office, and refused to attend meetings of the Executive Council, something which Kennedy opined, 'was. not attended by any ill-effects for the Colony'.1 Not at least until, because of a shortage of qualified members, and the absence of others on leave, a quorum of the Council could not be mustered.
Price was then appointed to the Council as deputy to the Colonial Secretary, and Colborne resumed his uncooperative posture. It was pointed out to him that when he had been absent from Hong Kong, he had made his own military secretary take his place on the Council, and had therefore no leg to stand on in his refusal to acquiesce in the Governor's appointing a deputy for the Colonial Secretary. Civil and military relations were for a time strained, a fact remarked on in the Colonial Office: 'There is always a row between the
Colonial Appeasement 135
Government and the General in Hong Kong ... and I conclude that it is one of the local occupations.22 While official London was often perspicacious in such pettyfogging disputes, the Colonial Office's grasp of the essentials of more grave situations in the colony was patchy, as many a governor dis- covered while he wrestled with intractable local problems. In the days of sea transport, even after the opening of the Suez Canal took weeks off the journey, no Colonial Office official in office ever visited Hong Kong.
On his way to England the Governor was informed of his wife's death, and from Singapore he returned to Hong Kong, where he was to remain for several more years.
Two of the obscure but important practical problems that troubled the commercial community in the years 1872-6 had to do with certain sub- stances added to grey shirting exported from England, and to tea leaves both in China and in England. What was known as the 'sizing question' was related to the fact that the addition of size (a substance to stiffen the fabric) to the shirting material appeared to cause mildew during its transport to Hong Kong. During the Crimean War with Russia, tallow for sizing became too expensive, and the cheaper China clay was used as a substitute. This required the use of certain deliquescent salts to decrease the damaging effect of the clay on the fabric. These salts were the culprit, causing mildew in transit. The matter was complicated by several factors, the most dramatic of which was that the badly mildewed cloth arriving in Hong Kong, when condemned and returned to England was, miraculously, found to be in perfect condition and free of mildew. It evidently dried out in the less humid northern climate. Serious losses to Hong Kong merchants occurred, and no feasible solution seemed available.
Likewise with tea. In 1874 import duties on tea in England fell by about 50 per cent. At once complaints were voiced by the tea-drinking public on the adulteration of tea by strange leaves and a greater proportion of tea dust. As in the mildew question, each side accused the other. The mildewed shirting caused Chinese buyers to start buying cloth from India; the adulteration of China tea caused the British consumer to turn to Indian teas. India reaped the benefit in both controversies.
Kennedy was the first Governor to invite Chinese guests to Government House receptions and other social gatherings. Most of these were com- pradors of the big foreign firms. The practice was said by Westerners to be 'distasteful to most English merchants, but Sir Arthur stoutly adhered to it'. His outlook on the Chinese was even-handed. Soon after he arrived a Chinese delegation called on him, and he informed them that the Chinese could always have access to him when they had things of substance to say. They had only to give him notice and bring an interpreter. The directors, both ingoing and outgoing, of the Tung Wah Hospital came to pay their respects once a year. On their first visit in December 1872 they requested the Governor to
136 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
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pass an ordinance punishing adultery in Chinese women. This was a some- what odd request considering that every one of the deputation had several wives and was, in English law, a bigamist and liable to punishment as such. The request seems to have been designed to deter one or other concubine from flight, perhaps to the bosom of another member of the deputation. The following year the directors requested some form of municipal government for the Chinese community, and the authorization of elections among them for a Chinese Municipal Board to assist the Registrar-General with advice on all Chinese matters an apparently worthwhile idea. In 1874 they wanted compulsory registration of all active and sleeping partners in Chinese shops and firms. Later they asked for an improved bankruptcy law, the building of a typhoon shelter for small craft, a town hall, and a lepers' asylum on some small island. These, it would seem, were mostly reasonable requests made by responsible, forward-looking men. The Governor, however, found himself able to accede to only one granting a site for a public meeting place. It is possible that his wife's death had a more profound influence on Kennedy than is on record, and his mind turned away from the liberality of the early years of his office. Later, he introduced an order 'couched in language of the most extraordinary circumlocution' which in effect gave Chinese with any petition or grievance leave to communicate with the government only through the Registrar-General. Great caution had supervened.
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The extent of the administration's lack of understanding of the Chinese, and its faltering control, were demonstrated in August 1872 when a small tax was levied on Chinese coolie rooming-houses in an attempt to control insanitary conditions. A strike of all the carrying coolies broke out at once. Considering the minuscule wages of these men, their solidarity was remark- able, indicating genuine grievance. They ended the strike only on condition that the government would repeal the tax. The government repealed it.
Some reorganization was introduced in the judiciary. Judge Ball of the Summary Court, suffering from epilepsy, retired in 1872, and this court was abolished. J. Paunceforte, Attorney-General since 1866, became Puisne Judge but left the same year to become Chief Justice of the Leeward Islands, and was succeeded by F. Snowdon. The post of Attorney-General was filled for two years by John Bramston, and on his appointment to a Colonial Office position he was followed by G. Phillippo.
Sir Arthur Kennedy was perhaps as good a Governor as any in the colony's history. His approach to his task was determined, generally fair, and un- clouded by personal idiosyncrasies. When a situation arose which had no obvious solution, or when no precise mode of action presented itself, he appointed a committee to look at it from more than one man's point of view; and he did this more often than any of his predecessors and than many of his successors in the nineteenth century. It was typical of his administration that the Gardens and Afforestation Department was very active and that the
Colonial Appeasement 137
systematic planting of trees in the city moved forward. Kennedy's was a friendly approach, both administratively and personally, and while he with- drew from his initial openness with the Chinese he was still regarded by them as understanding of their attitudes. He fought doggedly against the difficult problem posed by the ‘blockade' but failed to master it any more than had Macdonnell (see Chapter 14). His one major failure was his disregard of the appallingly insanitary condition of the colony. From reading the reports of the Surveyor-General and the Colonial Surgeon he could not possibly have been unaware of it. Perhaps, as his retreat from closer contacts with the Chinese may indicate, he was in greater distress at the loss of his wife than history relates. Eitel hints at it when he writes of Lady Kennedy's death that she was 'highly revered by Hong Kong residents as she had always given a tone of gentleness to the sterner rule of even the least severe Governor of Hong Kong.
The appreciation of residents was seen at Kennedy's departure in March 1877. Later, on the news of his death in the Red Sea in June 1883, on the return voyage to England from his appointment as Governor of Queensland, a public meeting determined to set up a statue to him, appropriately enough in the Botanical Gardens, where it remained until removed by the Japanese during the Second World War. Eitel calls him 'one of those few men who deserve a statue because they do not need one'.
Sir Arthur Kennedy's statue stood in the Botanical Gardens until the Japanese removed it during the occupation in World War II.
13. Mr Hennessy's Proceedings
G. R. SAYER introduces the next Governor of Hong Kong, who arrived in April 1877, in a paragraph of gentle irony:
Under the appeasing influence of Kennedy ... an unusual calm had fallen upon the colony and British and Chinese had settled down side by side to make hay while the sun shone. In these circumstances one might have expected the continuance of so happy a state of affairs would have been assured, at any rate by sending a second Sir Arthur to succeed the first. But, if the Secretary of State frowned on exuberance, he was no less fearful of stagnation and accordingly cast about for one who could be depended upon to keep things moving. There is no doubt that he was entirely successful.
·
Mr (later Sir) John Pope Hennessy was then near the end of his tour as Governor of the Windward Islands, and on him the choice fell. Having planted the scion of these islands in the soil of Hong Kong, both the Colonial Office and the colony were to reap a predictable – but apparently unforeseen
crop. The driving force behind the actions of the new Governor lay in the nature of the man himself. There were two factors or conditions. The first is best defined by quoting from a brief given to the Secretary of State by a leading civil servant. Commenting on the turmoil in Hong Kong during Hennessy's term there, in which the British community had ceased to accept. invitations to Government House, he wrote:
To my mind the history of all this trouble is a simple one. Mr Hennessy observes on arriving that long residence among Chinese, & familiarity with the Chinese character, has led the residents of Hong Kong to believe that a Chinaman is not to be dealt with as an Englishman or even as an Indian or Malay might be. He thinks this inhuman, and determines to set to work vigorously to reform what he believes to be a grave abuse. But, having no political wisdom, he proceeds in such a manner as to alienate from him all public sympathy and support, & ultimately to cause a sort of panic as to his intentions & their probable results.1
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}
1
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 139
The second factor lay in precisely what the official defined as the English attitude to the Chinese. His characterization of it was undeniably right, as any reading of the relevant documents demonstrates.
Both forces in the upheaval that took place in the colony may be seen at work in the comparatively_trivial matter of the use of the Hong Kong Museum in the City Hall. The Chairman of the Museum Committee was William Keswick of Jardine's. The museum enjoyed a small government grant but was substantially supported by subscription from the leading merchant houses, and from the rates which were paid by all who owned property, Chinese and foreigners alike. Hennessy discovered that Chinese were ad- mitted to the museum and library in the mornings only. At lunch the museum was closed and cleaned, and in the afternoon it was reserved exclusively for foreigners. At a meeting in the museum in 1876, both Keswick and the Governor agreed to sound out prominent Chinese business men for funds for an extension which would make the museum ‘a place of amusement and instruction to the Chinese'. The meeting noted that in the previous week 14,000 Chinese had visited it and the library, and only 300 Europeans. Hennessy found it all the more reprehensible, in view of the figures, that the Chinese should be confined to morning visiting. He wanted to open the museum to all during normal hours. Keswick expressed his view that the Chinese use of the museum was already excessive, and their presence un- savoury. Hennessy thereupon cut off the government grant. The Colonial Office upheld him, Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State, commenting dryly that ‘garlic-eating ratepayers must be endured by those who use their money'. The attitude of Lord Kimberley was at base the same as that implicit in the colonial attitude which attempted segregation by race, but British principles of imperial policy had to be seen to be practised, and the Secretary of State to be seen to uphold them. Apartheid could not be officially condoned, even if it was a fact.
The dispute might have died away in time had not the Governor's anger at what he correctly saw as the community's racist stance got the better of his sense. He proceeded to stop the sale of liquor at all functions in the City Hall on the legitimate ground that a licence had never been applied for. But, as the Secretary of State wrote testily, ‘a little tact might usefully have replaced these impassioned harangues'.
And there in a nutshell lay both the nub and the rub. Hennessy's endow- ment of liberal and progressive ideas, sincerely held, was hardly balanced by a store of political or even ordinary tactful sense. The visit of the King of Hawaii to Hong Kong in 1881 once more demonstrated the proposition. Keswick, honorary Hawaiian Consul in the colony, went out to the King's ship when it anchored in the harbour to invite him to stay at Jardine House. It was tactless of him too, no doubt. Hennessy, getting word of this, and while Keswick was still on board with the King, sent his official 12-0ar barge
140 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
bearing an invitation from the Governor ... in the name of the Queen, to be his guest'. The King, protocol having been thrust under his nose, could scarcely do other than comply, much to the ire of William Keswick. Hennessy, as usual, informed the Secretary of State of events. Lord Kim- berley, wisely, dismissed it as a ‘miserable squabble'.
One more example of Hennessy's capacity to put his foot in things occurred during a luncheon given a day or two after the barge incident. The host was Paul Catchick Chater, a wealthy business man and later philan- thropist. Hennessy made a speech in which, apparently intending jest, he referred to 'trifling incidents ... in past years, such as the killing of Captain Cook by His Majesty's predecessor'. Either the prandial level of inebriation was rather high or the King was a forbearing monarch, for he did not leave the table.
Hennessy, like the two governors before and one after him, was an Irish- man. Men of very different temperaments, both Macdonnell and Kennedy were, when it came to major decisions, realists. Hennessy was not. For him the standard concept of the colony as a place where ‘an Englishman could not only careen his ship without interference, but also dwell in peace and security ashore', as Kennedy had put it, was not enough. Hennessy was a man of lively human sympathy which, untypically for his time, he extended to all races. Mere toleration was not in his book. The consensus of opinion among Westerners was that the Chinese were a necessary adjunct to commerce, and that when one or other of them transgressed, the effective correctional methods were flogging, branding, expulsion. Apart from the question of humane sentiments, the Chinese, as Hennessy pointed out, were in many cases large taxpayers and as such had claim to a say on the body which dispensed the taxpayers' money. In the debate in Britain at the time on the question of the management of criminals, the swing was towards reform, prisoners' aid societies, and re-education. It is doubtful if anyone regarded this as applicable to Chinese criminals in Hong Kong. Hennessy was in a minority of one in merchant and governing circles. His isolation seemed to fuel the flames of his temperament. Encouraged by the abolition of convict transportation 20 years previously in Britain, he penned a series of dispatches- home very soon after arriving, condemning Hong Kong's whole penal system. Pointing out that much crime was of a petty nature, mendicancy, unlicensed hawking, and being out at night without a pass, he mentioned that in the past year only two in five were not first offenders. He criticized the gaol system which made no attempt to separate first from habitual offenders, and failed to apply any moral or other educational procedures. He found the habit of voluntary branding and deportation in return for full or partial remission of a sentence entirely inequitable, since under it good and bad, short- and long- term prisoners received the same treatment. He objected to the sentence of deportation on other grounds that it was used for criminals but also to
I
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 141
remove Chinese women who in many cases had lived in Hong Kong for years but at the age of seventy or eighty were too old to work. Under the existing law, he said, he had 'with pain and reluctance' deported them.
On the subject of the gaol, Hennessy thundered against the foreign turnkeys who were often in trouble for drunkenness, brutalized by admin- istering numberless floggings, and yet were retained in their positions. Hennessy dismissed the worst of them and began the recruitment and training of men brought out from England. He refused to free any prisoner before he had served at least two-thirds of his sentence, and announced his aim was to abolish branding then, for some reason, carried out on the neck rather than on the ear lobe. There was nothing in all those opinions and suggested alterations in practice which would have caused even the twitch of an eyebrow in Britain at that time. Hennessy's problem was that he was not in Britain but in Hong Kong. Public opinion (from mostly ill-educated, morally self-righteous instant experts) was set in dead opposition to the increasingly liberal climate in Britain because the subjects were Chinese, not British. It must remain in doubt whether, even by the exercise of that tact which Hennessy lacked, any governor at the time could have carried into practice, without antagonizing the foreign community, the kind of reforms Hennessy on the whole justifiably wanted.
The usual nostrum for the easement of social conflict in Hong Kong, a public meeting to express indignation and to formulate a petition to the Colonial Office, was applied by the residents on the cricket ground in October 1878 -— prompted by the previous year's rise in crime, said to be the result of the Governor's lenient policies. The meeting demanded the return of public flogging and deportation. The petition also requested an enquiry into the administration of the criminal law, and into relations between the Governor and officials.
The leading light in this was William Keswick, an unofficial member of the Legislative Council. Against this petition the Chinese submitted their own address to the Governor, signed by a large number of leading figures, sup- porting his policies. The Secretary of State (who must have been a sorely tried official at this time), in response to both documents, upheld the Governor in most aspects but feared the effects of his policies. Hennessy was asked to prepare plans for the reform of penal legislation, the conduct of the gaol, and methods of implementing his policies.
His proposals included the siting of a new gaol on Stonecutters island, its design suited to the segregation of prisoners in various categories. But the Secretary of State in London disagreed, preferring a site on Hong Kong island. Hennessy then constructed 40 cells in the basement of Victoria gaol as a tentative beginning to reform, and abolished flogging except in cases of violent crime. Perhaps the most significant revision of the penal laws was the dropping of legislation specifically directed against the Chinese
-
measures
142 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
dating from the panic months of 1857 in the wake of the Arrow incident. The Banishment Ordinance of 1882 was altered and banishment retained at the discretion of the Governor, and to be for not more than five years, and not to be applied only to Chinese but to all.
Generally speaking, Hennessy's policies in these matters were effective. Yet most Westerners in Hong Kong persisted in clinging to the short-term view, accusing him of encouraging crime and intending to abolish deportation and flogging altogether something he had never suggested.
In a society in which numerous female children constituted a threat to the economic security of Chinese families, a society moreover in which con- cubinage and the mui tsai system were approved by most, and which was physically removed from the constraints inherent in village life over the border, the problem of kidnapping was bound to arise. We have seen in Chapter 10 the stance of Hong Kong's Chinese community in relation to kidnapping and mui tsai in the formation of the Po Leung Kuk, and also the opinion of the Chief Justice that the system was repugnant to British law. The situation worsened in the wake of rising numbers of cases of kidnapping. Women and girls were lured on false pretences to the colony from where they were sent overseas to satisfy South-east Asian demand; or they were disposed of in Hong Kong itself. The price might be as high as $345 for the former and $45 for Hong Kong. Women were treated exactly as if they were commodities.
To the protests of the Chief Justice, the cautious Attorney-General sug- gested he confine his remarks to the cases of kidnapping which came to his court, leaving aside the question of mui tsai itself which was to be construed as a form of adoption. The Chinese themselves were clear on the difference between it and kidnapping. But the liberal Hennessy found his conscience troubled. On the one hand he was firmly against traffic in human beings: on the other he wished to respect Chinese customs permissible within the framework of British law in its colonial setting. In the end he refused action on the mui tsai question, preferring wisely to leave more or less well alone. There had been a marked increase in the Chinese population between 1872 and 1876, amounting to 15,000 in a total colonial population of about. 122,000. But the figure for British males fell in the same period by 86, a figure representing perhaps as much as a quarter of the total in Hong Kong. This would have been an absolute fall but for an influx of Portuguese, consequent on the ravages of the 1874 typhoon. Chinese businesses were increasing in number and prosperity causing, it seemed, a corresponding shrinkage in the foreign business sector. The Chinese by now had gained a certain expertise in marketing Western goods and, being Chinese, were in a better position to deal directly with their compatriots in China. Responding to this changing pattern, Hennessy reported in 1878: 'One sees warehouses that a few years ago were in the midst of a European district now in occupation of the
•
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 143
Chinese.' In the business district of the colony at least, the segregation of the races was breaking down a little. Formerly Chinese had clustered together in the east and to the west of Central District, and a clause in the leases of Central District properties restricted construction to Western-style buildings. Hennessy, in 1877, took the Chinese side.
There being no legal impediment in the way, and it being a matter of principal importance that no obstruction should be put in the way of the natural course of trade permits [may] be freely granted for native structures along any part of the Queen's Road, and business streets immediately adjoining
...
a line drawn between Upper Wyndham Street, Hollywood Road, and Aberdeen Street.2
Hennessy thought this was the minimum area into which the Chinese should be allowed to infiltrate. The Registrar-General, C. C. Smith, however, opposed the whole idea. Lord Carnarvon upheld the Governor, but another serious objection was put forward by the Commander-in-Chief, General Donovan. An irascible figure, chronically at odds with the Governor, he protested, pointing to the insanitary condition of most Chinese housing which might introduce a health hazard. This resulted, benignly for once, even salutarily, in the sending out from London of Osbert Chadwick to report on the sanitary conditions in Hong Kong (see Chapter 14).
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The other, less welcome, consequence of granting the Chinese permission to spread out from their former ghettos, led to what is nowadays termed a hiccup in the economy. The new census of 1881 revealed a population of 160,402 the increase in Chinese amounting to almost 21,000, and of Europeans to 273. The liberalization of the law, together with the pressure of Chinese entrepreneurs indicated by the figures, brought about an unexpected and very considerable speculation in land by the Chinese. Between January 1880 and May 1881 they bought land and property worth $1.7 million from foreign owners and a further $17,705 worth from the government. The frenzy of speculative purchases and opportunist selling drove up the price of land and property during 1881 to an extravagantly unrealistic degree. The bubble burst, as financial bubbles always have done to the eternal astonish- ment of the speculators in the autumn of 1881, the principal sufferers being the leading lights of the Chinese business community. The inevitable bankruptcies reflected a price fall of about 45 per cent, and were followed by vigorous litigation, the property market for the time being 'encumbered by the estates of the embarrassed owners', as Eitel puts it.
—
The old problem of securing adequate supplies of a suitable silver currency turned up again at this juncture, and various suggestions were advanced. The Chamber of Commerce wanted to introduce the American trade dollar and Hennessy suggested the legalization of Japanese yen in the light of increasing
144 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
trade with that country. Local business men presented a petition proposing that as there seemed no hope of having a Hong Kong dollar coined in Britain the Mint (of unhappy memory) should be revived. A note of high comedy, in the light of the débâcle over the original Mint, was sounded by the discovery that some enterprising Chinese were manufacturing, 'in the village of Tokwawan' on the Kowloon peninsula, immense quantities of cash for export to Annam and Tongking (now in North Vietnam) where no facilities for minting existed. In court no conviction could be secured since there appeared to be no law forbidding the manufacture of coins. Whereupon the colony was flooded with these cash until the Gazette published a warning in October 1879 that they were not legal tender. The speculation can hardly be resisted that had the operation of the Mint in Hong Kong been put in private Chinese hands, the coinage problem might have been solved to the satisfaction of all. Hennessy, as so often, did nothing at all.
―
When he did take action it generally caused a flurry in the colony, and often in London too. A member of the Legislative Council, H. B. Gibb, departed from Hong Kong on leave in January 1880. Hennessy at once appointed a Chinese, Ng Choy, in his place. On the face of it, Ng Choy was an eligible appointee a British subject born in Singapore, educated in England, the first Chinese to be called to the English Bar and the first to practise at the Hong Kong Bar. Giving his reasons, the Governor offered the information that he had consulted the 'wealthy and better Chinese', who had supported Ng Choy. A Chinese memorial sent to London in 1879 had claimed that as they out- numbered the foreigners 10 to one 'it would be fair to allow the Chinese community a share in the management of the affairs of the colony'. And Hennessy had previously, in Labuan (a British island possession off Borneo) when he governed there, made such a Chinese appointment; and Singapore had a Chinese on its Legislative Council. So there was precedent enough.
The Governor's proposal of 1880 was for a reorganization of the Council to contain six official members all holding named offices, and five unofficials, of whom four were to be British and one Chinese. But the Colonial Secretary demurred, deciding that Ng Choy's appointment was temporary, either until Gibb's return or at most for three years. His argument was that in the event of strained relations with China, and the Governor's need to consult the Council, the presence of a Chinese would raise difficulty. He also felt that a Chinese merchant would be better than a barrister. Doubtless he mistrusted the trained wits of a lawyer. At the root of the matter lay suspicion of Hennessy. As a former Secretary of State, Lord Carnarvon, had said: ‘I am afraid that a watchful eye is necessary over Mr Hennessy's proceedings.' In this case, however, the suspicion was probably incorrect and also unjust. In July 1880 when Gibb finally resigned from the Council, Hennessy had come out strongly in favour of a permanent Chinese member, bearing in mind that the Chinese were the largest owners of property, contributing 90 per cent of the
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 145
revenue, as well as being at the root of Hong Kong's prosperity. Later, in August 1881, the Governor appointed the Indian E. R. Belilios, one of the two leading opium merchants and a Director of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, to the Council. This was regarded locally as unexceptional.
The story of Eitel, however, another non-British citizen, turned out rather curiously. Ernest Johann Eitel came from Württemberg in Germany and became a missionary with the Lutherans in Guangzhou, and later with the London Missionary Society. He married an English missionary, Mary Eaton, but the Lutherans would not accept her because she was English. Later still, with a family to support, he moved to Hong Kong in 1870. Eitel gained a reputation for his Chinese Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect and other publications. In 1875 he had been appointed honorary Director of Chinese Studies by Kennedy. Hennessy elevated him to the paid position of Inspector of Schools and Chinese Secretary at a salary of £1,000 a year, and later still as Head of the Interpretation Department his salary doubled. He remained Hennessy's Private Secretary and confidant.
E. J. Eitel, the first historian of Hong Kong. This photograph appears to be the only likeness of him.
Hennessy's marriage to Kitty Low, daughter of the Colonial Treasurer in Labuan, was not a particularly happy one. His brooding temperament and his wife's rather child-like outlook (she was only 17 when they married) did not agree well. In Hong Kong the Governor became friendly with the colony's leading Queen's Counsel, Thomas Hayllar, and his wife. Hayllar had a re- putation as a womanizer. Hennessy's favoured form of relaxation from the
146 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
cares of office was to spend weekends on a steam yacht; whereas Kitty disliked the sea. He was often accompanied by Hayllar, but the latter began to cry off
often at the last moment. On one such occasion, as the Governor was about to cast off, a note from Hayllar arrived begging to be excused. Hennessy at once made all haste to Mountain Lodge, his official summer residence on the Peak, and in his wife's boudoir, he said, he found her with Hayllar engrossed in a book which the latter attempted to hide under a cushion. The book a catalogue of the Museo Boronico in Naples contained illustrations of classical male and female figures which Hennessy said were indecent. He turned the amorous QC out of the house.
—
―
The affair might have ended in stalemate had it not been for an encounter between the Governor and Hayllar on a quiet path near Mountain Lodge. Hennessy claimed Hayllar insulted him and that he struck the reprobate with his umbrella. Hayllar said this was unprovoked and that the Governor had attacked him in a frenzy. He retrieved the weapon and mounted its handle with a silver plaque in his house with the legend 'A memento of the battle of Mountain Lodge.' The story is told amusingly, and more fully, by Hennessy's grandson, James Pope-Hennessy, in his book, Verandah.
Two accounts of the affair reached London Hayllar's and a covering letter from the Governor. The former made no mention of Hennessy's wife. And for once the Governor had been discreet. No action was taken. But, when the Hennessys were leaving for Beijing, the Governor, with infinite indiscretion, instructed Eitel to show his dispatches on the affair to all members of the Legislative Council who might be interested. Hayllar, when he heard of this, set a trap. He sent a friendly member of the Council to see Eitel, who showed him the correspondence and argued the Governor's case. The visitor then made a sworn statement to Hayllar's lawyer and a writ was issued against Eitel for $25,000 damages.
Hennessy's grandson in his book Verandah avers that the Governor 'vowed to make the lawsuit his own', but the case never came to court. After a period of intrigue and negotiation by those concerned, Eitel was forced to write two letters of apology to Hayllar, and Hennessy himself was obliged to compose a conciliatory statement. He now looked rather askance at his former confidant, and when Eitel offered to resign, the resignation was accepted.
Eitel was never popular in Hong Kong, perhaps because of his Teutonic outlook (and later because of his confidential relationship with the Governor), but in the Colonial Office there was sympathy for him. When the Governor went on leave and was prevented by London from returning, Eitel continued on as Inspector of Schools until he retired in 1897. In his book Europe in China, he gives what is mostly a fair estimate of the quality of Hennessy's administration.
On many an occasion Hennessy discomposed the members of the admin-
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 147
istration; now and then he crossed swords with one or other of them. When he discovered that a Chinese woman had had to sell her son to pay a fine imposed by C. C. Smith, the Registrar-General, he set up a commission to enquire into the workings of that department. He accused Smith of illegal and immoral practices and put a stop to the system of informers used to incrim- inate prostitutes. No two men ever differed more essentially over policy towards the Chinese. Smith, who had every reason to think that on the retiral of the Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong (J. Gardiner Austin) in 1878, he would be appointed to that position, discovered that the Governor had secured a new man for the job W. H. Marsh and Smith had to look elsewhere for such an appointment.
Hennessy now attempted a wide reorganization of administrative arrange- ments in relation to the Chinese. His intention was to reduce the powers of the Registrar-General by setting up a new Department of Interpretation under a senior civil servant responsible for translation in the courts, and acting as Chinese Secretary as well. He had in mind for the job none other than Eitel. But here the Colonial Office jibbed. Hennessy was reminded that the purpose of the cadet scheme was to supply men qualified to occupy the highest posts without the need of an interpreter, and that the Registrar- General's job was to act as the official channel of communication between the Chinese and the government. In fact Hennessy's proposed scheme might have worked better than the existing arrangements, but the whole idea was shelved.
Having got rid of one potential Colonial Secretary, C. C. Smith, Hennessy now quarrelled with his own appointee in the position. Marsh found his job no job at all, for Hennessy handled all the business himself. Another casualty was Frederick Stewart, headmaster of the Central School, who had on one occasion refused the post of Registrar-General and accepted that of Police Magistrate where he thought he would be less under the thumb of the Governor. Hennessy also accused the Harbourmaster of laxity in examining shiploads of emigrants. Relations between the Governor and his officials were rapidly turning into the farce which had blemished the reign of Davis. General Donovan had ceased to attend the meetings of the Executive Council or to send his deputy. But worse was to come. There was but one military band in Hong Kong, and it was under the General's command. Whether maliciously or not, he had ordered the band to play at a dinner party organized by him on the Queen's birthday in May 1880. Hennessy had organized his own, official, birthday party, only to discover the essential musicians were otherwise engaged. Local communication being what it was, an appeal was sent to the War Office in London and brought a telegraphed order to the General to abandon his party and send the band to Government House. In terms of protocol the General was clearly in the wrong. Presumably he failed to grace Government House on the occasion.
148 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
―
Given the circumstances, the acrimony and the dumb insolence which was the reaction of the officers of government towards the Governor it is surprising that the finances of the colony remained good, even advancing into modest prosperity. Part of this was directly attributable to the influx of Chinese and the steady expansion of trade. But to give Hennessy his due, the remainder of the increase in revenues was the result of the stamp-selling agency which he had set up on a commission basis. The revenue from opium also increased, from $132,000 to $205,000, when he broke the opium licence ring. The Governor also wished to reduce the incidence of taxation on the Chinese, especially the junk owners; but the Legislative Council made the counter-suggestion of reducing the municipal rates by 2 per cent. The Secretary of State refused this measure in view of the urgency of the public works to be undertaken. The revenue of the colony, without added taxation, rose from $947,637 in 1878 to almost $1.25 million in 1882.
The state of public works and the successive delays in their implementation, demonstrate Hennessy's inefficiency and the disarray which his governorship induced in the administration. Virtually the sole project which went ahead was the rebuilding of the Praya, begun under Kennedy. The Central School, urgently needed in 1876, was at the end of Hennessy's term not yet in being. The Civil Hospital, wrecked in the 1874 typhoon, its tem- porary premises gutted by fire, then took over the Lock Hospital and a new school building at Sai Ying Pun. It had been Kennedy's suggestion that the Lock Hospital be converted to a general hospital, and when the Civil Hospital was established in those premises Hennessy appeared to believe that this had been accomplished; and he so reported to London. His assumption of almost all the work of his administrators obviously placed an intolerable load on him, and such confusions were the inevitable result. Having suggested a new gaol, not one stone of it was ever put in place. Muddled thinking on the Tai Tam water supply scheme effectively held it up. The Governor appeared to be under the delusion that to provide water tanks for fire-fighting would do much to solve the water problem, apparently oblivious of the point that people must drink and also wash and cook. Other inde- fensible ideas of his on sanitation (which fall more appropriately in Chapter 14) were bound up with his unsound opinions on water supply.
More appropriate to Hong Kong was Hennessy's interest in the budding science of meteorology. Weather prediction was obviously something worth pursuing in the context of the Hong Kong climate. The Governor proposed an observatory for Mount Elgin in Kowloon. Later, in 1881, he charged his Aide de Camp, Major Palmer of the Royal Engineers, to draw up a much more elaborate plan of what he proposed to call the Kangxi Observatory after the Chinese emperor whose interest in astronomy was fired by the scholar-Jesuits at his court in the late seventeenth century. Palmer's scheme was to cost an initial $33,000, with an annual maintenance of $10,000. This
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 149
was put to the Legislative Council in August 1881, with the colonial estimates for 1882 which included $20,000 for the observatory and time-ball. Hennessy reminded the Council:
The experience of the last few years will be enough to convince us of the importance of meteorological observations for the China Sea. I received within the last few days two telegrams from the government of Manila and the Council are aware that they indicated the full force of the gale we have recently experienced... In the same way we shall be able to make observations that will not only be useful to ourselves, but to all parts of the China Sea.
The expensive project was strongly championed by the Hong Kong Telegraph, but the Colonial Office was sceptical. The Governor was told to go no further pending consultations in London. The Surveyor-General, John Price, took another look at the project in May 1882 and suggested a different scheme, the cost of which was about half of the previous one. London con- sidered this 'sufficient for the requirements of the colony'.
Qualified men were sent out from England and the building was begun. A note of restraint was introduced by the Colonial Office when the Secretary of State wrote, commenting on Hennessy's suggestion for naming the obser- vatory: ‘As to [this] perhaps "The Hong Kong Observatory" will be enough for the present modest proposal."3 And a notation on the correspondence about the scheme adds a laconic touch: 'Pass over in silence Sir J. P. Hennessy's proposal to name it after Kong Hi [Kangxi], and the idea will probably drop into oblivion."4 The Observatory was completed after Hennessy left Hong Kong.
Characteristically, having in mind the severe loss of life among the boat people in the 1874 typhoon, Hennessy proposed to construct a breakwater at Causeway Bay as a refuge for junks in future storms. London insisted that the plans be scrutinized by a specialist consulting engineer, Sir John Goode, and allowed the cost of the work to come out of the special gambling fund. But by the end of 1881 nothing had been done and no plans for the breakwater had reached London. On being asked, Hennessy merely complained of the in- efficiency of Price. But, as with most of the other lapsed schemes, the reasons lay in the Governor himself, whose energies were consumed by the crime problem, the huge load of work he shouldered, and in altercations with his officials on almost every topic that arose. 'For excellent reasons, convincingly expressed,' writes Endacott, 'the programme of urgently needed public works was held up during the whole of his governorship." Those 'excellent reasons' in fact covered Hennessy's administrative ineptitude.
Almost the only success of Hennessy's term of office was the reform of the Grant-in-Aid scheme in 1879. By a few alterations in the wording of the official code, which was approved by the Colonial Office, the secular system of education was confined to government schools, and the Grant-in-Aid
150 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
schools were set free to devote their whole curricula to education, whether secular or religious, in both primary and secondary subjects. This was a giant step forward. On Hennessy's arrival in 1877 there were 41 schools in the colony with 2,922 pupils; when he left in 1882 there were 80 schools with an enrolment of 5,182 pupils all under government supervision. No credit was ever accorded him by the Europeans in Hong Kong for this considerable achievement.
―
Governor Hennessy (wearing top hat) with members of the Legislative Council and others, photographed with the King of the Sandwich Islands (today's Hawaii) when the latter visited Hong Kong.
-
However miserable his overall record, Hennessy's enlightened policies towards the Chinese were far in advance of the times so far, indeed, that in attempting to put the theory of racial equality into governmental practice, he deeply antagonized the ultra-conservative Westerners, so that by the time of his going they were not on speaking terms with him except on official business. Hennessy was an ineffectual administrator, inefficient, unable to delegate. The Colonial Office viewed him and all his deeds with extreme reserve; the colony with something approaching derision.
There is a brief glimpse of Hennessy in the description of the great fire that raged on Christmas night 1878, which destroyed a large amount of property on Queen's Road. Three hundred and sixty-eight houses were razed before it
Mr Hennessy's Proceedings 151
was extinguished on Boxing Day. Miss Isabella Bird arrived by sea at the height of the blaze.
Streets choked with household goods and the costly contents of shops, treasured books and nicknacks lying on the pavements Chinamen dragging their possessions to the hills; Chinawomen carrying their children on their backs
and Mr Pope
•
officers black with smoke working at the hose like firemen Hennessy, the Governor, ubiquitous in a chair with four scarlet bearers...6
Later he was to quit his sedan and lend a hand with the hoses.
There is a glimpse of another aspect, in a photograph taken of the official party on the visit of the King of Hawaii. A stuffy, lumpish group of men, his officials, sit and stand in untidy rows. Amid them, the King on his right, sits Hennessy, a pale top hat perched forward rakishly over his eyes, elegant, singular as an actor in a football crowd. He did not and could not belong.
A question poses itself: why was Hennessy ever sent out to Hong Kong when, as one civil servant in London noted, 'he has muddled the finances of every colony he has governed'? The Secretary of State once sent Hennessy copies of 39 dispatches which he had left unanswered, and was finally driven to having those on which he most urgently required action printed and published in Hong Kong for the populace to examine.
In March 1882, this dandified, emotional, well-intentioned, and by then hopelessly isolated figure at last left Hong Kong. The Chinese were hyper- bolical in their praise, the British equally cutting in their disdain. The praise was genuine enough, recording Chinese recognition that at least one foreign man, and a Governor at that, considered them to be equals in an appallingly unegalitarian place. Perhaps that thought, as he left the colony, formed a small island of comfort in the bitter sea of ostracism.
14. Public Health, and the Blockade
-
water
AMONG the problems affecting nineteenth-century Hong Kong were several which seemed down the years to be more intractable than others supply, sanitation, and public health. One more, affecting the terms of three successive governors, came to be known as 'the blockade'.
There was really no excuse for the continuing saga of Hong Kong's inad- equate water supply, given the relative smallness of the population and the state of Western hydraulic engineering expertise. And the history of China's own very ancient water supply facilities in the cities of the mainland point an accusatory finger at nineteenth-century Hong Kong administrators' inertia. The problem lay not with mechanics but in part with a failure to tackle the question seriously; and in part with the chronic stinginess of the Colonial Office. Yet another factor was the fact that the ruling classes in the colony lived in virtually total isolation from the Chinese majority, unaware of conditions. Furthermore, successive administrations were chary of interfering with Chinese custom in this and other matters. There seemed to be no answers to the situation until the Chinese could be co-opted somehow into the workings of the administration. And there was little or no will towards achieving that.
I
By 1881 the Chinese population had reached almost 200,000 a rise of 32 per cent in 15 years. Dr I. Murray, the Colonial Surgeon who had arrived in 1859, in his 1870 report complained that it was 'not creditable ... that after the unhealthy condition [of the drains] had been pointed out by myself and the Sanitary Commission, they should remain as they are, a source of disease and death'. He castigated the government for doing nothing when approached by the owners of marine lots complaining of untreated sewage fouling the shores, and pointed out that lack of funds was no excuse in the face of ‘the most dangerous nuisance'. He also called for better hospitals, the registration of all deaths, for tree-planting, and the liberal use of that Victorian kill-all, carbolic, in every drain, as palliative measures.
Public Health, and the Blockade 153
Governor Macdonnell made a stab at that sort of improvement when he started paving Taipingshan and installing surface drainage, but his energies were soon deflected to what appeared to him more urgent tasks in the suppression of gambling and piracy. Still, he was a carbolic enthusiast and made sure a good supply of it was available.
On Murray's retirement in 1872 after 14 years' service, he was succeeded by McCoy who soon died and was in turn replaced by Dr Phineas Ayres who arrived as the new Colonial Surgeon in 1873. The mortality among Colonial Surgeons in itself offers a sharp comment on public health in the colony. The first, appointed in 1845, was dead within a year, the next survived a mere eight months. The third lasted almost seven years. Ayres was the longest serving nineteenth-century incumbent and retired in 1897, after almost a quarter of a century in the post.
He had begun with some gusto, condemning the conditions he discovered. His January 1874 report pin-pointed the cases of typhoid originating in brothels, which were indescribably filthy with rooms constructed within other rooms, and without in many cases any sanitation at all. A few months later he condemned domestic accommodation where houses were occupied by from five to 10 families, dwellings unfit 'to put pigs in'. These houses were owned by rich Europeans and Chinese 'who squeeze those who have no power to make their complaints known'. He wrote in his April 1875 report:
I have made a series of inspections in company with Mr Price the Surveyor-General. The result of these inspections goes to prove that however much on the surface the town of Victoria may appear cleaner than most Eastern towns, beneath the surface it would be difficult to find a filthier condition of things.
My first series of inspections discovered that pigs were kept in houses all over the town in hundreds, and that pigsties were to be found under the beds and in the kitchens of the first, second, and third floors. I visited many houses in which over a hundred pigs were kept, every bed in these houses had large pigs in a sty constructed underneath it, and ... the late Inspector of Markets, whose duty it was to see that pigs were kept in proper places, [had given people Government licences to keep their pigs there].
Imagine houses whose upper floors are constructed of thin board, with wide interstices between them, and whose lower floors are inhabited, and the state they would be in under these circumstances, with pigs urine etc. dropping through from floor to floor.2
Ayres goes on to detail the unsuitable construction of those houses, their total lack of sanitation or, where there was any, the broken and half-choked pipes that led no further than from the kitchen (also in use as a lavatory) to the gully outside. There were further horrors. 'Cows were only to be found in the basement, but goats and sheep, like pigs, might be found on any floor. Pigs and sheep were kept until they were wanted for slaughter, goats and
COVERED
YARD
KITCHEN
CUBICLE
CUBICI.E
UP TO
COCK LOFT
5
SCALE FEET
10
43' 6"
00
о
10000
BED SIILLF OVER
88
}
I
SEMI-CUBICLE
SEMI-CUBICLE | SEMI-CUBICLE
COCKLOFT OVER THIS SECTION
BEL SPACE
BED SPACE
BED SPACE
BED SPACE
UP TO
FIRST FLOOR
о
SOLID WALLS:-
CUBICLE PARTITIONS
CUBICLE GRILLES
COCK LOFT
BEDS
DOWN
о
RESIDENTS: ADULTS
CHILDREN
TOTAL NUMBER
25 STAT. ADULTS.
∙13′ 6′′*
4. Plan of a typical tenement house in a congested district, built before 1903. The conditions described by Dr Ayres were to be found in houses such as this, with grossly overcrowded accommodation. (Source: Report of the Housing Commission 1935.)
K
I
O
o H
Οι
O O O O O
F
оо
O
F
B
Ꭰ
C
B
A
A. The ladder staircase of
entry. B. The couch for the opium smoking.
C. An ante-chamber. D. The salle à manger., E. The table, with stools round it. F. Where the musicians sat. G. A terrace in the open air, overlooking the sea. H. A table with brandy, soda, pale ale, and cigars.
I. Flowers in pots on the edge of the terrace. K. Hong-Kong harbour.
5. Plan of the first floor public rooms of a wealthy Chinese house, that of the P. &. O. comprador. The dimensions of the house are similar to those of the tenement house. (Source: Smith, To China and Back.)
cows for dairy purposes.' Goats were led round from house to house and milked, as required by the customer.
It was not only the Chinese whose health was at risk. Ayres discovered, among many others, one 'dairy' which supplied most of the households in Caine Road, then the preserve of European families and situated just up the
The
BISE #
Part of Taipingshan about 1868 in a photograph by William Pryor Floyd.
hill from the pullulating slum of Taipingshan. This 'dairy' was in the basement of a house between Shelley Street and Peel Street, the entry via a gully leading from the former. The basement consisted of cellars whose sole light came from doors or windows on to the gully. To milk or tend the cows required the use of a lamp to dispel the gloom. And, as the cows had been quartered there since they were calves, the full-grown animals had to be slaughtered in situ and then carved up because there was no other way they could be got out. Of another house, Ayres wrote, ‘I found a quarter of beef hanging over the bed of a man who was in the last stages of smallpox.'
The highly charged language of Ayres' reports was instrumental in their suppression; and unfortunately the facts he reported were read as less significant than their implicit condemnation of those in authority who had permitted the public health perils thus revealed. With the suppression of his reports it is perhaps not surprising that Ayres, in frustration at their fate, dealt in later ones with less controversial aspects of the sanitary situation. He had also come to realize that in the absence of drastically changed building
156 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
ordinances there was little that could be done about the potentially disastrous state of sanitary affairs.
―
What government impotence and inertia failed to do, the great fire of 1878 largely achieved for them, Ayres calling the destruction of much of Taipingshan in that year ‘a sanitary dispensation of Providence'. Hennessy was saved the responsibility for an even greater disaster rampant epidemic by those cleansing flames. The Governor's blindness to the dangers was due to his conviction that 'the Chinese inhabitants maintain that the attempts now and then made ... to force what is called "Western sanitary science" upon them were not based on sound principles'. They should be allowed to build houses of the Guangzhou type with earth closets. Hennessy completely opposed the introduction of flushing toilets. What he failed to see blinded by prejudice was the dire overcrowding in Hong Kong which negated whatever might be reasonable in Guangzhou. Had he read the reports of Dr Peter Parker working as a medical missionary there (one of whose patients had been Commissioner Lin), Hennessy might have formed a different view. It took another of Hong Kong's episodes of infighting and backbiting to spring the Ayres reports out of the Secretariat and lodge them on the desks of the Colonial Office. Hennessy's ordinance permitting Chinese housing in what were formerly European preserves so incensed the choleric General Donovan that he complained of the nuisance near the barracks ‘giving ocular, auricular, and nasal demonstration' that Chinese were unfitted to live near Westerners. He cited the Ayres reports as proof. As a result, the Surgeon- General of the army was dispatched to Hong Kong, and his report of 1 September 1880 condemned not only the sanitary conditions but also the policy of the Governor. The Colonial Office then demanded to see the Ayres reports and sent out Osbert Chadwick, a former Royal Engineers officer, to make a full-scale enquiry. His report in 1882 turned out to have even further- reaching effects than he could have suspected, in that it formed the basis on which the Sanitary Board, precursor of the Urban Council, came into being. Chadwick was almost the ideal man for the job. Not confining his invest- igations to sanitation, he surveyed the social picture of the colony in an attempt to place its problems in their context. He probed the views of the. Chinese, who surprised him by their openness in receiving him.
The Chadwick report scotched all Hennessy's sanitary ideas as invalid in Hong Kong. Fortunately it was submitted after the Governor had left. Calling for energetic remedial measures, the report pointed out that even in Chinese systems correct drainage is required. Noting that the water supply in the colony was inadequate, Chadwick made the point that neither 'the proposed works, nor works many times larger, would satisfy the wants of the city', while the water rate charges were unjustly applied. He considered that a new building ordinance was essential, and that apart from rectifying defective or absent house drainage which he called 'radically bad', the whole town should
Public Health, and the Blockade 157
be supplied with effective drainage. He separated the questions of ordinary scavenging and the collection of the euphemistically named 'night soil'. Collections were to be made by a trained sanitary staff under an appointed officer. Chinese involvement and co-operation should be obtained by using the district watchmen to enforce the process, and for this they ought to be paid extra. All those connected with the sanitary process should be closely in touch with the Registrar-General's office. There should be more public toilets, more baths, new markets and a proper water supply for Kowloon across the harbour.
-
The report shows Chadwick pointing out the means by which Chinese could be involved, means suggested in his conversations with them when they frequently called his attention to points requiring alteration or improvement. The fear that the town might ‘outgrow itself', expressed by an 1845 visitor, had proved all too true, and the barest amenities water, drainage, and
had not kept pace.
health care
The report reached Hong Kong in 1882, before a new Governor was appointed and during the administration of W. H. Marsh, the Colonial Secretary, recently knighted. His tenure was regarded by the Western community as a welcome respite from the ministrations of Hennessy who, arrived in England, began accusing the colony of being the distributor of £1,000,000 worth of opium a month to China. The figure was nearer to £200,000. But it required the appointment of a commission to repudiate his accusation, and it was on Sir William Marsh's shoulders that the brunt of the dispute fell.
As it affected the economic viability of the colony, the so-called Chinese customs 'blockade' of Hong Kong was quite as serious a matter as that hanging sword of Damocles, an outbreak of epidemic disease. The back- ground lay in the confused state of relations with Chinese customs authorities over a clause in the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. As ever, the root of the problem was opium. The clause in question laid down that opium, now legalized, could only be carried in foreign vessels, and these were confined to trading in the Treaty Ports where the import duty on opium and the likin transit tax were enforceable. This provision was largely disregarded by the Chinese in Hong Kong whose junks, under British protection, carried opium to China. The Chinese, however, regarded all Chinese-owned vessels, even if the owners lived in Hong Kong or the craft had (as did the Arrow) a British captain, as Chinese and therefore illegally trading. The Chinese government was, in consequence, losing revenues which it would have collected had the opium been carried in foreign vessels entering the Treaty Ports.
There were other grievances of the Chinese side. The protection of the British flag was quite legally given to vessels belonging to Chinese lessees of Crown land in Hong Kong. Although they were few in number, the Chinese customs also lost revenue in this trade. The obligation which confined foreign
158 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
trade to the Treaty Ports was largely circumvented by the fact that the colony's rapidly increasing coastal trade with China was conducted for the most part by Chinese merchants in Hong Kong who served as distributors of foreign goods which they bought from European import agency houses.
On the other side of the argument was the opinion that since the colony was a free port the suppression of this illicit trade was a matter to be dealt with by the Chinese themselves. The bones of contention were many, but the real question between Hong Kong and Guangzhou was which would win the battle for control of the local distributive trade. The sums involved were large. The loss of opium revenue at Guangzhou, normally collected by the Imperial Maritime Customs, was considerable. The likin tax levied at the Treaty Ports was $16 per chest of opium sent inland from there. Then there was the $30 per chest levied by the hoppo who controlled the collection of Chinese native customs revenues. It was these two agencies who, from November 1867, began to check all native craft operating to and from Hong Kong.
The first episode came in Macdonnell's time when, in November 1867, an opium-carrying junk was seized by Chinese revenue cruisers operating off the entrance to Hong Kong harbour. Macdonnell wrote in strong terms to Robertson, Consul at Guangzhou, demanding the return of the junk and compensation for the value of its cargo both of which he received. This dispatch was eventually passed from the Colonial Office to the Foreign Office by the Duke of Buckingham who expressed his disapproval of the language used by the Governor, in which he appeared to query the right of the Chinese government 'to exercise its own jurisdiction over its own subjects in its own waters in a manner which it considers conducive to its own interests'.3
In the following year nine marine and land customs stations were set up by the Chinese around Hong Kong, all native vessels being subject to stop and search. Rutherford Alcock, British Minister in Beijing, took the Chinese part, referring to the colony as 'little more than an immense smuggling depot'. Both he and Robertson supported the Chinese purchase of gunboats for the purpose of enforcing the blockade. Macdonnell called them a new species of. corsairs'. The Governor took a strong line throughout, but he was champion of a somewhat dubious cause. Only some of his points were soundly based. The Treaty of Tianjin did allow for the $30 tax on every chest of opium, but it did not provide for the likin tax which was therefore illegal. It was true that the blockade failed to differentiate between Hong Kong Chinese and foreign ships, although only Chinese vessels were affected, while ships bound for non-Chinese ports were also affected commerce which the Chinese had clearly no right to interfere in.
―
Robertson defended the measures in that they applied solely to opium to which the Governor replied in effect ‘so far'. He also denied estimates of the
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Public Health, and the Blockade 159
amount of opium smuggled. Of the 80,000 chests annually imported to Hong Kong, 63,000 went to the northern Chinese ports, and 3,000 to Chinese in California. His estimate was that about one and a half thousand chests were smuggled from Hong Kong, as against the Chinese estimate of thirty to forty thousand. What happened to the remainder he did not say. The Chinese next requested permission to set up customs stations in the colony, and Alcock in Beijing wanted a Chinese consul there, too. Both were turned down by Macdonnell with the retort that it would be inadvisable 'in the special circumstances of this very peculiar place, its very peculiar inhabitants and most peculiar geographical position'. He complained that Alcock and Robertson had approved of the blockade measures without so much as consulting him on a matter which deeply affected the colony.
4
But Macdonnell found himself well out on a limb, the home government unsupportive. 'More than one of the claims advanced by you', Lord Granville reprimanded him, ‘have been exaggerated and untenable ... the interests of H. M. Service are injured by the tone in which they are advanced . . . I hold you in no slight degree responsible for the want of co-operation which at present exists."
5
Under Kennedy, a man more ready to concede points, a commission of enquiry was set up in 1874. But the unruly merchants called a public meeting in September at which the customs cordon sanitaire was roundly condemned, Jardine's representative calling it an ‘organized invasion of the freedom of the port'. The motion passed at the meeting went off to London where Lord Carnarvon at the Colonial Office responded in peremptory manner:
The action of the Chinese revenue cruisers in the exercise of the right of search in close proximity to Hong Kong for the purpose of defeating the attempts of Chinese subjects to defraud the revenue of their country did not affect the freedom of the port and afforded no valid ground for diplomatic remonstrance.
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Both the Minister in Beijing and the Consul in Guangzhou took the part of the Chinese. Kennedy had recourse to his 'panacea for all problems', another committee this one composed of a small number of British and Chinese officials whose duties were to investigate complaints of illegal seizures from vessels. A convention signed in Beijing between the Chinese and the British in 1876 provided for the appointment of a commission on Anglo-Chinese lines consisting of an officer of the colonial government, a Chinese official, and a British Consul, so as to establish a system 'that shall enable the Chinese government to protect its interests without prejudice to the interests of Hong Kong'. Article 3 of the Convention also provided that opium be kept in bond until sold, whereupon the purchaser would pay in a lump sum the transit dues of the provincial governments involved en route to its destination.
Hennessy having taken over as Governor from Kennedy, it was hardly to
160 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
be expected that much progress would be made towards settlement. On his arrival in Hong Kong he was confronted with the seizure of an opium junk by the Chinese in colonial waters. Correctly, he demanded full compensation for both junk and cargo. But, receiving this, he refused to turn the money over to the junk's owner because the vessel had illegally set sail from port at night without a clearance. Although he was technically correct, mercantile opinion viewed this as an open invitation to the Chinese to continue the blockade.
Later, in March 1878, Hennessy reported an increase in the junk trade, mentioning that complaints about the blockade had ‘mostly ceased'. This was a fiction in which, isolated as he was from the merchant community and others, he may well have believed. The Chinese merchants were worried by the Chinese government's interference with the shipping of cotton piece goods, and other legitimate trade. Hennessy planned to solve the opium problem by collecting all dues on it in Hong Kong and then issuing clear- ances. In the contraband salt trade he thought that if Chinese government agents were to license the trade the matter would be cleared up. In return for these suggested easements he asked for the ending of the blockade. As ever, in a sense correctly, Hennessy's thought was for the Chinese mercantile com- munity on whom, to his mind, the colony's prosperity greatly depended. He ran into profound opposition from the mercantile community to the setting up of any collecting agency in a free port, and these various plans came to naught. The opium trade was still a very significant earner, the 83,000 chests clearing Hong Kong in 1870 worth $48,742,238.
Few events or processes in history are without their brighter, or at least other, side and the blockade, which was not to yield to reason for some time yet, was no exception. The seemingly timeless, sturdy, adaptable work-horse of the coastal trade, the Chinese junk in all its variety of shapes and sizes suited to this or that condition, now began to give way, as sail was giving way elsewhere, to the blandishments of steam. Steam launches of the Chinese Maritime Customs were proving every day that they could overtake the junk in all weathers. Soon enough Chinese merchants took notice. The potential was recognized. The China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was formed in 1874. It did not at first prosper so splendidly as the logic of its formation had given hope it would, yet its very formation marked the end of the foreigners' monopoly of steam navigation, and the beginning of a decline of the junk in sea transport. Competitors among foreign-owned companies included the China Navigation Company established by Butterfield and Swire in 1872, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company established in 1881, belonging to Jardine, the Douglas Steamship Company, started in 1883, and the Canton and Macao Steamship Company, formed in 1865. By 1877, Kwok A Cheung, a Hong Kong Chinese, had bought 13 steamers, a large enterprise for that time.
Until 1883, the movement of goods from China to Britain exceeded that
Public Health, and the Blockade 161
in the other direction, and since the material was mostly tea and silks which could be shipped direct from the Treaty Ports, Hong Kong did not become a major collecting centre in this trade. Conversely, almost one-half of British exports to China passed through the colony. The 1880 statistics show that Hong Kong handled 21 per cent in value of China's total export trade and 37 per cent of its import trade.
The best indication of the growth of import and export trade in this period, in the absence of figures for tonnage, is to be found in the numbers of ships entering and clearing the port. The data afford an overview of the expansion of trade and of the types of goods involved.
In 1866, 1,896 ships totalling 949,856 tons entered the harbour, and 3,783 ships totalling 1,891,281 tons entered and cleared; by 1881, 'foreign-going ships' other than junks entering port numbered 3,214 totalling 2,853,279 tons of which 2,750 totalling 2,599,461 tons were steamers. From 1867 figures for the junk traffic are available; in that year 20,787 junks totalling 1,353,700 tons entered, all engaged in foreign trade, carrying cattle, fruit, vegetables, and firewood. They took on opium, rice, salt, lime, cotton, and local granite. In 1874 the Harbourmaster reported that the junk trade had increased each year from 1867 to early 1872, at which point a fall in numbers began. Thus it would appear that the blockade had at first no serious impact. But by 1879 the junk trade had not yet returned to its former volume, and more foreign-built ships were now under the Chinese flag. Hong Kong Chinese vessels by that time carried 42.36 per cent of the total of the colony's inward trade.
That Hong Kong Chinese were taking a larger slice of trade was reflected in their increasingly monied lifestyle, seen in their new appetite for Western property and their growing use of their own steamers, Kwok A Cheung being one example. They were also the biggest ratepayers. In 1881 there were 18 ratepayers with property rated at over $1,000 per quarter, 17 of whom were Chinese the remaining one being Jardine, Matheson and Company. Old patterns were changing. Important factors in the changes were the lower freight rates following the opening of the Suez Canal and the evolution of improved marine steam engines. The great breakthrough was the invention, patented in 1884, by the Irish engineer Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, of the steam turbine. In conjunction with the high-speed electro-generator, this revolutionized marine propulsion the world over. Its effects on trading patterns in Hong Kong as elsewhere were one of the dramatic events in the evolution of nineteenth-century commerce.
Hong Kong had long been the centre for Chinese migration overseas. From the privations of life in China, from the ravages of bandits, from the periodic scourges of epidemic and hunger, streams of migrants filtered through to Hong Kong's port and, often unwitting of the terms of contracts they were acquiescing to, were shipped over the Pacific to California as labourers, to
162 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
endure the horrors of the voyage to South America and virtual slavery there — to the tin mines of Malaya, and to the gold-rush shanty towns of Australia and New Zealand. The trade in human beings was little better than the African slave trade. Such were the abuses in this traffic that in 1869 coolie emigration on contract was prohibited from Hong Kong. But it went on flourishing in Macau where it was said that there were 800 coolie brokers. Kennedy passed this Chinese complaint to London where the Colonial Office asked if it were true that Hong Kong was supplying Macau with the ships to conduct it. Replying, Kennedy admitted this almost all coolie ships were fitted out in the colony, there being nothing in law to prevent it. And when the law might be broken by work on ‘objectionable fittings', these were simply manufactured in Hong Kong and installed at sea. In the first nine months of 1872, 15 Peruvian, 10 French, nine Spanish, one Austrian and three Dutch ships had been dispatched to Macau for the coolie trade.
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In London, Lord Kimberley saw this as 'most unsatisfactory' and wanted new legislation and rigorous searches of all passenger ships. Contract emigration from China had been legal since 1860, the process regulated in 1866 by a convention between China, France, and Britain; and further restricted in 1869 when migrants were not permitted to leave Hong Kong for any destination other than the British colonies. Emigration of Chinese other than by contract, termed ‘voluntary emigration', was of course permissible. It brought in trade, and returning Chinese often brought bullion. Figures for 1866 show departures at 5,116 and returns at 9,253. In 1872 almost thirty thousand left and almost twenty-four thousand returned; and in 1881 over seventy thousand left and close to fifty-three thousand came back.
The outcome of queries from London on the subject of the coolie trade was an ordinance of 1873 imposing severe penalties on restraining women and children with a view to shipping them abroad, and also on the fitting out and possession of emigrant ships without a licence. When the ordinance was passed, the migrant ships that were fitting out in the harbour immediately sailed.
Voluntary emigration increased. The first five months of 1874 saw over seven thousand coolies take ship for San Francisco, with another 1,211 awaiting passage
most headed for the gold mines in search of wealth. One further effect of increased Chinese migration in conjunction with the increased efficiency of steam navigation was the expansion of overseas markets for Chinese goods supplied via Hong Kong. Just as did Western communities in foreign settlements, the Chinese abroad always attempted to construct a little China in alien lands. They needed the rice, the dried goods, and all the diverse ingredients of Chinese food. They wanted familiar textiles and house furnishings, porcelain tableware that only the motherland could supply. Most of these goods were bought from China by shrewd Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and shipped across the Pacific to California,
Public Health, and the Blockade 163
to Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore, to the Indonesian archipelago, and to Australia. The stream of Chinese grew to a flooding river, until restrictive immigration laws were passed in the British Dominions, and until the 1887 Exclusion Acts in America.
15. Constitutional Reform, and the Legalization of Opium
AFTER the departure of Hennessy in the spring of 1882 a whole year elapsed before Sir George Bowen, his successor, arrived. The Acting Governor, W. H. Marsh, administered in the interregnum. Bowen left Hong Kong in December 1885, and another gap without a governor ensued for almost two years before Sir William Des Voeux arrived in October 1887. Marsh again held the reins, and in his own absences Major-General W. G. Cameron and the Colonial Secretary, F. Fleming, took over. After Des Voeux left, Major- General Digby Barker administered until in December 1891 the new Governor, Sir William Robinson, came out.
This repeated change of helmsman within the span of a few years was unfortunate, coming in the wake of the turbulence left by Hennessy. Many pressing issues, new and old, required a firm continuity in leadership and administration, and it says a lot for the qualities of the civil service that a moderate and acceptable course was steered.
Both Bowen and Des Voeux had reached the peak of their careers as they arrived in the colony. An academic by early choice, Bowen had later joined the colonial service. Des Voeux had begun as a graduate of the Canadian Bar and had governed two colonies before Hong Kong. His health, never robust, appeared to require him to spend a considerable part of his term shooting duck on the Yangzi. He left Hong Kong in 1890.
Marsh when he took over had to tackle urgently the muddle bequeathed by Hennessy and also to begin the implementation of the Chadwick report. His first steps were incisive the building of the new hospital, the Central School, and the junk shelter at Causeway Bay. He then upgraded the Registrar-General's office under a cadet named James Russell.
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The Colonial Office asked for the appointment of a Sanitary Inspector and Marsh appointed H. Macallum, the apothecary at the Civil Hospital. The whole question of sanitation and public health and what to do about it, hanging over the administration, could scarcely be ignored for ever. Marsh,
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Constitutional Reform, and Opium 165
as Acting Governor, tentatively appointed a triumvirate of officials to sit on a Sanitary Board the Surveyor-General, Registrar-General, and Colonial Surgeon. In 1883, when Bowen arrived as Governor, he constituted the Board with three members ex officio, and the Surveyor-General as Chairman; and he nominated two other members to represent ratepayers.
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The wide powers accorded to the Board in the relevant ordinance powers to inspect insanitary housing and where deemed necessary to disinfect the premises, and to remove for treatment anyone suspected of being a source of infection were met with vociferous opposition from the community. The Board remained in being but powerless to act in the face of such popular revulsion; and the ordinance was withdrawn, although Bowen added to the Board a Sanitary Inspector and the Captain Superintendent of Police as extra members.
Bowen quit the scene in 1885 having in effect accomplished nothing meaningful. In 1886, Marsh again acting as head of the administration, the Board was strengthened by the addition of four unofficial members (Dr Patrick Manson, Dr Ho Kai, and two others representing ratepayers) and the old proposals were again considered, the Board producing another draft ordinance in 1886, offering wide-ranging powers to a partially elected Board of Health. The proposals included measures designed to compel owners of dwellings to upgrade their property to give adequate ventilation and a minimum of space for the residents. Human nature not having altered in the meantime, this proposal provoked another serious outcry, especially from the Chinese whose spokesman in the Executive Council, Dr Ho Kai, opined that no one should make 'the mistake of treating Chinese as if they were Europeans' that is, of enshrining in an ordinance the idea that Chinese required the same Lebensraum as the ruling class of Westerners.
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The then Acting Governor, Major-General W. G. Cameron, took what he thought was action. He simply omitted all the offending clauses in the proposed ordinance. Five years after Chadwick had condemned the disgust- ing sanitary conditions and had sagely indicated the minimal remedies, a piffling, toothless ordinance on the subject became law. And the question of what amounted to ‘challenging an Englishman [not to mention a Chinese] in his castle [and] also traversing the belief of Chinese that once their taxes were paid, they were guaranteed against ... interference and were free to live or die, avoid, catch, and spread disease as it pleased them' seemed to have won the day.
In 1887 the Public Health Ordinance established the constitution of the Sanitary Board as consisting of four officials (the Surveyor-General, the Registrar-General, the Captain Superintendent of Police, and the Colonial Surgeon) with up to six other members (four of whom were to be the Governor's appointees two of these to be Chinese), and two others elected by ratepayers on the jury list.
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166 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
In this step we see the decisive move towards local government institutions being entrusted with a measure of responsibility for municipal affairs, and also the first elections in the colony not reserved solely to British nationals. On his arrival in 1887, Des Voeux immediately encountered a petition signed by 47,000 Chinese damning all the powers of the Sanitary Board. The Chinese simply stated that there had been no plague despite the fact that none of the envisaged measures had been taken so what was the fuss about? They feared that the intended action would force up rents to an unbearable level, and they utterly condemned any idea that Chinese homes could be entered under any circumstances whatsoever.
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The Colonial Office in London, however, accepted the terms of the Public Health Ordinance. And now came a rash of new building in order to beat what was in the wind the Buildings Ordinance which became law under Des Voeux in 1889 and which he tacked on to the. Crown Lands Resumption Ordinance which in its turn embodied the hated clauses about ventilation and minimal space. However, the sop of compensation for property owners was also envisaged. Thus, after years of opposition the property lobby had its way and was to be paid for the destruction of its vile housing. The Secretary of State in London gave his approval.
The implementation of this ordinance was to take place piecemeal over the ensuing 20 years of resumptions and rebuilding of the Chinese areas. Des Voeux's vacillation must certainly be blamed for the inept handling of Chinese dissent and the emasculation of the content of the Chadwick report; and also for the rash of new insanitary construction before he promulgated the Buildings Ordinance. Strong Chinese prejudice, and the near unanimity of owners' self-interest presumably scared him away from speedier intelligent
action.
But living conditions were altogether too appalling to be left at that. The Board empanelled a two-man committee of investigation. Their 1890 report revealed the extent of the foul conditions. It described rooms subdivided to form between four and eight cubicles, dividers and furniture estimated to occupy about 29 per cent of the available air space. Many city blocks had a population density of 1,500 per acre, and one even of 3,235. Des Voeux's response was to pass an amending act to deal with overcrowding. As to sanitary conditions, little improvement was achieved.
In contrast to these procrastinations action was taken on the public works elements recommended by Chadwick. The Tai Tam water scheme was boldly set in motion, the estimated cost of $60,000 soon proving inadequate. A new and more hygienic Central Market, and the draining of swampy ground in Causeway Bay, were also begun, as were new main drainage and sewers at Yau Ma Tei, and the provision of dustbins and improved scavenging. More Inspectors of Nuisances were employed and a veterinary surgeon to look after the pig and sheep depot.
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Constitutional Reform, and Opium 167
The old idea of linking the east and west Prayas by a road to seaward of the central naval and military cantonments was revived, and one of the colony's enterprising business men, Paul (later Sir Paul) Chater unveiled his own scheme for a radically conceived reclamation in Central District, to provide fresh land for commercial development. Dr Patrick Manson of the Sanitary Board, a shrewd Scots business man, inaugurated his Dairy Farm Company in the spring of 1886 with a herd of 80 cows quartered on the breezy slopes of Pok Fu Lam. On the board Manson included some of the best brains and business heads in the colony Paul Chater among them. The establishment of the Dairy Farm Company led eventually, after vicissitudes including the loss of almost the entire herd from rinderpest, to the provision of a supply of milk free from the health hazards of the milk from the Chinese 'dairies'.
Manson was also responsible for starting a college of medicine, obtaining the patronage of China's elder statesman, Li Hongzhang. The first and brightest student to qualify was Sun Yatsen (Sun Yixian). In later years, Sun was to state that his reforming and democratic ideas which were to crystallize in the Guomindang and eventually lead to civil war and the establishment of a Communist regime in China had been gained during his student days in Hong Kong.
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Prior to Des Voeux's term, while Bowen was still Governor, one major task confronted him the reform of the Executive and Legislative Councils. This was a timely bid to lay a firmer foundation for the colonial legislature. In the four decades since the councils were first set up their membership had
Dr Sun Yatsen.
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An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
undergone several changes aimed at increasing their effectiveness. The original councils of 1843 consisted of three members each the same three, the entire senior civil service at that time. The councils were purely official. In 1844 the Lieutenant-Governor was appointed to an additional seat on each council, while on the arrival of the first Chief Justice and first Attorney- General both were given seats on the Legislative Council and the latter on the Executive Council. After that the membership of both councils altered rather frequently. Bonham created two unofficial seats in 1850. Bowring in 1855 enlarged the Legislative Council, throwing meetings open to the public. Robinson laid down that the proportion between official and unofficial members would be 2:1, excluding the Governor, and he also enforced a rule that official members should vote with and not against the government. Hennessy, typically, upset the balance severely; and the position on Bowen's arrival was that there were six officials and only two unofficials on the Legislative Council.
The new Governor at once objected. He thought it incorrect that the Chief Justice should have a seat on the Legislative Council, on the principle that the judiciary should be independent of the remainder of the adminstration. He supported the inclusion of a Chinese, but a problem arose when Hennessy's appointee, Ng Choy, got into financial straits in property speculation and resigned his seat. Bowen thought the choice of a successor a Chinese British subject who was 'a native gentleman combining in his own person the proper social position, independent means and education', independent of the government, he presumably meant a difficult matter.
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The Governor disagreed with the exclusion of the General Officer Com- manding British Forces from the Legislative Council, and disapproved too of the fact that official members filled two of the four places reserved for unofficials something which was also disputed by public opinion. He therefore increased the membership of the Council by three officials the General, the Registrar-General, and the Surveyor-General and added two additional members, giving a total of eight official members and six un- officials. Among the latter he wanted the Chamber of Commerce to nominate two of the unofficials, and the Magistrates one, with three to be nominated by the Governor (of whom one at least should be Chinese). He wanted members to hold office for six years only, not for life as before. He further suggested the Council hold a fixed annual session in which proposed future legislation could be sketched out and submitted for public discussion.
Bowen thought the Executive Council ought to be increased by adding the Colonial Treasurer and the Registrar-General; and he suggested also that the heads of government departments ought to have seats there.
With only minor amendments Lord Derby accepted these ideas, and the new Legislative Council had its first sitting on 28 February 1884. The Chamber of Commerce had nominated as an unofficial the Chief Manager of
Constitutional Reform, and Opium 169
the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Thomas Jackson. The Chamber itself was racially a rather broadly based body with 34 members: 20 British, one American, six Europeans, two Chinese, three Jews, one Parsee, and one Armenian. The 79 Justices of the Peace were all of British nationality, 62 being purely British, seven Chinese, three Jewish, and seven Parsees and Armenians. The election held by the Justices was curious in that they decided the British were already sufficiently represented on the Council, so they voted for Frederick Sassoon who came from an Indian Jewish family and had been educated in England.
The Governor nominated as Chinese member a man named Wong Shing who had been educated at the Morrison Society School and later in America. He had served under Li Hongzhang in China and in the Chinese Legation in Washington. He was reputed, by virtue of his background, to be 'fully qualified to look at Chinese affairs with English eyes and at English affairs with Chinese eyes'. When there seemed some doubt whether the Governor had the right constitutionally to appoint the fifth member, Jackson stood down and Wong took his seat.
The new Legislative Council's members had a 'constitutional opportunity of expressing their opinion of the conduct and proposals of the government'. A request from the Chamber of Commerce that the Legislative Council have the same powers as the Shanghai Municipal Council was turned down by London. But the movement for a municipal council elected by ratepayers was not to be so easily waved aside. It strengthened when the rates were raised in 1885 by 1 per cent. Bowen's attitude was matter-of-fact. There were, he reminded the Chamber, only 83 British ratepayers, heavily outnumbered by 647 Chinese and 98 others, most of whom were Portuguese. He suggested that in an election it was highly improbable that any British person would stand a chance. Then, playing on the British distaste of Oriental habits (as they saw them), he reminded his listeners that Chinese attitudes to ‘water supply, sanitation, police, harbour regulations... differed widely from those in Europe'. It was unthinkable to put a large garrison town with its trading activity in the charge of the Chinese. Bowen thought that the Legislative Council was near enough to being a municipal council.
He did, however, concede a point by placing municipal rating before the Legislative instead of the Executive Council. He also insisted that it should be a constitutional principle that the majority officials ‘should not be used to control an absolutely united unofficial minority, especially on financial questions', a considerable item of progress in constitutional development.
Having put the legislative house in order after the disarray of the Hennessy period, Bowen faced an unusual problem a threatening international situation brewing almost on the doorstep. In the light of Russia's apparent designs on the Far East, imperial defence had to be taken with more than usual seriousness. In Britain the Colonial Defence Committee had been set
170 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
up, and the colonies were to provide their own committees so that available resources there could be assessed, integrated, and if required tapped for the common good. Given the geographical spread of the colonies, and the slowness of communication, the process could not but take time.
Apart from Russian intentions, in Hong Kong's near neighbourhood the war between France and China over Vietnam had ended in the Li-Fournier Convention of 1884, but border disputes continued, leading to general tension in the area.
Reacting to these disturbances the colony began defensive works at either end of the island, and a Hong Kong Regiment was formed, mostly from Indians, the officers being British and Indian personnel. Bowen was full of complaints about the defenceless state of Hong Kong, and Russian action in Korea and their 1885 occupation of Port Hamilton prompted a request for torpedo boats from London. The Colonial Office assured him the Admiralty were 'thoroughly aware of what is necessary for the defence of the colony'. In January 1885 the legislature voted $56,000 for up-to-date weaponry, and further large sums were committed later. More troops were required, and a doubled military contribution from the colony was demanded before the troops arrived. And when they did come, they turned out to be a Madras regiment and not the ‘infantry of the line' as promised. The situation was handled by London with consummate insensitivity.
In the interim Hong Kong had suffered the spin-off from the Franco-Chinese conflict. Throughout it Britain had maintained strict neutrality, and Bowen had entertained both French and Chinese officials while protecting British rights. But Chinese opinion in Guangzhou and in Hong Kong was naturally anti-French, and when Chinese newspapers published edicts of the Viceroy of Guangdong urging Chinese to attack French ships and personnel, Marsh (Bowen was in Japan at the time) took four Chinese editors to court. The prosecutions failed. By September 1884 the boatmen handling cargo stopped working French ships, and French owners took 14 of them to court, securing convictions and fines of $5 on each. Whereupon all the boatmen went on strike and the harbour was brought to a standstill. In October a tense situation flared up and rioting erupted. The police were called out and troops. paraded the streets. Imprisonment of the rioters served merely to sharpen the antagonism and, when mediation by the Tung Wah Committee failed, a Peace Preservation Ordinance was pushed through the Legislative Council in one sitting. This allowed detention and banishment of persons who, though not convicted, were 'dangerous to the peace and good order of the colony'. In a week or two things had returned to normal. Marsh had made 38 banishment orders but only eight were carried out since the remaining men could not be found.
Another response to threats of war was the reviving of Hennessy's Hong Kong Volunteers, first flung together in 1878 following the Russian war
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Constitutional Reform, and Opium 171
scare. There had always been a touch of patriotism about the Volunteers, mingled with a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere on weekend get-togethers in the style of the as yet unthought-of Boy Scout movement. Under the slightly disapproving eye of the Colonial Office Bowen equipped the corps with guns and rifles. And the Volunteers rapidly took new heart, becoming an accepted part of the colonial social fabric. In 1885 Bowen went further and created the Hong Kong Auxiliary Water Police, with yachtsmen under the command of the assistant Harbourmaster. Four years later a machine-gun corps was formed, partly mounted, armed with Maxim guns paid for by the leading members of the colonial community.
Under Des Voeux the bold scheme for reclamation along the northern shore of the island was advanced by Chater. In essence what he wanted was the creation of a strip of land over three thousand metres long and over seventy wide in front of the existing shoreline, the reclamation to be paid for by holders of the marine lots but under government control. Owners of existing lots were to get the new land at $200 per quarter acre. Des Voeux, studying the scheme which had been approved by Major-General Cameron before his arrival, thought that the government ought to have a larger slice of the financial cake. Meanwhile Paul Chater had been in London pressing his suit with the Colonial Office, and it was he who won the day. The original scheme was approved with only minor amendments: and a grand opportun-
Various modes of conveyance on the old Praya around 1880.
sume
The Praya before reclamation. Markers in the harbour show the extent of the new land to be formed. Wardley House, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's second building, is the domed structure just left of centre with the City Hall on its left.
ity for a reclamation that would have benefited the public as a whole was lost. The new Praya, extending seaward from the old one, was to be renamed (with considerable injustice) Des Voeux Road. An enlarged reclamation suggested by the consultant engineer Sir John Goode was turned down by the Governor and by the lot holders involved, and the Praya Reclamation Ordinance was passed. Work began in 1890 and went on to completion
in 1904.
Chater's interest in the scheme was considerable. On 2 March 1889 he had joined forces with James Keswick, Jardine's senior representative in Hong Kong, to form a new company called The Hongkong Land Investment and Agency Company Limited, of which he was 'the directing genius from its inception. Working capital was initially $1.25 million, a sum rather more than the total revenue of the Hong Kong government only a few years previously. Two years after the company's formation government revenue. reached slightly over $2 million per annum.
The town planning tragedy of the era was the refusal of the Admiralty to move the naval docks to Kowloon, a decision backed by Des Voeux on the spurious grounds that the Kowloon area was growing in value and that the expense of moving would be excessive. Des Voeux also believed that for defensive reasons the Navy ought to be island-based. On these superficial and indefensible grounds the chance to remove once and for all the 'con- striction at the waist' was lost.
The 'blockade' at last came to an end during Des Voeux's time as Governor, though not as a result of any specific act by him. One of the obstacles
The new headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, built in 1886.
in the way of ending it had always been the hostility between the colonial authorities and the Foreign Office. This now eased, resulting in a more commonsense view of the Chinese side of the dispute. In 1885 Britain and China had signed a new agreement on opium after two years of nego- tiation. In this the duty and also the likin tax on it were raised to 110 taels per chest, the immediate result being seen in increased smuggling to avoid payment of the taxes. Bowen had sympathized with the Chinese in this. He suggested a compromise, and in 1886 the commission reached agreement. All opium entering the harbour was to be reported to the Harbourmaster; none was to be landed, moved, transhipped, stored, or exported without his express permission and notice being given to the opium farmer, the concessionaire who had paid the fee exacted by the government for the right to import opium; all movement of opium was to be reported and accounted for; night clearance of junks was prohibited; raw opium was to be imported only by the opium farmer, and no import or export of amounts of less than one chest was to be permitted. A branch of the Chinese Maritime Customs, whose head was British and whose revenues were collected by the British and remitted to China, was to be set up in China to sell opium duty certi- ficates at 100 taels per chest. The terms of this agreement were to be set forth
174 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
in an ordinance and the whole agreement was subject to a similar one being arrived at with Macau in default of which the Hong Kong controls would merely drive smugglers to the Portuguese territory to operate.
Hong Kong passed this ordinance, and another under which Chinese were forbidden to carry arms (thus pre-empting the depredations of armed gangs engaged in smuggling). The Colonial Office insisted the word 'Chinese' be altered to 'persons'.
The Opium Ordinance when introduced in March 1887 was regarded as offensive by the small traders and owners of junks, and both Des Voeux and Cameron reported that officials in the Chinese provinces would not work under the restrictions. In Hong Kong control and communication with the Chinese was assigned to the new Imports and Excise Department, and in 1888 the opium monopoly was once more sold to the highest bidder. Owing to the complexity of the agreement and the practical problems encountered in carrying out its terms in relation to a very lucrative trade, trouble continued and clashes at the Chinese border with Kowloon were frequent. Few were surprised when a smart Hong Kong opium concessionaire was discovered calmly and at great profit smuggling opium to China instead of confining his operations to Hong Kong. He had perceived a loophole in the law whereby opium which belonged to him was not subject to the provisions of the ordinance.
Added to the hazard of crooked opium concessionaires was the triad menace with its protection rackets and its blackmailed witnesses, among whom many a policeman and other government employee were numbered. Strong action against the triads seemed for a time to reduce the problem but, as successive administrations down to the present day were to find, the triad societies, almost as old in Hong Kong as the colony itself, were virtually ineradicable. Stemming from patriotic institutions far back in Chinese history, these organizations had become an integral part of Chinese society. To disentangle them from the web of social interactions never was easy and constitutes a problem in contemporary Hong Kong where the degenerate descendants of these ancient groupings still compete in organized crime from the sale of sex to the sale of drugs.
Setting aside those darker aspects of life which emerge from the story of events in the Bowen and Des Voeux periods, the picture of the era varies very much from writer to writer. It also varies with whether the recorder was Western or Chinese. As to the latter, we have rather little evidence. But an article by a Rhenish missionary, J. Nacken, which appeared in the China Review of 1873, describes Chinese conditions in the colony which did not alter for many a decade afterward. Nacken, in his stilted, somewhat arch English, succeeds in bringing that life alive in his Chinese Street Cries of Hong Kong. The following description is probably unique in its content in written material on the subject.
2
Constitutional Reform, and Opium 175
The Chinese generally are early risers. Most of them will get up with the sun; then they dress, after which, rich as well as poor look out for their warm water to wash in and have some tea. But the Congee hawker has been up an hour or two before sunrise... he sallies forth, two boxes hanging from his shoulder-pole, each con- taining a large cooking pot and a small wood fire ... Every Hawker cooks his own brand of Congee Here comes the first crying Mai chü hüt chuck [Buy pig's blood congee]; the next Mai chi shang chuck [Buy fish congee]. And you can buy mulberry-root flavoured congee, or barley, or kidney, or pork, or a variety of others ...
...
Then come the vendors of crabs, shrimps, fresh and dried oysters, shark's fin, and 'others who go about with baskets of live fowl'. In Guangzhou other hawkers employ what the writer terms a ‘Western mirror', probably meaning a peep-show:
but perhaps the Police do not allow them [in Hong Kong] as the of a licentious character.
· •
pictures are...
At noon tables are set . . . shaded by a large umbrella. A bench for guests stands in front, whilst the cook attends behind ... Those Chinese who can afford it sit down to shik an chau [eat the evening meal]
Here is [a coolie] panting under his load of earthenware; there is another who cries out his bamboo wares... baskets, brooms, mats, benches, ginger-grinders... Hawkers of fans, pipes, feather dusters, china, firewood, tobacco, salt, oil, cloth, lanterns ..
Reading these and other lists of Nacken's there emerges the feeling of a man who loves the ambience, and while still considering the Chinese
Auguste Borget made this watercolour of cooked food stalls just before Hong Kong was annexed, but little had changed in this respect by the end of the century and even for many years after.
176 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
heathens, cannot but be delighted in his bones at their activities and their ordinariness within the surrounding exotica.
Des Voeux, who was not a great mixer, gives a less animated picture of ordinary life, and a dispirited one of his own. He spent the summers at Mountain Lodge perched on the edge of a precipice on the Peak, rebuilt after the former residence was carried away over the heads of the Kennedy family in the 1874 typhoon. For him the house was a mixed blessing. Talking of mist and cloud, he wrote:
In our second season, this miserable experience lasted for the greater part of the summer. On one occasion for several weeks together the fog was as dense as the worst that afflicts London in November ... The damp inside the house was such that water ran down the walls in streams and collected in pools on the polished floors... At such times one seemed entirely cut off from the world, the existence of which was revealed only at rare intervals by the arrival of a government messenger with papers.
Mountain Lodge survived the summer laments of damp governors until the Japanese occupation in World War II, when it was destroyed. No governor since then has been tempted to exercise the privilege of living on the Peak.
Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887, the event marked in the colony by processions, the inauguration of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and by municipal resolve to commission a statue of Victoria the Queen suited to the dignity of Victoria the city. Two days after the celebrations, a newspaper carried a letter from an indignant citizen of Victoria who wrote:
Sir: Yesterday I got into a street chair and told the bearers to take me to Tai-lai-pai- t'ong, the Cathedral [that is, the Large Worship Hall]. When one of them caught the right idea he said to his fellow 'It is the Hung-mo-miu (Red-hair Temple)' [or temple of the red-haired foreigners barbarians]. I felt a little disconcerted on that glorious Jubilee morning to hear a nick-name applied to the British people as represented by the august assembly gathering in the Cathedral...
-
More than a century later a civil servant recalls seeing a memo in circulation in the Secretariat in Hong Kong, to the effect that clerks should be forbidden from writing on papers destined for Government House the words Ping Tau meaning Military Boss, a common term for the governor. Similarly, the Botanical Gardens adjacent to Government House are still often referred to as Ping Tau Fa Yuen the Military Boss's Garden.
Hong Kong was changing quite perceptibly as the century ebbed. Not far from the Governor's residence, on 2 May 1888, the Peak Tramway opened for business. This spectacular piece of nineteenth-century transport engineer- ing, whereby counterbalanced cars ascended and descended what must
Constitutional Reform, and Opium 177
Mid-levels
-
—
began
at the time have been a record gradient from the level of the Cathedral to the Peak, was the instigator of a social revolution. What had been Hong Kong's most desirable area of residence for Westerners almost at once to give way to the airy and frequently mist-wrapped heights of the Peak. There had been a few intrepid and wealthy Peak-dwellers before the tram, but now the slopes began to sprout luxurious mansions. The days when relays of chair-coolies sweated slowly upward from town with what the Chinese might well have called the Yellow Man's Burdens (human and material) gradually disappeared. The tram, swiftly, noiselessly, elevated the privileged to the cool Elysium above the sweating throng of Victoria in a matter of minutes. In those days, at the height of Empire, in the flush and glow of the Age of Steam (by which the Peak Tram was operated), the convenience of it seemed evidence of that splendidly Victorian thing the march of progress carried forward by the grand superiority of the Empire- builders, brought like some life-saving draught to the subject races. The Hong Kong Telegraph wrote with enthusiasm of 'the first car leaving St John's Place the lower terminal punctually at 8 o'clock and the suc- ceeding cars being dispatched according to the Company's time table'. That document reveals the information that the 'down' cars departing between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. were reserved for first-class passengers only for at that hour it may be presumed that the majority were likely to be gentlemen descending for business. On reaching the lower terminus they found their chairs, each borne by four liveried coolies, and off they went at a jog-trot to the office with a flourish of shouted warnings to straying pedestrians. Until the early 1930s, business men and others were still using the same two linked modes of conveyance.
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Some of the numerous late-Victorian travellers add word-pictures, or just a comment or two, which plump out the bare historical facts. Miss Isabella Bird, a writer of many books of travel, was only minimally impressed by Hong Kong. 'The colony', she remarked, ‘is moored to England by the electric cable',3 a view shared by several governors inhibited by quick responses from the Colonial Office. It was also lit by electric light by this time. The first vestigial street lighting had been by means of lamps fuelled by peanut oil. Those were replaced on 1 January 1865 by gas lamps, and by 1888 there were about six hundred of them illuminating the main streets, amid frequent cries that it was the less reputable districts which required lighting to deter criminal activities. By 1890 electricity had superseded gas, although after their successful inauguration the lamps were dowsed by a shower of rain on the following day; but these teething troubles were soon cured. Four of the antique gas lamps still burn at a flight of steps leading from Ice House Street down to Duddell Street the sole surviving link with that element
of Hong Kong's past.
Another visitor, Lord Ronald Gower, found himself, he wrote:
178 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
transported two thousand years back in ancient Rome or glorious Carthage. This illusion is helped no doubt by the coloured dresses and fanciful drapery of the Chinese, and by the ... classical style of the white houses ... porticoes and col- lonades... sparkling under the intensely brilliant sunshine, outlined sharply against the almost purple sky.
4
The apparently whimsical attribution of purple to the Hong Kong sky may just have a basis in fact. For in the years after the colossal eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in August 1883, sunsets around the world were much more colourful than normal.
Another comment on the times comes from a French writer, Jean Chailley- Bert:
The life rolls by, varied, swift, happy, useful. After three or four years one goes to recuperate in old England. After fifteen or twenty years one retires there. One is looked up to by reason of this hard-earned wealth, and thereafter ... one follows and encourages the efforts of those who, in their turn, strive and strain to conduct on so high a planę, with such faith and indomitable energy, the destinies of the Anglo-Saxon race.
5
An Anglo-Saxon writer, the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, later 1st Marquis Curzon of Kedleston and Viceroy of India, gives a more factual
account:
it is evident that business competition is much keener now than it ever was before. Large fortunes are made with difficulty; the merchant princes and magnificent hongs of an earlier day have disappeared; Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Co. . remain almost alone among the great houses whose establishments almost a generation ago were the talk of the East. Men do not now expect fortunes; they are content with competencies... The traveller finds the British merchants banded together in a powerful confederacy..
6
The truth lay, probably, somewhere among these various assessments.
In 1891 Hong Kong celebrated its first half century as a colony, the Queen sending a congratulatory telegram to the Governor. Anniversaries provoke reflection. Bowen, as he left Hong Kong, had reflected that
in the brief period of forty-three years which has elapsed since this island, then barren and desolate, was erected into a British colony, it has risen, by the blessings of Providence and the enterprise and energy of our race, to the proud position of the third greatest mart of shipping in the British Empire, ranking next after London and Liverpool.
Bowen had made his contribution in the revamping of the legislature, a real constitutional advance. To him must also be ascribed the achieving of
Constitutional Reform, and Opium 179
the waterworks scheme whereby water ran from Tai Tam through the hills by tunnel and conduit to the filter beds along Bowen Road, augmenting the supply to Victoria. He had also been responsible for the resumption of life, after Hennessy's procrastinations, of the Central School building programme. Completed in 1889 and named Victoria College, it offered education to no fewer than 1,000 boys.
Des Voeux, who had been out of the colony on sick leave, returned to serve a few more months. Probably when he departed on that leave at the end of 1889 he did not think he would be returning at all, for he took the opportunity then to deliver a survey of progress, entitled Report on the Conditions and Prospects of the Colony, dated 31 October 1889. It contains a summing up which, while similar to that of Bowen, enters into more precise reasons for that progress.
Hong Kong has indeed changed its aspect; and when it is remembered that all this has been effected in Her Majesty's reign and indeed during a space of less than fifty years and on ground in immediate contact with the most populous empire in the world, by a comparatively infinitesimal number of an entirely alien race separated from their homes by nearly the whole earth, and, unlike their countrymen in Australia and Canada, living in an enervating and trying climate; and when it is further remembered that the Chinese, whose labour and enterprise under British auspices have largely assisted in this development, have been under no compulsion, but have come here as free men, attracted by our liberal institutions, equitable treatment, and the justice of our rule; when all this is taken into account, it may be doubted whether the evidence of material and moral achievement, presented as it were in focus, make anywhere a more forcible appeal to eye and imagination, and whether any other spot on the earth is thus more likely to excite, or much more fully justifies, pride in the name of Englishman.
This resounding, splendid, architectural sentence, ringing with the very essence of Victorian trust and delight in the burdens and responsibilities of Empire, must serve as an ironic memorial to the legalization of the opium trade, as it does to a Governor whose main claim on posterity's attention is that he contributed virtually nothing to the colony he ruled.
16. Plague, and the New Territories Acquired
THE age of steam which had revolutionized the Far East maritime trade was the forerunner of the age of electricity. Without the steam-driven turbine to generate electricity, oil lamp, candle, and gas remained the only forms of light when dark fell. Heating was the job of coal, and cooling meant the traditional fan and the punkah, imported from India, powered by a servant activating, by means of a rope, a hanging textile strip to move the humid air.
淡
At Pok Fu Lam, Douglas Lapraik, the watchmaker who became a shipping magnate, built Douglas Castle with its machicolated turrets. A sedan chair and its occupant are being conveyed along the road in this Chinese rendering of the scene.
1.
1
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 181
The concept of architecture, commercial or domestic, suited to Western use in the tropics was based on the need for a current of air flowing through the interiors, themselves shaded from the sun by deep verandahs. The grace of the resulting buildings and Hong Kong until some time after World War II had preserved its share of them blending, often enough, Gothic Revival with classical and Romanesque elements, and Mogul and other oriental styles, gave the cities of empire (British, French, and German) in the East a certain charm and lightness. The solid sobriety of much nineteenth-century architecture in Britain was happily almost absent from Hong Kong where it gave place to a structural lightness and brightness of surface quite foreign to Northern Europe, more reminiscent of Italy.
In the 1880s Fung Wah-chuen, the comprador of Russell and Company, set up a small electric power-station in Guangzhou and, a mere 16 years after the opening of the world's first commercial power company in London, that ancient Chinese city received its first hesitant supply. Fung was a product of Queen's College, graduating with the prize for the best spoken English. Under the name Fung Shui, he became an assistant teacher there. The school magazine records him as a Chinese assistant and, later, comprador of Shewan Tomes and Company, the earlier name of Russell and Company. Jury lists of 1882-8 show him as assistant to Yan Wo Opium Firm, and in the 1883 Opium Commission he is described as comprador, National Bank, which he seems to have had a hand in floating. He was also involved in the Wai Sing lottery at Guangzhou in which bets could be placed on the candidates in the Imperial Examinations. Fung was a director of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1892, and in 1894 and 1899 was director and then Chairman of the Po Leung Kuk. The fiftieth anniversary issue of The Chimes, the magazine of St Stephen's College at Stanley, names him as one of its founders who, in March 1901, petitioned the Governor for a school in which Chinese children would be taught English and Chinese. St Stephen's opened on 23 February 1903 with seven pupils, one of whom, Fung Man-siu, was probably a son of Fung Wah-chuen.
-
Fung went on to a brilliant career in Hong Kong Chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1900, and then in China as deputy of Foreign Affairs to the Viceroy of Guangdong in 1909. And in that year he negotiated the sale of the electric company to new owners in that city. While the Hong Kong Electric Company began production on Hong Kong island in 1890, it was the vision of Robert Shewan (of Shewan Tomes) and Paul Chater, on the example of Fung Wah-chuen, which saw Kowloon as a potential city and which led to the construction of the first power-station there. This company became in time The China Light and Power Company, without whose forward thinking the eventual development of Hong Kong as an industrial giant of the latter half of the twentieth century could not have been so smoothly accomplished.1
182 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
It was into this setting of the early age of electricity, of still leisured manners, and commerce conducted in buildings cooled by natural breezes and the swinging punkah, that the new Governor, Sir William Robinson, disembarked in December 1891 the colony's fiftieth year. It was in this year, as Sayer succinctly phrases it, 'that Hong Kong's non-Chinese popu- lation rose to over 10,000, her Chinese population to 20,000, her revenue to $2,000,000, and her shipping to 10,000,000 tons'.
Amid the general jollifications, a number of carping voices were raised at the choice of 1891 to celebrate Hong Kong's jubilee. Hong Kong, they said, did not legally become a colony until the signing of the Nanjing Treaty in 1842; and there were even pedants who preferred 1843 when the treaty was ratified, and when Pottinger remarked that it was now ‘a bona fide possession of the Crown'.
In 1891 it was apparently a prosperous place, its expansion phenomenal, equalling that of mushrooming Shanghai up the coast, demonstrating the unbeatable qualities brought forth by the combined efforts of the Chinese and British. Lord Curzon described this in admiring terms.
The national love for neatness and decorum [of the British] appears in the private grounds, the bunds, the public gardens of the cities where the English are in the ascendant; and, were every other mark of British influence erased tomorrow, it would always remain a marvel how from a scorching rock have been evolved the Elysian graces of Hong Kong.2
Sayers takes Curzon up on this: 'It was', he wrote, 'of course the “scorching rock" itself that made an essential contribution to this transformation scene. At the magic touch of British capital and Chinese labour Hong Kong's unprofitable hills had yielded up their hidden treasure and a town of native granite had emerged.
The new Governor was very much a Colonial Office man from the time when at the age of 18 he began there as a clerk. Twenty years later he was Governor of the Bahamas. In Hong Kong he took over the administration from Major-General Digby Barker. Almost at once the shining face of prosperous Hong Kong darkened. To a degree Robinson was responsible. In his first speech to the Legislative Council he announced a change in the system of accounting by which all accounts for any one year, some previously not settled until January of the next, would be put into the balance of the relevant year. On the books this meant an additional expenditure of $170,000 in 1892. A loan committee put forward two methods of dealing with this problem securing local bank overdrafts at low interest, and the sale of land (even at depressed prices). A loan of $200,000 in stock was agreed. But retrenchment was to be the order of the day. Less urgent public works were to be postponed and economies were to be made by
Sir William Robinson, Governor from December 1891 to January 1898, photographed with the members of the Legislative Council. On his left is Sir Paul Chater, and the second figure from him on his right is Sir James Stewart Lockhart. Robinson had an almost uncanny resemblance to King Edward VII.
amalgamating certain government offices. A retrenchment committee set up in 1894 suggested staff cuts in some government departments, but it would not countenance any reduction in spending on public works.
With a basically resilient economy much of the cutting back proved temporary. But the situation was impaired by the doubling of the defence contribution in 1890 and the falling price of silver which made sterling payments heavier and pushed up the cost of living, requiring upward adjustments in salaries. At this time, coincidentally, Britain was in the throes of one of its periodic attacks of conscience over opium. In October 1891 the Secretary of State ordered the colonial government to take direct control of opium sales with a view to confining its consumption, in close co-operation with the Opium Commission which sat in Calcutta. This, even at the cost of lost revenue.
Another move was to pay government officials' salaries half at the old rate |___and half at current rates. But with the announcement of the 1894 revenue figures - $2,207,203, which topped the estimate by almost three hundred thousand dollars, an increase over the previous year of more than two hundred thousand dollars the economy appeared buoyant enough.
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184 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
In all this Robinson proceeded in a thoroughly text-book manner. In 1895 he raised stamp duties and almost succeeded in balancing his budget, even under the stress of the military contribution and the continuing public works programme. The deficit was a mere $12,000.
The momentum of certain public works projects continued. At Tai Tam the Water Extension Scheme envisaged a reservoir capacity increased by 400 million gallons to satisfy demand at Shau Kei Wan and Aberdeen. The population of Kowloon was also outdrinking the water supply, but proposals for sinking wells and pumping the water to storage tanks were not approved. The Colonial Office kept insisting on a new gaol, the old one being manifestly inadequate; but here an unforeseen obstacle arose. The unofficials of the legislature, abetted by Dr Ho Kai, argued that separate cells were unsuited to the Chinese. Robinson compromised, proposing a new police station and magistracy which would give room for the extension of the existing gaol on the same site.
On the Governor's innocent head fell blows consequent on his predeces- sors' lapses of judgement. By omitting fully to implement the recommenda- tions of the Chadwick report, they had paved the way for the 'irresistible logic' of the great bubonic plague of 1894 which then overtook the colony. The beginnings were discovered by chance. No law called for the notification of Chinese deaths, and there was consequently no hint of an unusually large number in any particular area. Plague was endemic up and down the China coast and, after the bitterly cold January of 1893 (the Peak down to 450 feet above sea level was ice-bound for three days), when the weather warmed up, several cases came to notice the first to be recorded in the city. By May 150 cases were reported, most proving fatal. In the next 10 to 12 days the death toll was 450, and increasing. Thus began the most dramatic episode of Robinson's time, and perhaps the most traumatic in Hong Kong's history to that date.
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In great haste a special committee of the Sanitary Board was convened to suggest the necessary action by-laws permitting radical cleansing and disinfection in the plague areas, compulsory removal of infected persons, provision of extra hospital beds, and the institution of house-to-house visits. by an augmented sanitary staff. Other laws, passed later, allowed for the scouring of all buildings thought to pose a danger to health, with the forcible ejection of the occupants. Three hundred troops were impressed to help out, but when five contracted plague (whose cause was unknown at this time) their numbers were reduced. Hong Kong was declared an infected port. Chinese prejudice against Western medical procedures was almost universal and deeprooted. Chinese dislike of Western intrusion into their private lives and houses was strong, as would Chinese intrusion into the lives of Europeans of the time have been resented (the reciprocity of such feelings was not con- sidered by the foreigners). Such was Chinese dislike of the military house-
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 185
to-house visits that the Tung Wah strongly urged the Governor to let it take over the treatment of all plague victims. But Robinson, doubtless feeling his authority challenged, unwisely refused.
At this point placards began to appear in Guangzhou warning Cantonese women to refrain from visiting Hong Kong, and accusing Western doctors of gouging out the eyes of children for use in the treatment of plague. Schools in the colony emptied overnight, thousands of Chinese fled in panic to China. Anti-foreign feeling in Guangzhou ran high. A Chinese charitable organiza- tion in the city sent junks to Hong Kong to take plague victims away, and also to remove all the dead, an offer which Robinson at first refused. Later he allowed 170 cases to be taken to Guangzhou. One further problem arose — the Chinese custom of keeping the dead for burial on an auspicious day. This, added to the fear of evil influences emanating from the dead which meant that corpses were often deserted, led to situations which aggravated an already dire threat to the whole community. In June, on one single day, 109 corpses had to be collected.
Large areas of Taipingshan were roped off and sealed. About three hun- dred and fifty houses were condemned and 7,000 Chinese were evicted from
A newly built glassworks was turned into a makeshift 'hospital' for victims of the plague of 1894.
186 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
their homes what happened to them went unrecorded. Room had to be found to set up temporary hospitals. The hospital ship Hygeia, a recently built but as yet unoccupied pig depot, and the Kennedy Town glassworks which had likewise not been occupied, were quickly filled with victims.
Robinson was of the opinion that the only remedy was wholesale destruction of buildings in the affected areas, and it seemed, since at least half of the cases recorded came from the Taipingshan region, that this might well be effective. As cooler weather came the epidemic died down, but not before over two and a half thousand persons had succumbed: the figure for those who fled was officially put at 80,000.
The strike among coolies in the following year, 1895, in protest against the provisions of an ordinance giving power to inspect their lodging houses, demonstrated the need for extreme caution in using such powers. An officer of the Chinese Maritime Customs at Guangzhou during the strike, L. C. Arlington, wrote:
• •
The treatment accorded to the Chinese inhabitants caused thousands to flee to Macau and the Hinterland. The specific reasons for this exodus were the house- to-house visitations of the 'Whitewash Brigade', the burying of the dead in lime, and the interments higgledy-piggledy at the western point of the island. The 'Whitewash Brigade' used to enter a house and demand a 'squeeze' otherwise the furniture and other things such as clothing, trunks, etc., were thrown out into the streets and destroyed by fire. The Brigade consisted of foreigners who did the dirty work, and their native helpers and interpreters did the money-making.5
―
Arlington appears to have believed what he wrote that it was the Chinese in the Brigade who did all the 'squeezing' while the foreigners (who were mostly a raggle-taggle of soldiers whose pay was a pittance) remained ignorant of what was taking place, and were neither tempted to nor took any part in the financial exactions. Or was he merely reciting that nineteenth- century British credo about the incorruptible Englishman? There can be no doubt, as Austin Coates writes of these events, that 'it was the most harrowing situation that had yet arisen between British and Chinese in Hong Kong, on the one side the necessity to cleanse the city of a deadly disease, on the other the people's incomprehension of the need for this...'. The further provocation of crude blackmail by the instruments of cleansing must have come near to ending in civil strife. Robinson remained firm on the strike, deporting some of the ringleaders and publishing a notice in Chinese explaining the position. And the strike collapsed with no incidents of violence reported.
Trade suffered. Shipping naturally avoided calling at an infected port, but as the plague died down a return to normal did not take long.
Plague, from being a thing that affected China, a remote horror to which a
|
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 187
civilized society (in European eyes) was scarcely subject, had now become endemic. Almost every year it was to recur with varying severity as spring came. The Sanitary Board had to bear the brunt of the criticism, only some of it fair. Ayres, in his 1895 report, castigated the Board for its ‘long, wordy, windy, desultory, rambling discussions' which led to nothing being done. While the Board had an unofficial majority and an elected element, it relied fundamentally on government favour for its funds. Even its by-laws had to be passed by the Legislative Council, which was also responsible for its policy. The Board existed somewhat tenuously in a legislative and executive limbo, its only real power its power to resign. This its unofficial members unanimously elected to do, in protest against a government decision to appoint a Medical Officer of Health. Thus, by 1895, the Board was to all intents and purposes defunct. Robinson sought permission of London to abolish it, but this was denied, the Colonial Office appearing to perceive in Robinson a degree of panic reaction. Robinson had indeed said at the height of the plague in June 1894: 'I may assert that so far as trade and commerce are concerned the plague has assumed the importance of an unexampled calamity.' In fact its effects were passing. But for Robinson it was ‘one of the saddest and most disastrous [years] in the recorded history of Hong Kong'. True. And also, to be just, the Governor had suffered the loss of his wife in the colony. His sorrows were compounded.
In the end Robinson changed his mind, making the Medical Officer of Health a member of the Sanitary Board in place of a lay administrator. But the beleaguered Board was not yet out of the woods. Its every act, it seemed, was destined to provoke public criticism, so that in 1896 Robinson was forced to respond by holding a plebiscite among the British community to decide whether the Board should have an official or an unofficial majority. The result was 331 votes in favour of the latter, with 31 against. This pro- cedure roused the Colonial Secretary in London to remark that ‘it is incon- sistent with Crown colony government to seek the guidance of a plebiscite'. Plague, very light in 1895, returned in all severity in 1896. By August of that year, 1,193 cases were reported, of which 1,088 proved fatal. The next year only 17 cases were reported, but in 1898 the epidemic was more serious. Few non-Chinese had so far died, but in that year two European nurses suc- cumbed. The cause of plague, a disease of rats conveyed by fleas deserting the bodies of dying creatures and infecting by their bites the human being on whom they settle for sustenance, was still unknown. Europeans and Chinese alike thought the miasma arising from the advent of hot weather and the season's rains to be the cause. Malaria (from Italian mal' aria bad air) had 1 also been attributed to the same cause before the discovery by Sir Reginald Ross in 1897 — of the transference of the parasite by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito. Sir Patrick Manson was near to the discovery at about the same time in Hong Kong. The pandemic plague of South China and Hong
188 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
doubtless via ships' rats and
Kong would appear to have found its way sailors round the world in succeeding years, and it remained endemic in the colony until the mid-1920s.
During its ravages not only Chinese but also large numbers of Portuguese left Hong Kong, fleeing to Macau and abandoning residential areas around Caine Road. Ironically, it was in 1894–5 that a group of Japanese researchers under Shibasaburo Kitasato managed to isolate the plague bacillus and recognized the connection between its habitat in rats and other rodents, and the infection of human beings. Yet, some considerable time after this, a government medical official is on record as denying the connection between rats and plague! Aside from the pitiable ignorance of the Medical Department staff, there must have been few enough occasions for laughter during the recurring blight. One was occasioned by the instructions issued to Chinese householders to catch their domestic rats and, unless they wished to be visited by the Whitewash Brigade, to place them in ‘rat-boxes' hung on lamp posts. This 'gave rise to a charming Cantonese expression used solely in Hong Kong when, if there is any marked disparity in height between husband and wife, and the husband is slim, the couple find themselves affectionately called "the lamp-post and the rat-box"!?
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By the end of 1895 the government had resumed the Taipingshan area and by the end of 1898 it had been razed and rebuilt.
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