Ghosts of Empire (53 page)

By 1839, Jardine had grown rich and decided to leave China, while still maintaining his business interests. He took his leave in January that year and planned a leisurely trip back to London, passing through Bombay and crossing the isthmus of Suez. It was while he was on this return trip that he heard some startling news which, in its way, would change the history of the relationship between the two powers, Great Britain and China. When he stopped off at Naples, Jardine was informed that an energetic Chinese official, Lin Zexu, had seized and confiscated 20,000 cases of British-owned opium, worth £2 million. Jardine hurried on to London, where he arrived in early September; he lost no time in urging his friend John Abel Smith, an MP, to arrange a meeting with Lord Palmerston to explain the situation. The first interview, fixed for 16 September, was a fiasco, as the Foreign Secretary did not turn up. The next meeting, on the 27th, was more successful. Jardine spread out the maps and charts of the China coast on Palmerston's desk and described the scale of armaments needed to punish the Chinese. A naval force was prepared that included sixteen men-of-war, four armed steamers and twenty-seven transport ships which carried 4,000 Scottish, Irish and Indian troops to China. It was this force which seized the island of Hong Kong in January 1841. Jardine,
whose commercial expertise was valued by Lord Palmerston, decided to have a real voice in Westminster and got himself elected as MP for Ashburton in Devon that same year.

After the Chinese fleet had been destroyed in a series of tragicomic battles, one of which lasted forty-five minutes, as twenty-nine Chinese junks were successively blown out of the water by British gunships, the Treaty of Nanking was signed in August 1842. This treaty confirmed British possession of the island.
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The ostensible reason was the defence of free trade, but the war was really about freedom to trade in opium, which Jardine described in 1830 as the ‘safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of'. The rich Jardine never married and died in 1843, but his values and drive had made their mark.

Hong Kong, from the start, fulfilled a basic commercial need. The idea of a free port in the East where goods could be warehoused and then resold was particularly appealing to a nation which was on the verge of adopting free trade. It was recognized that this free port would soon reap rich rewards. Even before the Treaty of Nanking, in April 1836, the
Canton Register
, an English newspaper founded by James Matheson and his brother in 1827, had recommended Hong Kong as the preferred site of a new British commercial base in the East: ‘If the lion's paw is to be put down on any port of the south side of China, let it be Hong Kong.' The ‘free' nature of Hong Kong was enshrined in the third article of the Treaty of Nanking.
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The treaty also forced the Chinese to pay an indemnity to British merchants of 6 million silver dollars for the loss in opium-derived earnings, in addition to the war expenses incurred by the British, which would cost the Chinese government a further 12 million dollars; it was not surprising that the treaty was referred to as an ‘unequal' one by the Chinese in the twentieth century.

Hong Kong may have started as a merchant's city, but it was soon encumbered by the formal structures of imperial rule. In April 1843, Sir Henry Pottinger was appointed governor but spent only a year in Hong Kong before returning to Britain. He was the first of a series of twenty-eight men who, ending with Lord Patten in 1997, set their mark in different ways on the island. More important than the figure of the governor was the idea of justice which the British worked hard, from the
beginning of their association with Hong Kong, to establish as a characteristic of their rule.

By 1857, the colony's population had grown to nearly 90,000, as against the 5,000 inhabitants found on the island when the British took possession of it in 1841. The city was thriving and had already become a market where East and West met, and where people of many nations could be found selling their wares. There was the famous case in 1851 when a brothel was advertised in a Hong Kong newspaper; an Australian ‘actress' had opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace, her advertisement announcing that ‘at Mrs Randall's a small quantity of good HONEY [sic]' was to be found ‘in small jars'.
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The most sensational scandal of the decade occurred in January 1857, when bread produced in the main local bakery, called Esing, was laced with arsenic and supplied to the expatriate community for breakfast. The proprietor of the bakery, a local Chinese of the name Cheong Ahlum, had taken all the members of his extended family to Macau earlier that morning. He was a confirmed Chinese patriot and was alleged to have hatched a plot to wipe out the entire British population of Hong Kong. In the event, 400 people suffered from indigestion, but, at the trial that followed, nothing could be proved. Even though the presiding Chief Justice, J. W. Hulme, the attorney general and many of the European members of the jury had been victims, Cheong was acquitted, the burden of proof demanded being the customary common-law ‘beyond reasonable doubt'. The Chief Justice, though he had expressed his suspicions, famously declared that ‘hanging the wrong man [would] not further the ends of justice'. The baker Cheong was expelled from the island, but the reputation of British justice had been established.
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Despite the Chinese trust in British justice, the merchants themselves quickly established a reputation for arrogance and high living. Within only a few years of the colony's settlement, dozens of merchant companies had come to Hong Kong and instituted a way of life which would later come to represent the worst features of expatriate excess. Jardine's famously imported a chef from London, whereas Dent's, at the time Jardine's principal rivals, had brought a chef from Paris. The ‘taipans' themselves, the managers and partners of the business, along with their assistants enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century an extravagant lifestyle:
for example, claret for breakfast and champagne for dinner, accompanying dishes of pheasant, partridge, venison and all kinds of fish. A Shanghai doctor of the time, in advising a moderate dietary regime, suggested a light breakfast consisting of ‘a mutton chop, fresh eggs, curry, bread and butter, with coffee or tea, or, preferably, claret and water'.
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Even though the expression ‘taipan' was a Cantonese word which meant ‘general manager', the taipans themselves were exclusively European. This didn't mean that Chinese could not become very rich indeed. In fact, the richest inhabitants in Hong Kong were, from the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese businessmen who knew both the Chinese and Western mind, but European merchants quickly became known for their exclusivity and arrogance. As early as 1846, the Hong Kong Club had been established as the ‘touchstone of social acceptability', from which ‘shop keepers, Chinese, Indians, women and other undesirables were rigidly excluded'. The colony quickly, even by the 1860s, was known for its hierarchical and snobbish atmosphere, even though many of the most arrogant taipans were men who, in England, had not come from the ‘best families' or been educated at the ‘best schools'. A genuine aristocrat, in Hong Kong, with a proper title was rare, yet the social arrogance of the merchants in Hong Kong became a byword for pettiness. The first demand for democracy came in 1894 from the merchants, 362 of whom signed a petition sent to the House of Commons asking to be given the vote for candidates for the Legislative Council, whose members were appointed exclusively by the Governor.
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Politicians in London dismissed this crude attempt to acquire power by an expatriate merchant class, who themselves disregarded the opinions of the Chinese, the overwhelming majority of the island's population. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-imperialist Colonial Secretary, observed rather acidly of the petition that the ‘Chinese community is the element which is least represented while it is also the most numerous'.
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There would be no elections in Hong Kong for 150 years. The colony was an example of benevolent paternalism, a place where hierarchy and status were enshrined to an almost absurd degree. The Governor and members of his staff formed an elite who, in their contempt for the taipan and merchant class, and in their own education in the Western Classics,
very closely resembled the Chinese mandarin officials they had replaced. There were, in the early days at least, and right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, tensions between civil servants from the Governor down, who tended to be more pro-Chinese and could often speak Cantonese, and the less cerebral but more commercially astute merchants who staffed the offices of Jardine's and Dent's.

The cadets, the junior civil servants who helped the Governor run Hong Kong, were recruited and trained in a system which was instituted by Hercules Robinson, the then governor, in 1862. The introduction of this cadet system created in Hong Kong a bureaucratic elite to replace the old mandarins who ran the Chinese Empire. The Chinese mandarin, deeply imbued with the Confucian classics, believed in the idea of a
fumuguan
, or father and mother official, whose duty was to treat the people under his administration like his own children. In the Chinese political tradition, this paternal metaphor was central to the idea of how a good official should behave. In the 1880s, the system of cadets in Hong Kong attained a shape it would retain till the 1940s, and central to the system was the dispatch of the young cadet to Canton for two years, when he was expected to learn Cantonese.

The degree of progress individual cadets made in learning about Chinese society, as well as mastering the language, was determined by their own industry and talents. A future governor of Hong Kong in the 1950s, Sir Alexander Grantham, described how he had worked hard as a young cadet in the 1920s, but, after passing the examinations, he could ‘do no more than make myself understood when shopping' or ‘read the easiest parts of a Chinese newspaper'. Others gained considerably more knowledge; Cecil Clementi, a prize-winning Classical scholar from Balliol College, Oxford, was recruited to the Hong Kong service in the 1890s and rapidly gained a fluency in spoken and written Cantonese which astonished the Chinese inhabitants of the colony. As governor in the 1920s, he was comfortable making public speeches in Cantonese and his linguistic skills were sufficiently good for Lu Xan, a renowned Chinese writer before the Second World War, to have mistaken a speech of Clementi's for an awkwardly written piece by a former official of the imperial dynasty.
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Some cadets used the two years to travel widely in China, while others, perhaps the
majority, were quite happy to spend time socializing with their fellow cadets and among the expatriate community.

The term ‘cadet officer' remained in official use for almost a century, until 1960. These cadets have been described as a
corps d'élite
, a ‘minuscule band of officials' with the same values and from the same social background. Their sense of superiority did not, as in the case of the taipans, stem from wealth or race. In terms of their own society, back in Britain, they were not generally from a high social class. It is true that they were nearly all public-school educated, but, in the fine distinctions prevalent at that time, the schools they attended were ‘minor public schools and obscure private schools, not listed in the Public Schools Yearbook': only one cadet from Eton and two from Harrow have been identified among the eighty-five cadets whose educational provenance is known, over the eighty years between 1862, when the scheme was started, and the Japanese invasion of 1941. The majority of the cadets were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, although a substantial contingent–about 30 per cent–came from universities in Ireland and Scotland. The fathers of the cadets were, for the most part, members of the older professions–the law, medicine and, especially, the Church; few of the fathers were businessmen or shopkeepers. It is important to notice that none was from an aristocratic background. Like so much of the snobbery in the British Empire, the superiority of the cadets lay in their education, not in their social status in Britain or their bank balances. The typical Hong Kong cadet was remarkably similar to his counterpart in the Sudan; he ‘came from a solid, though not rich, upper middle class family, went to a public school, but not to the most prestigious, and then went up to one of the older universities where he read classics or history and was noted for his application to study and interest in healthy recreation'. The cadets were from what one might term the public school middle classes, their main distinguishing features being a skill in passing exams and attendance at a fee-paying school, no matter how lowly.
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The cadets displayed an arrogance, at times, that was breathtaking. Reginald Stubbs, who had been Cecil Clementi's predecessor as governor at the beginning of the 1920s, remembered them as being ‘prepared to advance claims to act for the Almighty'. They saw themselves very much as
prefects in the schools which had educated them. The model prefect was expected to be ‘fair, just, upright, dignified'; ideas of equality were not really part of the public school prefect's mental universe. Authority, law and order were more likely to be concepts with which he would be familiar. In this hierarchical and intensely bureaucratic world, ideas of protocol and precedence were particularly important. The cadets also put a high premium on sociability, and their experiences involved endless picnics, swimming, polo, golf, tennis and bridge. When the New Territories (on the mainland and islands near by) were acquired on a ninety-nine-year lease in 1898, a further 350 square miles were added to the jurisdiction of Hong Kong. This newly acquired land offered the civil servants an opportunity to get out of the stifling atmosphere of Hong Kong itself, and walking expeditions in the New Territories became popular.
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