Ghosts of Empire (54 page)

Few of the officials in London knew anything about conditions in Hong Kong and the government in London relied very heavily on the judgement of successive governors of the colony.
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One of the earliest, John Davis, had been famously shunned by the business community in the 1840s for being pro-Chinese. Davis had complained to Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, that it was a ‘much easier task to govern the 20,000 Chinese inhabitants of this colony, than a few hundred English', and, when he came to leave in 1848, the English merchants boycotted all the farewell ceremonies.
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John Pope-Hennessy, something of an Irish political adventurer and a follower of Disraeli, who was governor in the 1880s, experienced similar treatment. He and his predecessor, Sir Arthur Kennedy, had offended the sensibilities of the English merchants, the taipans and their families, by inviting prominent members of the Chinese community to Government House, the elegant colonial-style mansion which had been build in 1855. The Europeans railed against Pope-Hennessy's ‘Chinomania' and his ‘native race craze'.
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The Chinese businessmen were regarded as dishonest and malevolent by the English merchants, who felt that Pope-Hennessy, an impoverished Irish squire, was betraying their interests. Relations between the taipans and the Governor became so embittered that the English merchants and their wives refused invitations to Government House and when, in March 1882, Pope-Hennessy finally left Hong Kong he had much the same experience as Davis, with none of the
business community presenting themselves at the wharf for the conventional leave-taking ceremony. Chinese business leaders did attend; Pope-Hennessy was known to be sympathetic to the Chinese, and he was called by them ‘Number One Good Friend'.
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In its first hundred years as a Crown colony, Hong Kong was an incredibly divided society. There were the obvious racial divisions between the English and the Chinese, which were not merely a matter of class and money, since, as already noted, some of the richest people on the island were Chinese. As early as 1881, all but three of the twenty highest taxpayers in Hong Kong were Chinese. Despite their wealth, the rich Chinese businessmen did not socialize with their European counterparts of equal wealth and commercial attainments. On top of racial divisions, there were divisions among the British themselves, the most obvious of which was the split between the official class, with their elite culture, their Classical education and their competence in the Chinese language, and the class of wealthy expatriate merchants. All three of these elites, the British business classes, the Chinese business leaders and the colonial officials, more or less despised the vast mass of coolies, the working men without whom Hong Kong would never have been built. If anything, it was the colonial officers who showed the most liberal attitudes on race and class; the imperial civil servants were reflective enough to realize that, without the hard-working Chinese labourer, Hong Kong would die. In 1863, Hercules Robinson, another reforming governor, reported to the Colonial Office in London that ‘it is the Chinese who have made Hong Kong what it is and not its connection with the foreign trade'. This contribution was widely recognized. As E. J. Eitel, a German missionary and scholar, observed in his classic account of Hong Kong,
Europe in China
, published in 1895, ‘the rapid conversion of a barren rock into one of the wonders and commercial emporiums of the world has demonstrated what Chinese labour, industry and commerce can achieve under British rule'.
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The coolies, however, were the great invisible masses. In March 1901, a group of ‘prominent Chinese residents asked Governor [Sir Henry] Blake to establish a special school exclusively for their own children'. These residents described themselves as ‘an important and influential section of the Chinese community' and they were disappointed that education for the
Chinese had been ‘directed almost exclusively' towards the ‘lower and lower middle classes' at the expense of the higher classes. The renowned Central School, which had been renamed Queen's College, was excellent in its way, so the richer Chinese thought, but they objected to the ‘indiscriminate and intimate mingling of children from families of the most various social and moral standing'. This ‘mingling' made the school ‘absolutely undesirable as well as unsuitable for the sons and daughters of respectable Chinese families'. Blake wrote to Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, that the ‘better classes of Chinese are as anxious as any European to preserve their children from contact with children of a lower class'.
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The aspirations of the higher-class Chinese family were, of course, very low down on the list of priorities of the Hong Kong Club, which sought to imitate the smartest clubs in London's Piccadilly and St James's. In the Hong Kong Club, there reigned a social tyranny even more rigid and exclusive than that which prevailed in London. An illustration of this was the experience of the Sassoon family who, having lived in Baghdad for several centuries, had come to Hong Kong after a stint in Bombay. Although based mainly in Britain, the family, of which the war poet Siegfried Sassoon was a member, had diverse business and financial interests which spanned Asia and Europe. Frederick Sassoon sat on the Hong Kong Legislative Council in the 1880s but never joined the Hong Kong Club, ‘the members of which were notorious for their propensity to blackball applicants on the least excuse'.
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In London, the Sassoons could enter highest society, but in the stratified society of Hong Kong there were barriers which even a colossal fortune could not penetrate.

The Chinese had long ago realized that money by itself was not sufficient to admit anybody into the highest social circles. The case of Sir Robert Ho Tung illustrates this very clearly. He was born in 1862, the son of Walter Bosman, an English trader of dubious origins, and a Chinese woman, whom Bosman had arranged to come to Hong Kong from mainland China to be his wife. They had seven children, of whom Robert was the eldest son. Robert Ho Tung, with his fair skin and cobalt-blue eyes, looked like a European in his youth, but essentially made the choice to live and act like a Chinese gentleman. He wore silk robes and grew a long beard, using a Chinese last name. He had attended the famous Central
School, which had been founded in the same year as his birth. This school would produce an impressive roster of influential figures who would form the elite of Chinese Hong Kong. Ho Tung joined the Chinese Imperial Customs, but then in 1880, still only eighteen, he resigned to become a buyer, or
comprador
, for Jardine, Matheson and Company. By spanning two cultures, Ho Tung was an effective middleman and became very rich. By the age of thirty, he was already a millionaire and his business interests grew ever more extensive, as he used his trading profits to develop his own businesses in property, shipping and insurance.
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Conscious that they would never gain admittance to the Hong Kong Club, Ho Tung and some of his associates established the Chinese Club in 1899, of which Robert Ho Tung was the first chairman. In this way the Chinese elites responded to exclusion and discrimination by creating their own parallel world of exclusivity and privilege. The Chinese Recreation Club was set up as the parallel to the exclusively European Hong Kong Cricket Club.
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Perhaps the most sensitive racial issue for the wealthier Chinese residents was the difficult question of where to live. The most fashionable district of Hong Kong, the Peak, was effectively barred to Chinese until after the Second World War. Under the 1904 Peak District Reservation Ordinance, no Chinese, except for servants, were allowed to live there. The Peak, with its panoramic view of Hong Kong Island, was not only a beautiful place; it also symbolized privilege and exclusivity. In fact, the only Chinese resident in practice was Robert Ho Tung who, by 1917, owned three houses there, but he was never really accepted by his European neighbours.
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Although a man of great wealth, Ho Tung was particularly sensitive to slights and, like many of his contemporaries, he was anxious to acquire titles from the imperial government. He had been made an ordinary Knight Bachelor in 1915 for his commercial activities and his help in the war effort, yet twelve years later he had come to feel that this honour was unsatisfactory.

At the beginning of 1927 Ho Tung entered into an extraordinary correspondence with the Colonial Office and the King's Private Office, in which he asked for a KBE, or Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a notch above the ordinary knighthood he had received in 1915.
He told Sir Ronald Waterhouse, an official at the palace, that the New Year's Honours List, which had been published on 3 January, ‘makes for my great disappointment', and this had been the third time ‘in succession' that he had been disappointed. Ho Tung, now aged sixty-five, enclosed a detailed list of his ‘services rendered to Hong Kong and the British Government after the conferment upon me of the honour of a Knight Bachelor'. The letter was direct and uncompromising in its self-confident claims: ‘I make bold to assert that no Chinese resident has done more in the history of the Colony in aid of the Colonial services than I have.' Ho Tung also stated that, when he had been in England in 1925, he had every reason to believe that he ‘might receive a K.B.E. from His Majesty's Government'. Such an honour, Ho Tung believed, ‘would be acceptable even gratifying'.

The boldness of Sir Robert Ho Tung's letter is further revealed by the fact that in the same letter he even asked for a KCMG (the Order of St Michael and St George), a notch higher than the KBE: ‘At the same time if the Prime Minister should be kind enough, after consideration of the special merits of the case, to recommend the conferment of a K.C.M.G. the honour, if conceded, would be even more greatly appreciated.' He then proceeded to list fifteen accomplishments which he felt had earned him the KBE; one of these was that ‘after twelve years of experimental work by my wife and myself, at great cost and labour, we succeeded in producing mulberry leaves . . . and producing silk in the New Territory'. Another was that he had acted as an honorary associate commissioner of the Hong Kong section at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925; he had paid for ‘all the expenses' of the journey and had guaranteed the exhibition against any losses the Hong Kong section might accrue.
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Waterhouse was stunned, and wrote to an official at the Colonial Office that the ‘Eastern tranquillity of his effrontery' made it ‘really very difficult to resist without rudeness'. The Prime Minister was being ‘systematically bombarded on the subject'. Finally, at the end of 1927, another Honours List was submitted and still Sir Robert Ho Tung's name failed to appear. This time, the Colonial Office was ready simply to absorb the venting of Ho Tung's frustrated ambition. ‘Sir Cecil Clementi has submitted his
recommendations for the New Year 1928 but while recommending two other Chinese has made no reference to Sir Robert Ho Tung,' wrote E. H. Howell to Sir Gilbert Grindle, Deputy to the Permanent Under-Secretary. More damningly, Howell observed, ‘no action [is] required until Sir Ho Tung again brings his claims forward'. Sir Gilbert believed that the Chinese themselves looked down on Ho Tung because he was ‘a half-caste'.
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In the end, Sir Robert Ho Tung got his KBE, but he had to wait another twenty-eight years to receive the honour, in January 1955, when he was ninety-two. The important point about the episode of Sir Robert and his KBE was how much a man who was known as the ‘grand old man of Hong Kong', and who enjoyed tremendous business success, really cared about the titles and baubles of empire.

Ho Tung's correspondence about his knighthood would have been strictly confidential and, indeed, the documents were not released until 1978. Yet, in the status-conscious world of the Hong Kong colony, an exchange of this kind was unsurprising. Somerset Maugham, the great short-story writer, captured a great deal of the oppressive snobbery of Hong Kong between the wars in his novel
The Painted Veil
, in which a world of endless bridge parties, dinner parties and adultery is described with remorseless precision. In fact the whole plot of the book hinges around an adulterous affair, in which Kitty, the heroine, falls in love with the Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charles Townsend, deceiving her husband, Walter Fane. Fane is a doctor, a bacteriologist, and is therefore a man of little consequence in the colony: ‘From a social point of view the man of science does not exist,' was one of Walter's more barbed remarks on the subject. The narrator observes that, as the wife of the ‘Government bacteriologist', Kitty ‘was of no particular consequence' and this ‘made her angry'.

Kitty married Walter Fane in a panic, because she was then twenty-five and her younger sister, Doris, aged eighteen, was about to marry the son of a ‘prosperous surgeon who had been given a baronetcy during the war'. Geoffrey (Doris's fiancé) would inherit the title: ‘it is not very grand to be a medical baronet, but a title, thank God, is still a title–and a very considerable fortune'. Against this background of finely observed social distinctions, Kitty is appalled to discover that Hong Kong has its own
rules. Status in London counted for very little in Hong Kong, while colonial grandeur did not necessarily translate into eminence in London. Dorothy Townsend, who, as Charles Townsend's hapless wife, was Kitty's rival, was an excellent example of a woman whose status was entirely defined by the empire. Her father ‘had been a Colonial Governor and of course it was very grand while it lasted–everyone stood up when you entered a room and men took off their hats to you as you passed in your car–but what could be more insignificant than a Colonial Governor when he had retired?' Answering her own rhetorical question, Kitty observed that Dorothy Townsend's father lived in a ‘small house at Earl's Court', whereas Kitty's father, Bernard Gastin, was ‘a K.C. and there was no reason why he should not be made a judge one of these days. Anyhow they lived in South Kensington.' In Hong Kong, Kitty's status in London counted for nothing: ‘It's too absurd,' she told her husband. ‘Why, there's hardly anyone here that one would bother about for five minutes at home. Mother wouldn't dream of asking any of them to dine at our house.'