Hong Kong (16 page)

Captain Elliot, raising the flag in 1841, declared that in British Hong Kong protection would be given to all foreigners, and ever since Hong Kong has been an entrepôt for everyone’s commerce, a port of call for everyone’s merchant ships and airlines, a favourite haven for the navies of all nations, and a great place for anyone who can get there to make money. Today the British form a minority among the expatriate residents, and foreigners of all kinds, like traders in an ancient caravanserai, are forever coming and going. Some came virtually at the start, and among them were the Filipinos, from Hong Kong’s nearest non-Chinese neighbour, whose numbers were greatly increased when the Philippines were freed from Spanish rule, in 1897, and who now form the biggest foreign community of all.

Jardine, Matheson employed Filipino guards back in the 1840s, and Filipino musicians have always played the part in Hong Kong that Goan musicians played in British India – minstrels by appointment. Philippine affairs figure largely in the newspapers, the Philippine Republic’s Consul-General is always prominent among the consuls. The endearing mass of the Filipino community, however, is provided by those laughing, chattering, always good-humoured girls on Statue Square each Sunday, indentured labourers who often work cruel hours and live in bunk-rooms hardly more than cubbyholes, but who still come to Hong Kong year after year in their eager thousands, many of them leaving husbands and small children behind, to escape still worse circumstances at home.

The Portuguese were also fellow-pioneers in Hong Kong – indeed they were on this coast long before the British. They had an old association with the British merchants in Macao, and many of them, including some of ancient family, came across the estuary to Hong Kong
after the Treaty of Nanking. They gave Hong Kong some of its early architecture, and some of its vernacular – praya, for example, meaning a promenade, mandarin, originally a giver of mandates, comprador, literally a provider, amah, a nurse, and even surprisingly joss, which comes from
deus
.

The Portuguese have always been prominent in the middle ranks of business and the law, and they were among the first Europeans to build themselves houses in Kowloon, when it became British, making themselves almost an enclave over there. Their club, the Lusitano Club, is one of the oldest in Hong Kong, and some of them live in an exquisitely civilized style: I think of one distinguished lawyer, whose grandfather came to Hong Kong from Macao in 1842, sitting in his lovely house in the rural New Territories – fronted by an islanded bay, backed by a green mountain – with his four big dogs, his three cats, his fastidious library, his flowers and rare works of Chinoiserie, showing me the scribbled diary he kept when a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, together with mementoes of his annual climbing trip to Zermatt, and the famous stamp collection which has made his name known wherever philatelists assemble …
⁷

The Indian association with Hong Kong was based upon alliances between the British taipans and their Bombay or Calcutta trading partners – alliances that predated the colony. Parsee merchants in particular were important in Hong Kong affairs from the beginning, several having bought land in Elliot’s original auctions, and Indians, fragmenting into Sikhs or Bengalis or Pathans, branching out into Pakistanis, have always been familiar in Hong Kong. They used to be familiar as soldiers, policemen and ships’ guards, they are familiar still as hotel doormen and security guards. The aristocratic-looking gentlemen often to be seen standing in the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel, as if waiting to join their fellow-directors for luncheon in the grill, are I am told strong-arm men from the north-west frontier; the police who guard the ammunition stores on Stonecutters Island, in the harbour, are always Sikhs, because their religion forbids them to smoke.

In the past at least they suffered from dual racial prejudices – unless they were rich or grand they were liable to be slighted by British and Chinese alike – but they have often prospered mightily all the same. It was an Indian who first operated a cross-harbour ferry service, in the
1840s, and another began the Star ferries, and for many years Indians were prominent in the hotel business. Two of the original Indian firms in Hong Kong, founded in 1842, flourish to this day. As manufacturers and agents, Indians and Pakistanis play a role in the Hong Kong economy wildly out of proportion to their numbers; they form less than 1/400 of the population, but they generate a tenth of the colony’s export trade.

Look at the buses of the Japanese School, lined up head to tail on the road above Chung Hom Kok! Listen to the animated chattering noise of the pupils on the beach below! Bear in mind that just across the bay, on Stanley Beach in 1943, thirty-three British, Indian and Chinese citizens were beheaded for alleged High Treason against the Japanese occupying Power! The Japanese association with Hong Kong has been ambiguous indeed. On the one hand their armies were the only armies ever to invade the colony, on the other for many years their foreign trade was largely financed by the colony’s banks. On the one shore the children merrily bathing, on the other the bloodied heads falling on the sand.

It was from Hong Kong that Jardine, Matheson moved into Japan in the nineteenth century, and except for the war years they have maintained thriving branches there since.
⁸
The Japanese in return established a large commercial and financial colony in Hong Kong, besides providing, for example, one of the best-known Hong Kong barbers of the 1930, the surgeons who, during a terrible epidemic in 1894, first isolated the plague bacillus, and that once ubiquitous Hong Kong vehicle, the rickshaw, whose name was really jin-riku-sha, ‘man’s strength cart’. Until the Second World War there was a thriving Japanese Residents’ Association, with its own temple, and when the future Edward VIII came to the colony in 1922 its members greeted him with a volley of rockets, which upon exploding released a multitude of Union Jacks on parachutes.

The years of the Second World War cast a pall of horror over the relationship, mingled (on the British side anyway) with a profound puzzlement and a trace of reluctant respect, but soon the Japanese were back in full force and confidence. Today they have their own banks, investment firms, insurance companies, hotels, restaurants and
at least ten perpetually jam-packed department stores. The rickshaws have almost vanished, but the Toyotas and the Nissans, the Sonys and the Panasonics are everywhere. The Hong Kong finance market might be in trouble without its Japanese funds, the topless bars and massage parlours of the territory would languish were it not for the insatiable lusts of Japanese businessmen, and the 21,000-odd Japanese residents are likely soon to develop, I would guess, into the biggest foreign community of all.

In Victorian times there was also a prosperous German colony – rather too prosperous, British competitors thought. It had its Germania Club, complete with theatre, and the Berlin Ladies’ Association ran a foundling hospital. Germans were personally popular in the colony, and an elaborate welcome was offered, by Germans and British alike, when in 1898 Prince Heinrich of Prussia arrived in the cruiser
Deutschland
on his way to the new German protectorate of Qingdao up the coast.
⁹
Two world wars dispersed the community, but anti-German feeling was never fierce in Hong Kong. During the First World War the exploits of the German raider
Emden
, sinking British ships all over the Indian Ocean, were much admired by the colonists, who had happy memories of the cruiser from pre-war visits, and during the Second World War Nazi Germany was remote from the anxieties of Hong Kong. The Club, closed in 1914, has never been revived, and the German presence remains unobtrusive – 2,900 souls in 1996: but as you might guess from the prevalence of Mercedes and BMWs, West Germany is a more important trading partner to Hong Kong than is Great Britain itself.

Russia, whether Soviet or Tsarist, has always been suspect in the colony, but Russians of one sort or another have repeatedly turned up. The future Tsar Nicholas II turned up in 1891, with a royal yacht and an escort of four warships, and was given a fairly frosty reception; nobody cheered him, and after a brief visit to Government House he sailed away again. Less eminent Russians turned up after the Soviet Revolution, and others again retreated to Hong Kong after successive alarms in Shanghai, a racier international settlement which in general they much preferred. Throughout the 1930s there were always White Russians knocking about, earning their livings as ships’ guards, as prostitutes, as dance teachers, as photographers, as racehorse trainers
(the last Russian trainer at Happy Valley retired in 1986). There were enough to form a Russian platoon of the Hong Kong Volunteers, and when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1941 there were enough to form a thirty-member Cossack choir in their prisoner-of-war camp.

The French, now represented by some 5000 people and at least 500 firms, are old
habitués
of the territory. In 1852 a French architect built Hong Kong’s first City Hall, in 1865 a Frenchman was appointed first general manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, in the 1950s French engineers built the new Kai Tak airport runway, protruding dramatically into the harbour. The chief Canadian connection with Hong Kong is a tragic one, being (as we shall later learn) the needless obliteration of two Canadian battalions in the Japanese invasion; today however there is a sizeable Canadian community, and Canada is best-known in the colony as the most popular destination for Hong Kong Chinese seeking a haven before 1997.

The Australian link is full of verve, beginning with the importation of New South Wales ponies to race at Happy Valley, culminating in the bold investment of Australian entrepreneurs in the nervous Hong Kong market of the early 1980s. Australians are everywhere in the history of Hong Kong, from Mrs Randall with her Honey to Mr Murdoch with his newspaper. They are everywhere on the ground too, developing properties, managing shops, editing papers, and their accents permeate High Court and stock exchange alike, besides ringing convivially (stridently sometimes) across yacht club marinas on Sunday mornings.

The Gypsies have never come to Hong Kong, but their wandering comrades the Jews have often fulfilled themselves by these remote and alien waters. Many have been refugees, often refugees twice or three times over – from Nazi Germany, from Soviet Russia, from Japanese occupation or Communist China. Others have come in the course of business, and some have established themselves in the classic line of the British imperial Jew.

They have never been a large community (some 3,000 in 1996), and for generations they were, for example, excluded from membership of the Hong Kong Club. On the other hand some gained acceptance by being very rich, owning successful racehorses and giving splendid parties, and some were notably interesting: E. R. Belilios, for instance, who came to Hong Kong in 1862, defied convention by keeping a camel to carry his provisions up the Peak, while Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, who arrived in the 1940s and had once been Sun Yat-sen’s bodyguard, was
one of the most colourful
condottieri
of the Chinese civil wars. The first great Jewish merchants followed the flag from Bombay, but some of them had originally come from Baghdad, and their families include some of the best-known in Hong Kong history.

Their white twin-towered synagogue was built in 1902 in a vaguely Dutch style, and is now hemmed in by gigantic tower blocks. It exhibits near its porch a list of subscribers, and there you will see some unexpected names, like Gezundhaji and Mackenzie. You will also find Jewish names, though, that were famous throughout the British Empire. The synagogue is named Ohel Leah, Leah’s Tent, having been built in honour of his mother Leah (‘Peace Be To Her’) by Jacob Sassoon, whose family came by way of Iraq and India to provide the empire with generations of poets, country gentlemen and millionaires. And prominent still in the affairs of the synagogue are the Kadoories, whom we see in pictures of a century ago dressed in turbans and baggy pantaloons, but who in 1981 produced Hong Kong’s first peer of the British realm – Lawrence, Baron Kadoorie, of Kowloon in Hong Kong and of the City of Westminster.

But of all the foreigners who have taken advantage of Britain’s presence in Hong Kong, pre-eminent from the first have been the Americans, whose Republic was rather more than sixty years old when the Crown Colony was established, and who have maintained a Consulate here since 1845. ‘Many people out in carriages,’ noted a visitor in 1858, ‘and some Yankees in light iron four-wheeled trotting gigs.’ We can see them now, with their tilted hats and their cheroots, and this is not surprising, for they have never gone away.

American ships had first come to the China seas in 1784, when because of the Revolutionary War most foreign ports were denied them, and an American factory was established at Guangzhou in 1803. American entrepreneurs, nearly all British by origin in those days, regularly bought opium in India and in the Middle East, distributing it along the China coast in their own fast vessels. An American figures in the very first printed British reference to Hong Kong – he was an interpreter, picked up at a rendezvous off the west coast of the island by Lord Amherst’s mission to Beijing in 1816 – and among the original hongs of the colony was Samuel Russell and Company; founded in Boston in 1811, with partners from New York, Connecticut and
Massachusetts, it remained for thirty years one of the presiding institutions of Hong Kong.

Americans built the first Christian church in Hong Kong (the Baptist Chapel, 1842), and brought the first ice (1847), and financed the first 1,000-room hotel (1962 – originally to be called the America Hotel, it later became the Hong Kong Hilton). An American owned the first motor car (not surprisingly he was a dentist, J. W. Noble). An American was present at the very first Government House Christmas dinner (he was George Henry Preble, one of Commodore Perry’s officers on the expedition to Japan). An American naval band led the Masons along Queen’s Road to the opening of their new lodge in 1853. Americans ran the first steamer to Guangzhou (the
Midas
, 1845), and made the first Hong Kong parachute jumps (the Baldwin brothers, 1891). The rental sampans known as Walla-Wallas are supposed to be named after a small town deep in the interior of Washington State, because that is where their original operator came from.