Hong Kong (27 page)

Its great rivals were, and are, Jardine, Matheson, the first of them all, who have always been as inescapable in Hong Kong as they are in the pages of this book. They adopted their Chinese name, ‘Ewo’, State of Happy Harmony, in 1842, and officially resumed it in 1958 because the Chinese characters for ‘Jardine’ meant in English ‘dumping ground’. Like Swire’s, Jardine’s had begun as general agents, buying and selling in China for clients in Europe, and had gradually diversified into shipowning, sugar-refining, banking, insuring, mining, railway-building and every imaginable kind of entrepreneurial activity in the east. Unlike Swire’s, for 150 years their headquarters was in Hong Kong, and unlike Swire’s again they depended very largely upon the personalities of their partners, who were almost invariably Scots.

Jardine succeeded Jardine in Ewo, Matheson followed Matheson, and in 1853 William Keswick, great-nephew of the original William Jardine, founded another related dynasty within the firm. By the 1980s the descendants of Andrew Jardine of Broadholm, Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, had included fifty-one men, spread over seven generations, who were associated with the business. Among them were some remarkable people. William Jardine himself was called by the Chinese ‘Iron-headed Old Rat’ because of the insouciance with which, attacked one day in Guangzhou, he totally disregarded a blow on the head with a club. Then there was David Matheson who resigned to become chairman of the executive committee of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, and James Johnstone Keswick, a man of such unrebuffable tact that he was nicknamed ‘James the Bloody Polite’, and Alexander Dallas who went on to be Governor of Manitoba. James Matheson, who once called the Duke of Wellington ‘a strenuous advocate for submissiveness and senility’, bought the entire island of Lewis, considerably larger than Hong Kong, and built Stornoway
Castle on it. Henry Keswick, at the end of the First World War, bought an uncompleted Royal Navy destroyer and had it finished as his personal steam yacht.

Ewo always sounds more fun than Taikoo. On St Andrew’s Day Jardine’s used to take over Happy Valley for a celebration which culminated with the running of the Ewo Handicap, a mile race for ponies ridden by members of the staff. Men of all ages and all riding abilities entered the race. The winner got a cup, the last man in got a wooden spoon so large that it became a Jardine’s custom to pass it around the company filled with whisky – ‘Testing the Capacity of the Wooden Spoon’. I have a photograph of the jockeys who ran the Ewo Handicap in 1930, and a formidable crew they look: eight extremely healthy-looking Europeans, mostly Scots, ranging from the youthful to the grandfatherly, and eyeing the camera with expressions of unsmiling resolution, as if they were summing up the photographer’s suitability for employment.

For Jardine’s was stylish, but seldom reckless. Its partners set about things with a Scottish calculation. They owned the fastest sailing ships, with the best-paid crews and the most ambitious captains. They brought the first steamships to the China coast. They financed the first China railway. They set up a subsidiary in Japan as soon as the Japanese allowed it (Ei-ichiban-Kan = British Number One House). They moved swiftly into cotton, when the American Civil War cut off American supplies from Europe. They were agents for Armstrong the gunmakers; when China was rearming in the 1880s. They were local pioneers in insurance, in the use of the telegraph, in textile-weaving, in sugar-refining. They shared in the beginnings of the Star Ferry and the Peak tram. They acted as consuls for many foreign Powers, and their Chinese compradors often became great men in their own right – the rise to power of the Ho dynasty, long one of the most influential in Hong Kong, was founded upon the wealth of a Jardine’s comprador.

By these means they became more than just a company, but an international power factor, with holdings and interests in many countries. When they first put their shares on public sale, in 1961, they described themselves elegantly as a company ‘which participates widely in the commerce and industry of the Far East, in the merchanting
¹¹
of imports and exports, the distribution and servicing of engineering products, the shipping industry, air transport business, insurance, investment
management, agency business and general merchant adventure’.

Though Jardine’s is no longer the most profitable public company in Hong Kong, its tentacles extend into many others, and it remains the most famous of them all. It is also still the most emblematic. For some years in the early twentieth century the company headquarters were moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai, where prospects seemed more exciting. They returned to Hong Kong in 1912, and when in 1984 it was announced that they were going to move once more, this time to Bermuda, a shock ran through the east. The future of Hong Kong was undecided then, confidence was shaky at best, and the news that the Princely Hong thought it wiser to shift its headquarters out of the colony had a devastating effect. Share prices slumped, and a hundred lesser concerns wondered whether it might not be wise to do the same.

The crisis of confidence passed, and within a few months Hong Kong had returned to economic boom, but in any case Jardine’s move seems more legal than logistical. Much of the company’s wealth is still tied up in its multifarious Hong Kong operations, and its Hong Kong office remains the biggest of all its branches. The noonday salute is still fired, by a Hotchkiss 3-pounder gun made in 1901, on the quayside near Jardine’s old East Point premises, opposite the Excelsior Hotel, which Jardine’s own. Eight bells is rung, too, on a ship’s bell, and this is the ceremony which Noel Coward immortalized in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’:

Eminent visitors are sometimes invited to perform the ceremony, and once the Master fastidiously fired the gun himself (‘I rather like loud noises’).

The third historic old money-maker is ‘Wayfoong’, Abundance of Remittances, known to Hong Kong people simply as The Bank, and listed as the second most profitable public company in the territory. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was founded in 1864 by an association of local firms, and became a powerhouse of commerce and industry not just in Hong Kong, but all over the Far East – much of Japan’s original foreign trade was financed by the
Bank, and much of China’s railway development. Its presence is towering in Hong Kong, and it is a particularly masterful Chief Manager of the Bank, the Victorian Sir Thomas Jackson, who is portrayed frock-coated in the single surviving effigy of Statue Square.

The Bank has known its hard times – convulsions in China which paralysed its operations there, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, when its head office temporarily migrated to London, the batterings of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts and finally the traumatic agreement that Hong Kong was to revert to Chinese sovereignty. But like most such Hong Kong institutions, it has long since hedged its bets and stashed much of its assets far away. Besides its own branches around the world, generally in ports, it has acquired subsidiaries as prominent as the Marine Midland Bank of New York, the British Midland Bank and the British Bank of the Middle East, as discreet as merchant banks in the Bahamas or Papua New Guinea. It owns investment management companies in New York, London and Sydney, it has its own satellite network, and whether you are taking out a policy with the Al Sakr Insurance Company of Saudi Arabia, buying stocks on the island of Jersey, or making a deposit with the Cyprus Popular Bank, you are dealing indirectly with HongKongBank (as its publicists vainly try to rename it). Its knowledge of China is profound – it started operations there in 1865 – and this gives it a unique and highly profitable status: in 1987 it was reckoned to be the sixteenth richest among the banks of the world, but its Scottish chairman announced that he wanted to make it the strongest of them all.

If Jardine’s has been immortalized by Coward, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was immortalized by Auden – it was the Bank’s new headquarters that the poet had in mind when he sneered at ‘a worthy temple for the comic muse’. The history of The Bank is remembered, in fact, chiefly by its buildings. After renting property for its first decade, its directors built three successive offices of their own, all on the same site at No. 1 Queen’s Road Central, and they have been pre-eminent in Hong Kong ever since, appearing on many of its banknotes, and in themselves forming an architectural index to the financial progress of the territory.

The first (1886) was a remarkable hybrid by the local architects Palmer and Turner, who had opened their office in Hong Kong in 1868 and are still there now. It was tropical Mediterranean on one side, monumentally domed the other; its main south door opened into
Queen’s Road, its north door faced the grand new Praya along the waterfront. The second building (1935), was the one Auden commemorated, and was specifically commissioned, from the same architectural firm, to be ‘The Best Bank in the World’. It was a skyscraper by the standards of the day, the tallest building between Cairo and San Francisco, with a pad for autogiros on its roof, air-conditioning of a kind and a squash-court in the tower. It was faced entirely in Hong Kong granite, the Bank buying its own quarry for the purpose, and its main banking hall was embellished with a magnificent mosaic ceiling, designed by a Russian artist from Shanghai, V. S. Podgoursky, and executed in a disused church in Venice. The building was thick with symbolisms, from Podgoursky’s didactic murals, all about the blessings of trade and industry, to the Men of Vision, looking vaguely Assyrian, who gazed towards the waterfront from the façade. Outside the north doors reclined two heroic lions, one snarling, one merely looking cross, which were nicknamed Stephen and Stitt after senior officials of the day.

The Governor was in hospital with appendicitis on the day of this building’s opening, so the ceremony was performed by his deputy, N. L. Smith, who was of the opinion that ‘generations yet unborn will gaze at it with something of the same gasp of admiration that we today bestow on, let us say, Durham Cathedral’. Mr Smith must momentarily have forgotten where he was, for in the Hong Kong way scarcely a single generation had passed before The Best Bank in the World was torn down to make way for the third headquarters (1985). This is said to have been the most expensive office building ever erected, and manages to represent not merely the glory of profit and the sumptuousness of wealth, but also the hard intelligence of the financial life. It was designed by the Englishman Norman Foster. He made it a stunning centrepiece for the whole of Hong Kong, at least for the moment, and since for reasons more of legal advantage than of public spiritedness the whole of its ground floor is a public passage, all Hong Kong passes beneath its presence as beneath a frigid benediction.

We should spend longer with this building, because it was the first truly original modern structure to go up in Hong Kong. Among the slavishly trendy skyscrapers of Central, which had assiduously followed every architectural fashion from curtain-walling to mirror-glass, it erupted almost extra-terrestrially. Built of steel girders sheathed in grey, which gives it an erroneously plastic look, it stands like a upturned casket of glass and metal, bound about with massive girders and
crowned with a ship-like miscellany of block-houses and aerials. It is entirely contemporary, except for Stitt and Stephen still recumbent outside its doors.

One’s first impression, entering that open-sided ground-floor patio, is one of forbidding cloisteredness. Two long escalators, installed skew-whiff at the geomancer’s insistence, crawl in steep diagonal through the open space to the working floors above, and riding up there feels like riding up to the gondola of a fairly unwelcoming airship. But just as Hong Kong itself combines the steely with a distinct note of the celebratory, so this remarkable building also gradually reveals to the visitor a kind of audacious endearment – a touch of devil-may-care. It is all so boyishly modern, so absolutely state-of-the-art, so piratically pleased with itself! Wherever you look there is something startling – mirrors to deflect sunlight into working areas, criss-cross escalators, vistas of bare steel. Through the enormous glass windows on the north side you can see the grand expanse of the harbour, and the ships lying there rank on rank look almost as though they are awaiting a signal from The Bank to sail away with their booty.

Such are three old corporate stalwarts of Hong Kong capitalism: but down the generations much of its fiercest entrepreneural energy has been provided by private citizens, remembered not just as the presiding names of institutions, but as individuals. Here are a few examples:

¶ George Duddell was Hong Kong’s first master of the auction. In 1845 he successfully bid for the Hong Kong opium monopoly, paying $8,250 for it and re-leasing it to Chinese operators for $1,710 a month. Thereafter he never looked back. He became an auctioneer himself, and although in 1850 he was discovered to have knocked a ship down to his own bid at far less than its proper price, was appointed the official Government Auctioneer anyway. He also had a bakery, which baked much of the European community’s bread after the affair of the poisoned bread in 1857, and at one time he was the third largest landowner of Hong Kong; he had bought four of his holdings, at $1 the lot, from the impoverished Colonial Auditor A. E. Shelley. By the mid-1870s Duddell had left Hong Kong, having sold his handsome waterfront office to Jardine, Matheson, and retired rich if not universally respected to live the rest of his life, it is said, in Brighton.

¶ ‘Captain’ John Lamont, a self-educated shipwright from Aberdeen, Scotland, was the first European shipbuilder of Hong Kong. Arriving in the colony at its foundation, he set up a slipway immediately beside Jardine’s go-down at East Point, and there he not only maintained Jardine’s vessels for them, but also built Hong Kong’s first foreign-registered ship, the yacht-like schooner
Celestial
. He became a famous figure of the east, as probably the best shipwright of the China seas, and ended up as owner of the Lamont Dock at the other Aberdeen, the one on Hong Kong’s southern shore. When he died the Governor of the day, in the manner of the day, personally proposed a toast to this ‘once common carpenter’ who had made himself uncommon in Hong Kong.