Hong Kong (42 page)

More and more, too, Hong Kong began to behave like a semi-autonomous State. The British Empire was now moving towards its swift disbandment, as colony after colony gained self-government or independence, but Hong Kong stood apart. None of the usual standards of aspirations, it seemed, applied to this peculiar territory, Curzon was proved right, in his prophecy that when India was lost the rest of the Empire would go too, but Hong Kong did not count. Hong Kong marched to a different drum. Hong Kong ran its own economic affairs, Hong Kong soon evolved a new and even more glittering image of itself, and was indeed the one territory of the dependent Empire, presently to be reduced to hardly more than a ragbag of indigent islands, which was able to stand on its own feet. As the years passed, and arrogant Empire faded into generally amiable Commonwealth, successive Governments in London learned to make Hong Kong a perpetual exception to everything.

The end of the imperial era, in fact, was leaving Hong Kong high and dry, but at the same time another mighty historical progression was about to toss the territory in its wake; for in the last year of the 1940s the Communists came to power in China, and everything changed again.

THE LANDLORD

U
NTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, IF YOU WALKED UP TUNG TAU
Tsuen Road north of the airport, just over the line between Kowloon and the New Territories, you would discover on your right-hand side a row of establishments curious even by the standards of this recondite place. One after another, glass-fronted to the street, they were the surgeries of unqualified dentists. Their windows were full of pickled abscesses, illustrations of impacted wisdom teeth, grinning rows of dentures, and in the background of each shop a dentist’s chair stood waiting, sometimes with the dentist himself reclining in it between customers while his ornamental goldfish (good for patients’ nerves) circumnavigated their illuminated tank in the background.

Unqualified doctors and dentists still practise all over Hong Kong, but these particular practitioners were there for a historical reason. They believed themselves to be beyond the reach of Government regulations and inspectorates, because that side of that stretch of Tung Tau Tsuen Road once formed the rampart of the old Kowloon City. This was the place, you may remember, that the Manchus maintained as a fortified headquarters before the British ever came to Hong Kong, and
in which they reserved their authority when the New Territories were ceded in 1898.

In their time it was a walled city, rebuilt in 1847 specifically as a defence against the British across the water. It had six watch towers, walls fifteen feet thick, a garrison of 500 soldiers and a
yamen
, the administrative office, securely in the middle of it. Its guns were black with red muzzles, and its demeanour could be fierce: there are pictures of convicted criminals crouched outside its gates with placards round their necks, and of pirates, apprehended by the Royal Navy, decapitated on the nearby beach courtesy of the
yamen
.

When the British took over the New Territories they very soon got rid of the Chinese officials at Kowloon, relying upon loose wordings in the Convention of Peking, and subsequent legal quibbles never quite settled the status of the place. It became a sort of no man’s land, known simply as the Walled City. The Chinese objected whenever the British proposed to pull the place down; the British never applied to it all their usual municipal regulations, and as late as the 1970s it was said that its only real administration was provided by the Triads.

For as the city grew around it, the Walled City became a famous resort of villains. Never being absolutely sure what their rights were, the British generally let it be, hoping that it would wither away of its own accord. It very nearly did; in 1933 there were only some 400 inhabitants, and by 1940, almost all its houses had been demolished. However it revived remarkably after the Second World War, when squatters by the thousand moved in, and by the late 1980s it was thought to house some 30,000 people.

By then the quarter bore no resemblance to the fortified town of the Manchus. Its walls had all been torn down by the Japanese, to be used as rubble for extensions to the airport, and very few of its structures were more than thirty years old. Nevertheless it still felt like an enclave within the city, extra-territorial and even slightly unreal. It was a frightful slum. No four-wheeled vehicle could enter it – there were no streets wide enough – and its buildings, rising sometimes to ten or twelve storeys, were so inextricably packed together that they seemed to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walkways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by foetid air-shafts.

A maze of dark alleys pierced the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reached them. Looped electric cables festooned their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It was like a bunker. Sometimes you seemed to be all alone, every door locked
around you. Sometimes the lane was suddenly bright with the lights of a laundry or a sweat-shop factory, and loud with Chinese music. In the one airy space of the labyrinth stood the
old yamen
, a low wooden building used as a school and community centre, and one got the impression even then of a close-knit, cohesive and homogeneous community, altogether separate from the colony outside. The Hong Kong sanitary laws were not applied. Fire risks were disregarded. The only planning restrictions ever enforced concerned the height of the buildings – as it was, aircraft landing at Kai Tak came screaming disconcertingly low over the rooftops.

Like the British, down the years Chinese Governments viewed the Walled City ambivalently. On the one hand they never abandoned their claim to authority within it, and from time to time made a minor issue of it. On the other they felt that to make too much fuss about the Walled City in particular might imply recognition of British rights over the territory as a whole. The slums accordingly remained a strange reminder of China’s stage in Hong Kong, and of the subtle, patient, cat-and-mouse way in which the Chinese viewed the progress of the colony.

In 1993 the Walled City of Kowloon was demolished at last, the British and the Chinese no longer being at odds about it,
¹
and on its site is now an agreeable Chinese garden, with the old
yamen
, heavily touched up, left museum-like in the middle. With it disappeared from Hong Kong an ancient thrill. Although in my own experience everyone within the Walled City was kindness itself, and although in later years Hong Kong policemen patrolled it, still to the very end tourists were warned against entering the place, for safety’s sake, and were sometimes to be seen enjoying an anachronistic
frisson
, a last shiver of the Mysterious Orient or the Inscrutable Chinese, as they peered past the preserved abscesses into its unenticing purlieus.

I say a last shiver of the inscrutable, because in theory at least the 1984 agreement brought frankness for the first time to Anglo-Chinese relationships on Hong Kong. Until then nothing had been straightforward, and the hazy difference of views about the status of the Walled City could be taken as a paradigm for attitudes about the colony itself.

At least since the fall of the Manchu dynasty the Chinese have
denied any British right to be in Hong Kong. They have maintained that both the cession of Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the lease of the New Territories, fall into the category of Unequal Treaties: that is, treaties unfairly forced upon a temporarily debilitated China by the ruthless military power of foreigners. The Unequal Treaty reached its apogee at the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Portugal and Japan all had their territorial concessions on the coast of China, and together with the United States enjoyed all manner of privileges in Treaty Ports and Spheres of Influence.

It was impossible to deny, though the British consistently did, that the treaties
were
unequal. The Chinese really had been obliged to make these concessions by
force majeure
, and they were given nothing in return. As China revived, one by one the foreign rights were abrogated. Most of the settlements were wound up between the two world wars – the British left Wei-hai-wei in 1930
²
– and in 1944 foreign rights in all the Treaty Ports were formally relinquished. The great international settlement at Shanghai came to an end in 1945. By the second half of the twentieth century there remained upon the coast of China only the two foreign enclaves that had started it all: Portugal’s Macao, which had been there for 400 years and was so small as to be almost meaningless, and Britain’s Hong Kong.

It seems slightly comical even to talk of relations between Hong Kong (population 6.4 million) and the People’s Republic of China (population 1.2 billion) – rather like the captive Gimson’s foreign relations with the Empire of Japan. But the relationship is not just between a minute colony and a colossus, but between two immense historical forces – between cultures and traditions, systems, races and values. It was the irresistible energy of the modernist West, approaching the climax of its supremacy, that placed the colony of Hong Kong upon the edge of China; it was the impotence of the traditional Chinese civilization at its nadir that allowed this to happen; it is the gradual equalizing of the two, and the spread of technology absorbing them both, that is now bringing the association to its climactic denouement.

One-nine-thousandth the size of its gigantic host, Hong Kong has often been likened to a parasite upon the skin of China. Sometimes looking across to the mainland from the top of the Peak, sensing the almost infinite landscapes of China which start beyond the Kowloon hills and stretch inconceivably away towards Tibet or Mongolia, it does occur to me that Hong Kong must seem to the leaders of China no more than an irritating itch on the skin. The simile, though, is false. Hong Kong’s role has never been passive, or merely extractive. The colony has been the agency of far greater powers, and in its dealings with China has given as much as it has got.

For much of its history it was far more threatening than threatened. From the start it defied the laws and the traditions of China, whether they eoncerned the divinity of the Emperor or the ban on the export of Chinese technology to foreigners. It repeatedly served as a base for attacks on the Chinese mainland, culminating in Lord Elgin’s humiliation of the Manchus in 1860, and the destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Throughout the nineteenth century indeed the colony treated China with general contempt. ‘I do not know,’ observed Keswick of Jardine’s in 1895, at the end of China’s most miserable and humiliating century, ‘that it can be good for China to be treated generously; for then the lessons of adversity and of supreme misfortune might be forgotten.’

From Hong Kong, in good times and in bad, the West has kept a monitory eye upon China. The colony has always been a base for intelligence and propaganda activities on the mainland. Today some of those great electronic aerials and dishes probing the sky above the territory are outposts of the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham in England, part of the Anglo-American system of eavesdrop which spans the world, and others beam the Chinese services of the BBC to the remotest corners of the People’s Republic. Even now the most thorough reportage of Chinese affairs is that in the Hong Kong press, in Chinese as in English: many pages are devoted to sessions of the People’s National Congress in Beijing, and innumerable items are recorded that never see the light of day within the People’s Republic.

Here too the opponents of authority in Beijing or Guangzhou have habitually prepared their subversions under cover of the British flag; republicans against Manchus, Communists against Kuomintang,
Kuomintang against Communists. Zhou Enlai took refuge in Hong Kong in 1927, early in his rise to ultimate power in China, and the Kuomintang authorities in Taiwan, still dreaming of a return to the mainland, have always used it as a base for mischief-making in southern China. Many a vanquished war-lord has retreated to Hong Kong to plan his come-back – the well-known ‘General’ Pipe Lee, for example, who for years held flamboyant court, together with his nine wives, in a fiercely fortified mansion in the New Territories.

But western imperialism was always an engine of development as well as of exploitation, and Hong Kong constantly projected new vitality, too, into the moribund mass of China. For better or for worse, its constant pressure for access to China’s business gradually opened up the country to modern realities. Even the trade in opium at least instructed Chinese financiers in modern methods of exchange, demonstrated the advantages of contemporary ships and armaments, and helped to open the eyes of the mandarins to the fact that foreigners might be barbaric, but were not invariably fools. The middlemen who dealt with the Hong Kong hongs, and later the Chinese compradors who served them, were among the first truly cosmopolitan Chinese, and acted as agents of enlightenment as well as of greed. Western techniques were usefully grafted on to oriental bases: a first symbol of an awakening China was the design of the hybrid junks called
lorchas
, which had a Chinese hull with a western rigging.
³