Top Quotes: “Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong” — Vaudine England
“Defining Hong Kong has never been easy. Geographically, it comprises one main island and more than 260 others, plus the Kowloon Peninsula, whose hinterland, known as the New Territories, is contiguous with the mainland of the People’s Republic of China.”
“Despite the dramatic high-rise architecture of its urban centers, three quarters of Hong Kong’s land mass is not developed; 40 percent of it is designated as country park.
The key that opened Hong Kong to the world has always been the deep-sea harbor. Protected by the peaks of Hong Kong Island on one side and the Kowloon Peninsula on the other, it gave shelter to pirates and smugglers from tropical storms or random oversight. Here opium clippers and floating warehouses could moor, while sending their produce into China with or without official sanction. Here, deep-hulled ships packed in tens of thousands of eager migrants from impoverished China, eager to try their luck in the goldfields or trading zones of the West. Here, too, those stately passenger liners of a globalizing world would deliver new arrivals from Liverpool, Marseille, or bevond, through the Suez Canal.”
“In 1841, the main island of Hong Kong was home to fewer than five thousand scattered villagers, mainly fishing and farming folk. By 2019, it had 7.52 million people, 92 percent of whom were of Chinese ethnicity.
Most (about 89 percent) speak Cantonese, and almost 5 percent claim English as their tongue.”
“The British first occupied Hong Kong — the harbor at least — in 1839 when British traders had to decamp from Canton via Macao. A search for food on the mainland caused the little-known Battle of Kowloon Bay (September 4, 1839); the entire occupation lasted just a couple of months. Trading firms led by William Jardine, Alexander Matheson, and others had encouraged the British government to go to war with Canton in order to secure freer conditions of trade.
On January 25, 1841, Captain Sir Edward Belcher of the Royal Navy landed on Hong Kong Islands northern shore with a small body of men, naming it Possession Point.
The next day, a mainly military crowd assembled, showing firmly wherein British power lay. Two thousand seven hundred Indian soldiers stood by as Sir Gordon Bremer, naval commander of the British Expeditionary Force, took possession of the island in the name of the Crown.”
“This brief but decisive first Anglo-Chinese war, or Opium War, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking between Britain and China. As well as ceding Hong Kong Island in perpetuity, this agreement also opened the five mainland Chinese “Treaty” ports of Amoy, Canton, Shanghai, Foo-chow (Fuzhou), and Ningpo (Ningbo). The document was signed, sealed, and delivered in print in 1842, and when London and Peking (Beijing) heard of it, neither capital was happy. But by the time they saw the small print, there was little they could do to stop it. Boatloads of diverse characters were already assembling — Southeast Asian sailors, Portuguese clerks, Parsi investors, Jewish traders, Muslim entrepreneurs, and many more.”
“In earlier phases of world trade, led by the Portuguese, Dutch, and finally the British, it was entirely normal to cohabit with a local woman, through whom one gained access to the local society and particularly its market. Southeast Asian women had often been the moneymakers of the family, operating with some autonomy, under a system of accepted serial monogamies. They might “marry” a trader for the duration of that man’s residence in port, parting amicably when that time was up and when he had paid or given whatever had been promised. This system enabled women to move on without shame. It was a world in which everything was hybrid, and the word foreign covered not just “Westerners” but even those Southeast Asians operating outside their own home area.”
“As with the Parsis and the Armenians, Jews were in Asia long before the western Europeans. Communities on India’s Malabar Coast provided advance bases for Jews following sea routes to the China coast; the first known synagogue in China was built in the Sung dynasty capital of Kaifeng in 1163. As with the Parsis and Armenians, the Jews were always more than just traders.”
“One clue to the presence of these classy establishments would be the flower stalls nearby, as the convention of taking flowers to one’s lady love persisted even when it was a commercial transaction, and perhaps even lent it an air of respectability.”
“Until recently, however, many descendants of Hong Kong’s first Eurasians have sought to downplay or deny their roots — often because acceptance meant admitting one’s great-grandmother was a prostitute.”
“It will be recalled that when “Hong Kong” was ceded to the British Crown back in 1842 this referred simply to the island of Hong Kong. In 1860, the tip of the peninsula across the harbor, a small part of Kowloon up to Boundary Street, was also ceded in perpetuity. Not until 1898 would the far larger swath of land including the mountain range, Lion Rock, and far beyond become part of Hong Kong. Called the New Territories, this was not ceded forever, but merely leased for ninety-nine years — prompting the handover almost a century later in 1997.”
“The unrest from the Strike of 1925 brought British rule perilously close to the edge of economic collapse. Total trade in Hong Kong fell by half, with shipping tonnage and share values dropping 40 percent, property prices and rents down 60 percent. More than three thousand bankruptcies had occurred by the end of 1925, and the devastating physical losses, personal crises, and political quarrels were unprecedented. Although clearly fueled by Canton-based politicians, in Hong Kong the strikers’ six demands were clear: freedom of speech, publication, assembly, and organization; universal suffrage for direct election to the legislature; legal equality with Europeans; labor protection laws including an eight-hour workday; rent control and provision of adequate housing; and the right of Chinese to reside anywhere in the colony. Ultimately, the mainland-based leaders of the nationalist Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to stand up for these demands; Hong Kong had to wait another sixty-five years before even limited voting was allowed.
The government, again, grossly underestimated what it was up against, and some of Stubbs’s emergency measures intended to calm things did exactly the opposite. All transportation stopped, Chinese compositors left their newspapers, waiters and bakers walked out, as did domestic servants once again. The Hong Kong Volunteer Regiment was called on and limited ferry and tram service resumed, but the strike spread through schools, university, most private clubs, and even some hospitals.”
Young men lined up to shoot and be shot at; families sought ways to bury wealth or hide their daughters; many fled to Macao, where they formed a contingent of Hong Kong people committed to supporting the resistance against Japanese occupation and envisaging a different future.
They included the obviously British gentlemen of The Hong Kong Club who patriotically drank as much of the alcohol stocks as possible to stop them falling into Japanese mouths. When later interned in the Stanley camp for civilian prisoners of war, these same men ran their® company boards on camp stools and empty stomachs,. authorizing money for the club housekeeper, and plotting actively for life after the war.
“Within months after Hong Kong fell, the Japanese-controlled Hongkong News reported that Jimmy’s Kitchen, the Parisian Grill, and Ruttonjee’s brewery were back in operation. But the city had deteriorated, Japanese shipping was under pressure and had failed to bring supplies, and repression was intensifying. By 1944, food shortages would become acute; the populace was starving and the economy had atrophied. A population of 1.6 million before the war was reduced, also by flight, to around 600,000 by its end.
The Japanese governor Rensuke Isogai was keen to play the racial card, encouraging Asians to rise up against their British colonial masters by backing Japan in a war of the colored races against the white. But the daily details of life under the Japanese — the huge number of rapes and looting, the lack of food and work, the infliction of petty humiliations, the corruption at every level, the atrocities — soon stripped the Japanese option of any appeal.”
“Young men lined up to shoot and be shot at; families sought ways to bury wealth or hide their daughters; many fled to Macao, where they formed a contingent of Hong Kong people committed to supporting the resistance against Japanese occupation and envisaging a different future.
They included the obviously British gentlemen of The Hong Kong Club who patriotically drank as much of the alcohol stocks as possible to stop them falling into Japanese mouths. When later interned in the Stanley camp for civilian prisoners of war, these same men ran their company boards on camp stools and empty stomachs, authorizing money for the club housekeeper, and plotting actively for life after the war.”
“He had allowed his home on Liberty Avenue in the garden city part of Kowloon to become a refuge that doubled as the consulate, frantically issuing Portuguese passports. About 85 percent of Hong Kong’s Portuguese would flee to Macao. On their way, about four hundred of them crowded into the Soares mansion, where chickens were reared on the roof and many of those staying had their own guns and guarded the whole area at night against looters. Sanitary waste was a problem, but then a beautiful mango tree in the garden that had never blossomed suddenly, thanks to a fresh sewage trench, burst into fruit.”
“Once Governor Grantham took charge in Hong Kong, in 1947, Young’s plan for a more inclusive future died.
Grantham lacked the background of Hong Kong’s resident communities from long before the war, and so was ignorant of that specific Hong Kong identity that had led so many diverse people to build multigenerational homes and families, and even risk their lives for it. Perhaps he listened too much to the newly arrived wealthy Shanghainese who brought money and industry but no Hong Kong history with them. He simply decided that Hong Kong was a Chinese port and its people would never develop pro-British tendencies. As it would thus never become a self-governing state, in his opinion, he backed the vested antidemocratic interests in his ruling councils, particularly the local Chinese elite. This rich dique, with its family and business ties through every major colonial institution, was unwilling to forgo its own position of unelected privilege. Hong Kong’s chance of an independent, self-determining future was lost.”
“More than a million mainlanders had fled communism, and the pressures on Hong Kong’s social provision were immense.”
“It is telling that the moment when many of these diverse peoples did give up on Hong Kong was not 1941 or 1945 or 1949. It would be 1967. This was when many Portuguese and Eurasian families spread into their global diaspora. In 1967, it seemed as if Hong Kong’s distinct, separate status as an autonomous place was most directly threatened as cadres of the Chinese Communist Party’s Cultural Revolution spread through town spurring protests and riots. In 1967, the Hong Kong Chinese police force stood up for Hong Kong. British chroniclers have said they stood against the red hordes in the name of British rule. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they stood and fought for non-Chinese-state rule. For so long as Hong Kongers have been able to convince themselves that their home was special and different, then they have stayed.”
