Hong Kong (12 page)

There was as yet no Government House, such as provided the traditional focus of the imperial order in other colonies. Throughout the 1840s Governors variously inhabited rented accommodations and furnished rooms attached to the Record Office (also used for weddings). The slopes behind Central had however been nominated Government Hill, and around it an incipiently Establishment style was already becoming apparent. The first mat-shed premises of the Church of England gave way, by the end of the decade, to a properly Gothic cathedral of St John. The tents of the soldiers had metamorphosed into barrack blocks on the Indian pattern, arranged in elegant echelon down the hill. On the site of James Matheson’s original ‘half New South Wales, half native’ bungalow arose Head Quarter House, the general’s neo-classical official residence.

There was a court-house, and a gaol, and a post office, and a harbour-master’s office, whose first occupant, Lieutenant William Pedder, ran a tight enough port – berths strictly allocated, top-gallant yards to be struck on entrance, jib and spanker booms rigged close when ordered. In 1846 the Hong Kong Club opened in a three-storey clubhouse, and in the same year the first races were run at Happy Valley. The Freemasons, who had come to the China coast with the East India Company, pursued their rituals in rented rooms in Queen’s Road; the amateur dramatic society, that
sine qua non
of colonial content, performed in a series of mat-shed Theatre Royals. Ever and again the redcoats came tramping from their quarters to the parade-ground above the sea, bear-skinned, pipe-clayed, long bayonets on their muskets. British warships habitually lay in the harbour, and once a month a packet loaded the mailbags for the Overland Route, via Egypt, home to England.

The official classes were trying hard to achieve a proper colonial stance. For instance amidst all the makeshift the Club, by tradition the fulcrum of colonial identity, set out to be just as lofty as any of its Anglo-Indian progenitors, even down to coolie-energized punkahs. Rules of membership were strict, all foreigners, women and people of unsuitable social background being banned, and very soon the place became, according to one contemporary chronicler, ‘the paradise of the select and temple of colonial gentility’, whose members spent much of their time in its high-vaulted rooms, playing billiards, reading the
newspapers, eating things like roast beef, game pie or suet pudding, and dressed from head to foot in white linen (though at some times of the year they wore flannel underneath).

Out of doors too, if we are to believe the old pictorialists, a suitable display was presented. Ladies in dainty bonnets, men in tall hats, are driven along those few rutted streets by liveried grooms. Officials are carried about in sedan-chairs, hanging their hats perhaps on hooks especially provided, and smoking their pipes complacently as they go. Military officers in plumed hats ride here and there on chargers, gallantly saluting passing barouches.

It is true that even in the water-colours the miscellaneous crowd of Chinese idlers, together with stray dogs and grazing donkeys, rather spoils the elegance of the Sunday afternoon promenade, on the parade-grounds beside the new Cathedral; but still a military band plays, and through the crowd one sees a sprinkling of decorous English families, gentlemanly-looking strollers with canes and boutonnières, pantalooned children with their Chinese nursemaids, and benevolently watching from his porch above, one likes to fancy, the newly appointed Right Reverend Bishop of Victoria, whose diocese also embraces Japan and the whole of China.

The flag flies over Head Quarter House. Turbaned Sikhs salute passing officers. Down in the harbour there is a flash of oars, perhaps, as the Commodore is conveyed in spendour from his flagship, the magnificent seventy-two-gun battleship
Blenheim
, to pay a call upon His Excellency the Governor. When the light was kind, when you looked the right way, Hong Kong was already recognizably Imperial; even Mr Robert Fortune was stirred by the knowlege that here ‘lives and property were safe under the British flag, which has … braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze’.

But off-shore at the eastern end of Victoria there lay another kind of headquarters ship, looking distinctly less ceremonial than the
Blenheim
, and smelling in an odd way of rotting vegetables. It was the smell of opium, very familiar in these parts, and the vessel was the massive old Indian trader
Hormanjee Bormanjee
, in whose holds, during the first years of Hong Kong, Messrs Jardine and Matheson stored not only their bullion, but the drugs which their swift armed clippers would distribute up and down the China coast.

In a way the
Hormanjee Bormanjee
was more truly a colonial flagship
than the Commodore’s battleship, for Hong Kong frankly depended then upon the profits of the narcotic trade. ‘In common with every Philanthropist,’ piously proclaimed the
Friend of China
in its very first issue, 1842, ‘we must deeply deplore the addiction of the Chinese to this fascinating vice,’ but hardly anybody really believed it – even the Great Seal of the colony, designed in 1844 by the Queen’s own medallist-in-chief, depicted beneath the royal crest a waterfront piled profitably with what might have been tea-boxes, but were generally assumed to be opium chests. In 1844 the Governor himself declared that almost anyone with any capital in the colony was either in the Government service, or else in the drug trade.

For every British warship in the roads, there were likely to be two or three opium clippers, as spendidly equipped, as confidently dressed as any frigate. The flag above the general’s residence was no more assertive than the flag above the Jardine, Matheson headquarters at East Point, half a mile along the shore. Hong Kong’s Government might be clothing itself in consequence; in cash it was far outshone by the merchant community, which brought to the colony all the insolent panache it had developed at Guangzhou. ‘You will like to know’, Robert Jardine wrote home in 1849, ‘who have got the nicest houses here. As you are aware the Governor and the General have generally the finest, here it is not so, “Who then?” – Jardine’s …’

Within a few years of the colony’s settlement dozens of merchant companies had come to Hong Kong, together with European shopkeepers, physicians, publicans and miscellanous commercial men. Most of the companies were British or Indian, but they included American, German, Italian, Dutch and French concerns, and they were dominated by three old familiars from Guangzhou: Jardine, Matheson, the most famous or notorious of them all, with five partners and twenty European assistants; Dent and Company, their chief rivals, with five partners and eight assistants; and the American Russell and Company, with six partners and eight assistants.

Life in Hong Kong really revolved not around the Governor, but around these formidable hongs and their bosses the taipans. Not only were they the shipowners, the warehouse men, the accountants, the agents and the chandlers of the colony, but they also played the parts of insurers and bankers. It was they who had induced the British Government to acquire this island, and they considered themselves its true possessors. The historian G. R. Sayer
¹
likened Hong Kong in
these early years to the headquarters of a commercial expeditionary force, whose outposts were at the Treaty Ports along the China coast; if the Governor was its chief of staff, unquestionably its field commanders were the taipans.

For they were frontier merchants of the most shrewd and energetic kind. Their rivalry was fierce, their methods were no-holds-barred, and they all lived for the moment, in the happy knowledge that twenty years in this place would make most of them rich. Few intended to stay longer, and the taipans frequently came and went, often handing over dynastically to family successors. William Jardine himself, who never came to Hong Kong, had spent only twelve years on the China coast; his partner James Matheson presently went home after nineteen years; but other Jardines, other Mathesons and lateral descendants of both clans were to remain in Hong Kong for generations.

They lived in some style, influenced still by memories of the East India Company at Guangzhou. The independent merchants had loathed that immense and venerable establishment, but had caught some of its attitudes all the same. Thus those waterfront offices of Hong Kong were clearly descended from the EIC’s old factories, and the manner of life among the merchants was distinctly John Company. Like the Anglo-Indians, they had their native surrogates, the go-betweens between rulers and ruled; the compradors were the interpreters, the middlemen of the hongs and often important men in their own right. Like the Anglo-Indians again, the merchants worked extremely hard, scorning the effete Latin notion of the siesta, as it was practised at Macao, and dressing for the office as they would dress for it in England, in high collars, thick suits and boots.

Like the Anglo-Indians, they sustained themselves amply in their exile. The assistants (nicknamed here, as in India, ‘griffins’) lived for the most part in messes, but the more senior men, who sometimes had wives and families with them, occupied sizeable houses; one advertised for sale in 1845 had two thirty-foot sitting rooms, five bedrooms with bathrooms
en suite
, two 100-foot verandahs closed by Venetian blinds, and ‘commodious out-buildings for servants’. Dent’s maintained a fine garden villa on the waterfront, prominent in those ship-deck pictures. Jardine’s No. 1 House, the one Robert Jardine bragged about, was a mansion in the Grecian mode, where the partners of the day were attended by many servants and well-protected against the island fevers – David Jardine’s London tailors, sending him a bill for a suit, expressed surprise at the increase in his measurements, and were
‘pleased to infer that the climate of Hong Kong agrees with your constitution’.

It was not however the climate. Jardine’s had imported a chef from London, just as Dent’s had brought one from France, and the taipans and all their assistants were very well fed. Victuals as varied as Dublin stout, English hams, tripes and tinned oatmeal were regularly shipped from Britain, alcohol seems to have been unlimited – they drank claret with their breakfasts, beer with their midday tiffin, and in the evenings great quantities of claret, champagne and port. As for local provisions, the
Friend of China
tells us that as early as 1842 beef was cheap and there was plenty of milk and butter. One could get pheasant, partridge, venison and all kinds of fish familiar and unknown. Ice soon became available from a publicly subscribed ice-house, and there was a Sheep Club whose members clubbed together to graze Indian and Australian sheep for mutton (though a London
Times
reporter, George Wingrove Cooke, writing about the Hong Kong cuisine in the following decade, complained that because in summer the sheep had to be killed on the day of eating, their meat was ‘as hard as death stiffened them’).

The merchants were nearly all young men, even the taipans being seldom older than thirty, and whether they lived in houses or in company messes, pursued their lives with a boyish brio, larking about a lot, playing a great deal of billiards, smoking heavily and living it up at the Happy Valley races, which were like country race-meetings in Ireland, and were dominated by the hongs’ own racing ponies. ‘I never saw one of the young clerks with a book in his hands,’ wrote the genial Albert Smith;
²
they had, he said ‘a mind-mouldering time of it’. For the most part their jobs were office jobs, tedious enough labours of accountancy and stock-taking, but all around them was the excitement of get-rich-quick. Everything was urgent, everything was fast, not everything was above-board. The opium ships that sailed in and out of the harbour were ships made for speed and getaway, raked schooners built to the latest American pattern. The tea clippers that stopped by were the most powerful sailers of their day, engaged in perpetual thrilling races with each other on the long run to England. Hard, reckless, well-paid captains came and went, telling tales of hit-and-run battles with Chinese cruisers, or planning yet more sensational voyages home.

In the early years of the decade many businessmen regretted their
move to Hong Kong, and thought of returning to Macao or Guangzhou. Later confidence fitfully grew. Hong Kong had certainly not yet become the immense mart of trade that Pottinger forecast, partly because the China commerce was now funnelled also through the Treaty Ports, but it was not languishing. Its free-port status brought much traffic, there being at that time no customs dues at all. Apart from opium, still illicit in China but still immensely profitable, there was trade in cotton, sugar candy, rattans, salt and tea – much of it smuggled through the Chinese customs. Dent’s, it was true, were getting into financial difficulties by the middle of the decade, their scheme to make Hong Kong the principal tea centre of the China coast having failed, but Jardine’s compound at East Point, around and below No. 1 House, was thriving. Built upon a small promontory, looking across to the
Hormanjee Bormanjee
, its three-storey warehouse was surrounded by granite and brick workshops, stables and lesser houses, and it sponsored its own Chinese quarter, Jardine’s Bazaar, on the higher ground behind. From its shipyard was launched the first foreign ship built in Hong Kong, the schooner
Celestial
.