Hong Kong (23 page)

MEANS OF SUPPORT

T
HE SHIPS ARE STILL COMING. ONE AFTER THE OTHER
they loom out of the West Lamma Channel. In the distance they look no more than shimmery hulks, shapeless and intangible, but slowly they resolve themselves, as they pass Lamma on the starboard side, Cheung Chau on the port, into the huge ungainly forms of container vessels, like floating warehouses, their decks piled so high with grey boxes that their bridges are almost hidden. All through the day they slide by, much faster than you expect and almost silently, a few crew members hanging over their rails, the Chinese pilot just to be glimpsed in the wheelhouse, the flag of Japan, or Taiwan, or Korea, or Panama, scarcely stirring in the clammy breeze over their sterns. As long as the Chinese have been in Hong Kong, so have the ships; the first purpose of Hong Kong island was fishing, and for many centuries deep-sea sailors have known about the shelter of its harbour.

It is the only deep-water harbour between Singapore and Shanghai, and is by common consent one of the most spectacular sights on earth. Nowadays it presents probably the greatest concentration of merchant shipping to be seen anywhere, and since most of the ocean-going ships lie at buoys in mid-channel, and are thus spread out across the water
for seven or eight miles, it is like a stupendous marine exhibition, through which a multitude of smaller craft, now as always, weaves, plods, circles, skims, loiters, swooshes or diffidently wavers.

When the early foreign merchants spoke of Hong Kong, they generally meant not the island, but the anchorage on its southern side, in the lee of Lamma. There are pictures of Hong Kong before the British acquired it which show this haven already crowded with foreign shipping, opium clippers and China-coast traders waiting for tides or monsoon winds, sheltering from bad weather, exchanging commercial information or picking up water from the waterfall at Pokfulam.
¹
Captain Elliot at first intended to make his original settlement on the island’s south shore but in the event it was the harbour to the north that became the port of Hong Kong. A strait really, through which the traffic from Guangzhou had always passed towards the more northern Chinese ports, it was sheltered by hills on both sides, and especially after the British had acquired the tip of Kowloon on its northern shore, was easy to defend from sea-attack.

The first British official appointment in Hong Kong was that of Harbour-Master, and the port has always been an allegory of order in chaos. It sometimes seems impossible that so many ships, of so many different flags, so many categories, can safely move in and out of such a jam-packed waterway; for some years the capsized and burnt-out hulk of the largest of all liners, the
Queen Elizabeth
, lay off Stonecutters Island, and it used to greet every ship entering from the west like a
memento mori
to navigators.
²
In earlier times the traffic looked even more uncontrollable. In the last chapter we surveyed the harbour through the proud eyes of the High Victorians, and recognized only its majesty, but actually in photographs of that time it can appear almost anarchic. Quite apart from the tumult of junks, sampans, ferry-boats and launches, the big ships appear to be in a state of confusion, facing this way and that, some steaming cross-channel, some making for the open sea, some apparently sinking with the weight of the lighters moored at their flanks, or about to collide with that queer old hulk in the middle of them, the
Victor Emmanuel
.

But if there was one thing the imperial British knew how to do, it was to organize a port, and there was no disorder really. In those days
the vast majority of the ocean ships out there were British, their masters well understanding the system, and anyway the whole idiom of the harbour was familiar to mariners in a period when everything to do with the eastern seas was dominated by British practice. You sailed your ship from Port Said to Aden, from Aden to Bombay, from Bombay to Penang or Singapore, from Singapore on to Hong Kong, and everywhere there were British charts to guide you, British pilots to see you into port, British harbour-masters to accommodate you, British agents to reprovision your ship, British shipwrights to make your repairs, and ships of the Royal Navy, swinging at their anchors in the roadsteads, to protect you on your way. Hong Kong was the last link in a familiar and well-tried chain.

The harbour-master’s original office was a pretty pillared villa with a signal mast in front. Today his officials are housed, as you might guess, in electronically state-of-the-art control-rooms on top of a waterfront high-rise block, and are linked by radio with a series of harbour signal-stations. Their charge, though, has not much changed. Much of the port’s tonnage is now handled at the container complex at Kwai Chung in the New Territories, the busiest in the world, and several other terminals are being created; nevertheless most of the ships must still be loaded and unloaded at the mooring buoys, as they have been since the day of the clippers. The last P&O passenger liner,
Chitral
, 13,800 tons, set sail on the long voyage home in 1969; but the big cruise ships still berth at the Ocean Terminal at Kowloon, flying their streamers in the old style as they leave festively for Kobe or Shanghai. Yesterday’s high-funnelled Liverpool freighters are today’s Panamanian-registered container ships. Even the old Receiving Ship survives, in petrified form, as the Royal Navy shore establishment HMS
Tamar
, and still in the narrows the warships often lie.

The Port Authority which runs it all is like a Ministry of Shipping for this City-State, and its rules are as strict as were Lieutenant Pedder’s at the beginning. Every ship over 1,000 tons must have a pilot. Every sampan must be licensed. No tanker may pass through the harbour, and ships using the eastern entrance, the Lei Yue Mun Channel, must report their proposed time of arrival to the minute, to allow coordination with take-offs from the nearby Kai Tak runway. The Authority has the power to license and inspect ships, too, but Hong Kong being Hong Kong, it has an incomplete hold upon the territory’s own merchant fleet. By ownership this is the third largest in
the world, after the Japanese and the Greek, but it flies many flags; of its 1,281 ships in 1986, only 188 flew the Hong Kong ensign, the others being registered in Argentina, the Bahamas, Denmark, Gabon, Honduras, Liberia, the Netherlands, Panama, St Vincent, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu.
³

Once a week the
South China Morning Post
publishes a Trade and Transport Supplement, ten pages long, and here at random are a few items from an issue I have before me. The Hanyin Container Line is offering a new all-water service to Long Beach, Savannah and New York City, Lloyd Triestino is accepting cargoes for Yugoslavia and South Germany. The Atlas Line offers a service direct to Chittagong, the Traverway Maritime Line sails to Famagusta, the United Arab Shipping Line is closing for Kuwait and Dubai.
River Ngada
is accepting cargoes for Monrovia.
Ming Energy
is loading for Jeddah and Le Havre.
Bold Eagle
sails for Felixstowe tomorrow. Cargoes for Kabul are being accepted by the Trans-Siberian Container Line. A Zim container ship leaves shortly for Eilat and Venice, and Burma Five Star Shipping is loading for Rangoon.

The whole world indeed is loading in Hong Kong – in 1994 there were some 37,000 arrivals of ocean-going vessels. Seeing them moored, bunkered, provisioned, stacked and insured, arranging their freight rates, paying their crews, remains the territory’s most obvious means of support.

Sometimes on the promenade outside the Regent Hotel, on the Kowloon waterfront, a virtuoso line fisherman practises his craft. So brilliantly sharpened are his instincts and so quick is his eye, with such a fierce exact intensity does he cast his hooks into the shadow of the shoal below, all the while glaring ferociously into the water as if he can see into its darkest depths, that a little crowd always assembles around him to watch the performance, and even rival fishermen sometimes abandon their own pitches to observe his technique.

I think of him as a living logo, because fishing was the first of all Hong Kong trades, and thousands of its residents live by their nets. This is the largest fishing-port in East Asia, and you cannot be long in Hong Kong without seeing a fishing-boat sail off to sea, whether it be a
high-pooped junk all black with age, or one of the blunt-nosed trawlers that always suggest to me sea-going bull-terriers, or possibly vintage Saabs. Off it trundles to its fishing-grounds with a dour kind of resolution, its engines thumping heavily, its crew working away unsmiling on its decks, and far out at sea you may later see it, among its scattered colleagues of the fleet, tossing and rolling in a web of nets as though it has been fishing there for ever. And taking the early-morning ferry yourself to the fishing island of Tap Mun, in the north-east of the archipelago, as the ship’s cook warms up your canned breakfast noodles behind a canvas windbreak in the stern, and the fishermen on their passing sampans huddle themselves in hoods, scarves and anoraks against the dank – sailing on a winter morning out to Tap Mun, its houses battened down among the waters of Mirs Bay in a miasma of drizzle and dried fish, is a reminder that Hong Kong shares this sea-industry with peoples far, far up the coast of China, away beyond the Tropic of Cancer to the Yellow Sea and Manchuria.

Then nothing in all Hong Kong seems more permanent than one of its traditional junk-building yards, which sometimes build their craft in much the same way, to virtually the same designs, as they were built when the colony was young. One such yard stands on Cheung Chau, not far from the Pak Tai temple, and is a delight to visit – its craftsmen never mind your wandering around the slipyard, and generally offer the ultimate courtesy, indeed, of taking no notice of you at all. There is a fine smell of wood and varnish in the yard, a whine of saws sometimes, a flash of oxyacetylene from the dark workshed, in whose doorway a noble retriever often stands half in, half out of the sunshine. Let us watch now, as a junk is winched out of the water to have its hull cleaned.

On the deck of the vessel the whole junk family is assembled, as for holiday, with the washing hanging on its line behind; grandmother in black trousers sitting in a wicker chair, mother in a white silk blouse, two or three excited children crowded in the prow as the chains are attached and the elderly diesel engine beside the workshops begins its slow haul. It is a long job, as the boat is winched inch by inch from the water, but nobody’s attention flags. Grandmother, mother, all three children hardly take their eyes off the chain, while the men of the junk crew, leaning over the gunwale with long poles, gently prod the boat in the right direction.

The yardmaster is on the slip, controlling everything with blasts of his whistle, and a couple of workers are poised in boats alongside,
waiting to push chocks under the hull as it emerges slowly from the water. Watchfully the winchman waits, ready to ease his chugging engine at a whistle-blast. Earnestly, like mathematicians, the two men in the water calculate the right moment to push another chock in. Minute by minute, whistle by whistle, the craft is eased meticulously out of the water, until at last it is high on its chocks with all barnacles revealed, and from dog to grandmother everyone relaxes. The yardmaster blows a final liberating blast and allows himself a single glance, almost a showman’s glance, at the solitary European watcher by the workshop door.

A maritime tradition more radically sustained is that of the Macao ferry, which has been running in one form or another since the colony was founded. The proximity of Portuguese Macao, neutral in time of war, jolly with food, wine and gambling halls in peace, has always been an inescapable fact of Hong Kong life. Sometimes it has been politically convenient to go there, sometimes it has been economically handy. Villains have fled to refuge, unmarried couples have found solace, escaped prisoners have been succoured, and in the early years of Hong Kong rich merchants still possessed pleasure-houses in Macao, as they had in the day of the Guangzhou hongs. Even during the Second World War the Macao ferries still sailed. As we have seen, they have been in their time oared galleys and paddle-steamers, and large conventional ferry-ships still make the run; nowadays, though, most people go to Macao in more startling kinds of vessel.

The ferry-station is startling enough. Part of a twin-towered Central complex which also contains a hotel, a shopping centre and the port’s main control tower, it is more like an airport than a dock. Visual display screens tell you the times of sailings, when the next craft is boarding, the number of your departure gate. Along air-conditioned corridors the passengers make their way, most of them incongruously clutching just the same shapeless packages they would have carried aboard the steamers a century ago, until crossing a glass-enclosed walkway they see their vessels waiting at the slips below.

Jet-foils or hovercraft, they are hardly like ships at all, but more like fantasies of adventure fiction, waiting there in their cavernous docks – themselves like submarine pens, or contemporary versions of Hong Kong’s old pirate lairs. It is with a futuristic roar that today’s passengers for Macao are carried in a furious rush to sea.