Hong Kong (28 page)

¶ When the East India Company still maintained its concessions at Guangzhou, a Mr Edward Lane was a butler in its employ. When the first European shops were established in the new colony of Hong Kong, a Mr Ninian Crawford was a clerk in one of them. Today the names of their two families are household words in Hong Kong. Joining forces in the colony, between them the Lanes and the Crawfords ran, at one time or another, ships’ chandlers, auction houses, hotels and bakeries. One Lane was involved in the
Keying
enterprise, one Crawford was secretary of the Hong Kong Club, and their memorial is Lane Crawford’s, the oldest and most exclusive of Hong Kong’s department stores, now Chinese-owned but still decidedly old-school.

¶ Douglas Lapraik, origins unknown, began his Hong Kong career in 1845, aged twenty-four, as an apprentice to a watchmaker, and ended it in 1866 a shipowner, a dockowner, and the principal hotel proprietor of the colony. He had invested in the
Keying
, too – some said he went in disguise to Guangzhou to buy the ship, the sale of junks to foreigners being forbidden. He was a partner of Lamont at the Aberdeen docks, his seven steamships held a near-monopoly of the trade with Fuzhou, Shantou and Xiamen, and he it was who gave to the city the Pedder Street clock. For years he lived with a Chinese mistress in an engaging Gothic folly, Douglas Castle, which survives to this day as a student hostel; but when he went home to England he married a bride from the Isle of Wight, and very soon died.

¶ In 1883 there arrived in Hong Kong from Baghdad a young man who preferred to call himself Kelly, perhaps supposing that the British Establishment was fonder of Irishmen than it was of Jews. His real name was Ellis Kadoorie, and with his brother Elly he established a
famous Hong Kong Jewish dynasty. They set up business as general brokers and agents, in the local tradition, but went into the hotel business and presently acquired control of the China Light and Power Company, which ran all the colony’s power stations and distributed all the electricity. The Kadoories became, and remain, great powers in Hong Kong. They gave vast sums of money to charitable causes, were lavish patrons of Happy Valley, and were to be rewarded not only with a couple of knighthoods but also, as we know, with the first of all Hong Kong peerages.

¶ Paul Catchik Chater, a Christian Armenian from Calcutta, disembarked in Hong Kong in 1864, aged eighteen. Starting as a bank clerk, he soon had a finger in every kind of profitable pie – wharfing, electricity, rope-making, trams, ferries, banking, hotels, land. His Hong Kong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company became Hong Kong’s chief dock operators, his most brilliant real-estate coup was the Praya Reclamation Scheme in Central, which created a slab of the most valuable building land on earth. An Anglophile and enthusiastic royalist, Chater threw himself into all the right activities (almost all – his young Scandinavian wife, extracted from Lyndhurst Terrace, was never accepted at Government House). He was a Mason, an art collector, a passionate racegoer. He became almost unbelievably rich, and built himself a vast and awful palace in mid-Levels called Marble Hall. When he died on a May morning in 1926 he left instructions that he was to be buried within twelve hours. The Stock Exchange, having opened as usual, hastily closed its doors again to prepare for the funeral, and by five the same evening the old millionaire was safely under the turf.

¶ The first Chinese to make a really great fortune in Hong Kong was Robert Ho Tung, chief comprador at Jardine’s; born in 1862, he was a multi-millionaire by the turn of the century. Actually he was only half-Chinese, being the natural son it is thought of a Belgian merchant. Before he grew his mandarin beard he looked in some photographs distinctly European, with his long face, long nose and wide mouth, and the woman he married was Eurasian too – the daughter of a Jardine’s partner. Ho Tung thought of himself however as Chinese, and as year by year he amassed his tremendous fortune he became one of the great figures of the Hong Kong Chinese community, ever more venerable, ever more generous in good causes, a founding father of the University of Hong Kong, now presenting a warplane to the Chinese Government
for its fight against the Japanese, now giving a couple of fighters to the RAF.

He was knighted of course, a road was named for him, he was the first non-European to own a house on the Peak – four of them, actually – and he died in 1956 as patriarch of a whole clan of plutocrats, several of them millionaires and prominent still in Hong Kong life. When Oswald Birley painted his portrait in his old age, Ho Tung wanted to be shown wearing all his twenty-two decorations; Birley declined for aesthetic reasons, but painted the decorations themselves in a separate picture, to be hung nearby in its own frame.

Sir Robert was only the first. ‘Do you wish your child to study in one of the oldest and most respected public schools in England?’ said a Hong Kong press advertisement in 1986. ‘If so, here is a chance not to be missed. The headmaster of Uppingham School will be in town from 6th to 12th April. Why not leave a message at the Mandarin, and Mr Bomford will contact you …?’

The Headmaster of Uppingham (founded 1584) had in mind children not of the English expatriate bourgeoisie, but of the ever-growing and ambitious Chinese moneyed classes. Today foreigners of many nationalities have joined the British in extracting the profits of Hong Kong, but it is the Chinese population that most spectacularly demonstrates the ideology of capitalism. The community’s model and epitome might well be Chan Hon-wah, a rich Hong Kong businessman of the 1950s whose career has been recorded by the historian James Hayes. Chan had left Guangdong forty years before with four dollars in his pocket. One went to pay his fare, two he sent home as Lucky Money, as custom required, and upon the single surviving dollar he built so steadily expanding an enterprise that by 1953 his company had branches and agencies in most of the big cities of southern Asia.

If they are not all as successful as Mr Chan, on every social plane the Hong Kong Chinese are virtuoso money-makers. They are tireless workers. Kipling in
From Sea to Sea
, comparing the industrious inhabitants of Hong Kong with the languid natives of Bombay, said he had never seen a Chinese asleep in the daytime, and hardly ever seen one idling – ‘let us annex China,’ he concluded. The Hong Kong Chinese are wonderfully astute: even among the villagers of the outer
islands, before they were leased to the British at all, illiterate middlemen and financial organizers dealt with most intricate arrangements of loan and mortgage: illiteracy did not matter, James Hayes tells us, ‘if other qualities required in this complex arena of money, chance, and human relationships were … demonstrable’.

And they are opportunists of genius. When communal lavatories were first installed in Hong Kong, Chinese entrepreneurs took to sitting on them for so long that people were obliged to bribe them to come off. When during the plague of 1900 the Government offered two cents for every dead rat delivered to the authorities, there was a brisk flow of imported rodents from the mainland. When the first tramlines were laid, Chinese manufacturers devised handcarts with flanged wheels to fit the tracks.
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When the buses and trams themselves stopped running during the Second World War, Chinese operators pulled people about on flat-topped wagons.

Marine Department employees posted to the signal station on the otherwise uninhabited Green Island took to breeding goats as a sideline.
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During the Japanese occupation the Chinese black market virtually took over the distribution of food. In the 1970s, when the future of Hong Kong first came into serious doubt, citizenship of a dozen foreign countries was offered by Hong Kong agencies, and one particularly persuasive operator even succeeded in selling people a World Passport, entitling them to go and live anywhere.

They are endlessly inquisitive and innovative. In the late 1980s Chinese salesmen from Hong Kong opened up a new trading route 2,500 miles across the breadth of China to Xinjiang Province, on the frontiers of the Soviet Union. They sold electric goods from air-conditioners to calculators (mostly Shrap 838s) for distribution inside the Soviet Union. Russian-Chinese middlemen paid for their goods sometimes in sacks of hard cash, sometimes in barter goods, sometimes in black-market US dollars, and the Hong Kong traders easily doubled their investments on every trip.

The Chinese magnates of Hong Kong are familiar figures of world
finance, and those great Hong Kong companies which are not already Chinese-controlled are under constant threat of Chinese takeovers. Sir Run-Run Shaw, with his thin benevolent face and his wire-rimmed spectacles, his high brow and long fingers, looks like a Confucianist sage; he is the owner of two of Hong Kong’s TV channels and one of the world’s most successful film producers, whose sprawling studios above the sea at Sai Kung, in the New Territories, make far more films each year than Hollywood ever did. Gordon Wu, a developer of visionary energies, has built a mighty super-highway to connect Hong Kong with Guangzhou. Stanley Ho, of the compradors’ dynasty, owns the gambling concessions at Macao, together with many of the vessels that take the gamblers there, and has mansions in both cities. The richest Hong Kong resident of all is said to be the financier Li Ka-shing, who is not only chairman of one of the biggest ex-British hongs, Hutchison-Whampoa, with its many ancillaries and subsidiaries, but also controls the Husky Oil Company of Canada.

These are the local heroes of Chinese Hong Kong, together with rock singers and Sir Run-Run’s film stars, and lower down the social scale a hundred thousand Hong Kong Chinese are still hoping to emulate them one day. There are no class inhibitions in this place. Almost everyone shares the memory of old hardships, if only by heredity, and almost everyone has similar aspirations. Nor is there much sense of corporate purpose, as there is in Japan: the Hong Kong worker works above all for himself, with no nonsense about the sacred function of the Company, and is perfectly ready to change jobs at any time, if he can get more money or better prospects.

The 1850 report of the Hong Kong Education Committee remarked that the Chinese parent’s attachment to education was ‘secondary to his attachment to gain’. In fact the two enthusiasms have gone hand in hand, as they did in Samuel Smiles’ self-helping England. Hong Kong’s newly emergent middle class is immensely able and ambitious, and the mass of the proletariat, fastening its children’s blazer buttons as it sends them off to school, is a living testimony to the ideological inspiration of free enterprise. There are said to be 30,000 restaurants in Hong Kong, and nearly all are family concerns. There are 4,800 fishing-boats, each in effect a private company. Last time I checked there were 17,528 taxis, and 16,651 of them were singly and privately owned.

Soon after the beginning of British Hong Kong there was a plan to build its chief town in Happy Valley, linking it by canal to the sea, and creating wharfs and go-downs within the shelter of the hills. There was a plan to import Australian sheep-farmers and cattlemen, with their herds and flocks; the southern slopes of Hong Kong Island would be turned into grazing-land, speckled with eucalyptus trees no doubt, with tin-roofed ranches above the China Sea, and Chinese cowboys riding about in floppy hats.
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There was once a proposal to raze the entire island of Cheung Chau (population 40,000) to make way for a new airport.

But then almost nothing has not been proposed, at one time or another, for the making of money in Hong Kong. The chief strength of this economy has always been its flexibility. Because it has been relatively free from Government interference, it has been able to switch easily from idea to idea, method to method, emphasis to emphasis. If it is frighteningly changeable sometimes, it has proved resilient too, swiftly recovering its poise after wars, revolutions, riots, share collapses and even treaties about its future. As 1997 draws near we see Hong Kong still working at the furious pace to which the world has grown accustomed; contemplating its apparently irresistible momentum I find it hard to remember that within my own lifetime it was considered a dull backwater of Empire.