The New Territories stretch north from Kowloon—they begin, appropriately, at Boundary Street—and up to the Shen Zhen River, where we meet the Gurkhas, the fence, and the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. They present a marvellous contrast to the overpopulated, superheated dynamo of the harbourside cities—here are wild mountain ranges, remote bays dotted with rock-bound skerries, meadows and lakes, paddy fields and forests. This is where the practices of China, ancient beyond the reach of memory, meet the ceaseless rhythms of the Imperial merchants: here are the workers in the rice-fields, the walled villages, the China of willow-pattern and temple-bell, of mao-tai and the courtly bow. It is being developed now, furiously—high-rise flats, fast railway lines, motorways, dockyards—but it is still a remote and peaceful place, with wild birds and animals and room to move, and air to breathe. People stuck in Hong Kong used to complain of a kind of hyperclaustrophobia, as though they lived in a pressure-cooker: the lush tranquillity of the New Territories provided them with a means of escape.
One small enclave has, however, remained resolutely Chinese. The Walled City of Kowloon, neither truly a city, nor having any walls—the Japanese knocked them down in the Second World War—was specifically mentioned in the Convention as the one place that would remain under Chinese administration ‘except insofar as may be inconsistent with the military requirements for the defence
of Hong Kong’. The British unilaterally revoked that particular clause of the Convention a few months after the lease had begun, and tossed the Chinese officials out. But the Walled City has never accepted colonial rule—it is a teeming, dirty little slum, unpoliced, unorganised, unfriendly and dangerous. There was never any town planning, though the Kai Tak airport authorities insisted recently that some buildings be lowered to an appropriate height, and so police moved in and obligingly lopped some storeys off. There has never been any sanitation, and electricity is siphoned from the main Kowloon grid, illegally. Fifty thousand people live in this single speck of China inside the Empire (which is itself, of course, a tiny speck of Empire inside China); the city is dangerous, stepping to the rhythm of a different drum, and likely to be unchanged by whatever forces come to dominate the future of the colony itself.
The British had few early doubts about the purpose behind the annexation of Hong Kong. The island had been placed there for the exclusive convenience of the British Empire, and its acquisition could only lead to one thing. ‘It is a notch cut in China,’ it was said at the time of the original Nanking Treaty, ‘as a woodman notches a tree, to mark it for felling at a convenient opportunity.’ Victoria, Empress of India, might soon add ‘Empress of China and Queen of Corea’ to her vast string of titles—and Hong Kong would surely be the vehicle by which she might do so.
But it was not to be. China was to be penetrated, but never vanquished. The British pierced the Manchu Empire one other time in 1898, when they forced a leasehold deal for the port of Weihaiwei, which lay across the Gulf of Chihli from the Russian enclave of Port Arthur. The British renamed their possession Port Edward, for the sake of symmetry. The Royal Navy loved the place and its people who were, as a journal reported at the time, ‘a comfortable set, easy to deal with’. But Weihaiwei was not to remain in the British Empire for long: the American Government, which disliked the idea of foreigners muddying the western Pacific waters, urged the British to give up the lease. They did, and abandoned the colony in 1930—the first part of the Empire to be
given up voluntarily. (It was almost immediately overrun by the Japanese, and China did not get her little port back until 1945.)
The importance of Hong Kong was at first more symbolic than real. It gave the Royal Navy theoretical charge of the China Sea and, with the battleships and destroyers based at Esquimault on Vancouver Island, the northern Pacific Ocean. It was, as Lord Curzon wrote, ‘the furthermost link in the chain of fortresses which…girdles half the globe’. Or it was, as that most Imperially minded of admirals, Sir John Fisher, noted, ‘one of the keys to the lock of the world’. The ships came steaming in from Calcutta and Sydney and Aden and Gibraltar, the flag flew proudly over the Peak, and a naval cannon was fired at noon each day. And still is: Jardine’s got into hot water once for firing a twenty-one-gun salute to welcome home the ‘Honourable Merchant’, as they call their boss. The Royal Navy set the firm a forfeit: a single cannonshot would be fired each noon as a colonial time signal. Noël Coward records the fact in his ditty about Mad Dogs and Englishmen—‘In Hong Kong they strike a gong and fire off the Noon Day Gun.’ Visitors have been recently known to fire the gun. One simply phones up Jardine’s, and asks permission.
There is no more potent symbol of British rule over Hong Kong than the existence of His Excellency the Governor. His rule is absolute. His authority is positively dictatorial, deriving from the Letters Patent and Royal Instructions written in 1917, and empowering the Crown’s personal factotum to ‘do and execute all things that belong to his said office…according to such instructions as may from time to time be given to him’.
‘What—no one interested in the job?’ asked one commentator, when told of some difficulty in finding a replacement. ‘Direct personal authority over five million people? Incredible that no one should want it.’ Someone—a fluent Mandarin speaker, as it happens—was promptly found.
The University of Hong Kong conducted a study in 1973 of the nouns most commonly used in the colony’s daily paper, the
South China Morning Post
. The word ‘Governor’ came third. (A similar survey of the fifty-four daily Cantonese-language papers would have
produced, one suspects, a rather lower figure.) He is omnipresent—making speeches, issuing declarations, presiding over meetings of the ruling committees, flying to London for talks, opening flower shows and concerts and exhibitions, or sidling off for weekends at his splendid country house at Fanling, in the New Territories. (Mountain Lodge, the Victorian grange built to help His Excellency survive the colonial summers, proved unsuitable: it was invariably shrouded in thick mist. It was pulled down in 1946.)
The Governor of Hong Kong has not always been the highest-paid of the colonial chieftains. In 1930 he took home six thousand pounds; the Viceroy of India received three times as much, the Governor of Northern Ireland was paid two thousand pounds more, and he was pipped by all the Indian State Governors, the Governors-General of the Dominions, and the Governors of Malaya, Ceylon and Nigeria (the latter getting an extra ten pounds a week). But regard the list of those who fared less well—Jamaica, Baluchistan, Uganda, Tasmania, the Falkland Islands, Somaliland, and nearly forty others. The Governor of Hong Kong was paid six times as much as his opposite number in St Helena.
Today he is the best-paid Colonial Governor—hardly surprising, since his Chinese charges outnumber all the other colonial citizens by some seventy-two to one. He is driven in an unnumbered Rolls-Royce Phantom, the only Colonial Governor to be thus chauffeured (at least two of his colleagues, in Grand Turk and Port Stanley, make do with London taxis: the remainder tend to Fords. Not even a British government minister rates a Phantom. Only the royal family has that privilege). He is also supplied with a private government launch, the
Lady Maurine
—though one critic publicly voiced the view that some Governors needed neither the
Maurine
nor any other boat for the purpose of crossing the harbour. They behaved, he said, as though they thought they could walk on the water.
Almost every Governor of Hong Kong is favoured by having something named after him. Sir Henry Pottinger has a peak, Sir John Davis a mount, Sir Samuel Bonham a strand, Sir John Bowring a town. There is a Robinson Road, though Sir Hercules Robinson has not endeared himself to Chinese memory: he introduced an
early version of apartheid, ‘to protect the European and United States communities from the injury and inconvenience of intermixture with the Chinese’.
There is a Hennessy Road, too: Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Governor from 1877 to 1882, decided to give a number of senior government jobs to able Chinese, won all Chinese the permission to visit the colonial library, and ended up with the Cantonese appellation ‘Number One Good Friend’. The Colonial Office thought rather less of him for that, and packed him off to Mauritius.
And so the memorials go on: Northcote Hospital, Peel Rise, Sir Cecil’s Ride (after Sir Cecil Clementi), and Grantham (who served until 1958, and is quoted as saying that, ‘The Governor is next to the Almighty’) College. Nathan, Macdonnell, Kennedy, Bowen, Des Voeux, Lugard, May and Stubbs all rated roads as well: and no doubt the final incumbents will be so honoured—though with the colony reverting to the ministries of Peking, their distinction may not last for ever. (Even the most innocent of British Imperialists were seen to wince when they found their High Commission in Calcutta on a street renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani. Hong Kongers suspect only Hennessy Road will survive the revolution.)
One Governor is not commemorated thus, though he is not forgotten, and in fact has left the most impressive memorial of all. Lieutenant-General Rensuke Isogai was Governor of Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945, when it wearily accepted control by its third Imperial suzerain, Japan.
Hong Kong fell swiftly—though not as swiftly as Singapore a year later. Nor did its occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army cause particular alarm: it seemed to be accepted that since Hong Kong was a part of China, and Japan had occupied southern China, then it was inevitable—irritating, but inevitable—that Japan should march in. The troops arrived at the colony’s border on the day before the Imperial Air Force struck at Pearl Harbor (and on the day that the Hong Kong Chinese Women’s Clubs were holding their annual fancy-dress ball at the Peninsula Hotel). At the moment Honolulu was hit, so was the airfield at Kai Tak, and the troops poured in across the Shen Zhen River.
Five days later all British troops were pinned down on Hong Kong Island, and the Governor, Sir Mark Young, was arranging for the storage of his furniture and the more valuable paintings from the Government House collection. Sir Mark then went and hid in a cave, and tried to run his fast-evaporating colony from underground. He finally surrendered on Christmas Day, at a brief ceremony in the Peninsula Hotel, and was led away to prison in Manchuria.
General Isogai turned up his nose at Sir Mark’s Government House on Upper Albert Road. For one thing, it was ugly; for another, it was cracked, and looked about to fall down. ‘Your Governor must be a very brave man to have lived in a building in that condition,’ a Japanese official told one of the British administrators at the prison camp at Stanley (from where, the British insisted, the true colonial government still functioned). He decided to rebuild it. An architect from the South Manchurian Railway Company did the design, and Japanese engineers did the building. The result, Isogai’s memorial, is by far the largest Government House still inhabited by a British Governor, and it looks, as might be expected, just like a Japanese Imperial railway station.
Isogai never lived there, though he had equipped the mansion with rice-paper screens, tatami baths and raised floors. The British used it for the surrender ceremony. ‘It was a scene,’ wrote the
China Mail
, ‘etched against the background of a magnificently rejuvenated Government House, which gave the Japanese no opportunity of evading the humiliation of their position, and it was perhaps apt that the ceremony should have taken place in the only building which, judging by the spacious grandeur of its interior, had furnished their high ranking officers with moments of pride in achievement.’
Sir Mark Young came back in triumph: someone dug up a bottle of brandy that had been buried in the garden while the Japanese were closing in: and the Union flag, raised slowly by an able seaman on surrender day, flew over the colony again. Sir Mark tore out the strange baths and edible screens, levelled the floors and ordered old-rose cretonne from the Ministry of Works in London (which, despite wartime shortages, soon obliged; the colonies still com
manded some degree of precedence). Hong Kong and the New Territories were, as was to be said of the Falkland Islands four decades later, ‘once more under the Government desired by their inhabitants’.
It was a close-run thing, in fact. The Americans had long wanted Britain to give up Hong Kong, as they had abandoned Weihaiwei, to provide the East with a timely gesture of non-Imperial goodwill. At Yalta, President Roosevelt had suggested to Stalin that it be internationalised, like Trieste, and run as a free port. It was only because Franklin Gimson, the British Colonial Secretary, had the wit to make contact with London the moment he was released from Stanley Prison, and accept orders making him Lieutenant-Governor, that British dominion over the colony was assured.
‘Astrologically, September 1982 was the worst possible time to start negotiating on anything.’ Thus begins the most crucial chapter of a book written by a Canadian named Ted Gormick—‘the first in a series of astropolitical studies’ a preface assures readers—about the future, as directed by the stars, of the colony of Hong Kong. Astrology, superstition, augury and omen loom large in the consciousness of the average Chinese, and so Mr Gormick’s book sold well, and his words were listened to with some care.
September 1982 was when Margaret Thatcher arrived in Peking, to discuss the status of what the Chinese now called Xianggang, and what many Britons still fondly thought of as the farthest of the far-flung battle-lines. The talks were essential: the 1898 lease on the New Territories was due to expire in 1997, and anyone wanting to buy land there on a fifteen-year mortgage was going to have to be certain (as was his banker) of the ultimate fate of the land. The colony’s future had to be firmly established, and for more than mere reasons of pride or nostalgia.
But nothing about the talks was auspicious. Two months before a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party had publicly announced that his country intended to make Macao, Taiwan—and Hong Kong—into ‘special administrative regions’ of the People’s Republic, and that the various residents ought to prepare themselves
for life under Chinese sovereignty. When the talks began the ‘malignant influence’ of Saturn was in the air, and in fact had just moved into the transit of Venus, creating what Mr Gormick said was a ‘sour’ atmosphere, and a time when ‘some chickens came home to roost’. And then, when the talks had finished, Mrs Thatcher tripped over on the steps leading down from the Great Hall of the People, and fell on to her hands and knees (prompting the irreverent observation by some of the colony’s Cantonese papers that she had decided to perform the kowtow before the image of Chairman Mao). To Britons, the accident seemed of no consequence—President Ford had appeared to fall over almost every week, and President Reagan was not totally steady either. But to the Chinese, and to the stargazers, it was more than simple chance.