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  Many of the people, especially the Tankas whom everyone else despised, lived on boats. Many more lived clan by clan in the dozen or so walled villages which were characteristic of the region – the local Cantonese dialect was known as ‘the dialect of the walled villages’. Blue-tiled, moated, sometimes towered, with narrow symmetrical streets around temple and ancestral hall, these were apparently sufficiently well administered by the clans’ own leaders and associations. So long as they paid their taxes, the Imperial Government generally left them alone. At night the village watchman beat his reassuring gong every half hour, ending at dawn with a long roll of reveille. In the daytime the workers went out, nearly all of them landowners in one degree or another, to work the communal fields around. On the hills above, sheltered by correctly planted trees, the ancestral graves looked down from positions meticulously calculated by the geomancers.

  So the territory was by no means primitive or deserted when, in the first half of the nineteenth century, it became known to the wider world. Nor was it unvisited. On the contrary, a constant sea-traffic moved through the archipelago, or anchored in the magnificent deep harbour which lay at the foot of the peninsula. Raggety sails of sampans, proud banners of imperial warships, skulking pirate masts and the high superstructures of cargo junks – all these were to be seen perpetually moving among the waterways. Much of the commerce of the Pearl River Estuary passed this way to the northern Chinese provinces, Taiwan or Japan, and by the 1830s the indigenes had become familiar too with an alien category of shipping; shipping of another technology, another culture – schooners, brigs and lofty full-rigged ships, bringing to the archipelago fateful intimations of another world to the west.

  Guangzhou was the one port of China which maintained links with that other world. The Celestial Empire in Beijing officially classed all foreigners as Barbarians – Outer Barbarians, in fact – and all foreign States as mere tributaries, so that there was no diplomatic contact between China and other Powers, and very little intercourse. The Manchus themselves were not Chinese by origin, having come from Manchuria in the seventeenth century, but this did not inhibit their xenophobia, and they treated all other non-Chinese with an ineffable mixture of contempt and paternalism.

  Guangzhou in the south, however, as the chief port of China, had for centuries been in touch with the countries of south-east Asia, with India and with the Arabs. Since the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese had been allowed to establish a trading colony at Macao on the western shore of the Pearl Estuary, the city had also been in touch with Europe. All the nations of the west dreamed of tapping China’s fabled resources, and for many years several of them had been permitted to operate ‘factories’ or warehouses on the waterfront at Guangzhou, the only Chinese city where foreigners were allowed to live. They sold woollens, cottons, furs and a few manufactured goods, they bought silks, works of art, the emetic rhubarb and huge quantities of tea. During the winter trading-season they lived in a closely confined waterfront enclave outside the city walls – around the site of our White Swan Hotel, as it happens. In summer they withdrew to more comfortable quarters in Portuguese Macao. The officials of the Dragon-Emperor treated them at best with condescension, at worst with a kind of ritual contumely, calling them Devils and Demons.

  At the end of the 1830s the merchants of four foreign Powers maintained factories at Guangzhou – the British, the Americans, the French and the Dutch. Of these businessmen much the most numerous, truculent and successful were the British, to whom China seemed a putative extension, if only in commercial terms, of their highly profitable Indian Empire. They were in a mood of dynamic confidence. The power of new technology was behind them, and they felt themselves to be on a winning streak. In particular, victory in the Napoleonic wars had made their nation indisputably dominant in the East, both the French and the Dutch competition having been largely eliminated, and the establishment of Singapore as an outpost of the British East India Company had seemed to promise the opening of all the China seas to their trade and influence.

  The Company had lately abandoned its official monopoly of Anglo-Chinese trade, and there were now some thirty British firms operating from the Guangzhou waterfront. In theory at least they were supervised by a Chief Superintendent of Trade, appointed by the British Government and known to the Chinese as ‘The Barbarian Eye’.1 By now the pattern of their trade had shifted, and they depended largely upon illicit dealings in Indian opium ‘foreign mud’ – as the Chinese called it, eagerly lighting their pipes, for though it was banned in China it was enormously in demand.

  The growth and sale of opium was officially organized in British India, and traders brought vast quantities of it up the Pearl River, selling it at handsome profit to Chinese entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact there was not much else British traders could sell to the Chinese, who were self-sufficient in most things and scornful of western innovations, so that the opium traffic was developed with relentless energy. The drugs illegally sold to China were worth twice as much as all the legal commodities put together, and without them Britain’s imports of China tea could have been paid for only in specie. Opium became, so it is said, not only the principal export of the Indian Empire, but actually the largest single article of international commerce anywhere in the world.

  Much skulduggery was involved, since the trade was forbidden even in Guangzhou; but opium or no opium, in any case relations between the Chinese and the foreigners, especially the British, were equivocal. The drug trade was only a symptom. These were the early years of a fateful confrontation, between east and west, between empires, between cultures, and each side was antagonized by the alien ways of the other. The westerners were intent upon expansion, commercial, political, even spiritual: the Chinese were determined to preserve their own status quo. One side was profoundly conservative and lethargic, the other vigorously radical and aggressive.

  Pinpricks, frustrations and anomalies abounded. On the one hand the traders were strictly circumscribed by Chinese Government regulations, forbidding them for instance to learn any Chinese language, or to bring their wives to Guangzhou, or to arm themselves, or to enter the walled city proper, or to ride in sedan chairs, or to deal with any Chinese merchants other than those officially appointed, or to go boating for pleasure without express permission. On the other hand the whole relationship was riddled with mutual corruption, and the Chinese generally turned a venal blind eye not only to infringements of the residential rules, but also to the all too obvious trade in narcotics. The traders constantly agitated for greater commercial freedom, the Chinese reiterated their reminders that the Outer Barbarians were there purely on sufferance, and should be humbly grateful for what they had – ‘Tremble and Obey’, as the imperial rescripts used to say, ‘Oppose not.’ British attempts to open diplomatic relations, and to establish normal trading practices throughout China, were haughtily rebuffed. Fortunes were made on both sides; enmities and friendships too.

  Matters had been more or less like this for half a century, give or take a crisis or two. There was growing anxiety in China, though, about the debilitating effects of opium on the populace, and in 1839 a mandarin of unaccustomed probity, Lin Ze-xu, arrived in Guangzhou as Imperial High Commissioner of the Court of Heaven. He had specific instructions to stamp out the opium trade, and the sly old equilibrium was now shattered. Besides banning all opium imports, Lin demanded the surrender of the 20,291 chests of the drug the merchants had in stock.

  He little knew what historical forces he was unleashing. The Chief Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot RN,1 decided to the contempt of the merchants that the chests must be handed over, and they were publicly destroyed. This was, however, by no means the end of the affair. The infuriated businessmen withdrew from Guangzhou to emergency headquarters on their vessels anchored at the mouth of the estuary (their ‘devil-ships’, as the Chinese called them). Lin forbade any Chinese citizen to supply them with food and water, Elliot responded by having the Royal Navy open fire
on three Chinese war-junks, and so a casus belli was provided.

  It was welcome in London. Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary in Lord Melbourne’s Whig Government in London, viewed the rest of the world rather as the Chinese did themselves, and his chief political purpose was the furtherance of British trade wherever the British wanted it. The two principal British Guangzhou merchants, the Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson, had long pressed him for action to force the Chinese into the comity of international trade – a ‘forward policy’, as the jargon of the day had it, to be sustained by the threat of military violence. Jardine had now retired to Britain and had been elected to Parliament, and seizing upon the affair of the opium chests he drew up for Palmerston a battle-plan for the humiliation of the Celestial Kingdom.

  Palmerston obliged. Gunboat diplomacy was authorized. Gladstone, in Opposition, warned that going to war with China on such pretexts would cover Great Britain in permanent disgrace – ‘we … are pursuing objects at variance both with justice and religion’ – but he was isolated even within his own party. British naval squadrons stormed the forts guarding the approaches to Guangzhou, and at the same time seized the islands of Zhoushan, at the mouth of the Yangtze far to the north. The Chinese were forced into negotiation, and acting without authority from London, the sensible Captain Elliot achieved a suspension of hostilities with a convention of his own design.

  His chief purpose was to acquire out of the fracas physical possession of a piece of China – a territorial base, under British sovereignty, where British traders could arrange their Chinese profits well away from Beijing’s preposterous dictates or the equivocations of Guangzhou. This was not a new idea. The British made much use of Macao, the only foreign foothold on the China coast, and had often coveted a similar enclave for themselves. A permanent British military presence, it was argued, would soon bring the Chinese to their senses, and open up their country to all the blessings of Free Trade and Christianity. Palmerston himself had demanded the acquisition of ‘one or more sufficiently large and properly situated islands’ off the Chinese coast – Taiwan had been suggested, or Zhoushan – while a few extremists had their eyes on Guangzhou itself.

  Elliot’s ideas were more modest. Among the scattered islands of the Ladrone chain there was a small, hilly, treeless granite island known to the British as Hong Kong. The name was variously interpreted as meaning Incense Port, Fragrant Harbour, or Aunty Heung, commemorating a legendary female pirate; the way the British pronounced and transliterated it is said to reflect the pronunciation of the Tanka people, who first identified the island for them – when other Chinese people said the name, it sounded to western ears more like Hernkong, or even Shiankang. The place was familiar to British seamen because a cataract on its south-western shore, easily seen from the sea, was a useful source of fresh water. This island, at 114°10’E, 22°15’N, the Chief Superintendent of Trade now demanded, and the humiliated Chinese agreed to surrender.

  Its area was twenty-six square miles, and it was separated from the Kowloon mainland only by a mile-wide strait. It was shaped rather like a multi-clawed and corrugated crab. Its landlords were of the Tang clan, and it supported no more than six or seven thousand inhabitants, many of them living on boats. The island was less than 100 miles from Guangzhou; the Kowloon strait provided a superb deep-water harbour. From here, Elliot thought, the British Empire and its merchants could safely conduct all their business with the Chinese Empire, service and supervise their trade along the China coast, and establish a permanent outpost of British authority in the Far East. On 26 January 1841, a British naval party landed on the north-west shore of the island and raised the Union Jack. Jardine, Matheson and several other Guangzhou firms presently followed, land auctions were held, and the new possession was declared a Free Port. All British and foreign subjects were to be afforded the security of British law; Chinese were to be governed according to the laws and customs of China, ‘every description of torture excepted’.

  Unexpectedly, Palmerston was not pleased. He thought Elliot should have followed up a British victory with far more exciting demands, opening up all China, perhaps, to western activities. Who had ever heard of Hong Kong? It was no more than a barren rock with hardly a house on it. Queen Victoria and her husband, though surprised at the ‘unaccountably strange conduct of Chas. Elliot’, were rather amused by the acquisition, and thought their daughter ‘ought to be called Princess of Hong Kong in addition to Princess Royal’; but the Royal Navy considered its victories wasted and the British merchants of the China trade, deploring the lost chance of trading concessions all over China, sarcastically belittled the new possession. ‘A street on a gigantic scale is already far advanced,’ sneered their newspaper the Canton Press, ‘leading from an intended public office to a contemplated public thoroughfare; and we now only require houses, inhabitants, and commerce to make this settlement one of the most valuable of our possessions.’ Elliot left the China seas in ignominy, and was packed off to be British Chargé d’Affaires in the brand-new Republic of Texas.’1

  But the thing was done. Actually both sides presently repudiated the convention, and fighting broke out again; but in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Anglo-Chinese War in a much more Palmerstonian way, accepted the Hong Kong fait accompli. Besides extracting trading rights and privileges for British merchants in five Chinese ports (the so-called Treaty Ports), and arranging compensation for all the lost opium, and scrupulously ignoring the matter of future drug trading, which the British Government maintained was none of its business, and establishing, in principle anyway, conventional official relations between the two nations – besides all this, the treaty confirmed the transfer of Hong Kong from the Chinese Empire to the British:

  It being obviously necessary and desirable that British subjects should have some Port whereat they may careen and refit their Ships, when required, and keep stores for that purpose, His Majesty the Emperor of China cedes to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain the Island of Hong Kong to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors and to be governed by such Laws and Regulations as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain shall see fit to direct.

  Except for Macao, which had never been formally ceded to Portuguese sovereignty, and some frontier strips transferred to Russia in the far north, it was the first segment of Chinese soil ever to be handed over to Outer Barbarians. It is said that before signing the document of accession the Emperor Dao Guang (‘Glorious Rectitude’) was seen by courtiers incredulously wandering his palace in the night, murmuring ‘impossible, impossible’, and repeatedly sighing.

  Gladstone’s ‘disgraceful’ war had done it, opened a few more doors into the Middle Kingdom and planted a British colony on its edge. Hong Kong formally became a British possession on 26 June 1843, and its founding Governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, declared his conviction that the island would very soon become ‘a vast emporium of commerce and wealth’. The British China merchants soon came to see its possibilities too. ‘Hong Kong’, exulted an editorial in their newspaper now – ‘deep water and a free port for ever!’

  Twenty years later, after another and still fiercer conflict with the Manchus, the British enlarged their property. The Convention of Peking, ending the Second Anglo-Chinese War in 1860, brought them the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula (which they knew well because they liked to play cricket there) and the nearby islet called Stonecutters Island, three square miles in all which gave them secure control of the harbour and its sea-approaches. At first a perpetual lease was extracted from the Chinese, later this became absolute cession – absolute except only that, we are told, the British undertook not to damage or remove the boulder honouring the poor little Song Emperor on its hill beside the sea.

  Forty years on again, and they made further demands. By now it was the heyday of imperialism, and several other Powers were grabbing parts of China for themselves. The French leased Qinzhou Bay in the south. The Germans established a pro
tectorate over Jiaozhou Bay, on the coast near Beijing. The Russians seized Lushun, in the north, renaming it Port Arthur. The Japanese acquired Taiwan. Professing to fear attacks from these rivals, in 1898 the British extracted two new concessions for themselves. Far to the north they got a lease on the territory of Wei-hai-wei, to be held as long as the Russians occupied Port Arthur; and at Hong Kong they acquired the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula and its immediate hinterland, together with all the rocks and islands of the archipelago which lay immediately around Hong Kong. These extensions to the colony they called at first the New Territory, later the New Territories.

  This time they did not demand outright cession, and it was agreed that the New Territories should be leased by the Chinese Empire to the British for a period of ninety-nine years, beginning in 1898 and ending in 1997. So at a stroke the subsequent history of Hong Kong was decreed, for as the twentieth century proceeded, and the colony developed, it became clear that without the New Territories Hong Kong itself could not long survive. It thus became a finite possession – the only such thing in the British Empire – with a terminal date already fixed. Just as the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, counted off on his calendar the days that remained for the Raj, so in 1898 British Hong Kong, had it realized the truth, might have started ticking off the years to extinction.

  For the time being the New Territories gave substance and security to the colony, increasing its total land area to 390 square miles – rather bigger than Madeira, considerably smaller than the Faeroe Islands – and adding all those Tangs, Pangs and Lius, all those clannish villagers and boat-people to its population. Even so, for many years Hong Kong never lived up to Pottinger’s prophecy, and it sometimes seemed that Lord Palmerston had been right in the first place. The colony plodded along. Though great fortunes were made there by enterprising merchants, after the abolition of the opium trade China was never quite such a cornucopia again, and anyway the cosmopolitan treaty port of Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze, developed into a far richer and livelier place than Hong Kong. Visitors in the 1920s and 1930s found the colony rather a bore, and the Japanese, who occupied it during the Second World War, never did much with it.