The opium trade worked to everyone’s advantage—except the Chinese mandarinate. The British had been alarmed for some time that the balance of trade between London and Peking was weighted heavily in the favour of China. The English taste for tea, and the London public’s liking for silk and later, more unaccountably, for Chinese rhubarb, caused an enormous outflow of silver from the treasury coffers (the Chinese, mistrusting every barbarian product, including paper money, insisted on convertible silver in payment). The British tried to sell them wool—but poor Chinese wore padded cotton, and the rich wore silk and fur, and the wool project was a fiasco. Only the export of Indian opium, it was swiftly realised, would bring that silver back.
And so, at the great factories in Patna and Ghazipur, opium was made into six-inch-wide ‘cakes’, placed carefully in crates made of mango-wood, and sent downriver to the Company’s warehouses on the Hooghly. There it was auctioned to the agents already established on the China coast—of which, pre-eminent, and established since 1832 in both Canton and Macao, was the firm of grocers and traders established by the legendary Scotsmen, William Jardine and James Matheson. If any commercial entity can be said to have created Hong Kong—a classic reversal of the axiom that ‘trade follows the flag’—it is the firm that, until 1984, continued to dominate the colony’s reputation as dealer and trader—Jardine, Matheson and Co.
The arrangements for getting the illegal Indian opium into Canton were byzantine in the extreme, and depended largely on the assiduous corrupting of the local Chinese officials—in particular the Canton trade superintendent who was called Hai Kwan Pu, but whom the British insisted on calling the Hoppo. He, like everyone else, took his cut—the term then was that he ‘squeezed’ those below him in the trading chain, and was in turn squeezed by those above. So the Hoppo squeezed the Canton merchants (the ‘Hongs’) who alone were authorised to do business with the round-eyed barbarians; the Governor of Canton squeezed the Hoppo; the Viceroy squeezed the Governor and, it must be assumed, the Forbidden City in faraway Peking squeezed the Viceroy. It was all strictly illegal, of course; but before long British India was selling 50,000 cases of opium a year to the Chinese, and poppy products were providing a healthy ten per cent of India’s annual revenue.
The rules were mysterious, and complicated. The East Indiamen would sail to the mouth of the Pearl River, and to the island of Lin Tin, halfway between Macao and the then barely inhabited (and wholly Chinese) island of Hong Kong. Here a score of floating warehouses were moored for the exchange of the contraband: opium cakes were taken from the ships, tea and rhubarb were loaded in their place. Barges then took the opium upriver—through a narrow, well defended defile known as the Bogue, to the port of Whampoa, and the foreign factories in Canton.
The factories—warehouses, presided over by foreign factors—were the only places in Canton where barbarians were permitted to live, and then only for the trading season of the summer. They lived well, and drank furiously—especially of a cocktail known as Canton Gunpowder, mixed from alcohol, sugar, tobacco juice and arsenic. Jardine’s had a factory in Canton, and came to dominate the opium trade into China, and the export of silks and teas to London.
But then the Manchus decided to crack down—less on moral grounds, more for the simple reason that opium imports were beginning to cause a serious haemorrhage in the Imperial silver reserves. In 1839 a tough, honest opium-hater named Lin Tse Hsu, a man who had already cleaned up the drugs business in his home provinces of Hunan and Kwang Tung, was sent down to Canton: he ordered all opium supplies to be surrendered, and warned that anyone found in possession of the drug or of an opium pipe would be strangled in public. And he tackled his British opposite number, Captain Charles Elliot, recently appointed as Superintendent of Trade in China (and, ironically, as opposed to opium as was Mr Lin). Elliot was ordered to cease all trading in opium, under pain of the most severe punishment.
London was outraged. Whatever Lord Palmerston might have thought about opium itself (and there is no evidence he objected—after all, it was regularly included in medicines available in London, and the only peculiar dimension was that the Chinese smoked it, but didn’t they wear pigtails, and write from bottom to top, and do other odd things too?) opium trade was free trade. Protection of free trade had been the lynchpin of British foreign policy for forty years: it was imperative that the trade in opium be allowed to continue. (Palmerston’s public stance was actually rather different: he said he understood Mr Lin’s objections, but would brook no violence done by Mr Lin’s henchmen to subjects of the British Crown, in the event that the dispute over the drug became heated.)
Violence did, indeed, break out. Lin closed Canton to foreign trade; Lord Napier, who was British Superintendent of Trade at Canton, took a pair of frigates upriver, ran the gauntlet of the Bogue (with Elliot on an unarmed cutter, sheltering from the gunfire under an umbrella) but was turned back at Whampoa. Lin then seized 20,000 cases of British opium, and became involved in a furious row about compensation to its owners. Then, while that was under discussion, in July 1839, there was a drunken brawl in Kowloon, and British and American sailors were blamed for killing a villager. Lin demanded a scapegoat for public strangling. Elliot refused. Lin occupied Macao, and threw out all Britons—whereupon they retreated to their ships and anchored in the Fragrant Harbour on the far side of the Pearl River—the harbour of Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, back in London, William Jardine—known in Cantonese as ‘iron-headed old rat’ ever since he failed to turn around after being hit from behind with a club at the Petition Gate in Canton—was advising Palmerston on just what to do. James Matheson had advocated force once before, but the Duke of Wellington had said no; on this occasion Palmerston agreed that a task force must be sent, to protect the Empire’s trading interests, and to ensure the financial stability of the Government of India. By December 1839 Cabinet had concurred: the Jardine paper was an accepted battle plan: a fleet would sail for the East, and rendezvous with Captain Elliot’s tiny flotilla, in the harbour at Hong Kong. The mountainous little island, and its sheltered harbour to the north, may not yet have become a British colony. It was, however, a British base.
The task force, assembled in Madras and Calcutta, arrived in Chinese waters in June 1840. It was massive—sixteen men-o’-war, thirty-one other vessels—and it struck fear into the Chinese.
The Royal Navy’s demands were essentially Jardine’s demands: an apology for the insult at Canton, full payment for the costs of this regrettably necessary expeditionary force, reimbursement for the 20,000 cases of opium seized by Lin, and free trade guarantees at five Chinese ports, and no further dealings through the Canton Hongs. The demands were put, with the persuasive addition of cannonfire, to the Chinese at Amoy, at Ting-hai, and Pei-Ho: within weeks the approaches both to Peking and the Yangtze ports were secured by the British. Troops landed on Chusan, less than a hundred miles from Shanghai, and prepared to march into the mainland. The Navy moved down to the Pearl River and seized the forts guarding the Bogue, thus securing all access to Whampoa, and to Canton itself.
The Chinese had no choice, and capitulated. The Emperor’s representative sullenly agreed to the Convention of Cheun Pee—already existing in draft form, so confident were the British of eventual triumph. All of Jardine’s demands were met, including the additional humiliation: the island of Hong Kong, and the harbour to its north, were to be ceded in perpetuity to the British.
That was on 20th January. Five days later Sir Edward Belcher and the officers of HMS Sulphur landed on Hong Kong Island, and drank a toast on Possession Mount, and gave three cheers for Her Majesty. On the twenty-sixth the full squadron arrived from the north: as a contemporary report put it, ‘the Union Jack was hoisted on Possession Mount, and formal possession taken of the island by Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer, under a feu-de-joie from the marines and the Royal Salute from the ships-of-war’. Five days later still all native residents of Hong Kong were told that, whether or not they approved, they
were now subjects of the Crown, under the benign protection of the Queen of England.
It was still not clear that the island was to be British for ever. The Chinese were still fighting. The Emperor declared that he would ‘seek another occasion for attacking and destroying [the British] at Hong Kong, and thus restore the ancient territory’. But a year later, after reverses that rubbed salt into his wounds, the Emperor was forced to a final, abject surrender. Nanking was about to be attacked; Shanghai had already fallen. He had no choice.
The famous Treaty of Nanking was the outcome of this sad occasion. Ratifications were exchanged on 26th June 1843—the official birth of the colony. It stated baldly that the Island of Hong Kong was ‘to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors, and to be governed by such laws as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain shall see fit to direct’. (In fact the draft Treaty had left a blank at the name of the island to be annexed. Some in London favoured Chusan, with its proximity to Shanghai. But Jardine and Matheson favoured Hong Kong, and that was the name eventually inked in to the document.) The Chinese were bitterly dejected, and closed the meeting with their conquerors with the haunting words: ‘All shall be granted—it is settled—it is finished.’
But it wasn’t quite. Two more opium wars followed, and not until 1860 was all the perpetual cession completed. The tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, and the tiny Stonecutter’s Island, were given up, for all eternity, when a joint Franco-British force was at the gates of Peking, and had already sacked the Emperor’s Summer Palace, and forced the proud and ancient nation to its knees. By the end of that year Britain had absolute control of the finest port in the Orient, the perfect base for trade, for quartering the Royal Navy, and for exerting dominion over all the East.
But it was not enough. Hong Kong Island soon became wretchedly overcrowded, and the paranoia of Empire—the feeling that a piece of British territory was never big enough, or secure enough, and that there was always a mountain or an isthmus or a harbour from which it could be attacked by the barbarian hordes—soon led to demands for its expansion. The Chinese Emperor concurred, though from a position of great military weakness. Not one he was prepared to display to his subjects, though: he ended his address to them with the characteristically Imperial warning—‘Let every one tremble and obey! An Important Special Notice!’
The agreement that was signed in Peking, in quadruplicate, in both Mandarin and English, on ‘the twentyfirst day of the fourth moon of the twentyfourth year of Kuang Hsu’ (or, more prosaically, 9th June 1898) was designed for the short-term gain of the colony. But unknown to all concerned the agreement held the seeds of the colony’s ultimate destruction. It was called simply ‘the Convention of Peking, 1898’ it allowed Britain to lease an extra 350 square miles of Chinese territory—which the British insisted on calling the New Territories, even when they were quite old—and it can be regarded as one of the most significant and underrated documents in British Imperial history.
It was signed on the one side by two officials of the Tsungli Yamen—which is what the Chinese then called their Foreign Office—and on the other by the great Imperialist figure of the British Minister in Peking, Sir Claude MacDonald, who was known as ‘Gunboat’ MacDonald and was described by The Times correspondent as ‘the type of military officer rolled out a mile at a time and lopped off in six-foot lengths’. (His colleague in Peking at the time was another celebrated personage, Mr H. Bax-Ironside, whom everyone knew as Iron Backside.)
But the land was not Britain’s to keep. The Convention of Peking was only a lease, ninety-nine years long. It had come into force on 1st July 1898. It was due to expire at midnight on 30th June 1997. The British may have liked to regard the extra real estate as a new possession, an integral part of the Empire on which the sun would never set; some academics said that the phrase ‘ninety-nine years’ was a cunning Chinese device that meant ‘for ever and ever’ without actually saying so. The Colonial Office wrote papers insisting that Hong Kong had been expanded in just the same way as any other colony might have been. Territory had merely been added, for British convenience. The New Territories, a memorandum said, were ‘part and parcel of Her Majesty’s Colony of Hong Kong, in like manner and for all intents and purposes as if they had originally formed part of said Colony’. They may have liked to regard the land as such—but if they did so, they engaged in the most wishful thinking, and were to get their eventual come-uppance. The Chinese are a patient people, and they have long memories.
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’.