‘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 commanded 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.
There was less than total surprise, then—though there was great dismay—when Mrs Thatcher proceeded to make a diplomatic blunder. She arrived in Hong Kong to tell the citizenry something of the talks she had had in the Chinese capital. She was in a tough mood—possibly she was still flushed by the great military victory in another colony, the Falkland Islands—when she made two declarations: the treaties that had given Britain dominion over these few square miles of China were in her view ‘valid in international law’, and China’s honour would be impugned if it thought otherwise since ‘if a country will not stand by one treaty, it will not stand by another’. Britain, she said, ‘keeps her treaties’. Moreover, Britain had a responsibility to the people of Hong Kong; and she was proud of what had been achieved by Hong Kong under British administration.
Peking was outraged. As David Bonavia, The Times man in China, was to write: ‘Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short space of time by a single person.’ The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market—and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng—went berserk. People began to wonder if the People’s Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call ‘British Imperialism’s plunder of Chinese territory’.
In the event it was the professional, often maligned diplomats who saved the Prime Minister’s reputation. For the next two years a team of Foreign Office men, all speakers of putonghua (Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China’s highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fishing Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China’s firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were ‘unequal’—signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a quid pro quo from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain ‘in perpetuity’); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain’s responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm assurance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations.
The result was a document signed in Peking shortly before Christmas 1984, by Mrs Thatcher. Hong Kong would, indeed, become a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic. There would be an elected legislature (something the colony had not enjoyed under British rule) and perhaps an elected Governor. The legal system would remain precisely as it is. All the freedoms commonly accepted by Hong Kongers—the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom of association and religion and choice of employment—would be guaranteed. Capitalism would remain the economic dogma of the region, provided that was what the local people wanted. The Hong Kong dollar would remain in circulation, and would be convertible. All land leases would be honoured. The citizenry would be able to carry British passports (though of the less-than-entirely-worthwhile kind—they would not enable their holders to settle in Britain, and would to all intents and purposes be regarded by British immigration officers as alien travel documents) and would enjoy some degree of British consular protection, long after Peking took control of the territory.
All these provisions would be preserved until at least 30th June 2047. A Joint Liaison Group, made up of officials from both London and Peking, would supervise the arrangements for the transition; the group would begin work in 1985, and would cease to exist in the year 2000, once Peking was firmly established as ruler once again.
The document was welcomed as a diplomatic triumph. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, a man with a reputation for weakness (being attacked by Sir Geoffrey in the House of Commons was like ‘being savaged by a dead sheep’, a member of the Labour Opposition Denis Healey once said), was the hero of the hour. At least, he was in London. The people of Hong Kong were told their objections would be noted, if they had any (and a team was set up to note them, and the Whitehall mandarin Sir Patrick Nairne, now an Oxford college principal and head of the Italic Handwriting Society, was sent to monitor the monitors), but that the agreement was not about to be changed. A few did object. Some, who had good cause to appreciate the mercurial nature of the Chinese leadership, said they were deeply sceptical—how, they asked, could the British, in all good faith, negotiate with the heirs to the Cultural Revolution, the practitioners of dogmatic madness? How could anyone be trusted? Others were angry about their own status—why had the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians been admitted to the cosy club of full British nationality, and the Cantonese of Hong Kong specifically excluded, and rendered into some national half-caste status, neither properly British, nor properly Chinese, nor even properly of an entity called Hong Kong?
A few leader writers in the British newspapers agreed with them, and so did a clutch of Members of Parliament, and some in the Upper House, too. Sir Patrick Nairne, with the utmost courtesy and care, took note of all the objections, agreed that they had been considered most fairly by the monitoring team, and wrote a report for Parliament. A Bill was presented, a vote was taken, an Act was passed, the Treaty of Nanking and the Convention of Peking 1860 were each effectively rescinded, and Hong Kong began its inexorable progress out of the British Empire, and into the fathomless mysteries of Special Communist Administration.
The rest of the Empire, and a gaggle of Commonwealth brother-nations, smelled fortune in the air. People would never stay in Hong Kong, they reasoned; companies would bail out, would place their funds in countries that had a guaranteed future (guaranteed non-Communist, that is), send their personnel to more stable outposts under Imperial control or influence. And so, like vultures (or like lifeboat crews, depending on the viewpoint) they flew in to Kai Tak—the Caymanian bankers, the tax-shelter aficionados from Grand Turk, officials offering passports from Fiji or citizenship in Canada or resident status in Bermuda and the Bahamas. There were uncountable billions of dollars in Hong Kong that could well be looking for new homes: everyone seemed, reasonably enough, to want to help find them.
In December 1938, W. H. Auden wrote of Hong Kong:
&
nbsp; The leading characters are wise and witty
Substantial men of birth and education
With wide experience of administration
They know the manners of a modern city
Only the servants enter unexpected
Their silence has a fresh dramatic use
Here in the East the bankers have erected
A worthy temple to the Comic Muse
The servants, and the bankers. Always the servants triumph in the end. They are on the verge of doing so now, though the Europeans—the bankers, the dealers, the merchants, the taipans—seem to do so for the moment.
It was not so long ago that the taipans, the great men of the Oriental Empire, really did rule Hong Kong. Their names—Jardine, Swire, Hutchison, Gilman, Dodwell, Marden, Kadoorie—really did cause the colony to tremble and obey. Power did once rest with the Jockey Club, Jardine’s, the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, and the Governor—in that order. Hong Kong Land, China Light and Power, the Hong Kong Club, the South China Morning Post—these were the pillars of established order, and woe betide any who dared forget.
But behind all these grand panjandrums of the Western Empire there was always—though not always heard, or recognised—the dull, thunderous murmur of the Eastern, mightier Empire of the Chinese. This may have been a British enclave, run by Sherwood Foresters and Grenadiers, flown over by the Royal Air Force, sailed around by the Royal Navy (though only in twenty-five-year-old Ton class minesweepers today), and policed by officers from Glasgow and Bristol and West Hartlepool; this may have long been run under the stern authority of the Union flag, all blanco, brass and tropical whites, goose-feathers and the Anthem and the Queen’s birthday party; this may have been the base for a hundred thousand temporary merchants with their gin-and-tonics, their cricket matches, their yachts and their bored wives; but this was also, irrevocably, unmistakably and magnificently, no other place than China.