Hong Kong (2 page)

T
HE TRAVELLER IN CHINA SEES MANY MARVELS. FROM
Harbin in the bitter north to Urumqi among the deserts of Xinjiang, from the frontiers of the Soviet Union to the marches of India, the way is marked everywhere by spectacle and anomaly. There are landscapes fragile or colossal, climates of infinite range, hideous cities, magnificent rivers. There are pagodas and porcelain bridges, mighty dams, acrobats, camels, flaming red banners, unimaginably dismal hamlets and glitzy tourist hotels. Venerable junks sail by, steam engines snort at railway stations, black limousines sweep through portentous gateways towards offices of incalculable power. The most astonishing thing of all, though, lies at the southern edge of the Chinese land mass, just below the Tropic of Cancer, where the Zhu Jiang or Pearl River debouches through Guangdong Province into the South China Sea.

Every night at ten a ship called
Xinghu
sails down the estuary from Guangzhou (Canton as it used to be transliterated), and taking passage on it suggests to me an evening in the theatre. Within sight of its wharf stands one of those smart tourist hotels, the White Swan, a convenient place to dine before the performance, and at the dock gates officials dispassionately gesture you through like ushers in the aisle. The formalities are brief, and hardly have you checked into your brown-panelled cabin (flowered Thermos flask of hot tea comforting beside the
bunk) than you feel the pulse of the engines vibrating the ship, and see through your porthole the lights of the city slipping away.

You are likely to be the only European on board, and your Chinese fellow-passengers look altogether of a kind. Pushy old ladies in high-collared black, exquisitely wide-eyed children, worn-looking mothers and robust anxious fathers – all are buried beneath similarly shambled baggage, move about at a kind of uniform trot, and seem less like real people than statistics on the move. Most of them settle below deck to gossip, gamble at cards, eat or sleep, and if you go up above as the ship steams down-channel you will find yourself almost alone in the dark. There is hardly a sound up there, only the swish of the wind and the beat of the turbines far below, but all round you unexplained lights go swimming by, lights of sampans or of freighters, fishermen’s lights, torch-beams out of nowhere, the forty-watt lights of the towns and villages that line the estuary on either side, growing more faint and more distant as the river broadens towards the sea.

It is like the hush in the theatre that succeeds the overture. The dark grows darker, a few shadowy figures lean over the rail here and there along the decks, and you may feel, as you feel in the dress circle at another kind of show, a frisson of expectancy. Perhaps you may be tempted to go to your cabin and sleep, but if you happen to be writing a book you will prefer to stick it out on deck, huddling yourself against the cold until the first light dawns.

You nod off, of course, despite yourself, but after what seems no more than a moment or two suddenly it strikes you that the engines have stopped, and the ship is lying motionless and silent in a thick white mist. Fog-horns sound now and then. There is nothing to be seen now, unless out of the obscurity a solitary sampan comes chugging by, or you can just make out the dim shape of a freighter passing. The ship
Xinghu
seems to be dead. The water is quite still. The mist is of a swirling stagey kind, like mists in TV videos. You might be anywhere, or nowhere at all.

But then like the rising of the theatre’s curtain the fog begins to lift, rolling slowly upwards from the sea, and you realize that you are already at anchor off another port. First the ships show, one beyond the other, hundreds of ships, ships of all sizes, ships of all shapes, cluttered about with lighters and apparently floating not in the water but in the mist itself. Then on each side of you buildings start to appear, speckled still with the lights of the night before – not those pale lights of the estuary, but bright, extravagant lights, in buildings of concrete, steel and mirror-glass, with advertisements on them, and forests of aerials.

Up goes the mist, taller and taller those buildings turn out to be, each higher than the one before – pressing upon one another, looking over each others’ shoulders, immense clean buildings of white, or silver, or even gold, with masses of portholed windows, or great cross-girders, with jagged rooflines and spiky towers – up the city heights until green mountainsides appear behind, and there are white villas everywhere, and snaking roads, and white domes alone on summits, and the rising sun, shining clean through the windows of an apartment block on a high ridge, suddenly seems to set the whole structure afire, blazing all white and red above the sea.

So like a fanfare, as the vapours are burnt away, a last phenomenon of China is revealed to you; a futuristic metropolis, like something from another age or another sensibility, stacked around a harbour jammed fantastically with ships – the busiest, the richest and the most truly extraordinary of all Chinese cities, identified in the new orthography as Xianggang.

It is more than a city actually, being an archipelago of some 235 rocks and islands attendant upon a squat mountainous peninsula. Humped or supine, silent in the haze, to the south and west the islands seem to lie bewitched along the dim blue coast of China, and to the north a line of mainland hills stands like a rampart – the hills of Kowloon, or Nine Dragons. With luck the sea, when the mist disperses, will be a tremendous emerald green, and if one looks with a sufficiently selective eye it is easy enough to imagine the place as it was when it first entered world history 150 years ago.

In those days the Ladrones or Pirate Islands, together with the neighbouring peninsula, formed part of the San On district of Guangdong Province. This was not a very important corner of the Qing or Manchu Empire, which believed itself to be uniquely and divinely supreme among all the kingdoms of the earth, but whose capital was 1,500 miles away in Beijing – at least a fortnight’s travel by the fastest messenger. The original inhabitants of the district had probably not been Chinese at all, but aboriginals of the stock called Yao, allegedly descended from miscegenation between a dog and a princess, who had left mystic monoliths here and there. Neither on the archipelago nor on the peninsula had there ever been a settlement larger than a small market town or a prudently fortified village.

The place had few resources, and some 80 per cent of the land,
whether insular or mainland, was too mountainous to farm. The all-but-tropical climate was trying. At its best, especially in the autumn, it could be perfection, but it could also be terribly hot and humid, and sometimes the sky was overcast for weeks at a time. Typhoons were fierce and frequent, and besides malaria, cholera, typhoid and bubonic plague, the people were subject to a more particular horror called Xhu Mao Bing, the Bristle Disease, whose victims found spiky bristles like pig-hairs (sometimes apparently fish-scales, too) sprouting through their skin.

An esoteric wildlife roamed the hills and frequented the waters. There were leopards, tigers, badgers, Chinese otters, pangolins, wild cats and boars; but there were also crab-eating mongooses, an unusual variety of newt, 200 kinds of butterfly and thirty-two kinds of snake, including the Flower-Pot Snake, the White-Lipped Viper and the Rock Python, which grew up to sixteen feet long and could swallow a dog. There were fish like the Golden Thread, the Lizard-Fish, the Big-eye and the Croaker, together with several varieties of venomous water-serpent. The bird life was rich and varied (the black-and-white pied kingfisher was found nowhere else), the wild-flowers included many species of orchid, and among the shrubs of the mountains grew the rare and profitable Incense Tree.

Only two moderately momentous historical events had ever occurred in these parts. One was the Great Evacuation of the seventeenth century, when during a war against Taiwan the Manchus removed inland all the inhabitants of the San On coastal regions, some 16,000 people, and ordered the destruction of all sea-shore crops and properties – an early example of ‘scorched-earth’ tactics which was to be remembered for many generations in the local folklore. The other was the flight to the Kowloon Peninsula, in 1277, of the child-emperor Duan Zong, the penultimate ruler of the Song dynasty: driven south by usurping Mongols he spent a year in the district with his fugitive court and his half-starved army before being harried to his death at the age of nine, and an inscribed boulder on a hilltop commemorates his pathetic passage.

Remote and inconsequential though the territory was, in the first decades of the nineteenth century scattered communities existed throughout the islands, and in the fertile flatlands of the peninsula. There were rice-farmers, salt-producers, fishermen, quarrymen, incense-gatherers. There were not a few pirates, who found convenient retreats among the myriad islands at the mouth of the great estuary
(hence the name Ladrones, which means ‘pirates’ in Portuguese) and who sometimes operated in great force – when the pirate leader Zhang Bao-zi capitulated to the authorities in 1810, he surrendered 270 junks and 1,200 guns.

The inhabitants were of four Chinese races: the Punti or Cantonese, the Hoklos, the Hakkas or ‘stranger families’, and the outcast people called Tankas or ‘egg people’ (perhaps because their boats had egg-shaped canopies). They lived for the most part in segregated communities, speaking their own languages and generally antipathetic towards one another. The powerful landowning families of the region, however, were all Cantonese, and they were grouped into the Five Great Clans, Tang, Hau, Pang, Liu and Man, each dominating its own villages and possessing its inherited lands in common.

The area was governed from Nam Tan, on the shores of Deep Bay to the north-west. There the district magistrate (‘the father-mother official’) had his
yamen
or seat of authority. He was responsible, through several gradations of hierarchy, to the Viceroy of Guangdong, and he was sustained by troops and warships. There was a fortified headquarters at Kowloon City near the southern tip of the peninsula, and among the islands were several small forts and naval bases, part of the coastal defences of the Guangzhou Delta, beneath whose guns the rotund war-junks anchored, and around whose walls the camp-followers deposited their shacks. Set against the bare green hills, too often washed in humid drizzle, all these outposts must have seemed very emblems of far-flung dominion, so lonely there among that half-charted archipelago; in old pictures, in fact, the main fort at Kowloon City looks just like a frontier stronghold in hostile territory, a stronghold on a hillock from which a ramshackle street runs like an escape route to the nearby quay. Government seems to have been sketchy at best, officials seldom visiting the more isolated settlements, and was also notoriously corrupt. There were frequent clan wars and feuds between villages, some of which had armies of their own, uniformed and equipped with artillery.

Nevertheless, though the territory was often turbulent, and was remote indeed from the exquisite subtleties of the Chinese Establishment, at a local level the people seem to have organized their lives competently enough. The class of scholar-gentry, which had for centuries set the tone of Confucianist civilization, was thin on the ground in these parts, and there was not much education; but the village headmen and elders were influential, residents’ associations were active,
local tradition was strong, and the people, while venerating an eclectic range of Buddhist and Daoist divinities, not to mention countless spirits and totems of animism, were united in honouring the Confucian ethic. Records were kept, on slabs in temples and ancestral halls. Lineages were maintained. Elaborate rules of land tenure were enforced. The laws of
feng shui
, ‘wind and water’, the ancient Chinese geomancy of location and design, were scrupulously obeyed. Travelling theatre companies made their circuits of the villages, and as a district magistrate recorded in surprise in 1744, ‘culture has spread even to this remote place near the sea – the Book of Poetry is read here as early as sunrise …’

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.