Title: Hong Kong
Author: Gleason, Gene
Language: English
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HONG KONG

GENE GLEASON



The John Day Company, New York

© 1963 by Gene Gleason

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be
reproduced in any form without permission. Published by The
John Day Company, 62 West 45th Street, New York 36, N.Y., and
simultaneously in Canada by Longmans Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalogue
Card Number: 63-7957

Manufactured in the United States of America



_To all who helped—particularly, Pat_



Contents


        INTRODUCTION                                 11

     1. UP FROM BRITISH BARBARISM                    15

     2. AN AVALANCHE FROM THE NORTH                  47

     3. CONFLICT AND COEXISTENCE WITH TWO CHINAS     85

     4. INDUSTRIAL GROWTH AND GROWING PAINS         113

     5. HIGH LAND, LOW WATER                        155

     6. A NEW DAY FOR FARMS AND FISHERIES           175

     7. CRIME, POWER AND CORRUPTION                 201

     8. TWO WORLDS IN ONE HOUSE                     227

     9. RAMBLING AROUND THE COLONY                  259

    10. SHOPPING BEFORE DINNER                      289

        INDEX                                       309

_Sixteen pages of illustrations will be found following page 160._



Hong Kong

[Illustration: BRITISH CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG and Adjacent Areas]



Introduction

    Hong Kong is a high point on the skyline of the Free World. As
    a free port operating on a free-world basis, it is too valuable
    to lose.—SIR ROBERT BROWN BLACK, Governor of the British Crown
    Colony of Hong Kong, 1962


Except for Portugal’s tiny overseas province of Macao, Hong Kong is
the last Western outpost on the mainland of China. It is the Berlin of
East Asia, poised in perilous balance between two ideologies and two
civilizations.

The government and people of Hong Kong have performed a matter-of-fact
miracle by saving the lives of more than a million refugees from Red
China. Without appealing for foreign aid or emergency subsidies from the
home country, the colony’s rulers have provided jobs, homes and freedom
for the destitute. Private charitable organizations overseas and outright
gifts from the governments of Great Britain and the United States have
achieved miracles on their own in feeding, clothing and educating the
poor of Hong Kong, but the main burden is too great to be borne by any
agency except the full public power of the royal crown colony.

Most of Hong Kong’s people are too poor to afford what an American would
consider minimum comforts. They came to Hong Kong with nothing, yet every
day they send thousands of food packages back to Red China, hoping to
save their relatives from starvation.

These are only the workaday miracles of Hong Kong; the greatest
miracle is that it exists at all. It has never had enough of the good
things—land, water, health, security or money—but always a surplus of the
bad ones—wars, typhoons, epidemics, opium, heroin, crime and corruption.

It is one of the most contradictory and baffling places in the
contemporary world—a magnificent port and a teeming slum; a
bargain-hunter’s paradise and a nest of swindlers; a place of marginal
farmland and superlative farmers, efficient and orderly, sly and corrupt.
It has outlived a thousand prophecies of its imminent doom. Its people
dwell between the claws of a tiger, fully aware of the spot they’re on,
but not at all dismayed.

Tourists and sailors come to Hong Kong by the hundreds of thousands every
year, half-expecting to discover inscrutable Orientals, or to be followed
down a dark alley by a soft-shod killer with a hatchet in his hand.
The Orientals turn out to be the noisiest, most gregarious people the
Westerner has ever seen. No one follows him down a pitch-black alley at
midnight, unless it’s a stray cat looking for a handout, or a shoeshine
boy working late.

The real magic of Hong Kong is that none of it is exactly what you
expected. You prowl around for handicraft shops and find them next to an
automated textile mill. You’ve been told to keep your eye open for the
sprawling settlements of squatter shacks, and you find them slowly being
swallowed up by multi-story concrete resettlement estates. You turn on
the faucet in your hotel at noon and it issues a dry, asthmatic sigh; you
try it again at six and it spits at you like an angry camel, splashing
all over your suit.

You look for a historic hill in Kowloon, and there is what’s left of it—a
stumpy mound, shaved down by a bulldozer, with the rest of it already
dumped into the sea to form the foundation of a new industrial city. You
look for the romantic hallmark of Hong Kong, a Chinese junk with bat-wing
sails, and it putt-putts past on a Diesel engine without a scrap of
canvas on the masts.

You fear for your life as you stand on the crowded sidewalk, plucking
up the courage to bull your way through a fantastic tangle of autos,
motor-scooters, double-deck trams, rickshaws, massed pedestrians
and laborers carting bulky loads on bamboo shoulder-slings, but the
white-sleeved patrolman in the traffic pagoda parts the torrent with a
gesture like Moses dividing the Red Sea and you cross without a scratch.

A small, slender Chinese beauty in a closely fitted Cheongsam strolls by
with a skirt slit to the mid-thighs, and you begin to perceive the reason
for the thousands of Caucasian-Chinese intermarriages in the colony. Such
unions go so well they hardly merit comment in today’s Hong Kong gossip;
a generation ago, they would have overturned a hornet’s nest of angry
relatives in both racial groups.

Hong Kong is like the Chinese beauties in their Cheongsams; no matter
how often you turn away, your next view will be completely different and
equally rewarding.



CHAPTER ONE

Up from British Barbarism

    The common disposition of the English barbarians is ferocious,
    and what they trust in are the strength of their ships and the
    effectiveness of their guns.—GOVERNOR LU K’U OF CANTON, 1834


In 1841, the British crown colony of Hong Kong attached itself like
a small barnacle to the southeast coast of the Celestial Empire. The
single offshore island that constituted the whole of the original colony
was a spiny ridge of half-drowned mountains forming the seaward rampart
of a deep-water harbor. Before the British came, it had no geographic
identity. They gave it the Chinese name “Hong Kong,” usually translated
as “fragrant harbor,” which distinguished the one appealing feature of
its forbidding terrain.

Sparsely inhabited from primitive times, Hong Kong, the more than two
hundred rocky islands scattered outside its harbor, and the barren
seacoast opposite them lay far out in the boondocks of China. Its
innumerable, deeply indented coves and mountain-ringed harbors made it a
favorite lurking place for coastal pirates.

For centuries, fleets of pirate junks had apportioned their rapacity
between pouncing on coastwise ships and pillaging isolated farms and
fishing settlements. The Manchu emperors, lacking the unified navy
necessary to sink these cut-throats, attempted to bolster the thin
defenses along the pirate-infested coast of Kwangtung Province by
offering tax-free land to any of their subjects who would settle there.
Even so, there was no wild scramble to accept the gift.

Less troublesome than pirates but hardly more welcome to the rulers of
China were the European traders who had been plying the Chinese coast
since the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the middle of that
century, Portuguese merchant-sailors overcame part of this hostility by
employing their well-armed ships to help the Chinese emperor crush a
pirate fleet. They were rewarded with imperial permission to establish a
small trading outpost at Macao, forty miles west of Hong Kong Island.

Traders from Spain, Holland, England, France and America soon began to
operate out of Macao, and the British East India Co. opened a trade base
at Canton in 1681 to supply a lively English market with Chinese tea and
silk. Canton, the only Chinese port open to world trade, stood due north
of Macao and ninety-one miles northwest of the future colony at Hong Kong.

Throughout a century and a half of dealings at Canton, European traders
enjoyed the same degree of liberty: they were all free to pay whatever
prices or imposts the Chinese Hong merchants and customs officials chose
to demand. The Chinese wanted neither foreign goods nor foreign traders,
but if the latter persisted in buying and selling at Canton, they were
expected to submit to strict Chinese regulations or get out.

There were rules forbidding any foreigner to live in Canton except during
the six-month trading season, rules denying foreign women the right to
enter the city, rules against possessing firearms and an absolute ban
against bringing foreign warships past the Boca Tigris (Tiger’s Mouth),
the fortified strait on the Canton River estuary leading to the city.

In practice, the rules were a kind of game; few were consistently
enforced unless the Western traders raised a howl over Chinese customs
duties or bumptiously insisted on dealing directly with the officials of
the Celestial Empire instead of its merchants. Then the reins were yanked
up tight, and the commercial interlopers had to obey every restriction to
the letter.

Foreigners at Canton remained in a weak bargaining position until a few
European traders, particularly the English, discovered one product that
the Chinese passionately desired. It was compact, easy to ship, extremely
valuable, and it brought full payment in hard cash upon delivery. It
could be brought from British India in prodigious quantities, and because
it contained great value in a small package, it could slip through
Chinese customs without the disagreeable formality of paying import
duties. This was opium—the most convincing Western proof of the validity
of the profit motive since the opening of the China trade.

The Chinese appetite for opium became almost insatiable, spreading upward
to the Emperor’s official family and draining away most of the foreign
exchange gained by exporting tea and silk. The alarmed Emperor issued
a denunciation of this “vile dirt of foreign countries” in 1796, and
followed it with a long series of edicts and laws intended to stop the
opium traffic.

The East India Co., worried by repeated threats of imperial punishment,
relinquished its control of the opium trade and dropped the drug from its
official list of imports. Private traders with less to lose immediately
took up the slack, and after opium was barred from Canton, simply
discharged their cargoes of dope into a fleet of hulks anchored off the
entrance of the Canton River estuary. From the hulks it was transshipped
to the mainland by hundreds of Chinese junks and sampans. Chinese port
officials, well-greased with graft, never raised a squeak of protest.

The Emperor himself seethed with rage, vainly condemning the sale of
opium as morally indefensible and ruinous to the health and property
of his people. Meanwhile, the trade rose from $6,122,100 in 1821 to
$15,338,160 in 1832. The British government took a strong official line
against the traffic and denied its protection to British traders caught
smuggling, but left the enforcement of anti-opium laws in Chinese hands.
A joint Sino-British enforcement campaign was out of the question, since
the Chinese had not granted diplomatic recognition to the British Empire.

This insuperable obstacle to combined action was the natural child
of Chinese xenophobia. When Lord Napier broached the subject of
establishing diplomatic relations between Britain and China in 1834, the
Emperor’s representatives stilled his overtures with the contemptuous
question, “How can the officers of the Celestial Empire hold official
correspondence with barbarians?”

The glories of a mercantile civilization made no impression on a people
who regarded themselves as the sole heirs of the oldest surviving culture
on earth. To the lords of the Manchu empire, English traders were crude,
money-grubbing upstarts who had neither the knowledge nor the capacity
to appreciate the traditions and philosophy of China. What could these
cubs of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution contribute to a
civilization of such time-tested wisdom? They could contribute to its
collapse, as the Chinese were to learn when their medieval war-machine
collided with the striking power and nineteenth-century technology of the
British Navy.

After the East India Co. lost its monopoly on the China trade in
1833, the British government sent its own representatives to settle a
fast-growing dispute between English and Chinese merchants. Once again
the Chinese snubbed these envoys and emphasized their unwillingness to
compromise by appointing a new Imperial Commissioner to suppress the
opium trade.

For a time, the British merchants comforted themselves with the
delusion that Lin Tse-hsu, the Imperial Commissioner, could be bought
off or mollified. He dashed these hopes by blockading the Boca Tigris,
surrounding the foreign warehouses at Canton with guards and demanding
that all foreign merchants surrender their stock of opium. He further
insisted that they sign a pledge to import no more opium or face the
death penalty.

Threats and vehement protests by the traders only drove Lin to stiffer
counter-measures, and the British were at last forced to surrender more
than 20,000 chests of opium worth $6,000,000. Commissioner Lin destroyed
the opium immediately. British merchants and their government envoys
withdrew from Canton by ship, ultimately anchoring off Hong Kong Island.
None of them lived ashore; the island looked too bleak for English
habitation, though it had already been considered as a possible offshore
port of foreign trade.

With the British out of the opium trade, a legion of freelance
desperadoes flocked in to take it over, leaving both the British and
Chinese governments shorn of their revenue. Further negotiation between
Lin and Captain Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade in
China, reached an impasse when Lin declined to treat Elliot as a diplomat
of equal rank and advised him to carry on his negotiations with the
Chinese merchants.

Having wasted their time in a profitless exchange of unpleasantries, both
sides huffily retired; the Chinese to reinforce their shore batteries and
assemble a fleet of twenty-nine war junks and fire rafts, and Captain
Elliot to organize a striking force of warships, iron-hulled steamers and
troop transports.

The junk fleet and two British men-of-war clashed at Chuenpee, on the
Canton River estuary, in the first battle between British and Chinese
armed forces. It was a pushover for the British; Chinese naval guns were
centuries behind theirs in firepower, and the gun crews on the junks
were pitifully inaccurate in comparison with the scientific precision
of the British. Within a few minutes the junks had been sunk, dismasted
or driven back in panicky disorder. The British on the _Hyacinth_ and
_Volage_ suffered almost no damage or casualties.

No formal state of war existed, however, so Captain Elliot broke off the
one-sided engagement before the enemy had been annihilated. He pulled
back to wait until orders came from Lord Palmerston, British Foreign
Secretary, directing him to demand repayment for the $6,000,000 worth of
opium handed over to Lin. At the same time, Elliot was told to obtain
firm Chinese assurance of future security for traders in China, or the
cession of an island off the China coast as a base for foreign trade
unhampered by the merchants and officials of the Celestial Empire.
Palmerston, maintaining the calm detachment of a statesman 10,000 miles
distant from the scene of battle, thought it would be best for Elliot to
win these concessions without war.

Elliot, mustering the full strength of his land and sea forces, blockaded
the Canton and Yangtze Rivers, occupied several strategic islands and put
Palmerston’s demands into the hands of Emperor Tao-kuang. Humiliated by
the irresistible advance of the despised foreigners, the Emperor angrily
dismissed Commissioner Lin. His replacement, Commissioner Keeshen, began
by agreeing to pay the indemnity demanded by Lord Palmerston and to hand
over Hong Kong Island, then deliberately dragged his feet to postpone the
fulfillment of his promises. Elliot, fed to the teeth with temporizing,
ended it by throwing his whole fleet at the Chinese. His naval guns
pounded their shore batteries into silence, and he landed marines and
sailors to capture the forts guarding Canton.

The Chinese land defenders were as poorly equipped as the sailors of
their war junks; when they lighted their ancient matchlocks to fire them,
scores of soldiers were burned to death by accidentally igniting the
gunpowder spilled on their clothing.

In a naval action at Anson’s Bay, the flat-bottomed iron steamer
_Nemesis_, drawing only six feet of water, surprised a squadron of junks
by pushing its way into their shallow-water refuge. A single Congreve
rocket from the _Nemesis_ struck the magazine of a large war junk,
blowing it up in a shower of flying spars and seamen. Eleven junks were
destroyed, two were driven aground and hundreds of Chinese sailors were
killed within a few hours. Admiral Kwan, commander of the shattered
fleet, had the red cap-button emblematic of his rank shot off by the
British and was later relieved of the rank by his unsympathetic Emperor.

Keeshen hastened to notify Elliot that he stood ready to hand over Hong
Kong and the $6,000,000 indemnity. But even the shock of defeat had not
flushed the Emperor from his dream world of superiority; he repudiated
Keeshen’s agreement and ordered him to rally the troops for “an awful
display of Celestial vengeance.” Well aware of the hopelessness of his
situation, Keeshen tried to hold out by postponing his meetings with
Elliot. Elliot, not to be put off this time, countered by opening a
general assault along the Canton River. Within a month, his combined land
and sea offensive had reduced every fort on the water route to Canton and
his ships rode at anchor in front of the city.

British preparations to storm the city were well advanced when a fresh
truce was arranged. The entire British force sailed back to Hong Kong,
having retreated from almost certain victory. Elliot, however, felt no
disappointment; he had never wanted to use more force than necessary to
restore stable trade conditions. He feared that full-scale war would
bring down the Chinese government, plunging the country into revolution
and chaos.

Hong Kong had become _de facto_ British territory on January 26, 1841,
when the Union Jack was raised at Possession Point and the island claimed
for Queen Victoria. Its 4,500 inhabitants, who had never heard of the
Queen, became her unprotesting subjects.

The acquisition of the island produced ignominy enough for both sides;
Keeshen was exiled to Tartary for giving it up and Elliot was dismissed
by Palmerston for accepting “a barren island with hardly a house upon
it,” instead of obeying the Foreign Secretary’s orders and driving a much
harder bargain.

A succession of disasters swept over the colony in its first year of
existence. “Hong Kong Fever,” a form of malaria thought to have been
caused by digging up the earth for new roads and buildings, killed
hundreds of settlers. Two violent typhoons unroofed practically every
temporary building on the rocky slopes and drowned a tenth of the boat
population. The wreckage of the ships and buildings had scarcely been
cleared away when a fire broke out among the flimsy, closely packed mat
sheds. In a few hours, it burned down most of the Chinese huts on the
island.

The flavor of disaster became a regular part of Hong Kong history. Its
own four horsemen—piracy, typhoons, epidemics and fires—raced through the
colony at frequent but unpredictable intervals, filling its hills and
harbor with debris and death. There is still no reason to assume that
they will not return, either singly or as a team, whenever the whim moves
them.

Even imagining Hong Kong as an island bearing no more than a minimum
burden of natural hazards, it is difficult to understand how it became
settled at all. The London _Times_ scorned it editorially in 1844 with
the comment that “The place has nothing to recommend it, if we except the
excellent harbor.”

The original colony and the much larger territory added to it in the next
120 years have no natural resources of value, except fish, building stone
and a limited supply of minerals. Only one-seventh of its total area is
arable land; at best, it can grow enough rice, vegetables and livestock
to feed the present population for about three months of a year. There
is no local source of coal, oil or water power. Fresh water was scarce
in 1841, and in 1960, after the colony had constructed an elaborate
system of fourteen reservoirs, the carefully rationed supply had to be
supplemented with additional water bought and pumped in from Red China.

Hong Kong has an annual rainfall of 85 inches—twice that of New York
City—but three-fourths of it falls between May and September. At the end
of the rainy season, ten billion gallons may be stored in the reservoirs
but by the following May, every reservoir may be empty. Water use,
especially during the dry winter, has been restricted to certain hours
throughout the colony’s history. Running water, to the majority of Hong
Kong’s poor, means that one grabs a kerosene tin and runs for the nearest
public standpipe. Those lucky enough to reach the head of the line before
the water is cut off may carry home enough to supply a household for one
full day.

The industries of the colony, which expanded at a spectacular rate after
World War II, could never have survived on sales to the local market.
Most of its residents have always been too poor to buy anything more
than the simplest necessities of food, clothing and shelter. No tariff
wall protects its products from the competition of imported goods, but
resentment against the low-wage industries of the colony continually
puts up new barriers against Hong Kong products in foreign countries,
including the United States.

From its thinly populated beginnings, Hong Kong has been transformed
into one of the most dangerously overcrowded places on earth, with
1,800 to 2,800 persons jamming every acre of its urban sections. Eighty
percent of its population is wedged into an area the size of Rochester,
N.Y.—thirty-six square miles. About 325,000 people have no regular
housing. They sleep on the sidewalks, or live in firetrap shacks perched
on the hillsides or rooftop huts. A soaring birth rate and illegal
infiltration of refugees from Red China add nearly 150,000 people a year.

Fire is the best-fed menace of contemporary Hong Kong. In the 1950-55
period, flash fires drove 150,000 shack and tenement dwellers out of
their homes, racing through congested settlements with the swiftness and
savagery of a forest in flames. Tuberculosis attacked the slum-dwellers
at the same ruinous pace. No one dares to predict what would happen if
one of the colony’s older, dormant scourges—plague or typhus—were to
break out again. But the colony found cause for relief and pride when a
1961 cholera scare was halted by free, universal inoculations.

More than a century of turmoil and privation has taught the colonists to
accept their liabilities and deal with their problems, yet they prefer to
dwell on the assets and virtues which have enabled them to endure, and in
many cases, to prosper tremendously.

Hong Kong harbor has always been the colony’s greatest asset. Of all the
world’s harbors, only Rio de Janeiro equals its spacious, magnificent
beauty, with its tall green mountains sloping down to deep blue water.
Perhaps Rio has a richer contrast of tropical green and blue, but the
surface of Hong Kong harbor is so irrepressibly alive with criss-crossing
ferry lines, ocean freighters riding in the stream, and tattered junk
sails passing freely through the orderly swarm that it never looks the
same from one minute to the next and is incapable of monotony.

An oceanic lagoon of seventeen square miles, the harbor lies sheltered
between mountain ranges to the north and south and is shielded from the
open sea by narrow entrances at its east and west ends. Vessels drawing
up to thirty-six feet of water can enter through Lei Yue Mun pass at the
eastern end of the harbor. Through the same pass, jet airliners approach
Kai Tak Airport, roaring between the mountains like rim-rock flyers as
they glide down to the long airstrip built on reclaimed land in Kowloon
Bay, on the northern side of the harbor.

The intangible ramparts of the colony are as solid as its peaks: the sea
power of the British and American navies, and the stability of British
rule. At their worst, the colony’s overlords have been autocratic,
stiff-necked and chilly toward their Chinese subjects.

The same British administrators who nobly refused to hand over native
criminals for the interrogation-by-torture of the Chinese courts could
flog and brand Chinese prisoners with a fierce conviction of their own
rectitude. Nevertheless, they brought to China something never seen there
before; respect for the law as an abstraction, an objective code of
justice that had to be followed even when it embarrassed and discommoded
the rulers.

Almost from its inception, the colony attracted refugees from China. Many
brought capital and technical skills with them, others were brigands and
murderers fleeing Chinese executioners.

Banking, shipping and insurance services of the colony quickly became the
most reliable in Southeast Asia. Macao, in spite of its three-century
lead on Hong Kong, was so badly handicapped by its shallow harbor,
critical land shortage, and unenterprising government that it sank into
a state of suspended antiquity. Hong Kong merchants, eager for new
business, kept in close touch with world markets. Labor was cheap and
abundant, still it was more liberally paid than in most of the Asiatic
countries. Labor unions numbered in the hundreds, but they were split
into so many quarreling political factions that they could rarely hope to
win a showdown fight against the colony’s business-dominated government,
although the Seamen’s Union did obtain many concessions after a long
strike in 1922.

Notwithstanding the social gulfs between the British, Portuguese, Indian
and other national elements in the colony, all of them march arm-in-arm
through one great field of endeavor; the desire and the capacity to make
money. Hong Kong lives to turn a profit, and its deepest fraternal bond
is the Fellowship of Greater Solvency.

Motivated by this common purpose, the British and Chinese dwelt together
in peaceful contempt during the first fifteen years of the colony’s
history, sharing the returns of a fast-growing world trade. The opium
traffic resumed as though there had never been a war over it. The only
enemy that worried the merchants became the Chinese pirates who preyed on
their ships.

From Fukien to Canton, pirate fleets prowled the China coast. Two of
their favorite hangouts were Bias Bay and Mirs Bay, within easy striking
range of Hong Kong. With the arrival of the British, they began looting
foreign merchant-ships with the same unsparing greed they had previously
inflicted on Chinese ships and villages.

British warships, superior to the pirate craft in all but numbers and
elusiveness, hunted them down with task forces. In four expeditions
between 1849 and 1858, the Queen’s Navy sank or captured nearly 200
pirate junks. Thousands of prisoners were taken, and a fair share of them
were hanged. British landing forces, storming up the beaches from the
warships, leveled every pirate settlement they could find.

The land-and-sea offensive had a temporarily restraining effect, but
new-born pirate fleets sprang up like dragon’s teeth to turn to the
practice of seaborne larceny. A fifth column of suppliers, informers,
and receivers of stolen goods within the colony obligingly assisted the
pirates in plucking their neighbors clean. Hong Kong’s oldest industry
has retained its franchise down to present times; in 1948, airborne
pirates attempted to high-jack a Macao-Hong Kong plane in flight.
The plane crashed, killing all but one person who was detained and
questioned, then released for lack of jurisdiction and sent back to China.

Piracy was the fuse that touched off a second Sino-British war in 1856,
when the Chinese government charged that a Chinese ship manned by a
British skipper was, in fact, a pirate vessel. While the skipper was
absent from the Chinese lorcha, the _Arrow_, his entire crew was taken
prisoner and accused of piracy by China.

The incident landed in the lap of Sir John Bowring, a former Member of
Parliament and one of the most curiously contradictory of all colony
governors. Philosophically a liberal and a pacifist, he was markedly
sympathetic toward the Chinese. A prolific author, economist and
hymn-writer, he had a brilliant gift for linguistics and was credited
with a working knowledge of 100 languages, among them Chinese. He
initiated wise and far-reaching improvements, including the first
forestry program, which were enacted into law by later governors. With
all these gifts, his five-year term (1854-1859) was marred by a series of
hot and futile wrangles with his subordinates.

This mercurial man reacted to the capture of the _Arrow_’s crew
by demanding an apology and their release. When the apology was
not immediately dispatched, he assembled a military force and set
out to capture Canton. War in India delayed the arrival of British
reinforcements, and Canton withstood the assault. Meanwhile, Chinese
collaborators in Hong Kong poisoned the bread supplied to Europeans;
Bowring’s wife was one of scores of persons who suffered serious illness
by eating the bread.

Shortly afterward the French joined forces with the English. Canton and
Tientsin were captured, and the Chinese government was forced to agree to
add more trading ports to the five provided by the 1842 Nanking Treaty.

The ensuing short-term armistice was broken by sporadic Chinese attacks
on British supply lines and a general resumption of hostilities, ending
in the occupation of the Chinese capital at Peking.

The Kowloon Peninsula, jutting from the Chinese mainland to a point one
mile north of Hong Kong Island, became involved in the war when its
residents rioted against British troops encamped there. The British
had considered the annexation of Kowloon for several years, realizing
that if the Chinese decided to fortify it their guns would command
Hong Kong harbor. Treating the riot as a compelling reason for taking
possession, the British obtained an outright cession of the peninsula
and Stonecutters Island, a little body of land about one mile west of
Kowloon, under the terms of the 1860 Convention of Peking.

Bowring, meanwhile, had created a public Botanic Garden—still a beautiful
hillside haven at the heart of the colony—laid down new roads and
erected a number of public buildings. But his daily relations with
other colony officials had degenerated into a battle-royal of insults
and counter-accusations. The home government, appalled at Bowring’s
un-British disregard for good form, rushed in a new minister to direct
negotiations with China and replaced Bowring as governor with Sir
Hercules Robinson, an unusually able colonial administrator. Bowring
left the colony with his reputation at low ebb, snubbed by its English
residents. The Chinese of Hong Kong, inured to snobbery but grateful for
Bowring’s attempts to help them, saw him off with parting gifts.

Sir Hercules began his administration with a piece of good fortune;
practically all the contentious subordinates who had made Bowring’s
tenure a long nightmare resigned or retired. The colony’s military
leaders kept the pot simmering by demanding most of Kowloon for their own
use, although Robinson wanted to preserve it for public buildings and
recreational grounds.

In England, where the brimstone smell of the Bowring affair lingered for
many months, the London _Times_ was moved to describe the China outpost
as a “noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented and insalubrious little
island” whose name was “always connected with some fatal pestilence,
some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble.” Robinson’s
skirmish with the military attracted no more attention than a stray
pistol-shot after a thundering cannonade.

Between wars and internal bickering, the colony was growing up. The
California gold rush of 1849, followed by a major gold strike in
Australia two years later, created a surge of prosperity as goods
and Chinese laborers funneled through the port on their way to the
goldfields. Japan was opened to world trade in 1853, and American
whalers and seal hunters had begun to call at Hong Kong. Total shipping
tonnage cleared through the port rose 1,000 percent in the fifteen years
after 1848. With skilled labor and well-equipped dockyards at hand, the
building, refitting and supplying of ships became the colony’s most
important industry.

Overseas shipment of Chinese laborers from mainland China to perform work
contracts in Central America, Australia, and the islands of the Indian
Ocean created grave human problems.

Chinese were being kidnaped, abused like slaves and packed into the
airless, filthy holds of sailing ships where they died at an alarming
rate. From 1855 on, the colony imposed tighter and tighter restrictions
on the trade, prescribing better living conditions aboard ship and
prosecuting kidnapers of labor. But the labor suppliers evaded the laws
of the colony by taking on provisions at Hong Kong and calling at other
ports along the China coast to shanghai contract workers.

The first of many waves of refugees to seek asylum in Britain’s
“barbarian” enclave arrived with the outbreak of the Tai Ping Rebellion
in 1850. Led by Hung Siu Tsuen, a Christian student, the rebels attacked
the ruling Manchu Dynasty and fomented wild disorder in Canton. Thousands
of apprehensive Chinese fled to Hong Kong, throwing themselves on the
mercy of the foreign devils.

Governor Robinson and the land-hungry generals eventually compromised
their conflicting claims to Kowloon real estate, but the colony
government spent years of patient effort in straightening out the fuzzy,
inexact and spurious titles to individual land-holdings on the peninsula.
On the whole, British courts achieved a fair adjudication of claims.

Sir Hercules did not permit his administrative successes to alter the
colony’s reputation for day-to-day blundering. He housed prisoners in
a hulk off Stonecutters Island where it was accidentally swamped by an
adjoining boat with a loss of thirty-eight lives. On a kindly impulse,
he belatedly moved the hulk closer to shore, and a group of convicts ran
down the gangplank to dry land and freedom.

Such oversights were exceptional; when Sir Hercules ended his term in
1865, he could look back on an administration which had put the unpopular
colony on its feet by reforming its courts and modernizing and expanding
its public works. This was no fluke, for he went on to similar successes
in Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa before being elevated
to the peerage.

During its formative period, the colony was predominantly a society of
adult males. Its merchants and workers came from China to earn a living
and to send their savings back to their wives and children; when they
grew too old to work, they returned to their native cities and villages.
But there was always a number of families among the population, and after
the refugees began pouring in, the percentage of children rose. In 1865,
children numbered 22,301 in a total population of 125,504. Only 14,000 of
these were of school age, and less than 2,000 of them attended school.

Missionaries began to run schools for Chinese and European children
almost from the time the colony was established, but the scale of their
undertakings was modest. The Chinese organized native schools, and like
the missionary ventures, floundered along with ill-trained teachers,
inadequate buildings and loose supervision. Government schools, low in
quality and enrollment, freed themselves of religious control in 1866. A
private school with advanced ideas instructed Chinese girls in English,
only to discover that its pupils were accepting postgraduate work as the
mistresses of European colonists.

Five Irish governors, starting with Sir Hercules Robinson in 1859,
ruled Hong Kong in succession, and three of them ranked among the
ablest executives in its history. Each one was in his separate way a
strong-minded, individualistic, and occasionally rambunctious chief.
After the Hibernian Era came to an end in 1885, no later governors
emulated their mildly defiant gestures toward the home government.

Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell, second of the Irish governors, was a tough
and seasoned colonial administrator who tackled the unsolved problems
of crime and piracy with perception and vigor. He saw that naval action
against the pirate fleets would bring no lasting results while the
sea-raiders had the assistance of suppliers, informers and receivers of
stolen goods within the colony. He put all ship movements in Hong Kong
waters under close supervision, and assigned police to ferret out every
colonist working with the pirates. To a greater degree than any of his
predecessors, he succeeded in checking piracy, but no governor has ever
stamped it out.

Macdonnell also intensified the campaign against robbery, burglary and
assault. Commercial interests applauded his increased severity in the
treatment of prisoners and his frequent reliance on flogging, branding
and deportation of offenders. Macdonnell himself saw no contradiction
between such rough-shod methods and, on the other hand, his generosity in
donating crown land for a Chinese hospital where the destitute and dying
could be cared for in a decent manner. Previously, relatives of ailing,
elderly paupers had deposited them in empty buildings with a coffin and
drinking water, leaving them to suffer and die alone.

Sir Arthur Kennedy, who followed Macdonnell, was one of the colony’s
most popular governors. He knew his job thoroughly and he combined this
knowledge with sound judgment, a lively sense of humor, and a rare talent
for pleasing the traders and the Colonial Office. He initiated the Tai
Tam water-supply system and continued Macdonnell’s relentless fight
against crime.

Kennedy threw his more orthodox colleagues into a dither by entertaining
Chinese merchants at official receptions in Government House, his
executive residence. He went so far as to invite these Chinese to suggest
improvements in the laws of the colony, and they promptly asked for a law
to punish adulterous Chinese women. Knowing that each of the petitioners
had several wives and concubines, Sir Arthur realized that his volunteer
legal advisers were actually looking for government sanction to hobble
their restless bedmates. He tabled the petition with tact.

External changes produced surprising mutations in the progress of the
colony. Its isolation diminished with the opening of the Suez Canal in
1869 and the completion in the next year of direct overland telegraph
connection with England. No longer was a governor left to his own devices
for days and weeks, improvising policy at the peril of his job until
orders arrived from home.

The hazards of life on the South China coast remained. In 1874, the
colony was devastated by the worst typhoon since 1841. Flying rooftops
filled the skies above the island, and 2,000 Chinese fishermen and their
families drowned in the ruins of their floating villages.

Sir Arthur’s departure to become the Governor of Queensland was a
melancholy time for the colony’s Chinese. They were openly devoted to
him—the first governor who had treated them more or less as equals. Even
the English liked him, and he became the first and only governor to have
a statue erected to his memory in the colony’s Botanic Garden. The statue
disappeared during the Japanese Occupation of World War II.

Kennedy’s successor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, not only preserved this
solicitude for the Chinese but provoked a storm of protest from European
residents by practicing leniency toward Chinese prisoners. When murders
and burglaries increased, his humanitarian policies were blamed.
Hennessy, a resourceful debater who was at his best in defending his own
policies, was not intimidated. The weak side of his administration showed
in a quite different area—his habitual neglect of essential paper work.

Hennessy’s friendliness toward the Chinese unexpectedly involved him in
controversy with the Chinese themselves. For centuries, wealthy Chinese
families had “adopted” little female domestic slaves by purchasing them
from their parents or relatives. In the households of the rich, these
Mui Tsai could be identified at once by their shabby clothing and their
general appearance of neglect.

Even families of limited means purchased Mui Tsai, so that the mother
of the family could take a job outside her home while the juvenile
slavey cared for the children and contended with the simpler household
drudgery. For the poorest families, sale of a daughter as a Mui Tsai
was the natural solution to an economic crisis. But the institution,
unacceptable to Western eyes from any aspect, had become the vehicle for
gross abuses—the kidnaping and sale of women as prostitutes in Hong Kong
or for transportation overseas. Kidnapings had become so numerous and
flagrant by 1880 that Governor Hennessy and Sir John Smale, the colony’s
Chief Justice, condemned the Mui Tsai system as contrary to British law.

The Chinese protested that Mui Tsai was not slavery; it was an ancient,
respectable adjunct of family life. Indeed, it was quite humane, for it
saved the daughters of many impoverished families from being drowned.
The English didn’t want that, did they? The Chinese offered no defense
of kidnaping and forced prostitution arising from the institution of Mui
Tsai.

Under pressure of the colony government, influential Chinese set up the
Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, to rescue women
and girls from flesh peddlers, provide a home for them in a section of
the Chinese-operated Tung Wah Hospital, and train them for respectable
occupations.

Hennessy, like Governor Bowring, entangled himself in a series of
acrimonious disputes with other colony officials, antagonizing them in
groups by lashing out at the school system, prison maladministration
and the harsh treatment of convicts. His most combative foe was another
Irishman, General Donovan, head of the colony’s armed forces. Their
verbal Donnybrook erupted over the perennially thorny question of how
much Kowloon land the military was entitled to.

General Donovan hit back at Hennessy with a sneak attack; he complained
to the home government about the outrageous sanitary conditions in
the colony—the lack of proper drainage, the polluted seafront, and
the verminous tenements where entire Chinese families shared one room
with their pigs and other domestic animals. All these conditions had
existed in Hong Kong since 1841, but no one had called them to the home
government’s attention with the holy indignation of Donovan.

Osbert Chadwick was sent from England to investigate and he found
sanitary conditions every bit as bad as Donovan had described them.
Chadwick’s report became the basis, after long postponement and inaction,
for the creation of a Sanitary Board and fundamental sanitary reforms.

Hennessy left the colony in 1882 to become Governor of Mauritius and to
lock horns with a new team of associates. Four administrators and two
governors passed through the colony’s top executive position in the next
decade, but none effected any substantial improvements in sanitation.
Every attempt to clean up pesthole tenements was balked by cries of
persecution and government interference from the landlords; they would
consent to no improvements unless the government paid their full cost.

In other directions the colony advanced steadily. It completed a new
reservoir system and central market and rebuilt the sewage and drainage
system. Ambitious land-reclamation projects were pushed ahead at Causeway
Bay and Yau Ma Tei to meet the unabating demand for level sites in the
crowded, mountainous colony. Kowloon, a wasteland of undulating red rock,
in the 1880s began cutting down its ridges and using the spoil to extend
its shoreline—a process that continues at an amazingly accelerated rate
today.

Hong Kong has never known an age of serenity; its brief interludes of
comparative calm have always been followed by cataclysmic upheavals. In
the spring of 1894, the colony was invaded by plague, long endemic on
the South China coast. Within a few months, 2,485 persons had died of
pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic plague, and Western medicine had no
more power to check it than had Chinese herb treatments.

The onset of plague was so terrifying that long-deferred sanitary reforms
were rushed through and rigidly enforced. Deaf to the protests of all
residents, British military units began regular inspections of Chinese
homes. Sanitary teams condemned 350 houses as plague spots and evicted
7,000 persons from infected dwellings. Resenting foreign invasion of
their privacy and mistrustful of Western medicine, the Chinese retaliated
by posting placards openly in Canton and furtively inside the colony
accusing British doctors of stealing the eyes of new-born babies to treat
plague victims.

Business came to a stop and ships avoided the plague-stricken port. The
plague abated for a year, then returned in 1896 to take another 1,204
lives. The Chinese kept up a rear-guard action against sanitary measures
with strikes and evasions, hiding their dead and dying or dumping their
bodies in the streets and harbor. Sometimes they exposed their dying
relatives on bamboo frames stretched across the narrow streets, hoping
that the departing soul would haunt the street instead of its former
house.

The benighted traditionalism of the colony’s Chinese awoke the British
administration to one of its most serious weaknesses; a half-century of
British rule had failed to give to 99 percent of the colony’s residents
any clear idea of the civilization they were expected to work and live
under. The tardy lesson eventually took effect, and the British embarked
on a long and intensive program of improving and enlarging their school
system. In the Tung Wah Hospital, English and Chinese doctors learned to
their surprise that therapies unlike their own were not necessarily sheer
quackery, and that they could work together for the benefit of their
patients.

With the population of the colony exceeding 160,000 in the early 1880s,
military and commercial leaders turned to the possibility of acquiring
more land on the Chinese mainland. They pressed the British Foreign
Office to seek the territory running north from the Kowloon Peninsula to
the Sham Chun River, about 15 miles away. The suggestions were rejected
as prejudicial to Sino-British relations until other foreign powers
started to thrust into Chinese territory for commercial concessions and
spheres of political influence.

France, Russia and Japan were the spearheads of this infiltration of the
Celestial Empire, which had been weakened by internal rebellion. Japan
defeated China in the 1894-95 war and exerted ever-stronger commercial
control over the mainland. Russia made its bid by advancing through
Manchuria and occupying Port Arthur. Germany hastened to join the
commercial invaders. Hacked at from four directions, the Chinese people
attempted to close ranks in defense of their homeland.

The United States, with no apparent desire to annex Chinese territory,
nevertheless heightened both British and Chinese apprehension by
launching its naval attack on Manila from Mirs Bay in May, 1898. The
Chinese feared another land grab, and the British felt they could best
protect Hong Kong if they were able to deal with a strong, unified China.

Despite its earlier reluctance to disturb the status quo, Great Britain
was now convinced that it had to acquire the territory between Kowloon
and the Sham Chun River as a protective buffer for Hong Kong. On July 1,
1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease to this mainland territory and 235
adjacent islands with a total land area of 365½ square miles.

Chinese guerrilla forces in the New Territories—as this leased area is
still called—opposed the British occupation but were defeated and driven
out by British troops in a ten-day campaign. That was the easiest part
of it. It took four years of wrangling with the uncooperative Chinese
residents to establish valid titles to private plots of land in the New
Territories. Kowloon City, an eight-acre patch on the border of Kowloon
and the New Territories, became a kind of orphan in the transaction,
with the British firmly insisting it was part of the lease and the
Chinese arguing somewhat inconclusively that it was not. Nationalist
China claimed it as recently as 1948, but Red China has not so far pushed
a similar claim. Britain regarded it as hers in 1960, and sent in her
police to clean out the robbers and murderers who had long used it as a
hiding place.

A general deterioration of Sino-British relations followed the leasing of
the New Territories. The two empires were at odds over the maintenance of
Chinese customs stations in the New Territories, the presence of Chinese
warships in Kowloon Bay and the treatment of Chinese prisoners in Hong
Kong jails. Moreover, each disagreement was intensified by the patriotic
fervor which led to the Boxer Rebellion.

At the opening of the twentieth century, the Chinese Empire had been
driven into a hopeless position. Bound and crippled like the feet of her
women, she had neither the weapons nor the industrial capacity to repel
the encroaching armies of Europe and Japan. By any reasonable standard,
she was beaten before she started to fight back.

Out of China’s desperation grew a super-patriotic secret society, The
Fist of Righteous Harmony, or Boxers, who claimed that magical powers
sustained their cause, making them invulnerable to the superior weapons
of foreigners. Occult arts and a rigorous program of physical training,
the Boxers professed, would carry them to victory. It was a crusade of
absurdity; foolish and foredoomed, but plainly preferable to unresisting
surrender.

The Boxers opened their offensive by murdering missionaries and Chinese
Christians, causing a new rush of refugees to Hong Kong. They burned
foreign legations in Peking and sent the surviving Chinese Christians and
foreigners fleeing to the British legation for safety. An international
army, composed of French, German, Russian, American and Japanese units,
lifted the siege of the legation on August 14, 1900, and remained in
Peking until peace was signed eleven months later.

Recurrences of plague killed 7,962 persons in the colony at the turn of
the century, but the discovery that plague was borne by rats prompted
a war to exterminate them. Rewards of a few cents were paid for their
carcasses, and profit-hungry Chinese were suspected of importing
rats from Canton to claim the bounty. The threat of plague gradually
decreased, but malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cholera remained to
ravage the refugee-jammed colony.

On September 18, 1906, a two-hour-long typhoon hit the colony without
warning, drowning fifteen Europeans and from 5,000 to 10,000 Chinese. No
one could accurately estimate the deaths, which were concentrated among
the fishermen and boat people, but nearly 2,500 Chinese boats of all
types were hammered into kindling wood or sunk without trace. Fifty-nine
European ships were badly damaged and a French destroyer broke in two.
Piers and sea walls were breached and undermined, and 190 houses were
blown down or rendered uninhabitable. Roads and telephone lines were
washed out, farm crops and tree plantations were laid low by the power of
the worst storm in local history. Damage estimates ranged far into the
millions.

In the aftermath of the typhoon, all elements of the population
cooperated to raise a relief fund. The money collected was used to repair
wrecked boats, recover and bury the dead, feed and house the homeless and
provide for the widows and orphans of storm victims. (The horror of this
catastrophe was reenacted on September 2, 1937, when a typhoon and tidal
wave engulfed a New Territories fishing village, drowning thousands.)

The dawn of the twentieth century marked the final collapse of the
Celestial Empire. Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who had been banished from Hong Kong
in 1896 for plotting against the Chinese government, steadily intensified
his revolutionary activities until, in 1911, he led the revolution which
overthrew the tottering monarchy and replaced it with the Republic of
China. The unrest that accompanied this violent change-over caused more
than 50,000 refugees to cross the Chinese border into British territory.

The transition from empire to republic did not end China’s internal
turmoil, and for many years afterward its political disturbances were
felt in Hong Kong. Piracy flourished in the waters around the colony;
one band of corsairs set fire to a steamship, causing the deaths of 300
passengers. Brigands and warlords preyed on southern China, sometimes
making forays across the colony’s border to pounce on villages in the New
Territories. China was torn by political struggles during the 1920s, and
these provoked strikes within the colony and Chinese boycotts of Hong
Kong goods. All through this period, refugees poured across the border in
unending lines.

The worldwide depression of the 1930s brought a sharp drop in colony
trade, but the government created jobs for thousands with road-building
and other public works.

Japan opened its war against China in 1937, and within a year Hong
Kong was bursting with the addition of 600,000 refugees. Poverty and
overcrowded housing offered ideal conditions for epidemics of smallpox
and beriberi which killed 4,500 persons in 1938. Still, the total
population climbed to 1,600,000. Government refugee camps housed about
5,000 people; another 27,000 regularly slept in the streets.

Emboldened by victories in China and an alliance with Nazi Germany, the
Japanese militarists launched their “Greater Far Eastern Co-Prosperity
Sphere” by attacking Hong Kong, Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on
December 7-8, 1941. Crossing the Chinese border at Lo Wu in the New
Territories, two Japanese divisions supported by overwhelming air power
invaded and conquered the colony within three weeks. They proceeded
without pause to loot its warehouses and strip its factories of machinery
for shipment to Japan.

The Japanese imprisoned the remaining British residents and raped and
pillaged at will. By torture, starvation, and main force they drove a
million Chinese residents from the colony and maintained a merciless
control over the survivors by propaganda, intimidation, imprisonment and
the use of Chinese fifth-columnists.

With their smashing victories in the Philippines, East Indies and at
Singapore, the Japanese should have found it comparatively easy to unite
Asiatics against the whites who had once lorded it over them. But they
suffered from the same compulsion as the Germans; at a time when they
had a chance to win allies among the people they had conquered, they
botched it by senseless cruelties. When their firecracker-like string of
victories had burned out, they had gained no friends, but instead had
earned millions of new enemies.

Nearly four years passed before the Japanese were beaten into
unconditional surrender and the British rulers returned to Hong Kong.
Their return had a kind of spectral quality as the British Pacific Fleet,
commanded by Rear Admiral C. H. J. Harcourt, steamed through Lei Yue Mun
pass, gliding under the silent muzzles of Japanese guns emplaced along
the mountainsides with their crews standing at attention beside them.

This was on August 30, 1945. The British went ashore to find thousands
of their countrymen and other Allied prisoners gaunt and starving in
prison camps. Many had been crippled and deformed by torture. Others
had been killed in Allied bombing raids on Hong Kong. Seven large and
seventy-two small ships had been sunk in the harbor, 27,000 homes had
been destroyed. The fishing fleet was in ruins and the fishermen were in
rags. Nine-tenths of the surviving residents were dead broke, while a few
collaborators and black-marketers had accumulated fortunes. Livestock
had virtually disappeared. Millions of carefully cultivated trees,
planted to check erosion and retain the run-off of tropical rainfall for
drainage into the reservoirs, had been chopped down to provide firewood.
Schools were almost entirely suspended. Railroads and ferry lines were
in an advanced stage of disrepair. Disease and crime had reached their
highest rates in many years.

The British, who are inclined to procrastinate in the solution of small
crises, can be indomitable in the face of major emergencies. Within six
months after reoccupying the colony they had restored its government and
society to working order. Six years after the British return, the colony
was more prosperous, more congested, and more progressive than it had
ever been before.

Nationalist China was driven from the mainland in 1949, and a new
Communist state took its place. Britain promptly recognized Red China
as the ruling power on the mainland, but relations between the Chinese
Reds and Hong Kong were strained by Communist-caused disturbances in
the colony and shooting “incidents” at sea and in the air. There was no
apparent danger of war, however. In 1951, the colony’s trade amounted to
$1,550,000,000, the highest point it had ever reached.

If there were signs of complacency in Hong Kong, they were erased by
the outbreak of the Korean war. The United Nations clamped immediate
restrictions on the colony’s trade with Red China, and Red China slashed
its imports from Hong Kong. Trade volume declined still further when Hong
Kong voluntarily halted its exports to Korea and the sending of strategic
materials to Red China. The United States at first included Hong Kong in
its embargo of all trade with Red China, but the colony prevailed upon
America to ease the ban. America agreed to accept goods from Hong Kong,
provided that they were accompanied by a Certificate of Origin attesting
that they were made in Hong Kong and had not simply been transshipped
from Communist China through the colony.

With the China market gone, as well as Hong Kong’s traditional role
as a transshipper to and from China, the colony executed its most
spectacular economic somersault since 1841; it switched from trading
to manufacturing. In six years, the great entrepôt became an important
industrial producer. By 1962, over 70 percent of the goods it exported
were made in the colony, and about half its workers were employed in
industry.

Having performed this overnight flip-flop without suffering an economic
set-back, Hong Kong has become more prosperous than ever. Except that it
has too many people, hasn’t enough land to stand on, can’t raise enough
food or store enough water, is incessantly harried by rising tariffs and
shipping costs, and has no idea what its testy, gigantic neighbor to the
north will do next, Hong Kong would appear not to have a worry in the
world.



CHAPTER TWO

An Avalanche from the North

    “When one reads of 1,000,000 homeless exiles all human
    compassion baulks and the great sum of human tragedy becomes a
    matter of statistical examination.”—“A PROBLEM OF PEOPLE,” Hong
    Kong Annual Report, 1956


From the end of World War II until the fall of 1949 the mainland of
China rumbled with the clash of contending armies. Thousands of Chinese,
uprooted and dispossessed by the Nationalist-Communist struggle, streamed
southward across the Hong Kong border in a steady procession.

The orderly nature of the exodus ended when Mao Tse-tung, having beaten
and dispersed the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, turned his
guns on all people suspected of thinking or acting against the People’s
Republic of China. What had been a slow withdrawal became a headlong
flight for life.

For six months after the Reds took over the mainland, Hong Kong clung
to its free-immigration policy. Then it reluctantly adopted a formula of
“one in, one out”—accepting one immigrant if another person returned to
China. But the refugee flow continued at a reduced rate in spite of land
and sea patrols on both sides of the international boundary.

In 1956, the British relaxed immigration rules for seven months, hoping
the refugees would go home. Instead, 56,000 new refugees arrived from
China, and the colony reimposed its restrictions.

The Chinese side of the frontier unexpectedly opened in May, 1962, and
70,000 refugees dashed for Hong Kong. The colony, alarmed and already
desperately overcrowded, strengthened and extended its boundary fence and
returned all but 10,000 of the new arrivals to China.

This race for freedom aroused the Free World’s tardy compassion. The
United States moved to admit 6,000 Hong Kong refugees, including some who
had applied for admission as long ago as 1954. Taiwan, Brazil, and Canada
also expressed willingness to accept a limited number. Until this change
of heart, Taiwan had taken only 15,000 colony refugees, and the United
States only 105 a year. None of these offers will materially reduce the
number of Hong Kong refugees, whose total is officially estimated at
1,000,000. Unofficial estimates set the total around 1,500,000.

Whatever the total within this range, it stuns the imagination. The
well-intentioned observer who has come to sympathize finds himself
backing away from this amorphous mass, unable to isolate or grasp its
human content of individual misery, privation and heartache. He wants to
help, as he would do if he saw a child struck down in the road, but when
the whole landscape is a panorama of tragedy, he hardly knows where to
begin.

There are a dozen landscapes like that in Hong Kong; the hills of Upper
Kowloon with thousands of flimsy shacks perched uncertainly on their
steep granite faces; the heights above Causeway Bay where squatter
settlements flow down the mountainside like a glacier of rubbish; the
rooftops of Wanchai, maggoty with close-packed sheds; the rotting
tenements of the Central District strewn in terraces of misery across
the lower slopes of Victoria Peak; the sink-hole of the old Walled City
in Kowloon with its open sewers and such dark, narrow alleys that its
inhabitants seem to be groping around in a cave with a few holes punched
through the roof.

Yet there are people in the colony who have chosen to cut their way
through this thick tangle of indiscriminate suffering. Going beyond
that first fragile desire to help and the secondary conclusion that no
one person can do anything effective against a problem of such vast
dimensions, they have learned to stand in the path of an avalanche and
direct traffic. They have opened a way to solve the refugee problem by
the simple process of starting somewhere. Ultimate solutions, in the
sense of housing and feeding all the refugees by giving them productive
jobs in a free economy, lie many years and millions of dollars away.
Meanwhile, people of courage and resolution, dealing with individual
human needs instead of wallowing in statistics, have achieved wonders in
improving the lot of Hong Kong’s refugees. Who they are and what they
have done offer the real key to Hong Kong’s problem of people.

Sister Annie Margareth Skau, a Norwegian missionary nurse of towering
physical and spiritual stature, began her work among Hong Kong’s refugees
with invaluable postgraduate training. She herself was a refugee from
China, driven out by the Reds.

Born in Oslo, she studied nursing at its City Hospital and decided
to become a “personal Christian,” dedicating her life to labor as a
missionary nurse of the Covenanters, or Mission Covenant Church of
Norway. The work was certain to be arduous, for the Covenanters sent
their workers to such remote corners of the world as Lapland, the Congo
or the interior of China. Annie, who has an almost mystical intensity of
religious faith, had no qualms about her probable assignments. Besides,
she looked about as large and indestructible as Michelangelo’s Moses, and
possessed a temperament of ebullient good nature.

After serving successfully in several other missions, she was sent to
China in the late 1930s. Establishing herself at a mission in Shensi,
northeastern China, she was the only Western-trained medical worker among
the 2,000,000 residents of this agricultural region. In all likelihood,
she was the largest woman ever seen by the Chinese children under her
care—over six feet, four inches tall, with a Valkyrie’s frame—but
so gentle that none of the children were awed by her presence. Her
appearance anywhere was a signal for laughter and games; she never seemed
too tired to play with children and teach them little songs.

Invading Japanese armies passed within two miles of her mission and
clinic in 1938, but none of the villagers ever betrayed the foreigner’s
presence. She had a quick, retentive mind, and learned to speak Mandarin
Chinese almost as well as she knew her own language. On the rare
occasions when an English-speaking visitor reached the out-of-the-way
settlement, he was surprised to find Sister Annie speaking his language
quite capably. Throughout the war and into the postwar era, she continued
to bring Christianity and expert medical care to her adopted people.

When the Communists seized control of China, however, the Christian
missionaries were doomed. The Christian God became a hateful image in
a shrine reserved for Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and a beloved
missionary nurse in a farming village was transformed into an enemy of
the people. The commissars and their lackeys began by hedging Annie
about with arbitrary regulations, then they confiscated medical supplies
intended for her patients.

None of these measures succeeded in halting her work. Exasperated at
their failure, the local party leaders finally dragged her before
a kangaroo-style People’s Court. The word had been passed that any
villager who arose to denounce her for crimes against the state would
be handsomely rewarded. Not a single accuser appeared. Having lost face
before the entire village, the Reds were more determined than ever to
punish her.

If no one who knew Sister Annie could be lured into a denunciation of
her, the obvious solution was to haul her off to a distant village where
no one knew her. Having done this, the Reds threw her into jail as an
object-lesson to anyone who befriended Christians. An old woman, knowing
nothing of Annie but remembering the humane work of other missionary
nurses in the village, begged the Communists to put her in jail with the
foreign prisoner so that she could comfort her.

“Even the guards were kind to me,” Annie recalls. “The village people
didn’t jeer at me or try to hurt me; they kept trying to pass food to me.
They were loyal to the last minute!”

Under the relentless persecution and mistreatment, Annie’s strong body
broke down, and in the summer of 1951, she was close to death from
pneumonia and malaria. The Reds, who refused to let her leave the country
when she was well, hurried to get rid of the ailing woman. Exhausted and
gravely ill, she left China and returned to Norway for a long rest and
the slow regaining of her normal health.

Eighteen months later she came back to Asia knowing that she would never
be readmitted to a Communist China. But there was still work to be done,
and she turned her efforts to a squalid shacktown in Hong Kong called
Rennie’s Mill Camp.

Three years earlier the routed remnants of Chiang’s army, left behind
on the mainland, had thrown together a cluster of shacks beside Junk
Bay, a backwater of the British colony without roads, water, light or
sanitation. Nearly 8,000 persons, wounded soldiers and their wives and
children, camped haphazardly on the steep shores of the bay, ran up the
Nationalist flag and claimed the forlorn site as their own.

When Annie reached the camp in March, 1953, traveling by sampan and
clambering over the high hills like a lost Viking, she found it haunted
by despair; a dirty, disease-ridden place, dragged down by the decline
of the Nationalist cause. Another nurse had started a small clinic in a
wooden hut, eight by ten feet in floor area, which treated 600 patients
a day. Annie and the other nurse shared sleeping quarters in a cubicle
attached to the hut.

Sometimes the cases were so numerous and critical that the two nurses put
the worst cases in their own cramped beds and spent the night on their
feet treating other patients. Their medical equipment consisted of one
thermometer, a few antiseptics and dressings, and a rickety table that
wobbled groggily on the half-decayed floorboards.

With the approach of Christmas, 1953, the fortunes of the clinic sank
to a new low. Both nurses were quite broke, unable to buy the food and
medical supplies their patients needed so critically. Acting more from
faith than reason, Annie set out to pick her way over the precipitous
rocks to Lei Yue Mun pass and cross by sampan to Hong Kong Island, hoping
to beg for help.

To her delighted surprise, the mission’s post-office box on the island
produced a windfall—$200 in contributions from ten persons overseas.
Charging into the shopping crowds, Annie spent every cent on food and
medicine. She scarcely noticed the weight of her purchases as she trekked
the hard route back to Rennie’s Mill. Until three o’clock Christmas
morning, the two nurses were on their feet, handing out life-saving
presents and exchanging holiday greetings in Mandarin and Cantonese.

“The money problems weren’t so bad after that,” Annie says. “Gifts came
in from welfare organizations and individuals, and we were able to build
a little stone clinic and a home for ourselves.”

At the same time, health problems grew worse at Rennie’s Mill. Drug
addiction and tuberculosis spread through the camp as its inhabitants
abandoned hope of an early return to China.

“Bad housing and poor food started the TB,” she explains. “But it got
much worse when people gave up hope, or heard about their relatives
being killed by the Communists. Chinese people are devoted to their
parents, and to be separated from them, or learn they’ve been killed—it’s
heartbreaking.

“That was when we realized we’d have to build a rest home for those
patients,” Annie says. “We didn’t have any money; all we had was a
mission to do the best we could. One day I boarded a sampan with a group
of children and we rowed out into Junk Bay until we came to a little
inlet. I saw a hill just above us, jutting right out to the shore. I knew
right then we would build our chapel on that hill.”

Annie discusses the incident with the fervor and conviction of one who
has received a private revelation.

“I saw the whole rest-center arranged around that chapel almost as if
it were already completed, built around love. I had no idea where the
money was coming from, not any kind of an architect’s plan, but it didn’t
matter. I knew that Christ would find a way.”

A way began to appear when a nurse who had worked with Sister Annie
visited the United States in 1954, telling children in Wisconsin schools
about their work. The response was electrifying. One small boy stood up
beside his desk to announce with utter seriousness, “I want to give my
heart to Jesus.” The appeal spread like a prairie fire; by February,
1955, Wisconsin school children had sent more than $2,500 for the new
rest home, which was called Haven of Hope Sanatorium. An anonymous
contributor donated another $5,000 through the Church World Service, Hong
Kong welfare agency of the National Council of Churches of Christ in
America.

“Now our sanatorium had walls and a roof,” Annie says. “So we prayed for
furniture and food for our patients—and for bedpans, too.

“It was a hand-to-mouth existence,” she remembers without a trace of
self-pity. “Our staff had no resources—we were so short of staff that
some of us worked for two years without a day off. We didn’t mind it at
all; we worked with one mind and one spirit, as if that sanatorium and
what it stood for was our one reason for living.”

In its early stages, the sanatorium was nothing more than a rest home.
One day, almost as an afterthought on a busy round of duties, Annie asked
a few of her patients to help her with some routine tasks. They pitched
in at once and returned the following day to volunteer for more duties.
They kept at the work for several days, then called on Annie in a kind
of delegation.

“Give us instructions, show us what to do,” they respectfully demanded.
“We want to learn how to be real nurses.”

Annie agreed, taking care to see that none of the volunteers exerted
themselves beyond the limits of their precarious health. After three
months, they insisted on examinations to show what they had learned.

From modest and tentative beginnings, the courses multiplied and expanded
into a full-scale nursing school, offering a two-and-a-half-year
progression of classes in eleven different subjects, with stiff exams.
Most of the pupils are girls between eighteen and twenty who specialize
in TB nursing. The eleventh class was graduated in February, 1962, and
the demand for new enrollments was so brisk that Annie, as Director of
Nursing Services, could accept only five out of sixty eager applicants.

The sanatorium grew into a 206-bed institution of modern and spotless
appearance, and a 40-bed rehabilitation center for chronic and infectious
TB patients has been built nearby. Church World Service cut a road
through to the isolated site and it was later paved by the colony
government. Tuberculosis has been brought under control at Rennie’s Mill
Camp, and the Haven of Hope is drawing many of its patients from outside.
There is no danger of a shortage; TB strikes everywhere among Hong Kong’s
poor.

Haven of Hope is administered by the Junk Bay Medical Council, which also
operates a clinic at Rennie’s Mill. Four doctors comprise the sanatorium
staff. Except for Annie and Miss Martha Boss, the assistant matron,
from Cleveland, Ohio, all the nurses are Chinese. Miss Boss, trained in
the same diligent tradition as Annie, spends three days a week at the
sanatorium, three days on church work and school duties in Rennie’s Mill,
and the seventh day on an industrial medical project.

Rennie’s Mill Camp no longer looks like a shacktown. Catholic and
Protestant mission schools have been established, and many residents are
employed in handicraft shops. A new police post has been erected beside
the camp, and a bus line carries camp residents to the business and
shopping districts of Kowloon. Soon a reservoir is to be constructed with
government aid on a hill above the camp, and a modern housing development
will replace inadequate dwellings.

Taiwanese flags still fly in the breeze at many places in the camp, and
Nationalist Chinese contribute to its support. But its main lease on life
comes from the churches and the colony of Hong Kong.

Although the scope of Annie’s activities has become much wider, she
has lost none of her personal and religious attitude. When she walks
through the wards she is followed by the smiles of hundreds of children.
At any moment, she will stop to lead a grinning group of little girls,
perched on their beds like sparrows, in a song. With Annie joining in the
gestures, the kids sing out in Cantonese “Jesus loves little children ...
like me ... (pointing to themselves) ... like you ... (pointing at Annie
or the girl in the nearest bed) ... like all the others” (with a big,
wide-open sweep of the arms).

Annie hugs a lively, black-haired youngster and says quietly, “Her
mother was seven months pregnant when she swam from China to Macao with
this little one on her back. The girl’s been here two years, and she’s
gradually getting better. Her mother went back to China, and has probably
been liquidated by the Communists.”

Another girl reacts to Annie’s pat on the head with the wiggly cordiality
of a puppy.

“This little one was scared to death of ‘imperialists’ when she came
here,” Annie explains. “It took us a long time to persuade her that the
Red propaganda wasn’t true.”

Her first two patients at Haven of Hope, a brother and sister, have now
completely recovered. Both had seen their parents tortured and killed by
the Reds.

“When the girl came to us, her face was like stone,” Annie says. “For two
years I played with her, trying all kinds of funny things to bring her
out of that frozen stupor, but she never smiled once.

“I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she continues. “Then I tried something
different. On July 6, 1955, I put her in a sampan with eleven other kids,
and took them all to see the wonderful new building we’d just finished.
You know, the first time she got a look at it she broke into a big smile!
It was the first time she looked happy. Now she’s fourteen, and her
greatest ambition is to be a nurse.”

A magnificent chapel, built exactly where Annie had visualized it, was
completed in time for Christmas services in 1961. A group of Norwegian
seamen donated an illuminated cross to surmount its roof. At night, when
their ships sail out from Hong Kong, they can see it glowing above a line
of hills that cut back from the sea like the fiords of Norway.

To Annie, the chapel embodies the same spirit she expressed in naming the
eleven wards at Haven of Hope Sanatorium: Love, Peace, Joy, Patience,
Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Neatness, Temperance, Hope and Courage.

For qualities like these, exemplified in her work at Rennie’s Mill Camp
and the sanatorium, Sister Annie Margareth Skau was given the Florence
Nightingale Award of the International Red Cross on May 18, 1961. Annie
regarded the award not as a personal tribute, but as an honor earned and
shared by everyone who worked or contributed to make the Haven of Hope a
reality.

“There is so much that needs to be done for these poor, homeless people,”
she says. “Why, we’ve hardly begun the job.”

In 1951, the same year that Annie Skau was exiled from Red China, the
Communists drove out a remarkable European-Chinese couple who had been
helping moneyless families to support themselves by setting up home
industries. Their house, with all their savings invested in it, was
seized by the state and they reached Hong Kong with a total capital of
thirty-four cents.

The husband, Gus Borgeest, had been a production expediter in a Shanghai
textile mill for twenty years. His background was almost as international
as the U.N.; a British subject, he was born in Shanghai of mixed
British, Danish, Portuguese, Italian and German ancestry. Mona, his
Christian-Chinese wife, was born of Cantonese parents in the Hong Kong
fishing town of Aberdeen.

During the Japanese invasion, Gus was interned for two years. He spent
his time in prison reading about the Quakers and became converted to
their ideal of helping others. When the war ended, he returned to his
Shanghai job until Mona contracted tuberculosis. To aid her recovery,
the couple moved to the more favorable climate of Hangchow. It was only
a stopover, for the political climate that developed after the Reds took
control made the survival of Christian welfare workers an impossibility.

Arriving in Hong Kong, Gus found a job in the Fish and Vegetable
Marketing Organization of the colony government. Mona had regained her
health, and the two of them spent their spare hours doing refugee welfare
work in the squatter settlements. It was thoroughly discouraging; living
conditions were deplorable and the refugees, subsisting on handouts, were
losing their pride and initiative.

“We aren’t accomplishing anything,” Gus told Mona. “It’s a waste of
time—unless we can do something, find some way to help people earn their
way out of these miserable firetraps.”

After a long series of discussions in which they considered and discarded
a variety of self-help schemes, Gus and Mona agreed to stake all their
resources on one hopeful but wholly untried plan. They put aside every
spare penny until they had saved $700. Now Gus was ready to present their
plan to the appropriate officials of the colony government.

He went to K. M. A. Barnett, District Commissioner and the colony’s top
authority on the Chinese people and their customs. Mr. Barnett listened
in some wonderment while Gus outlined a proposal to build a refugee
rehabilitation center on a desolate island seven miles west of Hong Kong
Island. He would teach people how to make a living by farming marginal
land—and there was plenty of such land lying idle in the colony.

The Commissioner was friendly, but he needed the answers to certain
questions. What was Gus’s farming experience? Twenty years in a textile
plant. Why did Gus think he could grow anything on that island? Hadn’t
the Chinese farmers abandoned it?—and they could grow almost anything,
anywhere! Gus was positive he could make it go. Did he have any money?
Gus mentioned the $700 and said he was sure it would be enough for
a starter. On the face of it, the plan looked highly unfeasible to
Mr. Barnett, but he sensed something out of the ordinary in Gus’s
determination. Besides, the Commissioner reflected, his office was never
crowded with people who intended to do something simply for the benefit
of their fellow men.

Having weighed the matter thoroughly, District Commissioner Barnett
recommended that the strange couple from Shanghai be given a chance.
The colony government leased the barren, 200-acre island to Gus for
thirty-four dollars a year, and he and Mona spent most of their savings
to buy two tents, bedding, a sack of rice, cooking utensils and farming
tools.

On June 5, 1953, Gus, Mona, their five-year-old daughter, Naomi, and two
refugee farmers set sail for their new home, which Gus had rechristened
Sunshine Island, in a hired junk. On their first night ashore it rained
four inches in two hours, but they stuck it out with Mona doing the
cooking and Naomi scampering around for field grass to ignite the fire.
Twelve days after they landed, a refugee fisherman, his wife and daughter
nosed their leaky boat against a sandy beach and became the next settlers.

Within a month, Gus and his helpers had tilled a small patch of land and
were raising some chickens, geese and nanny goats. Three-fourths of his
capital had been consumed by these improvements and the farming books he
pored over every night. An interest-free loan from a Quaker friend kept
the venture afloat, and they sweated through the humid summer building
grass huts, planting crops, and slashing paths through the shoulder-high
sword grass.

Any heavenly blessings they received did not cover weather conditions,
for Typhoon Tess flattened their huts and tore up their garden. Yet the
improbable colony earned its first income at the end of five months—$2.60
from the sale of rabbits they had raised. Loans and small gifts from
friends overseas furnished additional support. Virtually nothing went
swimmingly; the first few families who joined them on Sunshine couldn’t
stomach the solitary island and had no interest in working to pay their
way.

One of the worst catastrophes in Hong Kong history—the Shek Kip Mei
fire that destroyed the shacks of more than 60,000 squatters—created an
unsought opportunity for Gus. Strapped for cash, he landed a temporary
job helping to relocate the fire victims and sent his earnings back to
Mona, who kept the Sunshine Island project breathing. He returned in
a few months to find the island earning about one-third of what the
Borgeests had spent on it.

Both of them decided on some major changes. He talked to welfare agencies
and secured their help in selecting people who had the desire and the
qualifications to benefit from the scheme; farmers and those who wanted
to learn simple trades, or people like Professor Ting, a former lecturer
at Hangchow Christian College, who was willing to mind the geese while
building up his shattered health. Every worker on the island earned $.35
a day, plus food and lodging for his family; a puny income, even by Hong
Kong standards, but in their view, infinitely preferable to handouts.

Welfare organizations in Hong Kong had been watching the progress of
the fledgling colony and were quick to appreciate its value. The United
Church of Canada donated $960, the Hong Kong Welfare Society put up $30
a month to pay families working on the island, and other agencies joined
in—Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World
Federation—sending cash, supplies and carefully chosen settlers.

When the first stone houses on the island were completed in 1955,
Gus struck a note of triumph by giving them the high-sounding name of
Villa Borghese—a salute to his Italian ancestors. Twenty families,
comprising 100 persons, had entered wholeheartedly into the spirit
of the plan, digging terraced gardens from the rocky hillsides and
planting pineapples. Bamboo, banana, and pine trees were set firmly on
the hillsides or in the sheltered hollow between Sunshine’s two highest
hills. Refugee students, earning their tuition from welfare agencies,
excavated a fish-breeding pond.

For the first time Gus was able to pay himself a salary of $36 a month,
but as often as not in succeeding months he turned it right back into
the kitty to balance his accounts. Periodic crises like typhoons, crop
failures, and the death of valuable livestock regularly badgered the
colony, but Gus contrived to ride them out.

In 1957, Gus was laid low by a serious case of tuberculosis. For six
months he reluctantly remained in a chair placed on a sunny terrace in
front of his house. From there he directed Mona in the management of the
colony. Gradually regaining his strength, he recovered fully in two years
and resumed active charge of the enterprise.

Increased aid from the outside enabled Gus to raise every worker’s daily
pay to 70 cents. Sunshine Island lost its bleak look; besides its new
stone buildings, it had over 800 fruit trees and 300 pigs, including 30
breeding sows. Roads had been chopped through its spiny ridges, knitting
the whole project together.

Hong Kong’s government staff, satisfied that Gus was doing something
solidly beneficial for refugees, furnished district officers,
agriculturists, forestry and fisheries experts as consultants on various
Sunshine Island jobs.

But the human dividends of Sunshine Island were far more impressive
than its physical achievements. More than 700 men and women, including a
number of drug addicts, had found new hope on the island. After working
there for six months or a year and creating a small nest-egg from their
savings, they applied their newly acquired skills to start their own
farms on marginal land or get jobs in the city. A large majority of them
are now earning their own living in the British colony.

Gus, having conceived Sunshine Island as a pilot project for farming
marginal land, schooled a group of his “graduates” in a marginal-farm
resettlement at Cheung Sheung, in the New Territories. Each new farmer
received two acres from the Hong Kong government, plus a cow, farm tools
and a small cash allowance. Practically all of them made the grade as
independent farmers.

Activities expanded once more on Sunshine Island when the Hong Kong
Junior Chamber of Commerce donated $2,500 to build a piggery for
30 animals, and 20 more sties were added to it in 1961. Papaya and
pomegranate trees were added to the orchard. The island became a local
attraction for visitors, with Boy Scouts and other youth organizations
camping and swimming at a beach on the side of the island most distant
from the farm area.

With the knowledge he paid a steep price for on Sunshine Island, Gus has
set up marginal-farm projects at three more locations besides Cheung
Sheung.

“I think that Mona and I have reached our first major objective,” he
said, early in 1962. “That is to show refugee families a better way of
living than handouts and squatter settlements, and to help strengthen the
over-strained economy of Hong Kong.”

Several other organizations have adopted the self-help system pioneered
by the Borgeests, and Gus is ready to move on to fresh challenges once
the Sunshine Island settlement becomes self-supporting. He believes
this can be done within three years; from there on, he would like to
turn Sunshine over to an administrative committee capable of running it
without him.

The island has become a bustling work center. A one-handed stonemason who
has built hundreds of feet of stone-and-cement walls for pig pastures is
erecting the walls of another piggery. Dozens of Hakka women in their
black-fringed straw hats are transporting dirt in straw baskets to clear
the site of a new road. One man tirelessly splits boulders with a heavy
hammer and a chisel; while he works, he listens to Cantonese music
issuing from his transistor radio, perched on an adjoining rock. A sampan
taxi, operating between Sunshine and the nearby island of Peng Chau,
supports a family with several children and a seaworthy chow dog.

Gus is absorbed in new plans to help others. Two years ago he undertook
a complete survey of the island of Shek Kwu Chau, two miles west of
Sunshine, to determine whether it could be made into a rehabilitation
center for some of Hong Kong’s 250,000 narcotics addicts. With only
slight modifications, the survey has become the blueprint for the center,
opening in 1962 under the administration of the Society for the Aid and
Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts. He was one of the early developers of
Hei Ling Chau, the island leprosarium run by the Mission to Lepers, and
remains a member of its administrative council.

On the last day of August, 1961, Gus and Mona became winners of a Ramon
Magsaysay Award, the “Nobel Prize of the East,” for their Sunshine
Island accomplishments. The award also carried a $10,000 prize, and the
Borgeests decided to save it for the education of their three daughters.

“We have no other funds,” Gus explained. “But a lot of people who heard
about the prize must have decided that old Gus is on easy street. Our
contributions fell off, and our debts started shooting up again.”

At fifty-two, Gus is a ruggedly built man whose face and bald head have
been burned dark brown by the sun. His one gospel is the doctrine of
helping others to help themselves.

“The Chinese people don’t want to live on anybody’s charity,” Gus said.
“And that’s doubly true of the refugees; they wouldn’t have come here,
most of them, if they’d been willing to become stooges for a government
that did all the thinking for them.”

Gus has a well-defined conception of the way he prefers to spend his own
future:

“I’d like to devote the rest of my life to work among the lepers and drug
addicts. We couldn’t do much for the addicts on Sunshine; we’d get them
accustomed to living without drugs, but they’d slip back into addiction
when they met their old companions back in the city.

“And if there’s time enough, I’d like to go to one of the rural areas in
the Philippines with Mona and set up another place like Sunshine Island.
With what we’ve learned here, I know we could do a lot better.”

The heroic works of the Borgeests and Sister Annie Skau, outstanding
though they are, have directly affected the lives of less than one
percent of Hong Kong’s refugees. But the dimensions of the crisis are
so great that they have engaged the attention of scores of humane and
intelligent people. They have gone far beyond routine assistance to
devise creative and practical solutions to the colony’s refugee problems.

Monsignor John Romaniello, a Maryknoll missionary from New Rochelle,
N.Y., used his noodle to produce millions of meals for hungry refugees.
A roundish man with nothing on his mind but the Lord’s work and noodles,
he revels in his title as “noodle king of Hong Kong.” He sings about
noodles, writes about noodles, puns about noodles and buttonholes every
American tourist he meets for contributions to buy more noodles.

It is showmanship with a purpose. Behind the kidding lies an idea so
obvious that no one ever thought of it until Monsignor Romaniello
came to Hong Kong in 1957 as director of Catholic Relief Services. He
noticed that millions of dollars’ worth of American surplus foods like
milk powder, corn meal, and wheat flour being sent to the colony to
feed refugees were winding up on the black market. Having lived among
the Chinese for thirty years, he decided to keep a close eye on the
surplus-food traffic.

One day he observed a young girl taking a sack of surplus flour into a
bakery, then paying the baker to convert it into noodles. The simple
incident stayed in his mind, nagging at him. Later, while riding across
the harbor on the Star Ferry, the answer to a gigantic riddle came to him
in one reflective flash; the little girl was paying to have the flour
made into noodles because her mother, like most refugee mothers, had
no way of turning the flour into an edible meal. The same was true of
com meal; there was neither space nor cooking facilities for it in the
average refugee cubicle. In their raw state, the surplus foods were alien
to a Chinese palate.

Why not convert these foods into noodles? No colony baker was equipped
to handle the job on the scale Monsignor Romaniello envisioned. On
any scale, the cost was too high for the refugee feeding program.
Monsignor Romaniello, helped by other Maryknoll fathers, constructed a
noodle-making machine out of scrap parts and an old engine. It looked
like nothing ever designed by engineers, but it rolled out the noodles.

The Maryknoll noodles caught on at once with the Chinese, who found them
easy to prepare and agreeable to eat. With funds provided by Catholic
Relief Services and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, the first
noodle-making contraption was replaced by a production-line model. Within
four years, Hong Kong noodles were pouring out of the machines at the
rate of 5,000,000 pounds a year, and welfare organizations like the
Church World Service had adopted them. Noodle machines were exported to
the Philippines, Macao, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam as the noodle mania
grew.

Another Catholic priest, working in a phase of welfare work wholly unlike
that of the “noodle king,” has achieved a degree of success comparable
to that of Monsignor Romaniello. He is Father P. J. Howatson, an Irish
Jesuit who has become a key figure in the colony’s youth leadership
program.

Welfare workers will tell you, holding their breath as they do so, that
gangs of young hoodlums have not yet infested Hong Kong. Widespread
poverty, overcrowded housing, and a predominantly young population seem
to offer fertile soil for their growth, but welfare people believe
juvenile gangs have not appeared primarily because of the integral unity
of the Chinese family, with its respect for parents and elders.

There is a second line of defense, the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs
Association, which embraces 13,000 of the poorest youngsters in its
recreational and leadership programs. Father Howatson is the prime mover
in the Association, doing some of its finest work among rooftop squatters
in Wanchai, a waterfront jungle of bars and cabarets where shiploads of
pent-up sailors are regularly turned loose.

Because of the magnitude of Hong Kong’s welfare needs and the bewildering
assortment of private organizations attempting to deal with them, there
is an absolute necessity for a central clearinghouse to eliminate
overlapping in some areas and neglect in others. This is the function
of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, a coordinating agency of
ninety welfare organizations which regularly checks the balance sheets of
its affiliates. If they pass muster, the colony government grants them
substantial aid to supplement their own resources.

The Council, under its executive secretary Madge Newcombe, is also
charged with discovering where and what the needs of poor people are, and
then of assigning the religious or welfare societies best equipped to
satisfy them. There is no shortage of needs; the Council’s concern is to
avoid imbalance and wasted effort in meeting them.

Five years ago the Council created the Central Relief Records Office.
With its file of approximately 200,000 cards, listing the name of every
relief client and the aid he is receiving from each agency, the office
has drastically reduced the duplication of welfare-agency work and
chiseling by potential recipients. There is no need for begging; relief
is so well organized that any hungry person can get a meal at a welfare
agency.

Apart from feeding and housing the colony’s displaced persons, there is
a human problem of especial poignance. A resettlement estate, at its
outset, is an assembly of strangers from all over China, some from big
cities, some from back-country hamlets, tossed together like beans in a
bowl.

At Wong Tai Sin, one of the largest resettlement estates, 60,000 people
are packed into long rows of multi-story concrete blocks. Physically,
they are far better off than they were in the shacktowns they came
from, but when they first moved in they were strangers lost in a crowd,
rootless and with no sense of community interests.

During World Refugee Year (1959-60), the United States government met
the problem of building community consciousness at Wong Tai Sin with one
of its most effective gifts—$210,000 to build a community center there.
Now completed and in full operation, it is a large, modern, five-story
building teeming with community enterprises.

The variety of its activities is bewildering: classes for the deaf,
courses in Diesel mechanics and refrigeration engineering, Chinese opera,
day nurseries, social events, libraries, movies and a hundred other
interests—all of them designed to form a congenial community out of
thousands of isolated families.

The idea worked so well that the United Kingdom put up an equal amount
of money to build a second center in the new-born industrial city of
Tsuen Wan. The Toronto and Canadian World Refugee Year committees donated
$75,000 for a third community center at Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island.
Others are planned, and the public response to the centers has been so
enthusiastic that the colony hopes to establish one in every resettlement
estate.

The Hong Kong branch of Church World Service, a department of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, picked up fresh
vigor a few years ago. Dr. Elbert E. Gates, Jr., pastor of the First
Baptist Church of Westfield, N.J., made an incidental stop at Hong Kong
during a trip to Australia. He and his wife, June, had a close-up look
at the colony’s refugees, and what they saw made an unforgettable
impression on them. In 1959, he gave up his pastorate and took a
one-third cut in salary to become director of the Church World Service
branch in Hong Kong.

Working together, the couple have become leaders in colony refugee
activities. The statistical side alone is enormous—distributing 53,000
quarts of powdered milk a day and 2,500,000 balanced-ration biscuits a
month, and operating a noodle factory and a central kitchen with a daily
capacity of 40,000 meals. There are scholarships for young people, dental
clinics, foundling homes, homes for orphaned girls and a dozen other
undertakings.

Dr. Gates, a cheerful, tireless advocate of the colony’s poor people,
interrupts his work many times to show overseas visitors what is being
done, and still needs to be done, to help the refugees. He takes most
pleasure, perhaps, in displaying the “self-help” projects of Church World
Service.

At one school in the hills of Kowloon, he directs a home where girls are
taught to make dresses, sweaters and ties for the American market. All
were formerly homeless, most are under twenty years old, some are blind,
others have only one hand or one arm. They have all learned to knit,
including the girl with one arm, and are earning their living by making
high-quality products for sale in the best stores.

“We don’t want to produce curios, or something that tries to play on
people’s sympathy by calling itself a refugee product,” Dr. Gates says.
“These girls have proved they can turn out goods that will hold their own
in a competitive market.”

It is obvious that Doctor and Mrs. Gates are enjoying themselves as much
as those they help when they drop into the Faith Hope Nursery, a joint
enterprise of Church World Service and the YWCA. The nursery children,
two to five years old, are shack-dwellers whose mothers work during the
day. At the nursery, the kids receive daytime care, meals, clothes and a
daily bath, with plenty of time left over for group singing and dancing.
When the pastor and his wife appear, moppet grins spread the width of the
classroom and there is a spirited exchange of Cantonese greetings.

Church World Service, together with CARE, Catholic Relief Services and
the Lutheran World Service, form the recognized “big four” of Hong Kong’s
private welfare organizations. Each one does its own work and cooperates
willingly with the other three, as well as scores of other Catholic,
Protestant and non-denominational groups. One hears a certain amount of
subdued muttering about this or that religious group pushing hard for new
members, but there is no sign that it has seriously impaired their aim,
which is to help all poor people without regard to finicky distinctions
of race or religion.

CARE, the non-denominational American member of the big four, made a
brilliant and original addition to its long-established welfare program
in 1961. This was the Ap Chau Island settlement, built for the families
of fishermen.

The people who fish the waters around Ap Chau, a three-acre island in the
northeastern corner of the New Territories, had for generations spent
their entire lives on fishing junks, never establishing homes on shore
or attending schools. But the technical demands of the modern fishing
industry put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they petitioned the
colony government for permission to build homes on Ap Chau and send their
children to school.

Graham French, a Philadelphia philanthropist who was in Hong Kong to
observe CARE operations, heard about the petition and became curious
enough to investigate it thoroughly. He discovered that the petitioners
were so deeply indebted to loan-sharks that they had no real chance to
finance housing ashore unless they got outside funds. He offered to give
$17,500 to get the settlement started, CARE added another $20,000 and the
colony government spent $14,000 to clear a site for the houses.

With these combined funds, a settlement consisting of houses for
forty-eight families, or 360 people, was completed in December, 1961.
The Royal Engineers laid an undersea 1,000-yard pipeline from a mainland
reservoir to supply the island with fresh water. The fishing families,
for their part, formed a community cooperative to administer the scheme.
Rents go into a revolving fund, and members of the co-op can borrow from
it at one percent interest to repair and mechanize their boats.

The fishermen’s wives were at first so naïve about living on shore that
they tried to furnish their houses with a piled-up heap of boards and
braces resembling the poop deck of a fishing junk.

After a time, the seagoing ladies learned to adjust themselves to
conventional tables and chairs. Using sewing machines supplied by
CARE, they took instructions from the government teacher on the island
and learned to sew their own curtains. Their husbands took carpentry
instruction at the same school and produced some acceptable furniture.
Ultimately, the entire project will become self-supporting.

A similar cooperative settlement has been launched at Sai Kung, a market
town in the New Territories. Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie, Hong Kong
industrialists and philanthropists, donated pigs to bolster the domestic
economy of Sai Kung. Three other allied ventures have been okayed by the
government for construction at Tai Tam, on Hong Kong Island, and on the
outlying islands of Tsing Yi and Po Toi.

Numerically, the most extensive of all private welfare groups in Hong
Kong are the Kaifongs, or Chinese neighborhood welfare associations,
with 665,000 members. Operating on slim budgets, they have nevertheless
managed to provide medical care, distribute emergency relief supplies,
conduct hundreds of free classes, set up noodle factories and give
anti-cholera shots.

The Kaifongs are a departure from the older Chinese practice of limiting
charity to your own family or clan; they branch into such community-wide
interests as traffic safety and antinoise campaigns. Once they even put
on a drive to persuade Kowloon kids not to fly their kites in the path
of airliners approaching Kai Tak Airport! (This last one sounds a bit
overzealous, but not to anyone who has stood in the streets of Kowloon
Tong while the jets roared overhead, all but untying his shoelaces with
their vibrations.)

Although the United States government has conducted no regular
foreign-aid program in Hong Kong, it has given the colony almost
$30,000,000 worth of aid, either as surplus foods or as part of its Far
East Refugee Program.

The main burden of relief falls, as it should, on the colony government.
The Hong Kong administration spends $10,000,000 annually on social
welfare work and more than $55,000,000 a year on every form of direct and
indirect aid to its millions of poor residents.

The problem of what to do about its refugees had been with the colony
throughout its history. Whenever China was afflicted by famine, unrest or
revolution, thousands of its people sought temporary haven in Hong Kong.

Perhaps the most noted refugee of the pre-British era was Ti Ping, the
last boy Emperor of the Sung Dynasty, who was driven out of China by the
Mongols in 1279 A.D. He encamped on the Kowloon Peninsula for almost
a year, then resumed his flight to the west, where he was defeated and
drowned in a sea battle with the Mongols. An inscribed rectangular rock
called the Sung Wong T’oi, or Terrace of the Sung Emperor, stands near
Kai Tak Airport to commemorate his stopover.

The British had barely settled in their new colony when a group of
refugees who had been plotting to overthrow the Manchu emperors fled
there in the 1840s. Unwilling to endanger their relations with the
Manchus, the British branded the plotters under the arm and shipped them
back to China. The Tai Ping Rebellion of 1850, fomented by a Christian
Chinese, Hung Siu Tsuen, to depose the Manchus, provoked serious disorder
in Canton and brought another wave of frightened Chinese to Hong Kong.

Thousands of Chinese streamed into the colony during the next decade, but
most of them moved on to the goldfields of California and Australia, or
to contract labor in the Americas and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Their passage was expedited by labor-traders who often recruited manpower
by kidnaping Orientals and shipping them out in barbarously overcrowded
vessels.

The Boxer Rebellion of 1900, bringing a rash of murders of missionaries
and Chinese Christians, forced thousands to seek safety in Hong Kong. A
far greater number arrived in 1911 when Dr. Sun Yat Sen overthrew the
Manchu Empire. In the early chaotic days of the Chinese Republic about
100,000 refugees came to the crown colony, jamming its housing and
creating prime conditions for a plague outbreak which presently killed
nearly 2,000 persons.

There was a brief reversal in the direction of the refugee procession
when Britain entered World War I and 60,000 Chinese turned back home.
But continuing disorders in China brought many right back to Hong Kong,
and the southward drift persisted through the 1920s.

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the drift became a tidal wave;
in two years 600,000 refugees crossed the border. The population had
reached 1,600,000 when the Japanese attacked Hong Kong in December, 1941.

Having no desire to support such a large population, the Japanese
conquerors set to work to reduce the head-count. Their methods were a
model of brutality; starvation, execution and driving the Chinese back to
their homeland with bayonets. All who attempted to detach themselves from
the northbound herd were instantly killed. By the end of the war, the
Japanese had cut the colony population to less than 600,000.

During the war, the colony came perilously close to losing its chances
of ever being returned to its place in the British Empire. At the Yalta
Conference, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Stalin privately
that he thought Hong Kong should be returned to China or made into an
internationalized free port after the Japanese were defeated.

Nothing was said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flatly
opposed every attempt to whittle down Britain’s colonial possessions. Ten
years after, when asked about the Roosevelt proposal, Churchill replied,
“According to the American record [of the Yalta Conference], President
Roosevelt said he knew I would have strong objections to this suggestion.
That was certainly correct—and even an understatement.”

Chiang Kai-shek also campaigned for the return of Hong Kong to China and
almost as soon as the war ended, James F. Byrnes, American Secretary of
State, announced that the future status of Hong Kong would be determined
at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. As soon as they learned
about this, the British, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, registered
their emphatic disapproval and the idea died without further discussion.

Although Hong Kong did not go back to China, the Chinese went back to
Hong Kong. During the postwar struggles of Nationalist and Communist
forces, thousands of their Chinese countrymen removed to Hong Kong,
including virtually all who had been driven from the colony by the
Japanese. But the great human avalanche came in 1949, when the Reds
gained absolute control of the country. Fugitives from Communist
“liberation” swarmed into Hong Kong at the rate of 10,000 a week.

One year after the Communists took over, the colony’s population reached
2,360,000. More than 330,000 people were living in hillside squatter
settlements, sleeping on the sidewalks, on tenement rooftops, even in
the center strip of the widest Kowloon streets. A shacktown fire in
1950 drove 20,000 persons from their homes. The next year a single fire
dishoused 10,000 people, and a series of fires in 1952 burned out 15,000
others.

Sooner or later, colony officials told themselves, the refugees would
return to China as the immigrant waves of other years had done. The
government took a firm stand on the doctrine that it was not supposed
to become the landlord for millions of its residents, but it yielded
sufficiently to erect temporary wooden huts and bungalows for 40,000
squatters.

All the high-principled resolutions to stay out of the public
housing business were swept away on Christmas Night, 1953. A roaring
conflagration broke out at Shek Kip Mei, in Upper Kowloon, racing up
the tiers of hillside shacks as if it were mounting a flight of steps.
Somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people were left homeless. About half
of them found shelter with friends or relatives, and the government was
plunged into the enormous task of feeding, clothing and rehousing the
fire victims.

Pausing just long enough to permit the displaced people to sift their
few remaining possessions from the ashes, the government bulldozed
the 45-acre site, leveled the ground, and had erected emergency
accommodations on it in fifty-three days. The streets had hardly been
cleared of homeless people when a new shack fire at Tai Hang Tung
dishoused 24,000 others.

Simultaneously, the colony recognized the inadequacy of its
cottage-and-bungalow housing, which required too much land and provided
for too few people. It began the construction of multi-story resettlement
estates—six- and seven-story blocks of reinforced concrete clustered
together in populous communities. Eleven such estates, lodging 360,000
people in fireproof and typhoon-proof structures, have been completed
since 1954 at a cost of $32,000,000. One toilet is shared by hundreds
of people and there is no electric light in the rooms unless the tenant
pays extra for it. But when they are seen beside the remaining shacks,
the multi-story blocks seem immeasurably superior. In addition to the
multi-story estates, 80,000 persons have been housed in fourteen cottage
resettlement areas.

An apartment in a resettlement block is a concrete-walled room, renting
for $1.60 to $4.60 a month. The Hong Kong Housing Authority has built a
higher-quality low-cost apartment in skyscraper developments, renting
from $8 to $23 a month, and 106,000 persons are to be accommodated in
them by 1964.

Around 30,000 people live in flats built by the Hong Kong Housing
Society, a voluntary group aided by government loan funds, and this
number will be doubled in a few years. If the colony maintains its
present rate of building, it can provide new apartments for 100,000
persons annually for the next five years.

This small mountain of statistics looms large on the landscape until you
consider that there are now about 500,000 to 600,000 people living in
squatter shacks, on sidewalks and rooftops and in tumbledown firetrap
tenements. Theoretically, they could all be rehoused in five or six
years, but the colony’s population is rising meanwhile at the rate of
150,000 a year.

The dreams of Hong Kong housing officials are haunted by figures; a baby
born every five minutes and illegal immigrants sneaking across the border
at an incalculable rate. Illegal immigration is never estimated at less
than 10,000 a year and often set as high as 40,000. Popular guesswork may
jack it up to 20,000 a month.

In its own protection, the colony has been forced to forbid further
immigration, except at an approximate rate of fifty a day. Its
only shield against a smothering horde of advancing people is the
effectiveness of its land and marine police. To the extent that the
border police can restrain illegal immigration, the colony may be able to
catch up with its housing needs, provided, of course, that the birth rate
tapers off.

The colony’s marine police are a small, well-trained force contending
with overwhelming odds. Their fleet of 27 boats and 610 men is charged
with patrolling 400 miles of coastline and 728 square miles of
territorial waters. They have one 58-foot boat with a top speed of 22
knots and three jet boats of 20-foot length, useful in hot pursuit, with
a maximum speed of 42 knots. Their 70-foot launches mount a 50-caliber
Browning machine-gun on the foredeck and carry a cache of smaller arms,
but they deliver no more than 11 knots.

As many as five of the patrol boats may be out on duty at one time, but
the sea lanes from Macao and China are crowded with ships at all hours.
A police launch cruising along the western edge of Hong Kong waters on a
clear day will often have forty vessels within its sight.

There are red sails in every sunset off Lantau, largest and westernmost
of Hong Kong’s 237 islands. The skipper of a police launch may spend
every spare moment scanning the horizon for suspicious-looking craft,
but even in full daylight he cannot hope to detect and halt all the
smugglers. At night, when the smugglers slip through fog or run without
lights, the skipper’s chances are considerably slimmer. The Red Chinese
gunboats are also on the prowl just beyond territorial limits, hoping to
catch their runaway countrymen, but they are often unsuccessful.

The Hong Kong courts charged 1,551 illegal immigrants in 1961; another
1,763 were intercepted by the marine police and sent back to China.
Thousands of others slipped through the net either at Macao or Hong Kong.
Here are a few typical incidents that occurred during two months in the
winter of 1961-62.

Eighty-three men, women, and children stole a Chinese military launch and
escaped to Macao. Marine police caught seventy-three illegal immigrants
in a motor junk off Lamma Island. Police discovered thirty-two men and
women attempting to slip past Castle Peak in a sailing junk. A woman and
two children were arrested in Tai Tam Bay, Hong Kong Island. A Communist
gunboat intercepted a sampan near Lappa Island, opposite Macao, firing
shots into the hull and driving the dozen women and children aboard back
to Red territory. A Red gunboat fired on a junk at the mouth of the
Canton River estuary, sinking it with all twenty-nine immigrants aboard.

During the same period, an unknown number of illegal immigrants swam
across Starling Inlet from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong, using rafts
and basketballs to keep themselves afloat. A middle-aged man swam from
Lappa Island to Macao under the muzzles of Communist guns to visit his
son. On every dark night or at any time there is a chance of screening
their passage in foggy or overcast weather, the immigrants keep coming in.

Marine police inspectors say there is a well-organized traffic in
smuggling illegal immigrants. Smugglers can buy a second-hand junk in
Macao and stuff its hold with twenty to forty immigrants. They have
a regular scale of prices based on the financial blood-count of each
customer; $40 for well-heeled Shanghai Chinese, $30 for a moderately
solvent Fukienese, and $13 to $20 for a Cantonese farmer or laborer. If
the smugglers fall into the hands of the marine police, they may spend
a year in prison, and their passengers will be sent back to an ice-cold
reception in Red China. Jail sentences seldom keep smugglers from
returning to the trade; the profits justify the risk.

“If we catch a boat with people that look like genuine fishermen, we
may warn them to get a Hong Kong operating license and let them go,” a
marine police inspector said. “If we spot one that looks like a regular
smuggler, we arrest the whole bunch.”

The marine police crews are predominantly Cantonese; first-class seamen
and courageous policemen, but at best they can scarcely hope to snare
more than a minority of those who are determined to break through the
blockade. When the successful ones reach Hong Kong Island or one of
the sheltered coves of the New Territories, they are met by friends,
relatives or confederates of the smugglers. They vanish into the almost
impenetrable masses of Chinese and emerge a few months later to register
as residents. In most cases the British have no alternative but to accept
them.

Many of the police are themselves refugees from Red China. They perform
their antismuggling duties conscientiously, but if refugees get through
despite their best efforts and vigilance, they may be something less than
heartbroken.

Protection of the land border with Red China is the responsibility of the
200 uniformed men of the Frontier Division, with headquarters at Fanling,
four miles south of the border. Measured in a straight line, the border
is only thirteen miles long, but 22 miles as it follows a snaky line from
Deep Bay in the west to Mirs Bay in the east. On the colony side, it is
backed up by a closed zone which varies in depth from a few hundred yards
to a mile. No one except police, farmers living in the area, or persons
carrying special passes from the Commissioner of Police is allowed to
enter or move about in the closed area.

Before the dramatic refugee surge of May, 1962, only nine-tenths of the
border was fenced on the British side, and the stoutness of the fence was
variable—high and topped with barbed wire at some places, but no more
than a plain, low fence at others. The storming of the barrier in 1962
caused the British to build an entirely new one which stretched the full
length of the border. Crowned with many strands of barbed wire, it stood
10 feet high and was laid out like a long cage, with 20 feet of enclosed
ground between the outer, parallel fences.

Between the marshlands on the west and the hilly country in the east, the
Frontier Division police have three main stations and nine police posts.
From each of these, police observers scan the border with binoculars.
Foot patrols also keep a continuous watch along the boundary. At night,
when the closed area is under curfew, searchlights and dogs are added to
the regular patrols. When the integrity of the border is as seriously
threatened as it was by the spring invasion of 1962, the closed area may
be increased to a depth of three miles, as Governor Black ordered on May
19, 1962.

Under normal conditions, farmers who live along the border enjoy a
kind of twilight-zone immunity. Known to the patrols, they may cross
the border during the day to work either in Hong Kong or China without
molestation, but they must be home before nightfall, because the border,
with all its rail and road connections, shuts down at dark. Night
crossings, even before the 10-foot barrier went up, were discouraged by
peremptory challenges and bullets.

The Reds have no fence on their side of the border. They do not need it;
nobody wants to get in.

Why did the Red Chinese permit the transborder flight of May, 1962?
At first it was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass the
British, and certainly the colony’s police and military units had a
thankless assignment. When they transported the captured refugees back to
the border, they were jeered at and reviled by colony residents. Protests
were issued by international relief officials.

The onus soon shifted to Red China, which was revealed by the exodus as a
land of hunger. All news from Communist China is censored or second-hand,
so no accurate explanation of the flight could be made at the time. It
appeared, however, that industrial retrenchment in the cities of China
had caused many city-dwellers to move to rural areas, perhaps to seek
food, perhaps to bolster the country’s sagging farm production.

Most of those who crossed the border in the big May surge were from
the adjoining province of Kwangtung, indicating that free movement of
people within China was confined to this one southern area. Most of those
interviewed in Hong Kong complained that they were hungry, and that
they had lived on a substandard diet for months with no real hope of
improvement.

There was a momentary temptation to regard the flight as a sign that
civil government had collapsed in Communist China, but this hope faded
on May 25, when the Reds again sealed off the border. No official
explanation for the turn-about was made, but newspapermen in the colony
suspected that a sharp British protest to Peking may have prompted the
clamp-down.

To the refugees in Hong Kong, the world spotlight meant very little,
except that it may have made other countries aware that no place in the
world has shielded so many fugitives from Communist tyranny as the crown
colony.



CHAPTER THREE

Conflict and Coexistence with Two Chinas

    “There is a saying in China; ‘If the east wind does not prevail
    over the west wind, then the west wind will prevail over the
    east wind.’ I think the characteristic of the current situation
    is that the east wind prevails over the west wind; that is, the
    strength of socialism exceeds the strength of imperialism.”—MAO
    TSE-TUNG, MOSCOW, 1957


So spoke the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party at a time when all
the winds seemed to be blowing his way. For eight years the People’s
Republic of China had performed with the disciplined enthusiasm of a
collegiate cheering section, expanding its industrial capacity at a
prodigious rate and disseminating its political influence throughout
Asia. Soviet Russia had given complete ideological support and technical
assistance to its junior partner in world Communism.

Since then, the winds have shifted to a new quarter. The Great Leap
Forward that began in 1958 has struck a dead calm. Backyard factories
and foundries have failed to attain either the standards or quantity of
production anticipated, but they succeeded for a time in clogging the
country’s transportation system and in interfering with the distribution
of food and other consumer goods. The same confused planning that turned
the emphasis from large-scale industrial production to backyard factories
also transformed the traditional small Chinese farm and the medium-sized
collective farm into titanic agricultural communes. By a combination of
mismanagement and adverse growing conditions, the communes have brought
about the worst food shortage in China’s recent history.

In the summer of 1961, the prevailing winds from Moscow turned
unseasonably icy as an ideological split developed between Russia and
China. No one outside the Communist partnership could assess the full
significance of the break, but it offered very little prospect of
increased Soviet assistance to Communist China.

Every change in the political winds of mainland China creates an eddy
in Hong Kong. In the eight years when Red China was swept along by
the momentum of its revolutionary spirit, the colony was beset by a
succession of incidents. British ships and planes became the target
for Chinese Communist guns. Long after the mainland fell under the
unchallenged domination of the Reds, the grim warfare between Communists
and Nationalists continued in the streets of Hong Kong.

Whether by coincidence or direct cause, the second year of the Great Leap
Forward brought an unexpected lull in the Communist harassment of the
colony. Left-wing agitation in the schools and trade unions persisted,
but colony officials noticed that Communist sympathizers, once so avid
for violent strikes and street demonstrations, seemed to have lost their
appetite for both. The assumption was that Peking had told them they
could expect no further support from that source. At the same time,
shooting incidents and border clashes virtually ceased.

There was no disposition in the colony to regard this undeclared
armistice as a bid for reconciliation. The news that the Great Leap had
made its first big stumble was already in circulation, and the colony
administration, quite unofficially, reached its own conclusion; Communist
China was temporarily too busy mopping up its own mess to indulge its
normal passion for badgering Hong Kong. When China’s house had restored
order, its Communist leadership would be right back at the colony’s
throat.

Hong Kong’s colonial administration has never deluded itself with
the belief that it could survive a massive assault by Red China. In
population and the size of its armed forces, Hong Kong is outnumbered by
approximately 200 to 1. Against Japan in 1941, Hong Kong’s resistance
lasted less than three weeks; against Red China, it might last about half
as long.

But there are certain restraining factors unreflected in the comparative
strength of the opposing land forces. The most tangible of these are the
ships of the British and United States navies, continually riding at
anchor in Hong Kong harbor or cruising in the surrounding seas. Aircraft
carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers equipped with planes and
missiles tend to put the brakes on impulsive acts of aggression by an
inferior naval power.

A Communist grab for Hong Kong would almost inevitably involve Red China
in a major war. Great Britain has shown no disposition to surrender this
profitable possession without a fight, and although the United States
has made no specific pledge to defend the colony, it is not likely to let
the Chinese Communists snatch it from her principal ally.

Red China’s instinctive belligerence may be tempered by the fate of its
first outright aggression, which did not keep the United Nations out of
Korea, but did a great deal to keep Red China out of the United Nations
for years thereafter.

Aided in part by these considerations, Hong Kong has sat since 1949 on
the doorstep of a country dedicated to its destruction. In the late
1940s, it was felt that a substantial cut in the colony’s trade with
China would ruin the British enclave by purely peaceful methods. Most of
the trade has been lost since then, but Hong Kong has perversely grown
more prosperous than ever before.

The overriding reason why Hong Kong continues to thrive in the shadow of
its hostile neighbor is economic. Ideologies apart, they need each other.

Despite the drop in their total trade, Hong Kong remains Red China’s
chief non-Communist trading partner. In recent years it has become a
lop-sided arrangement, with the Chinese Communists shipping ten times
more goods to the colony than they purchase from her. Yet the imbalance
appears to suit the purposes of both sides.

Hong Kong, which cannot produce enough food to sustain its population
for more than a few months of the year, has imported an average of
$200,000,000 worth of goods from Red China in each of the last three
years, and food represents more than a third of the total. In the same
years, Red China imported about $20,000,000 annually from the colony.
Thus the Reds earned a favorable trade balance of $180,000,000 a year,
giving them the foreign exchange they need as critically as Hong Kong
needs food.

It may be wondered why the Chinese Communists, with three successive crop
failures, are willing to export any of their food. But they must earn
foreign exchange to pay for grain, flour, powdered milk and sugar to save
themselves from starvation, and their food purchases in the world market
during 1960 and 1961 ran up a bill of $360,000,000.

The whole pattern of mainland-colony trade has been reversed since
1950. In that year, their trade came to $406,000,000, or about a third
of Hong Kong’s total world trade of $1,314,000,000. By 1960, the total
colony-mainland trade had skidded to $228,000,000 and represented only
one-seventh of the colony’s world trade volume of $1,716,000,000.

In 1950, Hong Kong exported $255,000,000 to Red China, but imported
only $151,000,000 from her. The crown colony still serves as a major
transshipment port for China’s trade with other countries, but her
importance as an exporter and re-exporter from other countries to China
was painfully diminished by United Nations and United States embargoes
during the Korean war.

The pinch of those embargoes was so tight that it looked for a while
as if Hong Kong, which had prospered on its Chinese export trade for
110 years, would wither from the loss of it. To the amazement of its
economic obituary writers, the colony side-stepped its assigned grave
by developing its own industries. Within a few years, Hong Kong became
bigger as a manufacturer than it had ever been as a trader.

Red China’s benefits from the existing trade with Hong Kong go further
than the earning of foreign exchange from a favorable trading balance.
She also trades profitably in human misery. The Chinese refugees who fled
to Hong Kong are the prime victims of this merciless squeeze.

No matter how intensely the refugees dislike the Communist regime on the
mainland, they have not severed their ties with friends and relatives in
China. They are the first to know of economic reverses and crop failure
inside China because the news is brought to them by travelers crossing
the colony border. It is a story repeated by almost every new refugee who
escapes from the homeland to Macao or Hong Kong.

The effect on the Chinese in Hong Kong is irresistible; by every
tradition of family loyalty they are compelled to help their starving
kinsmen in China. In obedience to this obligation, the Hong Kong Chinese
sent 13,000,000 two-pound packets of food and other household needs
through the colony’s post office in 1961 to friends and relatives across
the border.

The squeeze takes the form of customs duties which often exceed the value
of the goods shipped. If the sender mails his parcel from a Hong Kong
post office, the receiver in China pays the duty when it arrives. But the
duty can be any amount the Red Chinese officials choose to assign, and
many recipients refuse the parcels because they cannot pay for them. If
a parcel agent handles the shipment, sending it through the Chinese post
offices across the frontier or through his own agents inside China, the
Hong Kong sender has to pay all the duties in colony currency before it
starts on its way.

One Chinese resident who came to the colony in 1962 told _The South China
Morning Post_, a Hong Kong English-language daily, that the Red Chinese
government was taking in about $53,000 a day on these parcel duties,
with the peak of the loot coming at Chinese New Year, when presents
are shipped home in the greatest numbers. A vast percentage of the
parcel-senders were poor people, and each parcel cost them anywhere from
a day’s to a week’s wages, or more.

The external harmony which has prevailed between the colony and the
mainland since 1959 offers a glaring contrast to the discord that
preceded it. Ever since 1949, the Reds have been taking angry swipes
at the colony, a game in which their worst enemies, the Chinese
Nationalists, frequently joined.

In the year that the Reds gained control of the mainland, trade relations
and communications between China and Hong Kong were broken off. The
Kowloon-Canton Railway suspended transborder operations and Communist
guerrilla forces lined up threateningly along the frontier.

While the Communists pressed the colony from the north, the Nationalists
launched a blockade of all ports along the Chinese coast. Caught between
the opposing forces, the colony banned political societies with outside
allegiance and bolstered its own defenses. Additional lands and buildings
were requisitioned for military use and 900 volunteer soldiers were added
to its garrison.

Great Britain sought to relieve the existing tension by recognizing
Red China on February 6, 1950, but there was no exchange of diplomatic
representatives. Swelling tides of Chinese refugees continued to pour
across the frontier and the colony instituted its first immigration
controls in May, 1950.

The initial breach in Hong Kong’s policy of cautious neutrality came on
June 5, 1950, when two Nationalist warships, enforcing their own blockade
against the Reds, attacked the 800-ton British merchant vessel _Cheung
Hing_. This dreadnought, steaming along with a cargo of fertilizer
from Amoy, was raked with Nationalist shells which killed six of her
passengers and wounded six others.

Early in August, 1950, the Reds produced their own series of incidents.
Communist gunboats fired on three British ships just outside Hong Kong
territorial waters and an armed Red junk bombarded the American freighter
_Steel Rover_. The day after the _Rover_ incident, a Communist shore
battery on Ling Ting Island, a few miles outside the southern limit
of Hong Kong waters, directed its cannon and machine guns against the
British freighter _Hangsang_, wounding two British officers. Communist
forts in the same area fired on the Norwegian freighter _Pleasantville_
on August 6, but no hits were scored.

The shootings were collectively interpreted as a Red warning to keep all
Allied shipping away from her installations on Ling Ting and the nearby
Lema and Ladrone islands. On August 17, the British destroyer _Concord_
replied to the warning by exchanging a half-hour of shellfire with the
Communist forts.

None of these incidents was as disruptive as the Communist agitation
inside the colony. Here the core of the trouble arose from the Hong Kong
Federation of Trade Unions, or FTU, an openly pro-Red group with more
than sixty member unions whose power was concentrated in shipyards,
textile mills and public utilities. The FTU succeeded in fomenting a
streetcar strike in 1949. With zealous devotion to the party line,
the FTU unions shoved themselves into every labor dispute they could
penetrate. They also displayed a touching concern for the unhappy living
conditions of the refugees, undeterred by the fact that most of the
refugees obviously preferred them to conditions in Communist China.

A flash fire in a refugee settlement on November 21, 1951, drove 10,000
persons from their shacks and enabled Red China to rush in with the offer
to send a relief mission. The Communist angels of mercy were to be met at
the Hong Kong terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway by a banner-waving
group of left-wing welcomers. They failed to show up, and a riot broke
out in which there was one fatality and thirty injuries before police
brought it under control.

The left-wing unions trumpeted their public concern for the refugees by a
number of street demonstrations which police barely managed to keep from
exploding into new riots. Wearying of the skirmishes, Police Commissioner
Duncan MacIntosh tried a new tack. With the consent of Governor Alexander
Grantham, he offered to satisfy the strident Communist demands to improve
the refugees’ lot by paying full transportation costs and expenses of ten
Hong Kong dollars to every person who wanted to return to any part of Red
China. The only acceptance came from an old man who wanted to be buried
with his ancestors in Northern China.

The sea-lane incidents resumed on September 25, 1952, when a Communist
gunboat halted the Macao ferry with a burst of warning shots, searched
the ship and removed a Chinese passenger. In the same year, there were
two other Communist and three Nationalist attacks on British ships.

A Communist warship came upon a Royal Naval launch in the Pearl River
estuary on September 10, 1953, riddled it with shells and killed six men,
wounding five others. A stiff British protest was delivered to Peking
without bringing either an apology or compensation. The Nationalists kept
up their end of the harassment in that month with one of their warships
firing on the British destroyer _St. Bride’s Bay_ off the China coast.

Each of these incidents stirred the British government to send protests
to Peking or Taipeh, but they usually elicited only transient interest
outside the countries directly involved.

The Chinese Communists’ capture of two American newsmen and an American
merchant-marine captain on March 21, 1953, brought the United States
government into the long succession of Hong Kong incidents. The reaction
was quick and angry, for the Reds had subjected the United States to an
unceasing campaign of vilification and had already imprisoned more than
thirty American civilians in China. The Dixon-Applegate case came as a
kind of climactic tail-twister.

Richard Applegate, National Broadcasting Company correspondent in Hong
Kong, and Donald Dixon, International News Service correspondent in
Korea, were sailing five miles west of Lantau Island on Applegate’s
42-foot sailboat, the _Kert_, when they were stopped by a Chinese gunboat
manned by Chinese soldiers. The newsmen, accompanied by merchant marine
Captain Benjamin Krasner, his Chinese fiancée and two Chinese sailors,
were in international waters, bound for Macao on a pleasure cruise.
Protests that they were violating no law had no effect on the Reds, who
accused them of straying into Chinese waters.

The _Kert_ and its six passengers were towed to the Communist base at
Lap Sap Mei, transferred to Canton and held prisoners until September
15, 1954. The United States protested vehemently to Peking, and Great
Britain joined in demands that the group be set free. Harry J. Anslinger,
United States Commissioner of Narcotics, had a private revelation which
he duly reported to the United Nations: The _Kert_ had been captured
by Chinese narcotics smugglers, led by Lu Wang-tse, a notorious woman
pirate! Nothing more was heard of the lady known as Lu—Applegate said
after his release that he could not imagine how the preposterous tale had
originated, but the Red Chinese let many months pass before they admitted
the capture.

When the three Americans were finally released, they had suffered
physically from a skimpy diet of practically inedible food. Captain
Krasner’s fiancée, and one of the crewmen, a British subject living in
Hong Kong, were subsequently allowed to leave China, but the other
Chinese crewman remained a prisoner.

The international repercussions of the Dixon-Applegate affair were
intensified by a fresh provocation which called ships and planes of the
United States, Britain and France into emergency action. This was the
callous and apparently senseless shooting down of a British-owned Cathay
Pacific Airways C-54 Skymaster on July 23, 1954, with the loss of ten
lives, by three Red Chinese LA-9 Lavochkin piston-engined fighter planes.

The Skymaster, carrying twelve passengers and a crew of six, took off
from the Bangkok airport at 8:28 P.M., heading northeast in bright
moonlight over Thailand and Indochina for the 1,071-mile flight to Hong
Kong. The passenger load was light, so most people occupied window seats.
The sun rose soon after the plane flew out over the South China Sea. Cape
Bastion, the southeastern tip of Hainan Island, a Communist possession
about the size of Denmark, became visible 50 miles away. Below, a brisk
southwest wind whipped the sea into whitecaps.

Co-Pilot Cedric Carlton suggested a time-saving route nearer to Hainan,
but Captain Phillip Blown decided to hold his present course, keeping
far away from Hainan to avoid another of the Red charges that their
twelve-mile limit was being violated by non-Communist flyers. At 8:45
A.M., Carlton looked out a starboard window and shouted to Captain Blown
that two cream-colored fighter planes with Red Chinese markings were
coming up fast from the rear on his side. Captain Blown put the plane on
automatic pilot, took a quick look back through the port window and saw a
third fighter zeroing in on his side of the tail.

“Without any warning, they opened up with machine-gun and cannon fire,”
Captain Blown later wrote in his report. “The noise and the shambles from
their guns was terrific. It was obviously a premeditated attack.”

The hail of bullets from short range immediately set fire to the
Skymaster’s left outboard engine, and the No. 4 engine on the far right.
Flames burst from the auxiliary and main fuel tanks beside the No. 4
engine at almost the same moment.

Captain Blown, flying at 9,000 feet, instantly went into a dive. He
turned sharply left and right as he descended, trying to shake the
pursuing fighters, and headed for the sea at 300 miles an hour. He was
fighting to get out of the line of fire long enough to dump his gas and
check the flames that were eating away a broad section of the skin on his
right wing.

The guns of the LA-9s kept up their clatter on his tail and bullets
tore through the plane cabin, splintering the interior and killing
several passengers. Bullets whizzed past the two pilots and smashed the
boost pressure and fuel-flow gauges. At 5,000 feet, the rudder controls
snapped; at 3,000, the right aileron control was shot off. The No. 4
engine was feathered, but its extinguisher failed to stifle the raging
flames.

The Skymaster began to stall groggily toward the right, but Captain Blown
checked it by throttling back his two left-wing engines and pouring full
power on No. 3, the only operative engine on the right side. The ship’s
speed dropped to 160 miles an hour, and the right wing began to dip.

With the small degree of control remaining, Captain Blown plunged the
Skymaster through the shoulder of a 15-foot wave as the right wing and
No. 4 engine snapped off, then slammed into the middle of the next
wave. The solid impact of the water caved in the cockpit windows. The
tail broke off, up-ended in unison with the fuselage and headed for the
sea bottom. Less than two minutes elapsed between the attack and the
ditching.

Thirty seconds after hitting the water, the fuselage sank out of sight.
Two of the Red fighters executed a U-turn around the wreckage before
heading back to their base at Sanya, on the southern end of Hainan
Island. Few of the victims had time to put on life jackets. When the
cabin went down, only those washed clear of it had a chance to survive.

The eight survivors clambered or were dragged aboard the twenty-man
inflated rubber raft. Captain Blown spread a weather awning over the
raft and warned all passengers to keep out of sight under it in case of
another attack.

Steve Wong, the Chinese radio operator, had died in the wreck. Captain
Blown remembered seeing him talk into the mike all during the dive
toward the sea and sending a final message, “Losing altitude, engine on
fire.” The message was heard at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong and rescue
operations started immediately.

Two hours later, rescue planes began to circle over the raft—Hornets, a
Sunderland, Valetta, York and a French B-24, but none could land on the
water. A pair of U.S. Air Force SA-16 Grumman Albatrosses were dispatched
from Sangley Point in the Philippines. One of the big amphibians landed
in sheltered water on the lee side of Tinhosa Island and taxied out to
the raft in a perilously rough sea.

The rescuers were guided to the spot by smoke flares dropped by the
French B-24. Dozens of Chinese junks wallowed and rocked on the waves at
some distance from the raft, making no attempt to interfere as American
fighter planes flew cover over the raft. The survivors had been on the
raft for seven hours before being rescued.

Besides the three fatalities among the crew—Stewardess Rose Chen, Steve
Wong and Flight Engineer G. W. Cattanach—there were seven passenger
deaths, including a tea merchant, a Hong Kong University student, an
American exporter and his two sons, and the owner of a Hong Kong curio
shop. Captain Blown, who continued as a Cathay Pacific Airways pilot for
many years, received a Queen’s Commendation for his cool-headed efforts
to save the Skymaster and the lives of those aboard.

Humphrey Trevelyan, British Chargé d’Affaires at Peking, delivered his
government’s strongly worded protest, and the Red Chinese ultimately paid
$1,027,600 indemnity for the loss of the plane. No explanation of the
shooting was given, except for undocumented guesses that the Communists
may have been trying to kill or kidnap some person on the plane or to
scare off all ships approaching her territorial limits.

The shooting prompted John Foster Dulles, American Secretary of State, to
issue a hot denunciation of the “further barbarity” of the Chinese Reds.
The U.S. Navy Department dispatched two aircraft carriers, the _Hornet_
and the _Philippine Sea_, to join in the rescue. Their planes raced to
the rescue scene, ready to start shooting if there were any Red Chinese
interference. It was one of the angriest moments between the U.S. and Red
China since the Korean war. It passed without further raising of American
tempers, but reinforced the already intense American antipathy for Mao’s
Communist state.

Less than one year later, the destruction of a second airliner in
the South China Sea thrust Hong Kong into the Communist-Nationalist
crossfire. A Lockheed Constellation of Air-India International took
off from Kai Tak Airport, bound for the first Afro-Asian Conference
at Bandoeng carrying eight Red Chinese delegates. The conference was
intended to assure the uncommitted nations that Communist China had put
aside its warlike ways to become an exemplar of peaceful coexistence.

There was an appalling roar as the Constellation approached Sarawak; a
bomb burst in the baggage compartment, setting the aircraft afire. Pilot
Captain D. K. Jatar, showing incredible skill and nerve, managed to guide
the shattered plane to a jolting belly-landing at 150 miles an hour.
But the impact with the sea tore the Constellation apart and it sank in
moments, leaving a circle of flames on the surface. Before the radio went
dead, the ship had issued an international distress call.

Eleven passengers and five crewmen, including Captain Jatar, died in
the crash and explosion. Three surviving crew members drifted in a life
raft for nine hours until they were picked up by the British frigate
_Dampier_. All the Chinese delegates were among those killed, and Peking
charged sabotage. The accusation proved to be well-based; the bomb had
been planted by a Nationalist saboteur, employed as a cleaner by the
British maintenance company at Kai Tak Airport. Hong Kong police offered
a $17,500 reward for his arrest, but he escaped to Taiwan on another
airplane.

The Hong Kong government issued a warrant for the bomber’s arrest, but
the Nationalist authorities replied that they had no legal basis for his
extradition to the colony. There the matter rested, with the abiding
hatred between Peking and Taipeh continuing as before.

Each of the sea and air incidents threatened the security of the
colony to some degree, but none rocked its internal structure with the
earthquake power of the Double Ten riots of October, 1956. No other
crisis since World War II has presented such a frontal challenge to
its ability to preserve law and order. Three days of savage guerrilla
warfare raged through thickly congested streets, and when the fight was
over, the British administration had had the fright of its life.

Statistics convey none of the heat of these bloody battles, but they
measure a few of their dimensions: 59 people killed, 500 injured, nearly
$1,000,000 in property damage, 6,000 arrests, 1,241 prison sentences
and four executions for murder. Nearly 3,000 police and several army
battalions were engaged in subduing the rioters. From east to west,
the riots extended across eleven miles of Upper Kowloon and the New
Territories, and were marked by fifty-four skirmishes between mobs and
the uniformed forces.

If the genesis of the riots were to be narrowed down to a single
proximate cause, it would have to be something as trivial as an argument
over a few paper flags pasted on a concrete wall. Physically, that was
where they started, but their true origin goes back at least three
centuries.

The riots took their name from the common designation of a patriotic
holiday on October 10, the tenth day of the tenth month, marking the
anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. In
Hong Kong, it is preceded by the October 1 celebration of the birthday
of Red China. Each holiday gave Nationalist or Communist sympathizers
an opportunity to explode strings of firecrackers, hold rallies and fly
their national flags. On both days, police were out in full force to
prevent riots between the opposing Chinese groups, and they managed to
keep the lid down fairly well until 1956.

The October 1 holiday in 1956 passed without undue commotion and October
10 began with no indication of Communist violence. Nationalist flags were
displayed by refugees all over the colony, particularly in the heavily
populated resettlement estates of Upper Kowloon. The refugees were
predominantly pro-Nationalist, having been driven from their homeland by
the Reds. After years of exile and grinding poverty, many of them were
steeped in bitterness and yearning for revenge against the Communists.

The Triad gangs, whose members played a key part in the Double Ten riots,
had been established in China three centuries ago as a patriotic society
dedicated to the overthrow of the foreign Manchus who dethroned the
native Ming Dynasty. Their professed ideals slowly rotted away and they
devolved into a band of thugs, living on protection rackets, shake-downs
of street peddlers and petty criminals, enforced by fear and strong-arm
brutality. Since World War I, crime has become their primary business and
their patriotism survives only as a front.

On October 10, 1956, pro-Nationalist residents of the Shek Kip Mei
Resettlement Estate began to take down the paper flags they had pasted on
the concrete walls of the housing blocks. Housing officials had objected
that the pasted flags were difficult to remove after the Double Ten
holiday was over, and the tenants, who could still fly flags from poles
or ropes, accepted the cleanup job unprotestingly.

At Li Cheng Uk, a resettlement estate about a quarter of a mile to
the northwest of Shek Kip Mei, housing officials themselves removed
Nationalist flags and symbols stuck on the walls. It was early in the
morning of the Double Tenth, when an unfriendly crowd of about 400
gathered quickly and demanded that the flags be restored. Police were
called, but the crowd swelled to more than 2,000 by early afternoon
and its demands became more extravagant. Impatient for action, some of
the crowd attacked two resettlement officials, beating them severely.
Police units, hurrying to help the injured men, were met with a barrage
of flying bottles. They replied with tear gas and the mob, turning its
anger on the police, showered them with rocks. A resettlement office was
set afire but police reinforcements succeeded in dispersing the mob. By
midafternoon, with two persons arrested and four injured, peace appeared
to have been restored.

Right after the dinner hour, a newly formed mob at Li Cheng Uk renewed
the rock-throwing attacks on police. Nationalist flags were unfurled and
a shouting mass of rioters charged into police lines. Four riot units of
240 men were called out and the strengthened force threw a cordon around
six blocks while a sporadic exchange of rocks and tear gas continued. The
area enclosed by the cordon became relatively quiet, but new disorders
broke out along its southern edge. Police vehicles were attacked, and
members of Triads were sighted in the center of the commotion.

Rioting became general and violent by 10:30 P.M. and police set up
roadblocks on main routes into the area. The mobs altered their tactics,
splitting into small fighting squads that pounded a segment of the police
lines with a swift, sharp attack, then scattered and ran before police
could bring up reserves. Within a few minutes, the attack squads would
re-form on another block and hit police lines again. As the evening
advanced, the riot zone kept expanding into other parts of Kowloon.
Police units were alerted on Hong Kong Island to forestall possible riots
there.

Police were only one of the mob targets. A fire engine returning from
a minor blaze near the Kowloon resettlement estates was bombarded with
bricks, bottles and chunks of concrete. The engine driver, struck on
the head by a flying object, lost control of the truck and it plunged
erratically into a crowd, killing three and injuring five. Ambulances
were stoned as they arrived to pick up the casualties. An Auxiliary
Fire Service vehicle was dumped over and set on fire. Hordes of rioters
swarmed into the area, more police were summoned and a four-hour battle
ensued.

The looting phase of the riots began with an attack on a bakery in the
heart of the disturbed area. After smashing the bakery windows and
setting it afire, rioters turned their rock-and-stone batteries on
firemen called to put out the flames. Two floors of the building were
destroyed before the firemen could extinguish the blaze. Meanwhile,
rioters went berserk on the streets, looting and burning shops until
the massed strength of police laboriously regained control of the
neighborhood.

Another battle was fought in the crowded streets of Mongkok. Rocks were
dropped on the police from balconies while Triad gangs embarked on
the looting of shops. Marauding gangs roamed the Kowloon streets down
to Austin Road, the northern edge of the tourist and luxury shopping
section, before police hammered them into submission.

General restoration of order in Kowloon was still far off. October 11 was
only a half-hour old when police learned that a mob infiltrated by Triad
gangsters was preparing to set fire to a pro-Communist private school.
Police sent to investigate were pelted with rocks and forced to withdraw
with five men injured. A riot unit used tear gas to pen the rioters
inside the resettlement buildings while other police went to the school.
They found looters and arsonists busily at work and arrested eleven men.

About 3:45 A.M., hoodlums became active near Kai Tak Airport, a mile and
a half east of Tai Hang Tung, wrecking a traffic pagoda.

Sunrise on October 11 brought a lull, but at 10 A.M., there was renewed
rioting at Li Cheng Uk. Triad thugs peddled Nationalist flags by
threatening to beat up anyone who refused to buy. Looting and mob
barricades again confronted police who had been hard-hit by injuries.

One mob launched a full-scale attack on the Sham Shui Po police station,
but were repelled by gunfire and scattered into the side streets when an
armored car pursued them. Mobs of ever-increasing size were fast-moving
and elusive, and tear gas did little more than drive them to another
location where they attacked again. They lighted bonfires in the streets
and then heaved rocks at the firemen called to extinguish them.

The Kowloon rioters displayed no signs of a unified battle plan, nor any
concerted push toward a strategic objective. But their actions revealed a
consistent pattern of criminality after the looting and extortion began,
confirming the police belief that Triads were in control. Police decided
to shoot to kill, but realized that even this last-ditch measure would be
useless unless they deployed their units to surround the rioters and take
them prisoner. Shortly after noon of October 11—and very late by many
people’s judgment—three battalions of the Hong Kong army garrison were
thrown into the fight.

With army battalions in action, the mob spirit began to die down
throughout Kowloon by evening. A curfew was imposed, cross-harbor ferry
service suspended, and the main impetus of the Kowloon riots came to an
end.

Rigid enforcement of the curfew slowly cleared the streets of bystanders,
but failed to drive the active rioters to cover. Looting and stoning of
police persisted in Mongkok until after midnight, when riot guns and
tear gas finally halted it. Strong-arm gangs armed with rocks, hammers,
and iron bars prowled through eastern Kowloon, extorting money from
shopkeepers, looting factories and battling police. Three rioters were
killed and more than 400 arrested before the plundering was checked.

Looting and arson continued for the third day, October 12, at many
places in Kowloon. The mass riots of the first two days were replaced
by a merciless street war between bands of gangsters and the uniformed
services of the colony. Three looters were shot to death in a raid on a
provision shop in Mongkok. Firemen, ambulance crews and practically every
man in a uniform was stoned or beaten if he ventured into a riot area.

On the afternoon of the 12th, police began dragnet raids on the hideouts
of rioters and looters, taking 1,170 prisoners. The next day, raids at
Li Cheng Uk by police and military units took 1,000 prisoners, and 700
others were rounded up at Tai Hang Tung.

On the morning of October 14, the curfew was lifted in Kowloon and most
of the army units were relieved. But a night curfew continued for three
more nights in northwestern Kowloon.

The day after the Kowloon riots erupted, a related but different kind
of rioting broke out in Tsuen Wan, a New Territories factory town five
and one-half miles west of Li Cheng Uk. In this area of textile and
enamelware factories, most of the workers lived in company dormitories;
physically close, but divided into intensely hostile pro- and
anti-Communist unions.

Tsuen Wan had experienced some friction over the refusal of factory
owners to display Nationalist flags on plant buildings during the Double
Ten holiday, although pro-Nationalist workers could display the flags in
their dormitories. No open protest was made until the afternoon of the
next day, when a mob gathered outside a cotton mill and insisted that
Nationalist flags be shown. The company acceded, and even granted the
crowd leaders a small amount of money.

But the right-wing unions were in no mood for peaceful solutions that
same evening when they launched a series of raids on Communist union
offices; they looted and burned the offices and beat some leftist workers
so savagely that five of them died. Sixty other leftist union members
were collared by a mob and dragged off to a Nationalist rally where they
were kicked and punched until many were unconscious. Meanwhile, another
group of right-wing unionists continued to raid Communist union offices,
assaulting any members they could find. Army troops were called to
restore order, and their heavy vehicles crashed through mob barricades to
remove the injured and clamp a strict curfew on Tsuen Wan.

One mile south of the town, mobs were still on a rampage, attacking a
canning factory and setting it on fire. Four other factories on the
outskirts of Tsuen Wan were besieged by mobs carrying Nationalist flags.
Their demands were identical; either the plant would put out Nationalist
flags and pay protection to the mob, or the place would be burned down.
Management officials hastened to comply.

Several large textile mills were also favored with mob visits and a
peremptory demand that they fire all pro-Red workers. Four miles west of
Tsuen Wan, a Nationalist union group combined forces with a Triad gang,
looted a textile factory, set fire to an automobile, stole a factory
truck and withdrew after having their demands satisfied by management.
Five houses and shops identified with Communist interests were invaded
and wrecked.

The Tsuen Wan curfew was extended to surrounding areas and remained in
force until October 16 while police and the army locked horns with
the Nationalist rioters. Left-wingers were not an immediate problem,
most of them having fled to the hills for their lives. But the rightist
demonstrators were tough; they were disciplined fighters, ably led
and guided by whistle-blast commands. Eight persons were killed, 109
seriously injured and 684 arrested before the rioters capitulated.

Long after the restoration of law and order, fear continued to keep
workers away from their jobs. Full production did not resume at factories
and mills in the Tsuen Wan area until early in November.

When the last of the Double Ten disorders ended, the hard-pressed colony
government had a chance to assess events. Most of the property damaged
by mobs belonged to Communists or their sympathizers, but Nationalist
vengeance was by no means the only reason for its destruction; the longer
the riots continued, the more inescapable became the conclusion that they
were directed by criminals bent on manipulating patriotic emotions to
enrich themselves.

The Double Ten riots did more than weaken the prestige of the
Triads, whose leaders were either arrested or deported; it helped to
illustrate the futility of waging a street war in Hong Kong over the
Nationalist-Communist issue. Partisanship toward either side still
burns strongly among the older Chinese, but it is a dwindling flame.
Younger people, and many Chinese intellectuals within the colony, seem
indifferent or hostile to both camps. Practically no one wants to return
to Red China, and Taiwan had shown little inclination to welcome Chinese
immigrants from Hong Kong until the border rush of May, 1962.

The turmoil occasioned by the Double Ten riots was succeeded by a period
of comparative calm between Red China and the colony. But it ended in
1958, when the Chinese Communists clamped tight restrictions on inshore
fishing by boats from Hong Kong. The Reds, perennially belligerent over
the suspected invasion of their territorial limits, demanded that any
boats fishing in their waters must have a Communist registration in
addition to their colony registry. The registration also involved a
Communist share of the fisherman’s catch, and Hong Kong boats resented
the gouge. The apparent solution was to keep their craft out of Communist
waters.

The Reds made the problem more complex by invading Hong Kong waters on
numerous patrol swoops to seize Hong Kong junks. The first of these came
in October, 1958, when Red patrol boats grabbed several junks near Po Toi
Island, on the southern edge of colony waters. In December, a Communist
gunboat fired on junks in colony waters, killing two fishermen and
injuring several others. A month later, a Chinese gunboat crossed into
colony waters and captured two fishing boats with six persons aboard. In
May, 1959, an armed Communist tug pushed nine miles into Hong Kong waters
to round up a pair of large fishing junks.

In self-defense, many Hong Kong fishermen abandoned inshore fishing, and
ventured much farther out to sea. Without intending to, the Reds helped
to stimulate the mechanization of the colony’s fishing fleet and improve
its efficiency.

The colonial administration at Hong Kong carefully avoids comment on
the Nationalist-Communist issue. It can, of course, initiate no foreign
policy of its own, but must keep precisely to the line set down by the
British government. It is expected to get along as best it can with both
Red China and Taiwan, and leave the high-level thundering to London.

While the colony’s officials are well aware that the United States and
other Western powers are using Hong Kong as an observation post on Red
China, and that both Red China and Taiwan have their corps of spies in
the colony, they take no official cognizance of such activities until
they become too conspicuous. Unfortunately, they often do. Toward the
end of 1961, the colony had 21 Nationalist spies in custody, including a
former leader of guerrilla forces in Southeast Asia.

Even more embarrassing are the cases in which one of the colony’s
officials turns out to be a foreign spy. On October 2, 1961, the colony
government arrested John Chao-ko Tsang, an Assistant Superintendent of
Police and one of its most promising career men, and deported him to Red
China on November 30. The case created a sensation, for Tsang had the
highest post of any colony official ever involved in an espionage case.

With its customary delicacy in matters affecting Red China, the
government announced only that Tsang was being deported as an alien.
Fourteen other “aliens” were rounded up for questioning in the case, and
four of them were sent across the border at Lo Wu with John Tsang. Tsang
was later rumored to be in charge of public security for the Reds at
Canton.

Tsang’s arrest was pure luck. A Chinese detective returning from Macao
on another case noticed a man dressed as a common laborer take a bundle
of $100 banknotes from one pocket and put it into another. The detective
questioned him about the large amount of money, but found his answers
pretty thin. He was accordingly hauled to a police station, questioned
further and searched. A letter found on him was eventually traced to John
Tsang. Unofficially, the letter was said to contain instructions from a
Communist espionage cell in Macao.

The former Assistant Superintendent was thirty-eight years old, and so
intelligent and popular that he looked to be headed for a top place in
the department. Born in China, he had come to Hong Kong before the Reds
ruled the mainland, joined the police in 1948 and rose rapidly from the
ranks. He had gone to Cambridge University in 1960 for advanced studies,
married while there, and returned to the colony in mid-1961. He was then
one of the highest-ranking Chinese officers in the department.

The nature of Tsang’s work gave him an expert’s knowledge of the colony’s
defenses and internal security, information of obvious value to the Reds.
His associates in the police force still doubt that he came to Hong Kong
as a spy, believing that he turned Communist after he became established
in the colony. His wife and mother remained in Hong Kong after his
deportation.

The Tsang case was also an embarrassment to Hong Kong Chinese who aspired
to high office in the colony. It bolstered the anti-Chinese bias of
old-school colonialists, giving them an opportunity to say, “See! When
you give those Chinese a good job, they sell you out.”

The stream of political abuse which Peking had directed at Hong Kong
for a decade was superseded in 1960 by a stream of fresh water flowing
at the rate of 5 billion gallons a year. On November 15, 1960, the two
governments signed an agreement under which Red China was to tap its
newly built Sham Chun reservoir, two miles north of the colony border,
to provide an auxiliary supply for Hong Kong. The colony put up its
own pumping station and laid ten miles of steel pipeline, four feet in
diameter, to convey the water to its own large reservoir at Tai Lam,
near Castle Peak. The water began flowing in December, 1960, and the
arrangements for receiving and paying for it have proceeded smoothly
since then.

No one has assessed the symbolic or political significance of the deal,
which meets only a small fraction of the colony’s water needs, but it
disconcerts many American tourists.

“Do you mean to tell me I’ve been drinking Communist water?” they ask.
Most of the food they ate in Hong Kong probably came from Red China,
but water is different. Some of them eye it suspiciously, as if they
expected it to have a reddish hue or to contain traces of poison. The
water is purified and filtered in Hong Kong, however, and thus far it has
maintained a crystal-clear neutrality.

The life-or-death issue between Red China and Hong Kong is one that may
not be decided until June 30, 1997, the termination date of the New
Territories lease. If it is not renewed, more than 90 percent of the
colony’s land will revert to China, leaving Great Britain with Hong Kong
Island, most of the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island.

If China refuses to renew, as she has a clear legal right to do under the
terms of the 99-year lease, she will get much more than the land itself.
With it will come the colony’s only modern airport, practically all its
productive farmland, its chief industrial centers at Tsuen Wan and Kwun
Tong, by far the greater part of its reservoirs and water-supply system,
from one-third to one-half its population and all its mineral resources
except a few quarries and clay pits.

“It would be folly to try to foresee what will happen in thirty-five
years,” said one of the colony’s principal officials in 1962. “In this
age of fission and fusion, it’s impossible to see even five years ahead.”

On one point, there is little doubt among the colony’s officials: without
the New Territories, Hong Kong would be untenable.

Outside of the colony, the 1997 deadline looms like doom; inside,
it is just another of those far-off worries, like an epidemic or a
catastrophic typhoon. Everyone knows it is coming; meanwhile, they go on
making money, putting up new factories and hotels and planning gigantic
public works.

Some of the colony’s leading businessmen expect the Chinese Communists,
or any other power ruling the mainland in 1997, to drive a tough bargain
for the New Territories and then renew the lease for another 99 years.

Red China, which holds all the cards, hasn’t tipped its hand.



CHAPTER FOUR

Industrial Growth and Growing Pains

    “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have
    greatness thrust upon them.”—SHAKESPEARE, _Twelfth Night_


In 1951 the economy of Hong Kong set two memorable precedents; it reached
the highest level in the colony’s 110-year history and then fell flat on
its face. When the year ended, it looked as if Hong Kong was finished as
a world trading port.

Twelve months earlier all indicators had pointed toward a continuing
boom. Red China, frantically buying goods to equip itself for the
Korean war, had pushed the colony’s trade volume to an all-time high of
$1,314,000,000 in 1950. Buying continued at the same furious rate until
May 18, 1951, when most of the trade was choked off by the United Nations
embargo on shipments to Red China. Even so, Hong Kong’s total trade
volume reached a new high of $1,628,000,000 in 1951.

The U.N. embargo administered the _coup de grâce_ to the crown colony
trade with Communist China, but it was only the last of a series of trade
restrictions arising from the Korean war. The United States embargoed
all its trade with Red China when the conflict broke out in June, 1950,
and at first included Hong Kong in the ban. The colony voluntarily
stopped its trade with North Korea in the same month and banned a list of
strategic exports to Red China in August, 1950. In December, 1950, and
March, 1951, the colony increased its list of strategic items banned for
export to China.

The cumulative effect of these restrictions, which were critically
important in checking Chinese Communist aggression, was to push Hong Kong
to the edge of economic disaster. With the loss of the China trade, the
colony lost half its export market and about one quarter of its imports.
This was the trade which had always been the main reason for the colony’s
existence.

Prospects for reviving the China trade when the Korean war was over did
not look encouraging. Long before the embargoes and restrictions had gone
into effect, the Chinese had begun to shift their trade from Hong Kong to
Soviet Russia and Europe.

Hong Kong had grown and prospered on its ability to receive, process
and reship the products of others, but its own productive capacity was
insignificant. With a few minor exceptions, its industries—chiefly the
building, repairing and supplying of ships—existed to serve its trade.
Its banks and insurance companies, too, lived almost entirely on the
colony’s trade. Accordingly, when trade collapsed toward the end of 1951,
the whole economy of the colony came crashing down with it.

In the aftermath of the 1951 debacle, there was at first no thought of
substituting industry for trade. For a variety of reasons, industry in
the colony had never been developed independently of trade. Certainly
Great Britain had not established the colony to produce goods which
would compete with English manufacturers. The Hong Kong market was too
small and its people generally too poor to support its own industries.
There was no tariff wall to protect the colony’s goods from outside
competition, and this factor alone had stifled several early attempts to
launch local industries.

Many natural handicaps combined to make the colony a most unlikely place
for industry. Its mineral resources were few and limited in quantity.
It had no local source of power to run a plant. Its water supply was
chronically short of ordinary needs and suitable land for factories
was scarce and expensive. The colony could not raise enough food nor
provide enough housing to take care of its potential factory workers.
And if anyone were imprudent enough to invest his money in an expensive
industrial establishment, how could he be sure that the Reds would not
move in and take it over, just as they had grabbed the mills and plants
of Shanghai?

The colony had a few assets worth noting, however. Its government was
stable and orderly, and had attracted a heavy influx of capital from
pre-Communist China and the shaky regimes of Southeast Asia. Its banking,
shipping and insurance services were the most efficient on the mainland
of Asia, and its merchant community had well-cultivated connections with
the world market. Its sheltered deep-water harbor was one of the best in
Asia.

The colony’s possibilities as a future industrial power were further
enhanced by an unlimited supply of cheap labor and the immigration of
skilled workers and experienced industrialists from Red China. Its labor
unions numbered in the hundreds, but were so weakened by factional
fights and political objectives that they were unable to drive a hard
bargain in wage negotiations. Under Imperial Preference and the Ottawa
Agreements of 1932, colonial products paid a lower tariff rate within the
British Commonwealth than their foreign competitors.

Finally, any industry in Hong Kong could rely on one intangible asset of
unique value; the character of the average Chinese workman. In most cases
he was a refugee, uneducated and penniless but determined to reestablish
himself with any job he could find. Having landed a job, he worked at it
with a diligence, energy and skill that astounded Western observers.

Although industry had accounted for a very minor part in the colony’s
economy before 1951, its beginnings go back to the earliest years. Its
first recorded product was the eighty-ton vessel, _Celestial_, built and
launched by Captain John Lamont at East Point, on Hong Kong Island, on
February 7, 1843. The California gold rush of 1849 and the Australian
gold strike two years later caused a shipping boom in Hong Kong as
scores of sailing ships carried Chinese labor to work in the goldfields.
Shipbuilding expanded rapidly, a dry dock was constructed on the island
and a whole new industry of refitting and supplying ships came into
being. A foundry for the casting of ship cannon was established in the
same era when cannon were the only valid insurance against South China’s
coastal pirates.

A group of ship-repair yards was consolidated in 1863 as the Hong Kong
& Whampoa Dock Co., which subsequently sold its Chinese facilities and
established its headquarters at Hung Hom, on Kowloon Bay. The Taikoo
Dockyard & Engineering Co. began operations at Quarry Bay, on the north
shore of Hong Kong island, in 1908. Between them, the two yards have
completed nearly 1,400 ships, ranging from large cargo and passenger
vessels to light harbor craft. Each company employs about 4,000 men,
which is still the largest number employed by any Hong Kong industrialist.

These two companies, equipped to build 10,000-ton ships and capable of
repairing practically any ocean liner that enters the harbor, remain the
giants of local industry. But where they and about two dozen smaller
shipyards employed 28 percent of the colony’s industrial workers in 1938,
they now hire around 3 percent. Theirs is not a declining industry, but
it has become a hopelessly outnumbered one.

The colony’s oldest export industry has a rather spicy history,
antedating the establishment of Hong Kong by at least twenty years. A
Cantonese hawker with an eye for trade discovered that the roots of
the ginger plant when boiled in syrup had a strong appeal for British
traders. Following the line of the most susceptible palates, the
merchant, Li Chy, moved his ginger-preserving plant to Hong Kong in
1846. Some helpful soul introduced the product to Queen Victoria, who
was so taken with its flavor that she made it a regular dessert at royal
banquets, and suggested that it be named the “Cock Brand.” Whether or
not the Queen’s intervention actually occurred is open to question, but
there is no doubt that preserved ginger became a favorite English and
European delicacy. Li Chy’s Chy Loong Co. and a dozen eager imitators
kept Caucasian tongues tingling until 1937, when U Tat Chee, the Ginger
King, formed a syndicate to standardize quality and prices. During the
Korean war, the United States detected a perceptible Marxist taint in
the ginger that grew in Red China and banned its importation. A more
democratic strain was then planted in the New Territories, and with
suitable documentary evidence, permitted to enter the United States.
Preserved ginger exports currently bubble along at 225 tons a year,
pleasing overseas tastes and being credited by the Chinese with curing
the lesser debilities of old age.

Sailing ships were insatiable rope-consumers, and from this demand grew
the Hong Kong Rope Manufacturing Co., formed in 1883, and still doing
business in Kennedy Town at the west end of Hong Kong Island.

The Green Island Cement Co., founded in Macao and transferred to Hong
Kong in 1899, drew most of its raw materials from outside the colony
to supply the local building industry. After replacing a kiln and four
grinding mills hauled away by the Japanese in World War II, it got back
into production in time to ride upward with the postwar building boom.

The Taikoo Sugar Refinery Co., established in 1884, was one of the first
local companies to provide houses for its workers. Extensively modernized
in 1925, it prospered until the Japanese looted and wrecked its plant so
thoroughly that it was unable to resume production until the fall of 1950.

A 55,000-spindle cotton mill made a pioneer beginning in 1898, but the
unrelieved humidity of the climate damaged its machinery and impaired its
efficiency. Stiff competition did the rest and it was out of business
before World War II. Flour mills and shell-button factories prospered for
a time, then wilted in the heat of competition.

As cattle country, Hong Kong is slightly superior to the Sahara Desert.
Nevertheless, Sir Patrick Manson, a doctor who specialized in tropical
medicine, decided to establish a dairy company in 1886. He leased 330
acres of semi-vertical pasture from the crown and his first herd of 80
cows clambered and skidded around its dizzying slopes for a decade until
an epizootic of rinderpest exterminated them. A new herd which soon
outgrew its pasturage was stall-fed thereafter, living on fodder grass
hand-gathered by patient Chinese women. Today’s herd includes about half
the colony’s 3,000 dairy cows and is the chief domestic source of milk
and butter. The dairy company has proliferated into a nutritional combine
called The Dairy Farm, Ice & Cold Storage Co., which runs a chain of food
stores, restaurants, soda fountains and ice and cold storage plants.

The match-making industry, dating from 1938, offers a gloomy illustration
of Gresham’s Law. Factories were built on Peng Chau, To Kwa Wan in
eastern Kowloon and at Yuen Long in the New Territories, turning out
tiny, cheap wooden matches. Factory equipment was primitive, wages low
and the matches, more often than not, splintery and unpredictable. At
its peak in 1947, the industry employed almost 1,000 workers, chiefly
women. Then Macao entered the market with still lower wages and skimpier
matches. Every box of Macao matches ought to bear the warning: “Take
Cover Before Striking Match,” but they far outsell the colony product.
They have also done a lot to stimulate the manufacture of low-cost
cigarette lighters.

Because of the colony’s habitual preoccupation with trade, many of its
industries existed for decades without attracting much attention outside
their own circle of customers. With the collapse of trade in 1951,
they assumed such unexpected importance that they seemed to have been
invented for the occasion. Some of them, like the printing and beverage
industries, were a century old. Cosmetics, furniture manufacturing and
the fabrication of nails and screws dated from the early 1900s. Three
industries of considerable importance in the export market—electric
batteries and flashlights, rubber footwear, and canned goods—had been
around since the 1920s. Enamelware, electro-plating, machinery, tobacco,
and motion picture industries appeared during the depression decade, and
the leather industry emerged in 1947.

Cottage industries, or small enterprises operating out of the home or
a back-room workshop, are as old as Chinese civilization, embracing
everything from wood and ivory carvings to musical instruments, jade,
coffins, toys, beadwork, lanterns and silk-covered New Year’s dragons.
They average perhaps a dozen employees each, and number in the thousands.

The colony government has kept a careful record of total employment in
registered factories (with 20 or more employees and subject to government
inspection) and recorded workshops (15-19 workers and subject to
inspection), but it has never had a statistical record of the number of
industrial workers outside these two categories.

There are government estimates, but no precise figures, for the number of
persons working in cottage industries, or such major industrial groups
as building construction, engineering construction, agriculture, fishing
and public transport. Estimates of the number of people working in shops,
offices, and other commercial establishments are even hazier.

A purely statistical assessment of changes in Hong Kong industry that
followed the 1951 trade collapse must necessarily be limited to the
registered and recorded industries. Luckily, it has been the registered
and recorded factories which most clearly reflected the colony’s recent
economic revolution.

Between 1947, when the postwar boom began moving, and 1951, when the U.
N. embargo was imposed, the number of registered and recorded industries
rose from 1,050 to 1,961 and their employed force nearly doubled. The
colony’s trade had been shooting upward at almost the same rate, and the
Net Domestic Product (the total value of all its goods and services) had
increased by 75 percent.

The embargo halted the trade boom and reduced its volume by almost
one-third in 1952. Not until 1960 did the total climb back to the record
level of 1951. Colony traders, abruptly cut off from the China mainland
market, had to find new markets or liquidate their accumulated stocks.
Some found new markets in Southeast Asia; others liquidated their
stock for whatever it would bring. Colony imports rose uncomfortably
above exports, investment capital began searching around for better
opportunities outside Hong Kong and unemployment became an additional
cause for anxiety.

One obvious need was to step up the colony’s export volume at once. It
was in this situation that the “poor relation” in Hong Kong’s economy—its
industry—came into its own.

Despite its rapid postwar growth, the colony’s industry had supplied only
about ten percent of the products it exported. In simple desperation, the
traders invested their Korean war profits in local industry. So also did
the transplanted Shanghai industrialists who had lost their factories
to the Chinese Communists but had retained their capital and managerial
skills. The effect on Hong Kong was basic and far-reaching.

After a two-year period of readjustment, the number of industrial
undertakings, or individual registered and recorded manufacturers,
increased at the rate of 500 a year. Employment in the industries more
than doubled; by the end of 1961, the colony had 6,359 companies with
271,729 workers. The climb continued into 1962.

Local industry, which had once contributed only ten percent of the value
of colony exports, contributed more than seventy percent by 1962. Trade
had made its comeback by then, but it showed no sign of regaining the
dominant position it had occupied until 1952.

Entirely without warning and almost against its will, Hong Kong had
become a manufacturing center instead of an entrepôt. New industries
had cropped up from nowhere, taken a firm hold and climbed to the most
important positions in the colony’s productive economy. A few of the
old industries had slumped, but most were expanding with the general
prosperity.

During the uneasy two-year period of transition from trade to
manufacturing, the colony had to lay down two sets of regulations to
stabilize its trade relations with Japan and the United States.

Japanese industry, swiftly reviving during the American Occupation, began
pouring cotton yarn and piecegoods, household utensils and metalware into
the Hong Kong market. In 1952, Hong Kong imported four times more from
Japan than it exported to her. But the colony was less concerned about
export-import balances than it was over reducing the Sterling Area’s
adverse balance of payments with Japan. Japanese imports were tightly
restricted or suspended from early in 1952 until the second half of 1953.
Meanwhile, local industries enjoyed a welcome breather from Japanese
competition, especially in their home market.

Restoration of trade with the United States was essential. The volume of
this trade had taken a steep dive after the U.S. and U.N. embargoes
on trade with China, and the United States wanted no Communist products
funneled through Hong Kong, nor any Red Chinese raw materials fabricated
in the colony. The Hong Kong Commerce and Industry Department and the
U.S. Treasury Department finally worked out a solution: the Comprehensive
Certificate of Origin, covering every kind of goods that might be
suspected of Red Chinese origin. Among these were silk, linen, cotton,
jade, furniture, Chinese antiques and handicrafts. Goods of North Korean
origin were similarly classified.

In enforcing the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin regulations, the
Commerce and Industry Department directly supervises the raw material
supply and the finished products of the factories; in some cases, it
seals the goods after examination and keeps them under surveillance until
they are exported. Severe legal and administrative penalties are slapped
on manufacturers or dealers who are caught falsifying a Comprehensive
Certificate of Origin. The colony government protects the validity of
the certificates to insure trade relations with its biggest customer,
and because it gives the colony a monopoly on certain goods for which
Red China would otherwise have the market sewed up. The most vociferous
critics of the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin are American tourists
who recoil from it as if they had been handed two sets of income-tax
demands for the same year.

With the road clear for industrial expansion, the response was
overwhelming, and more than half the growth came in six light industries.
Between 1948 and 1958, the six light-industry groups showed these
increases in employment: garment-making, 20,000; metal products, 13,000;
cotton spinning, 11,000; cotton weaving, 9,000; plastic wares, 8,000; and
rubber footwear, 3,000.

At the end of 1961, registered and recorded industries employed a round
total of 272,000 persons, with 42 percent of these workers concentrated
in two categories; textile-making with 69,000, and garment-making with
45,000. Metal products were third in line with 28,000. Shipbuilding and
ship-breaking employed 13,000. Plastics, non-existent until 1947, had
separated into two major industries, plastic wares and plastic flowers,
with each employing around 13,000 workers. Food manufacturing, printing
and publishing, rubber products, machinery, electrical apparatus and
chemicals were the other leaders. In the metal-products line, just one
of its many specialized products, the manufacture of flashlight cases,
employed more than 6,000 persons.

The success of Hong Kong’s light industries is typified by three of its
leaders in plastics, textiles and metal wares. The Three Ts—H.C. Ting, P.
Y. Tang and John Tung—were prosperous Shanghai industrialists when the
Chinese Communists closed in on them. Each one managed to reestablish
himself in Hong Kong as the head of a major industry. Together, they
represent one of Red China’s unintentionally generous gifts to the
colony—the exodus of capital and management skill. A whole new complex
of tall, modern buildings in the North Point section of Hong Kong Island
called Little Shanghai is a monument to this newly arrived capital.

H. C. Ting, managing director and principal owner of Kader Industrial
Co., Ltd. at North Point, began as a battery salesman for a Shanghai
factory, set up his own company, the Wei Ming Battery Works, in 1925, and
began tinkering around in a laboratory to develop a long-lived battery.
He picked up his chemistry as he went along and painstakingly dissected
hundreds of messy cells until he evolved a really durable battery that
sold well. He branched into flashlights, bulbs and carbon rods, survived
the Japanese invasion of China and planned to try his luck in the
plastics industry after the war. Foreign exchange limitations made it
impossible to equip a plastics factory in Shanghai, so he sent a group of
his employees to Hong Kong in 1947 with instructions to set up a plant.

The new factory was to include a cold-storage unit which could cool and
store plastics and also make ice for sale. It was a dismal flop and Mr.
Ting hurried down the following year to untangle the snarls. He soon
discovered that he had, in effect, enrolled himself for a cram course in
refrigeration engineering, but he learned enough to make the plant pay.

Today the North Point plant, greatly enlarged, employs 1,300 people
and makes 400 different plastic items. Its four-story building of
prestressed, reinforced concrete backs into a rocky hillside which is
being blasted away to make room for a new ten-story plant. Mr. Ting
trains all his own workers, pays them straight wages instead of the usual
piece-work rates and hands out annual bonuses, in some instances, equal
to ten months’ pay.

Operating on the general premise that he’ll try anything until he makes
it work, Mr. Ting designs many of his own products, and if he can’t find
a machine to make it, designs that also. One machine molds a plastic
automatic pistol and its bullets in a single operation; the model is so
precisely fitted that it works as smoothly as the original gun. Other
machines mold a pair of binoculars with one press, then equip it with
accurate lenses stamped out of clear Styrene plastic. A plastic doll,
including the eyes, is pressed out in seconds, but the mold has been
carefully developed from a hand-made clay original that is reproduced
first in plaster of Paris and then in polyester before the steel die is
cut. Dressing the dolls keeps 100 girls busy at Kader sewing machines.
The plant works three shifts daily, but Mr. Ting sleeps through one shift
at his penthouse on the roof. His latest venture is transistor radios,
jointly undertaken with a Japanese electrical appliance company.

“We can compete with anything except junk,” Mr. Ting said. “If Hong Kong
turns out quality products at reasonable prices, we can gradually raise
the living standards of our labor to the level of other countries. It
can’t be done overnight; they tried it in Red China and failed.”

P. Y. Tang, head of the South Sea Textile Manufacturing Co. at Tsuen Wan,
is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the largest producer of cotton yarn and grey cloth in the colony. His
main plant covers nine acres along the waterfront and contains 45,000
spindles and 900 looms. Its employed force numbers 2,100.

Tsuen Wan, now an industrial center with more than 60,000 residents,
was a village with a few huts and no roads when Mr. Tang erected a
pilot plant there in 1948. He had brought 300 technicians and skilled
workers, plus his own administrative experience as managing director of
the gigantic Ching Foong Cotton Manufacturing Co. in Shanghai and other
cities of China.

Experience was not enough; Hong Kong had practically nothing to help the
mill get started—no cotton, power, spare parts, skilled labor or parallel
industries, such as weaving and garment-making, that could use yarn and
doth. There was no local market and the humid climate quickly rusted the
machinery.

Mr. Tang beat the rust problem and shaved his operating costs by keeping
the machines in continuous use, running 8,500 hours a year, compared
with 3,700 hours a year in German mills and 1,500 hours in English ones.
He opened up new markets for his prolific output in Great Britain, the
United States, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere. His early sales were
made at a loss, but with his markets established and Red China knocked
out of the market by the U.N. embargo, South Sea sales and profits soared.

The main plant is completely air-conditioned, reducing summer working
temperatures by twenty degrees. The spindles and looms, imported from
Japan, England, Switzerland and the United States, are the finest
obtainable. Much of the carding, combing, and sizing machinery is fully
automatic, tended by Chinese girls in their early twenties. Some of the
girls appear to be prematurely grey, but it’s nothing more than loose
cotton that has settled on their black hair; all wear breathing masks to
protect their lungs from floating cotton. Every phase of the operation is
under strict quality control, preserving the uniform diameter of the yarn
and testing its tensile strength.

The South Sea plant sometimes disconcerts visiting textile executives,
who expect a Hong Kong textile mill to look like an over-extended cottage
industry. What they find here, and in several other Hong Kong mills, is a
streamlined efficiency equal to the best in the world.

The young men and women employees, most of them single, live in free
dormitories near the plant, pay an average of 27 cents a day for meals
and have a choice of Cantonese, Shanghai or Swatow cuisine. They have
workmen’s compensation, a barber shop with electric hair-dryers for
the women, a vocational training program, and for high-performance
workers, a lounge and recreation center. The plant is non-union, with a
six-day, 48-hour week. Wages are slightly above the colony average for a
registered factory, ranging from $1.38 to $2.25 a day.

Mr. Tang has been in the thick of the fight to protect the colony’s
textile industry from demands—especially clamorous in England and the
United States—that its exports be reduced.

“I just can’t see the wisdom of Western powers in restricting Hong Kong
textile exports,” he told David Lan, a reporter for _The China Mail_, a
colony daily. “We have no hinterland or diversified industries to which
refugees may turn from a threatened textile industry.”

“From 1959 through 1961, total colony exports of cotton piece goods were
less than 5 percent of Great Britain’s production, and 0.53 percent of
United States output,” he stated.

“We are asking for no aid but only a fair chance to trade,” he said.

John Tung, third of the alliterative industrial Taipans, has been
connected with the colony’s metalware industry since 1937. Like Mr. Tang,
he was the son of a Chinese industrialist. His father started the I. Feng
Enamelling Company in Shanghai shortly after World War I and established
a Hong Kong branch in 1937. John, working part-time for his father while
he attended the University of Shanghai, left both school and job and
founded his own firm, the Freezinhot Bottle Co., to manufacture vacuum
flasks. By 1940, he, too, set up a Hong Kong branch. When the Communists
expropriated Shanghai industries, he moved to the colony to direct both
the I. Feng and Freezinhot branches.

The I. Feng enterprise prospered, and in the familiar Hong Kong pattern,
dozens of small operators rushed in to cut some of the pie. By 1956 there
were approximately 30 of them in the field and Mr. Tung had to cut back
his production. The marginal companies went broke in the glutted market,
but I. Feng remained the largest in its line. Mr. Tung proceeded to build
the Freezinhot bottles by handling all the manufacturing processes in
his own plant, instead of the usual practice of contracting them out,
and successfully invaded Japanese markets in Africa, Latin America and
Southeast Asia.

Like many other Hong Kong manufacturers, he set up subsidiary companies
outside the colony. Bet-hedging is widely practiced among colony
entrepreneurs; the economic climate is unpredictable and no one wants
to be caught flat-footed. In the colony, Mr. Tung also runs a firebrick
works, a marble plant and a trading company, shuttling daily between his
various offices.

He takes a coolly realistic view of tomorrow’s prospects, declaring that
the market for enamelware and vacuum bottles in underdeveloped countries
will drop when hot running water, electric percolators and refrigerators
make his products less useful, or the countries develop their own
industries to meet the need. He probably would not be offended if his
potential competitors subscribed to this pessimistic outlook.

Mr. Tung’s survival in the 1956 enamelware boom illustrates a recurring
weakness in the colony’s economy, the perennial, headlong dash to make a
fast dollar. The urge is irresistible, with new industries coming over
the horizon and eager money lying in wait for them. At the first sniff
of profit, the money swarms into the latest bonanza, fresh companies
pop up like dandelions and products flood the market. Older firms slash
prices repeatedly to meet each competitive assault; presently, the bottom
falls out and half the old and new companies disappear in a welter
of bad debts. The frantic cycle has swept through the apparel, film,
glove, plastic flower, and enamelware industries without losing any of
its momentum or lure. It is often and justly deplored, but in Hong Kong
it will always be difficult to find an investor panting to turn a slow
dollar.

The race for a quick profit careens along at a perilous pace in the
colony’s building industry, where the investor in a large apartment
or office building may get all his capital back within four years,
or go broke in six months. The industry moved ahead at a moderate
$25 million-a-year rate until about two years after the post-embargo
manufacturing boom began. Then it took off, reaching a new record of
$42,000,000 in 1959. In 1960 it shot up to $69,000,000, and held the
steep angle of climb into 1961.

It is the building aspect of Hong Kong’s industrial spurt that strikes
every visitor at once. A skyscraper bank building and two hotels, of
600 and 1,000 rooms respectively, are going up in the central business
district of Hong Kong Island. There is hardly a square block in the main
business area where there is not at least one building under construction.

The transformation of the Tsim Sha Tsui section at the tip of Kowloon
Peninsula is even more startling. In the 1920s, it was predominantly a
quiet house-and-garden neighborhood strung along both sides of Nathan
Road, the main north to south street. The Peninsula Hotel opened at the
south end of Nathan Road in 1928 to become the new social center of the
colony, and its Peninsula Court annex was added in 1957.

During the 1950s, Tsim Sha Tsui slowly became an area of small hotels and
luxury shops catering to tourists. An epidemic of building fever swept
over it in 1959, and the place will never be the same again. Three huge
hotels—the Ambassador, Imperial and Park—opened in 1961 with a total
of 1,025 rooms. Two years later, the 800-room President was to join
the Kowloon tourist parade. Tall apartment buildings, reaching almost
as high as their rents, and an assortment of compact luxury hotels,
sprouted through the thick crust of tourists and shoppers. Guests at
the top of the newly opened Imperial Hotel looked down on a scene of
general devastation at the opposite side of Nathan Road; dozens of old
structures being demolished to make way for larger and more expensive
ones.

New hotels opening throughout the colony in 1963 will add 3,368 rooms,
doubling its tourist capacity. Many of them will show the familiar marks
of speculative building—undersized rooms, insufficient elevator service,
thin walls and cracked masonry. The best hotels will stay the course,
but the merely flashy ones may be pulled through the same wringer as the
overly eager, overnight speculators in other industries.

The construction industry, which employs 160,000 people, roughly
estimated, was also active in less speculative projects. From 1957
through 1961, it erected more than 200 factories, many of them on
reclaimed land. Government construction on water-supply facilities,
land reclamation, and resettlement estates ran just over $40,000,000 in
1960-61, and was scheduled to increase considerably in the next fiscal
year.

All of the large new hotels in Hong Kong were built to serve a tourist
trade which could scarcely have supported three of them in 1940. For
well over a century, Hong Kong had about as much tourist appeal as the
islands of Langerhans; and in its early days, the English used to sing a
derisive song, “You can go to Hong Kong for Me.” In the popular mind, it
was associated with such disagreeable phenomena as rainstorms, typhoons,
floods, pirates, malaria, bubonic plague, squalor and poisoners. Most
of these scourges have disappeared, but it took travelers many years
to forget them. People went to Hong Kong only on government or private
business or because, being either rich or retired, they had been
everywhere else and wanted to add one more odd-sounding place to their
itinerary.

Distance alone was a formidable obstacle; by today’s shortest air route,
Hong Kong is 10,611 miles from New York and 7,286 miles from London.
It was much farther by ship, and it took weeks to get there. Imperial
Airways opened the first regular airline service from Europe in 1936,
and Pan American World Airways started weekly transpacific flights in
1937. Early flights from New York or London still required a week, more
or less, and although faster piston-engined planes gradually pared down
the time, it took the introduction of jet airliners in 1958 to cut the
longest flights to approximately 24 hours.

The new Kai Tak Airport, whose 8,350-foot runway juts into Kowloon Bay
on a strip of reclaimed land, opened on September 12, 1958, six weeks
earlier than the first oceanic jet passenger service. Scheduled ocean
liners and cruise ships continue to call at Hong Kong, but four-fifths of
all tourists arrive by air at Kai Tak. More than 210,000 of them came in
1961, with Americans and residents of the British Commonwealth comprising
the two largest groups. Not included in this total are the 132,000
members of the American armed forces who had shore leave in the colony
during 1961. For many years they have been the largest group of colony
visitors; liberal spenders and generally law-abiding.

After ignoring Hong Kong effortlessly for decades, Americans had their
attention drawn to it by a variety of stimulants. Hollywood motion
pictures such as _Soldier of Fortune_, _Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing_,
_The World of Suzie Wong_, and _Ferry to Hong Kong_ were of varying
artistic merit, but they all helped the tourist business. Television,
radio and film personalities—Arthur Godfrey, William Holden, Jack Paar,
Ed Sullivan, and David Brinkley—presented documentary reports on the
colony. There was even a television adventure serial about Hong Kong,
but with the exception of a few on-the-spot film clips spliced in for
authenticity, it dealt with people, places and customs unknown to any
colony resident.

Tourism stands next to the textile industry as a source of foreign
exchange and it has created thousands of jobs for hotel and restaurant
workers, entertainers, guides and shop clerks. Recognizing its economic
value, the colony government set up the Hong Kong Tourist Association a
few years ago. The association beams its Lorelei serenade to tourists
overseas, but in its own yard, it functions as a watchdog. Its warning
yip is brief: Don’t flim-flam the tourists, or you’ll kill a $120
million-a-year industry.

Transportation facilities in and out of the colony are equipped to handle
any foreseeable increase in freight or passenger traffic during the next
few years. Seventy-six shipping lines sail to 234 ports around the world.
Nineteen airlines operate out of Kai Tak, with the four busiest—Cathay
Pacific (chiefly regional), British Overseas Airways, Pan American and
Japan Air Lines—averaging two or more arrivals and departures every day.

No one has the exact figures on how many people are employed in all the
industries of the colony beyond the registered and recorded factories and
including every category. But 1,200,000 have some sort of job, whether
working at home, in factories, on farms, at sea or for the government.
Government employs about 50,000.

There is no minimum wage. Most workers are paid by the day or on a
piece-work basis. Normal daily wages of industrial workers are 50
cents to $1.30 for the unskilled, $1.20 to $1.70 for semiskilled, and
$1.30 to $3.50 for skilled men. Women get 30 percent less than men.
Overtime is at time and a quarter or time and a half, with the latter
prevalent. Incentive pay is given for good performance and attendance.
Some companies provide free or subsidized food to compensate workers
for cost-of-living jumps. A bonus of one month’s wages is paid by many
companies just before the Chinese New Year.

As a rule the European firms and a few westernized Chinese firms provide
a cost of living allowance on top of the basic wage. Yet in spite of
rapid industrial expansion, inflation has been slight; the index rose
only 22 points between 1947 and 1961. The eight-hour day and six-day,
48-hour week are observed by most European companies, but some Chinese
companies have an 11-hour day. Women and all workers under eighteen are
given a second rest day a week by law. Many big companies, especially
those dealing in textiles, provide dormitories and free bedding for
unmarried workers; some house the families of married workers, and the
government encourages this practice by providing land for such quarters
at half the market price. A few companies provide recreation rooms and
free transportation to and from the job. Workmen’s compensation insurance
has been prescribed by law since 1953. Women, as well as children under
fourteen years old, may not work between 8 P.M. and 7 A.M.

Hong Kong wages look tiny to an American worker who earns more in an hour
than a colony factory hand receives in a day. But the chasm between the
two standards of living is not so vast. The Hong Kong worker takes the
bus, streetcar or ferryboat for less than two cents a ride; his lunch
costs about ten cents, and his month’s rent is under $5.00 if he lives in
a resettlement estate, and below $23 a month if he occupies a low-income
Housing Authority development unit.

There are 245 labor unions in the colony, but they lack biting power
in wage negotiations. Three have more than 10,000 members each: the
seamen’s union; the spinning, weaving and dyeing workers; and the motor
transport workers. These three, with the unions of the seafarers, workers
in Western-type employment, restaurant and café employees, government
workers and teachers, represent 40 percent of all union membership.
The unions split into a pro-Communist Federation and a pro-Nationalist
Council. The pro-Red unions are strongest among seamen, public utilities,
shipyards and textiles; the anti-Reds are most influential in the
building trades, food and catering and numerous small industries. Only
25 of the 245 labor unions are free of political leadership. Collective
bargaining is generally confined to the transport, printing, and
enamelware industries, and to taxi drivers.

Most wages are set by agreement between the worker and his employer;
the agreement is verbal and follows no uniform wage-scale. Family
connections, references from friends, or the contracting system are
used to get jobs. Except in the large shipyards and textile mills, the
apprentice system is mostly a matter of observation and imitation.
Several private trade schools train boys and girls in various jobs, and
Hong Kong Technical College and Hong Kong University teach engineering,
commerce and highly advanced technical specialties, with the university
giving a full range of professional training. But when all are combined,
they fall far short of the demand.

The majority of the colony’s industrial workers impress both employers
and outside observers as industrious, purposeful, capable and
intelligent. They are unwilling to make bold, independent decisions, some
employers complain. On the other hand, they are seldom encouraged to do
so.

In the last few years, an increasing number of American businessmen
have found the risks and rewards of the colony’s economy well worth
their interest. The first American trading concern, Russell & Co., was
established there in 1850, but the road was rocky, and Russell, along
with several later Yankee traders, faded out of the picture before 1900.
About a dozen American companies located agencies in Hong Kong in the
early 1900s. Most notable of these was the International Banking Corp.,
which opened a Hong Kong branch in 1902; after a series of mergers and
name changes it became a major branch of the First National City Bank
of New York, occupying its own large building in the central financial
district.

Except for First National City, Singer Sewing Machine Co., National Cash
Register Co. and a few others, most of the American offices were agencies
or area representatives until the last decade.

Anker B. Henningsen, a Montana-born businessman of Danish ancestry, came
to Hong Kong from China, where his family had been in business since
1913. With his son A. P. Henningsen, he heads a group of companies that
distribute Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, export and import women’s
wearing apparel, run a quality dress shop called Paquerette, Ltd., and
act as agents for a number of American chemical, pharmaceutical and
manufacturing companies. They employ 300 people.

The older Henningsen’s father, a Danish immigrant to the United States,
had built a prosperous produce business in the Northwest and later
supplemented it by shipping eggs from China to the U.S. Eggs came
in by the boatload until his competitors sabotaged the business by
circulating the canard that the Chinese eggs were hundreds of years
old. Mr. Henningsen turned then to Europe for his primary market, but
his American produce operations took a beating in the 1919 to 1921
depression. A. B. went out to China in 1923 to start his own ice cream
and frozen-drink-on-a-stick business. He had to install refrigeration
units in all his retail outlets, working out of a central plant with
3,000 employees. In cold months, he packed and shipped eggs; in summer,
he made and sold 125,000 frozen suckers a day. Sticks for the suckers
were stamped out of Idaho pine planks, shipped from the U.S. in the form
of heavyweight packing crates to avoid lumber duty. It was no small item;
the Shanghai plant used 250,000 board feet of Idaho pine a year.

In 1933 he set up a dairy business, imported 500 head of American cattle
and a full line of equipment for a modern dairy farm. A few years later,
Japanese bombers killed the entire herd. He was president of the American
Association and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai when he and
1,500 other Americans were interned by the invading Japanese. As head of
the American business community, he was permitted to organize a hospital,
school and food facilities for the prisoners. Repatriated to the United
States in September, 1943, he operated a dried-egg plant for the Army
during the rest of the war. He returned to China after the war, and ran
produce and export companies until the Reds began to gain control of the
country. Liquidating his interests in China, he came to Hong Kong and
organized a soft-drink bottling company in 1948.

He and his son extended branches to Japan, Korea and Taiwan, but closed
them down after a time, he said, because he could not find executive
personnel capable and willing to run them. He expects Hong Kong to
survive and prosper, despite the ever-present threat from Red China.

“Hong Kong is China’s best source of foreign exchange,” Mr. Henningsen
says. “If the Reds took it over, the whole economy would collapse, just
as it did in Shanghai. The Communists have mismanaged their food supply
so badly that their people can’t work. All they get to eat is a small
rice ration, a few vegetables, very little fish and no meat at all. If
people are underfed, they just die on the vine.”

Robert J. Newton, another native of the American Northwest, has
established his own prosperous business in the colony. Born in Salem,
Oregon, he worked as a construction engineer in California, Hawaii and
the Philippines. He made his first Hong Kong visit in the early 1930s,
found it easy to do business with the people there and was deeply
impressed by the skill of its workmen. He returned to the colony often in
succeeding years.

He had made the building of boats his lifetime hobby, and was frequently
praised for the quality of his craftsmanship. But it was not until the
1950s that he began to consider boat construction as a possible business.
His two sons, Whitney and John, became his associates, with John heading
a distributorship for Bireley’s soft drinks. Whitney became the manager
of American Marine, Ltd., the boat-building yard established by his
father.

In 1958, the company set up operations in a tin-roofed shed that was not
much larger than a two-car garage. The yard site was along the shore of
an inlet on Clear Water Peninsula, nearly five miles due east of Kowloon.
Well away from other industrial areas, it lay just across Junk Bay from
the Chinese Nationalist refugee settlement at Rennie’s Mill Camp.

American Marine, which produces pleasure boats for the American market,
outgrew its corporate cradle in a few weeks; its present shed is 500 feet
long and 300 feet wide, and will be doubled in area during 1962. The
company turns out 40 to 50 yachts a year, selling from $7,000 to $70,000
each. Mr. Newton and his son are the only Americans in the company; all
of their 300 workmen are Chinese.

Mr. Newton’s basic assumption was that he could produce a sailboat,
modified luxury junk, motor sailer, or power cruiser to the finest
design specifications, ship it to the United States as deck cargo on a
freighter, and still undersell American boat-builders by a fair margin.
The idea appears to be sound. His yard crew is working on 30 boats at a
time and expects to raise its annual output to 80 or 100 boats a year
when the enlarged shed has been completed.

Wood for his boats comes from many countries—Sitka spruce, for spars,
from the American Northwest; teak from Thailand; and other hardwoods from
Borneo and mahogany planking from the Philippines. Engines and fittings
come from the United States. The largest of his boats to date is a
59-foot motor sailer, and all are built to the specifications of American
marine designers and architects such as Sparkman & Stephens, Inc. of New
York, and William Lapworth of Los Angeles. It takes six to eight months
to finish most boats.

One problem he has, Mr. Newton explains, is training Chinese workmen to
use power tools. Ten years ago power equipment was a great rarity in the
colony; now American Marine has 50 electric drills, planers, bandsaws and
a bolt-threader. Some of his workmen had never seen a power tool before
they were trained to use them at the boatyard. Whitney Newton’s ability
to speak Cantonese is helpful, but the instructor has to proceed with the
utmost caution in introducing a greenhorn to a bandsaw.

American Marine builds a few modified junks, using American equipment
and finishing them like yachts. The three masts of the typical Chinese
junk are retained, but the rigging is simplified and the usual ponderous
rudder is greatly reduced in size. They sell for $10,000 or more. The
Newtons built one for Don the Beachcomber, Hollywood restaurant owner.
Americans are often infatuated with the romantic outline of a large
working junk, but they would soon go aground trying to handle its
complicated sails.

American Marine follows the Chinese practice of paying one month’s
bonus to its workers at the New Year. Trucks carry the men to and from
work. A barracks and mess hall accommodate those who live at the yard.
The hamlet of Hang Hau, half-destroyed by fire years ago and still in
ruins, was American Marine’s only neighbor in 1958. Now there is a mill
for cold-rolled steel and a ship-breaking shop, with the light-colored
buildings of Haven of Hope Sanatorium arrayed along the hills of the
opposite shore.

Mandarin Textiles, Ltd., best known in the United States for its Dynasty
line of high-styled women’s apparel, is also directed by an American,
Linden E. Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who served with the U.S. armed forces
in China during World War II, stayed on to become a Shanghai textile
executive. When the Reds drove him out of China, he came to Hong Kong
and founded Mandarin with a Chinese partner who was murdered by a
fellow-Chinese in 1957. Mr. Johnson kept the business going, completed an
eight-story plant in Kowloon, near Kai Tak, in 1958, and expanded it into
one of the colony’s finest tailoring and designing houses.

Mandarin, which makes the Empire line in cottons in addition to the
Dynasty silks and brocades, employs up to 1,300 workers. It provides a
recreation room, catered meals and classes in English for its work force.
Most of its permanent staff are highly skilled people, like the young
sewing-machine operator who stitches intricate rose and tea-leaf designs
on quilted fabrics at high speed, working from memory with unerring
accuracy. The cutters, tailors, and pressers are advanced craftsmen,
trained by long apprenticeship.

Mandarin introduces about fifteen new silk and brocade patterns each
year, originated by its own designer, Doris Saunders, with such names
as Cherry Blossom, Ivory Blue, Sing Song and Garland. Its stockroom
carries nearly 500 patterns, including as many as eight different color
variations on a single pattern. Wives of visiting VIPs often tend to go
haywire when exposed to this exciting inventory, and have had to be led
or dragged away from the shelves. Most of the brocades are woven by the
Fou Wah mills in Tsuen Wan. Finished garments are packed in waterproof
paper and special shipping boxes and sent to the U.S. by air express or
sea freight.

Mandarin keeps its finger on the high-fashion pulse through its Dynasty
Salon in the colony’s Hotel Peninsula, but it also cagily remains in
touch with a wider and less sophisticated market by noting what the
American sailors buy at its servicemen’s outlet in Wanchai, where the
fleet comes in.

Textiles have become the largest single factor in the colony’s economy.
Textile exports totaled $273.5 million in 1960, or 55 percent of the
colony’s entire domestic exports. In 1961, textiles constituted 52
percent of all exports. The industry employs 42 percent of all the
workers in registered and recorded industries. It has a capacity of
614,000 spindles and 18,700 looms.

All this is cause for rejoicing in Hong Kong textile circles, but to
textile producers in England, the United States and Canada, it is a
problem that becomes greater all the time. The United States absorbed 31
percent of the colony’s textile exports in 1960, and the British Isles
were a close second with 26 percent. Textile exports to the United
States took a sharp drop in 1961, while those to the British Isles showed
only a slight decline.

There was much concern among Lancashire mill-owners when Hong Kong
cottons began to hit the English market. American textile producers
and textile union leaders joined in a protest that was echoed with
lesser volume by the Canadian textile industry. In all three countries,
textile men declared that if they had to compete with Hong Kong’s low
wage-scales, they would be driven to the wall.

American textile producers have their own special complaints against the
Hong Kong industry. They point out that because of the existing price
differential, Hong Kong can buy U.S. cotton at 8½ cents less per pound
than American mills can, and that the colony has been stocking up heavily
on it. In 1960, Hong Kong imported 55 percent of its raw cotton from
the United States. The U.S. textile men say that while Japan’s textile
exports have been held down by a five-year quota limitation, Hong Kong
has rushed in to sell America the items that Japan agreed not to sell.

The demand for restrictions on colony textile exports to the United
States began in 1958. United States officials visited the colony in 1959
with a proposal for a voluntary cut in the exports. The Hong Kong garment
manufacturers proposed a three-year quota arrangement, starting in July,
1960, to hold exports to the 1959 level, plus 15 percent on cotton
blouses and blouse sets, shorts and trousers, sport shirts, brassieres
and pajamas. American textile producers immediately rejected the proposal
as far too generous to Hong Kong competitors.

During the negotiations, American importers placed huge orders with Hong
Kong to get in ahead of the threatened limitations. When the agreement
blew up, they found an interesting variety of reasons why they couldn’t
accept most of what they had ordered, such as late deliveries, and
unsatisfactory quality. Exports to the U.S. dropped and the decline
persisted into 1961.

In May, 1961, President Kennedy proposed an international textile
conference to work out some agreeable way to control textile exports.
The United States then suggested that Hong Kong cut its textile exports
at least 30 percent below the levels of 1960. But the word “quota” had
assumed a fearsome aspect in Hong Kong because of a textile agreement
involving the colony, England, India and Pakistan. Hong Kong had agreed
to limit its exports to the British Isles, provided that Pakistan and
India would do the same. In 1961, the Hong Kong industry began to suspect
that India and Pakistan might jump the traces, leaving the colony
interests holding the bag.

A large section of the Hong Kong press is rabidly pro-textile industry,
and every American move toward textile controls is headlined as a thrust
at the heart of the colony’s principal industry. Communist papers shoved
their way into the act by crying that American restrictions would starve
the refugee workers who left the People’s Republic of China to escape
that very fate.

After the July 1961 International Textile Conference at Geneva, the Hong
Kong government, following long bilateral discussions with the U.S.,
agreed to limit its exports according to the Geneva Textile Agreement,
with July 1960-June 1961 as the base year, and dividing the affected
export items into 64 different categories. Starting date of the agreement
was October 1, 1961.

Meanwhile, the United States Tariff Commission began to study the
8½-cents-a-pound cotton export differential at the direction of President
Kennedy. Genuinely alarmed, Hong Kong business groups hired Dean
Acheson, lawyer and former American Secretary of State, to represent them
before the Commission and help to retain the price differential.

The textile volcano erupted again in March, 1962, when the colony
government, acting under the one-year agreement that went into effect
the previous October, banned eight categories of textile exports to the
United States. The Hong Kong _Tiger Standard_, clamorous advocate of the
textile interests, excoriated the move as a prelude to economic ruin.
Pandemonium ran through the industry. The government ban was lifted
almost immediately. Prospects of a peaceful solution seemed as poor as
ever.

On September 6, 1962, the U.S. Tariff Commission voted to retain the
8½-cent export differential and rejected a proposal to raise the duty on
cotton imports. This action coaxed the Hong Kong manufacturers out of
their sulks, but it sent the American textile-makers into a fresh tantrum.

Hong Kong’s motion picture industry is one of the world’s most prolific,
and least-known, producers of feature films. More than 300 feature-length
pictures were made in 1961 by its six major studios and scores of
independent producers who rented working space from the big studios. All
were in Cantonese or Mandarin, aimed at the Overseas Chinese market in
Taiwan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Mandarin features
are generally based on heroic or historical themes, with rich costuming
and elaborate sets; each one takes 35 to 40 days of shooting and costs
around $40,000. A few Mandarin films have contemporary stories. Cantonese
films, usually drawing on time-tested plots from Cantonese opera, can be
run off in 10 or 15 days for less than $20,000 and are more popular than
Mandarin with the Hong Kong fans.

As might be guessed from their shooting schedule, many of these quickies
are rubbish. But the quality of the Mandarin films has improved, and a
few super-productions costing as much as $175,000 are made every year.
Hong Kong films have won top honors at the East Asian Film Festival for
the last four years.

The Shaw Brothers, Run Run Shaw and Run Me Shaw, bill themselves with
typical cinematic restraint as The Greatest Purveyors of Entertainment in
the Far East, and are the kings of the local industry. Late in 1961 they
moved their Hong Kong organization into a modern and elaborate studio at
Clearwater Bay in the New Territories. Its four sound stages were to be
increased to six within a few months, and its employed force numbered
several hundred, plus an equal number of low-paid extras.

Lin Dai, twenty-six-year-old beauty and box-office queen of the Shaw
Brothers studio, took the 1961 best-actress Golden Harvest Award. As the
highest-paid star, she earned $42,000 annually on a three-picture-a-year
contract. A singer, actress and dancer, she is stunning by any standards,
East or West, and the studio plans to release some of her best films in
the American art-theater circuit. Thus far, their American audience has
been restricted to Chinese-American viewers.

The Shaws, who also own studios in Malaya and a chain of 120 theaters in
Southeast Asia, began operations in Hong Kong three years after Grandview
Film Co. founded the local industry in 1933. After a slow start, the
industry boomed in the early 1950s, overexpanded and crashed, leaving
only four companies in the field by 1956. Pro-Nationalist studios such as
Shaw Brothers have no market in Red China, but there are a number of Hong
Kong film-makers who have a pro-Communist slant. Shaw’s new studio can
produce wide-screen pictures, overcoming one of the handicaps that has
limited the growth of the industry in the colony. Generally speaking,
there is still plenty of room for technical and artistic improvement.

The 1961 Hong Kong census reported a total of 337,000 women in all
the employed forces, yet women have played a disproportionately small
part in the direction of industry and public affairs until the last
twenty years or so. It is not surprising that Chinese women were
excluded from public life, since they had few rights outside their
homes until the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. But
British women, presumably well-educated and qualified to take executive
responsibilities, found few opportunities to do so. The fact that Queen
Victoria ruled the colony for the first sixty years of its existence
should have helped, but it didn’t. What influence women had was unseen,
and was exerted through their husbands or other men.

Even today there is not one woman in the top echelon of Hong Kong
government, although women constitute about one-twelfth of the
government’s Class I and II administrative staff officers (more than a
third of these women are Chinese).

In nongovernmental posts, there are about ten women conducting their own
retail shops, chiefly in fashions, jewelry and objets d’art. Rosalind
Henwood, an American, heads an air freight forwarding business.

There are about a dozen women of prominence in writing, advertising and
publicity. Two of them, Mrs. Beatrice M. Church and Miss Elma Kelly,
direct their own advertising and publicity agencies. Mrs. Church, a
former Far Eastern correspondent for the _London Daily Mail_, survived
Japanese air attacks and ship-sinkings during World War II, served in the
SWANS, a women’s service affiliated with the British Navy, and returned
to Hong Kong to reestablish the pioneering advertising and publicity
firm she had founded with her husband, Captain Charles Church. Captain
Church, his health shattered by Japanese tortures during imprisonment
at Singapore, died of the effects of his injuries in 1950. Mrs. Church
assumed sole control of the business, the Advertising and Publicity
Bureau, and has successfully operated it since then. Miss Kelly, a native
of Melbourne, Australia, began her career as an analytical chemist.
She also was a Japanese war prisoner before setting up her own agency,
Cathay, Ltd., in Hong Kong.

There are about 20 women executives and administrators in private
or semipublic health and welfare agencies. Women staff officers in
government health and welfare work number approximately 150—by far the
largest group of women in civil-service staff posts. The colony has a
small number of women doctors, educators and lawyers, plus one architect,
but most women professionals in these fields are government officers.

Women employed in art or cultural activities total about fifteen,
including several Chinese movie actresses. Miss Aileen Woods, a colony
resident for nearly forty years, is widely known for her Down Memory
Lane program over Radio Hong Kong, which she conducted from 1947 to
1954. A Japanese prisoner in Hong Kong during the war, she subsisted on
a semistarvation diet of rice, fish and boiled sweet-potato leaves; her
weight fell to 81 pounds and many of her fellow prisoners died. Miss
Woods, now seventy-five years old and in excellent health, was honored by
a personal visit from Princess Alexandra of Kent during the Princess’s
tour of Hong Kong in November, 1961. She was awarded the Coronation Medal
in 1953, and the Member of the British Empire in 1958. She still does
occasional programs for Radio Hong Kong, a government agency, and is
regarded as the unofficial dean of the colony’s working women, having
begun her career as a world-touring featured dancer in the _Ziegfeld
Follies_ and other shows more than fifty years ago.

In private business and professional activities, as in government staff
positions, about one-third of the colony’s career women are Chinese, and
both groups of women have achieved much greater prestige and success than
any previous generation of the colony’s women. Among the Tanka fishing
people of Hong Kong, women own most of the fishing junks. On Po Toi, a
small island southeast of Hong Kong Island, a Chinese woman, who died in
1957, held the rank of village elder; as such, she was the arbiter of all
local disputes, having an authority rarely given to women. Many women
in the colony hope that the lady from Po Toi will become a trend-setter
instead of a legend.

What are the prospects for Hong Kong industry and trade? Among the
many persons who have weighed these prospects are three of the most
influential men in the commercial life of the colony: Hugh Barton,
chairman and managing director of Jardine, Matheson & Co.; Sir Michael
Turner, chairman, general manager and a director of the Hongkong &
Shanghai Banking Corp.; and John L. Marden, chairman of Wheelock, Marden
& Co. A listing of their combined directorships would fill two closely
printed pages, and it would be only a mild exaggeration to say that
they and the companies they head are in everything of a business nature
in the colony. Each man also holds an important position in the colony
government; Sir Michael as an unofficial member of the Executive Council,
Mr. Barton as an unofficial member of the Legislative Council, and Mr.
Marden with unofficial membership in the Urban Council.

Mr. Barton heads one of the oldest and most respected business houses
in Hong Kong, with financial or operational control of companies in such
diverse lines as real estate, shipping, wharves, warehousing, insurance,
utilities, textiles, transport, engineering, airlines and trading.
Jardine’s, as it is commonly called, was deeply engaged in the opium
trade during the colony’s early years, but has long since turned to other
interests.

One of its recent investments, the Jardine Dyeing & Finishing Co.,
was established two years ago and now produces two million yards of
high-quality cloth per month.

Barton believes that if the United States drops the 8½-cents-a-pound
cotton export differential, most of the cloth produced in Hong Kong will
not be able to compete in the world market. Of the 500 million yards
of cloth produced annually by Hong Kong, a relatively small amount is
exported to the United States.

However, Barton feels, removal of the 8½-cent differential would cripple
the local industry’s efforts to produce its cloth cheaply enough to
compete in the markets of Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

“Many people urge the textile industry to accept tight controls of its
exports, or they want our textile producers to diversify by going into
new industries,” he says. “But the imposition of such controls doesn’t
fit the character of Hong Kong, which has prospered because it is a free
port with a minimum of controls.

“Of course it is easy to advise diversification, but what about the
Shanghai textile industrialists who spent a lifetime becoming experts in
the business? The Hong Kong textile industry is built on that knowledge,
and it can’t be reconverted to some other industry overnight,” Barton
states.

He feels that some degree of diversification is certainly desirable, but
that Hong Kong cannot afford to drop its textile industry.

“There is a fresh Indonesian market for low-grade textiles produced
here,” he says. “And there are many good markets for Hong Kong’s made-up
cloth.”

He points out that local industry in many lines was hit by a 1961
substantial rise in shipping costs and port charges. In turn, the
shipping industry has taken a loss from the invasion of the dry-cargo
field by the super-tankers originally built to ship oil. Freighters,
tramp steamers, and ocean liners have all experienced a drop-off in
profits because of this invasion, he declares. Many new nations, partly
influenced by national pride and prestige, have launched their own
shipping lines, further crowding and depressing the profit margins of
existing lines.

“Industrial production and tourism are our two lungs,” Barton says of
Hong Kong’s economy. “We not only have to maintain our present employment
levels; we must also find jobs for thousands and thousands of young
people in the next few years.”

He cites one of the major discoveries of the 1961 census—that 40.8
percent of the total population of Hong Kong is under fifteen years of
age—as evidence of the coming demand for new jobs.

Accustomed to economic upheavals, Jardine’s has adapted itself to changed
conditions by investing in growth industries, and by developing new
industrial sites at Tsuen Wan, Kwun Tong and West Point. It is selling
some of its land holdings to finance a six-year modernization of the
wharf operations of the Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf & Godown Co. Its new
international ship terminal in Kowloon, costing $7 to $8 million, will
include a pier 1,200 feet long, and will have car parks, shopping areas
and a bowling alley.

Sir Michael Turner, head of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, emphasizes that
local industries, confronted with restrictions in their export markets,
must seek new markets for their output.

“Our land and labor costs are rising,” Sir Michael says. “But we must be
able to compete with Japan, Formosa, and ultimately, Red China. Red China
can ignore costs and flood our markets, as they did previously in shoes
and textiles.”

Sir Michael has a limited faith in the doctrine that the colony’s market
problems can be solved by diversification of its industries.

“Even diversification means that we’ll encounter resistance in the new
lines we enter.” He believes that the colony’s industries must maintain
quality and raise it where possible, rather than lowering standards to
compete with inferior products.

He says that Hong Kong has attracted investment capital from all over
Southeast Asia because of its exceptional political stability, and
because local industry was not disrupted by union work-stoppages. He
cites the traditional Chinese dislike of regulation and regimentation as
a factor inhibiting the expansion of union power.

“The shortage of land and water is still our greatest limitation,” Sir
Michael says. “Land development is very costly, and although the builder
of an apartment house may recover his costs in one year, that is not
possible in the construction of factories.”

He notes that the colony has a serious problem of “under-employment,”
rather than unemployment. He adds that the colony’s predominantly young
population would necessitate a sharp increase in government spending for
schools and hospitals. Like Mr. Barton, he recognizes that thousands of
additional jobs must be ready for young people when they begin moving
into the employment market.

He regards the preservation of Imperial Preference as vital to the colony
in meeting Japanese competition, but he believes that Hong Kong will not
be injured by the European Common Market if the colony’s economic needs
are recognized in the agreement.

Although the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank is commonly viewed as the
incarnation of everything British, its founders included an American,
two Parsees, two Germans and an Ottoman Jew. For many years it has been
a leader in employing and training Portuguese office workers, accepting
them on individual merit instead of drawing a rigidly British line. The
bank celebrates its centennial in 1964.

John L. Marden is the chief executive of a company which dates from 1933
under its present title, but has corporate origins going back to the
opening of the China trade. The Wheelock Marden companies have interests
in shipping, shipbuilding, textiles, finance, aviation, land, insurance,
merchandising and many other lines.

Among Hong Kong’s industrial assets, Mr. Marden lists its freedom from
controls, its political stability, its low income tax on individuals and
corporations and its resistance to inflation.

It is his conviction that Hong Kong industry should concentrate on
quality products, and those which require a high labor content. He cites
transistor radios of the less complicated type as an example of the
colony’s high-labor products.

“I think we should emphasize that there is something more at stake than
profits,” Marden says. “The colony is seeking to create 300,000 new jobs
for the young people who will be coming on the job market soon; if we can
do this without appealing for outside aid, then we’ve made a contribution
to the economy of the entire free world.”

In the past, he believes, colony industries just took orders as they
came. Now, in his opinion, the industries must develop their own
marketing facilities to discover what products are needed, and then work
to meet these needs. He feels that there must be greater diversification
if Hong Kong is to hold its place in the industrial world.

These three men, like practically every leader in its industrial and
political community, are acutely conscious of the many hazards that Hong
Kong faces.

And not one of them acts or speaks as though he were not solidly
confident that Hong Kong will overcome its handicaps and external dangers
and go on to greater prosperity.



CHAPTER FIVE

High Land, Low Water

    “It is unfortunate that the space between the foot of the
    mountains and the edge of the sea is so very limited.”—HALL &
    BERNARD, _The Nemesis in China_, 1847


Hong Kong has always had more land and water than it could use, because
most of the land is a hilly waste and most of the water is salty.

From the first years of the colony until today, the persisting shortage
of usable land and fresh water has confronted every governor with a
problem that he could neither solve nor ignore. They have all wrestled
with it, none more vigorously than the governors of the last fifteen
years, and the problem has become more costly, complex and acute than
ever.

In any community, land and water problems are related to each other;
in the peculiar circumstances of Hong Kong’s climate, geography and
population, they intersect at more points than Laocoön and the serpents.

Consider the governor’s alternatives: If he stores the entire run-off of
the summer rainy season in the reservoirs it will barely meet the minimum
needs of the urban millions on Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and it will
cause the withering of the crops of farmers in the New Territories during
the winter dry season. If he cuts the city supply, how can he meet the
ever-increasing needs of the new industrial centers, like Tsuen Wan and
Kwun Tong, that the government is building on land reclaimed from the sea?

The if’s are endless: If he stops the reclamation program to reduce
the demand for more water, real estate costs will climb so fast that
local industries will price themselves out of the export market. If he
builds all the reservoirs the colony needs, who will pay for them? If he
doesn’t, how can the fast-growing population of the colony survive? If
the reservoirs displace more farmers, who will raise the food?

The present disposition of the colony government is to provide as much
additional land and water as it can, and let the if’s fall where they
may. To that end, it has spent about $60 million on reclamation and
$55 million to increase its water supply since World War II. Over the
next decade, its further expenditures in these two areas may reach $300
million. Many projects have not yet been authorized, but much of the
preliminary surveying has been done. With the need for them becoming more
imperative as the colony’s population continues to increase, it is not so
much a question of if as of when.

Allocation of several hundred million dollars to correct deficiencies
of the topography is none too large for the job that must be done. When
one has noted that Hong Kong has a sheltered deep-water harbor (probably
the bed of an old river that flowed from west to east), that one-seventh
of its land is arable, and that its mines and quarries yield a modest
amount of iron ore, building stone, kaolin clay, graphite, lead, wolfram
and a few other minerals, one has exhausted the list of its terrestrial
assets. Its liabilities are unlimited.

Three broken lines of perpendicular hills cut across the colony from
northeast to southwest, with irregular spurs branching off haphazardly;
two dozen peaks poke up from 1,000 to 3,140 feet. Eighty percent of the
surface is either too steep for roads or buildings, too barren to grow
anything but wiry grass or scrub, too swampy to walk through or so hacked
up by erosion that it is worthless and an eyesore. The rest, except for
farmland, is either in forest or packed with people in numbers ranging
from 1,800 to 2,800 an acre. Rivers tumble from the high hills in all
directions, but they are short and unreliable, mostly summer torrents and
winter trickles.

Hong Kong’s weather is impartially disrespectful toward annual averages,
periodic tables and the population. Rainfall averages about 85 inches a
year, with the rainy season extending from April through September. There
have been long summer droughts and ruinous winter floods. On July 19,
1926, it rained nearly 4 inches in one hour and 21 inches in 24 hours.

Prevailing winds blow from the east in every month but June, and the
colony’s fishing settlements have been located to protect them from it.
The protection avails nothing against typhoons, which usually form in the
Caroline Islands, curve northwards over the Philippines and hit Hong Kong
from all angles, principally during the June to October season, though
there is no month which has not had at least one of them. Four out of
five bypass the colony, but the fifth may inflict devastation on ships,
boats and shoreline villages. It never snows and freezing temperatures
are extremely rare, yet the high, year-round humidity can put a raw edge
on cool wintry days and make summer clothing stickily uncomfortable.
Except for flat farmland in the northwestern New Territories, topsoil is
thin, highly acid and leaches badly during the rainy season.

This chronicle of drawbacks only tends to revive the question every
British administrator since 1841 must have asked himself: Why did we ever
settle this hump-backed wasteland? They have answered the question by a
dogged and unremitting effort to make it a habitable place.

The first English traders had scarcely settled along the north shore of
Hong Kong Island when it became evident that there was a shortage of
suitable land. The slopes of Mt. Gough and Victoria Peak rose steeply
behind Queen’s Road, the only street along the shore. Holders of
waterfront lots on the road extended them toward the harbor pretty much
at random, giving them more level land but creating a jagged shoreline
unprotected by any seawall. Several governors sought to build a straight
and solid seawall, but the lot-holders balked at paying its cost.

Two poorly constructed seawalls, erected in piecemeal fashion, were
wrecked by typhoons before the government was able to push through a
unified seawall and reclamation scheme. By 1904, a massive seawall
stretched along the island front for two miles, and Queen’s Road stood
two blocks inland from the harbor. Most of the colony’s principal office
buildings have been built on this reclaimed land.

Once the value of reclamation had been proved, the whole northern shore
of the island was gradually faced with a seawall. Much of the Wanchai
district rose from the sea in the 1920s and its new-found land was soon
covered with tenements or bars and cabarets catering to the sailors’
trade. Swamps became solid ground and promontories were swallowed up by
the seven-mile-long reclamation.

Starting in 1867, a succession of seawall and land-fill projects altered
the size and shape of the Kowloon Peninsula.

By the time of the Japanese invasion, a total of 1,425 acres, or more
than two square miles, had been reclaimed. The gain was twofold, for it
not only added level land, it absorbed all the fill from sites where
obstructing hills had been cut down to make existing ground usable.

The foundation of the colony’s tourist industry and air cargo business
rests on land reclaimed from Kowloon Bay and converted into an
international airport. Its name and its origin go back to 1918, when two
real estate promoters, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Au Tak, organized the Kai Tak
Land Development Co. to create building sites by filling in the northern
end of Kowloon Bay. Homesites and an 800-foot-long airstrip were in use
on the land by 1924, with Fowler’s Flying School the first aviation
tenant. Government took it over in 1930, improving and enlarging it in
preparation for the first international flight, an Imperial Airways’
weekly service to Penang started March 24, 1936, linking with the main
route between England and Australia. Four other international airlines,
including Pan American and Air France, joined the formation before the
Japanese seized the field in 1941. The Japanese extended its area and
built two concrete runways, but its buildings were bombed into rubble
before the war ended.

Restored to full operations in 1947, Kai Tak handled the strangest
one-way traffic boom in its history. In one month of 1949, 41,000
passengers were flown in from China to escape the advancing Communist
armies. Mainland service ended a year later, and traffic declined to
one-third of its former volume. The field itself, penned in by rocky
peaks, had reached the limits of its development, and the largest
four-engined ships were rapidly outgrowing it. For jets, it would be a
cow pasture at the bottom of a canyon.

The Department of Civil Aviation, after concluding that nothing further
could be done to expand the existing field, began casting around for
alternate sites. Fourteen of them, including Stonecutters Island and
Stanley Bay, were ruled out for excessive cost, inaccessibility, or risky
topography before the experts decided to put the airport right next to
the old one, on a strip of land that didn’t then exist.

The government put up the money and the job of building a promontory
7,800 feet long and 800 feet wide that would point directly into Kowloon
Bay began in 1956. A few hills would have to be knocked down to clear the
approaches, but disposal of the dirt would be simple, since 20 million
cubic yards of fill were needed to build the promontory. The new airport
runway was to have a length of 8,350 feet, extending the full length of
the reclaimed strip and well beyond its landward end.

Three thousand laborers, most of them hauling dirt by hand, worked nearly
three years to lay down the man-made peninsula. Although it was near
the old airport, it overcame the earlier field’s approach limitations
by being pointed straight at the 1,500-foot-wide harbor entrance of Lei
Yue Mun, and at the opposite end, having the Kowloon hills truncated to
permit another clear shot at the runway, depending on which direction
best fitted weather conditions.

The new runway went into use in 1958, with the completion of the terminal
coming several years later. Temporary terminal buildings bulged with
incoming tourists, but they were moved through these buildings fairly
well. Most colony residents are hardly aware of the arrival and departure
of the huge jets, though they shake the earth with their thunder as
they pass over Kowloon. Kai Tak has become a full 24-hour airport. Its
200-foot-wide runway is stressed to take a maximum plane weight of
400,000 pounds, well above the limit of the heaviest airliners. From the
air it looks like a super-highway lost at sea.

[Illustration: North from Victoria Peak. The colony government and main
business section are chiefly based on Hong Kong Island, foreground.
Kowloon Peninsula and the long runway of Kai Tak Airport lie at top
center. The New Territories start with the mountains in the background,
extend north to the Red China border. Hong Kong is one of the busiest
seaports in the world.]

[Illustration: Hong Kong in a hurry. Queens Road Central, in the colony’s
commercial center, swarms with pedestrians in a typical noon-hour rush.]

[Illustration: A Chinese funeral procession. Chief mourners ride in a
rickshaw. Street bands, drummers, and cymbal players march with them.
Firecrackers are exploded along the way to dispel evil spirits.]

[Illustration: Many picturesque laddered streets, such as the one above,
climb the slopes of Victoria Peak in the heavily populated Western
District of Hong Kong Island. Passable only by foot or in sedan chair,
they also serve as playgrounds for children and runs for dogs, cats, and
chickens.]

[Illustration: Night view of Government House, executive mansion of Hong
Kong’s British Governor. Behind it are Victoria Peak and tiers of fine
apartment buildings.]

[Illustration: Billy Tingle, the colony’s best known athletic instructor,
demonstrates the game of cricket to young pupils at the Hong Kong Cricket
Club.]

[Illustration: In contrast to Hong Kong’s many fashionable and modern
houses and apartment buildings, thousands of tightly packed boats serve
as floating homes in the mud flats of Aberdeen, on Hong Kong Island.
Periodically they are damaged or destroyed by typhoon.]

[Illustration: Bearded monsters like the one above adorn the prow of
rowing shells which participate in Hong Kong’s annual Dragon Boat
Festival races, part of a colorful religious observance held annually in
the late spring.]

[Illustration: Workmen unload 800-pound hampers of vegetables from Red
China at Lo Wu, where a railroad bridge crosses the Sham Chun River on
the Hong Kong-China border. The Communist flag flies above guard post at
the right.]

[Illustration: A marine police inspector at Hong Kong hauls in a
water-logged sampan used by six refugees in their escape from Red China.
They spent three nights and two days in the leaky craft before a fishing
junk picked them up near Lantau Island. Because of the overwhelming
number of refugees arriving in Hong Kong police were forced to return the
six to Red China.]

[Illustration: This Hong Kong heroin addict has been reduced to near
starvation by his craving for the drug. Drug addiction in the colony is
closely related to crime and poor living conditions.]

[Illustration: A hollowed-out wooden doll found in the home of a dope
smuggler. The heroin cache, covered with a closely fitted lid, was
difficult to detect.]

[Illustration: Girls at work in the vast spinning room of the South Sea
Textile Manufacturing Co. at Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, one of the world’s
most modern textile mills.]

[Illustration: By contrast, a woman uses a primitive wooden plow to till
a rice field in the New Territories, where power equipment is too large
and too costly for the tiny farms.]

[Illustration: A carpenter at a Shau Kei Wan shipyard on Hong Kong Island
uses an ancient bow type of drill in building a Chinese junk.]

[Illustration: At another yard in Shau Kei Wan, a workman employs a
portable electric power drill. Primitive and modern tools often are used
side-by-side in the changing and expanding Hong Kong boat industry.]

[Illustration: A young refugee Chinese girl paints artificial birds at
the China Refugee Development Organization factory in Kowloon, where
about 40,000 of these wire paper and cotton birds are produced every
month for sale overseas.]

[Illustration: A welfare pioneer, Gus Borgeest established a farm colony
on desolate Sunshine Island, Hong Kong, to teach refugees how to raise
crops on marginal land. With him is his wife, Mona, and Ruth, one of
their daughters.]

[Illustration: A freighter moored to a Hong Kong harbor buoy off-loads
its cargo into junks and lighters. There most cargo is handled in this
way, rather than by transferring it directly to piers.]

[Illustration: Fishing junks sail along Tolo Channel, one of the
deep-water inlets in the Eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. The bleak
hills are characteristic of the colony’s predominately rocky, barren
terrain.]

[Illustration: Refugees from Red China collect tin, tar paper, scrap
lumber and sacking for use in making their flimsy shelters. Multi-story
concrete resettlement developments are gradually replacing such shacks in
Hong Kong.]

Opening of the new Kai Tak Airport brought the colony an additional gain
by freeing 70 acres of the old field for industrial development.

Less than half a mile from the seaward end of Kai Tak, the first new town
in the government’s history is being built—Kwun Tong, an industrial,
commercial and residential area along the northeastern shore of Kowloon
Bay. A ten-year project of large extent, it required the removal of a
whole range of hills. The spoil was then hauled to the bay and dumped
behind a protecting seawall 2,477 feet long. The leveled hills and the
land reclaimed from the sea will provide a 514-acre site, close to a
square mile, for an industrial center whose population is expected to
reach 300,000 within a few years.

Digging and filling began in 1955 and have proceeded with such speed that
today, in order to get a panoramic view of the project, one has to go to
a hill three quarters of a mile back from the seawall. Block after block
of multi-storied factories stretch along the sea front, approximately
eighty of them, several blocks deep in the industrial zone between the
seawall and Kwun Tong Road, which cuts directly across the town. On the
landward side of Kwun Tong Road, the commercial and recreational zones
are beginning to take shape; behind them, the long files of resettlement
estates housing 60,000 persons and various government-aided housing for
another 15,000. Privately built houses are also being developed.

Kwun Tong has all the noisy, dusty confusion of any construction job in
progress, but there are already 15,000 people working in its completed
factories, making cotton yarn, furniture, garments, and other products.
Most of the factories are humming and a few betray signs of hasty
organization. One plant spent two years tinkering with stop-gap orders
for simple novelties while its management tried to find some profitable
use for a million dollars’ worth of fine machinery standing idle under
its roof.

Kwun Tong will never be a beauty spot because its main function is
industrial. Nearly half its total area will be reserved for homes and
commercial use, however. Proceeds from land sales are expected to repay
the government for its $17 million investment in Kwun Tong.

Tsuen Wan, a second industrial town about eight miles northwest of Kwun
Tong in the New Territories, has reclaimed around 70 acres from the sea.
Gin Drinkers’ Bay, an adjoining inlet used for ship-breaking, is being
filled in to provide 400 more acres of industrial sites. No one knows
the origin of its name but it no longer matters; this glass will soon
be filled with earth. When completed, Tsuen Wan will be a town of about
175,000 people.

Specialized reclamation projects have been pushed ahead at many other
spots. At North Point, on Hong Kong Island, 12,000 people live in tall
apartments built on recently reclaimed land. The new City Hall opened in
1962 on reclaimed waterfront land in the Central District. Five blocks
of the central waterfront, just west of the reclaimed land on which the
Star Ferry’s Hong Kong Island terminal sits, are being extended several
hundred feet into the harbor for more building sites.

The principal land-fill operations have been restricted to the island
and Kowloon Bay, except for Tseun Wan. The limitation has been human,
rather than geographic; most urban workers can’t afford to travel to
outlying locations and they don’t want to anyway. They plainly prefer the
excitement, gossip and sociability of the crowded cities.

Nevertheless, central reclamation possibilities are running out, unless
the government proposes to pave its entire harbor. As a more likely
alternative, it sent engineers out in 1957 to study reclamation sites
in the bays and shallow inlets of the New Territories. Five have been
tentatively chosen that could be developed to create 3,000 more acres
of land. The cost would come to more than $83 million, so there’s no
eagerness to tackle the project at once.

The never-ending task of providing more land for the colony’s growing
population would be meaningless without the assurance of an adequate
water supply. At this stage in the colony’s development, even when the
work of increasing the water supply is proceeding on a scale no previous
generation would have attempted, the builders and planners are not
deluding themselves. They know that when they have completed the last
unit of the reservoir system under construction, the needs of the colony
will probably have outstripped its capacity. There were times in the past
when some optimistic governor, presiding at the opening of a new dam or
reservoir, fancied that the problem had been met. The next drought was
sufficient to knock his hopeful predictions into a cocked hat.

Hong Kong has never been inclined to waste water. On the rare occasions
when its people had a full supply, as in certain periods of 1958 and
1959, its maximum average consumption ran to about 88 million gallons a
day for nearly 3,000,000 people. New York City, with just under 8,000,000
people, consumes about 1 billion 200 million gallons a day. Because of
an unparalleled water-supply system, Americans are the world’s champion
water-wasters. An American will use 100 gallons a day, compared with 27
gallons per person in Hong Kong, and about 50 gallons per person in Great
Britain.

There are compelling reasons why Hong Kong residents will not waste
water. The colony, unlike New York City, cannot draw from a watershed
covering several states. Except for a relatively small amount piped in
from Red China since 1960, it has had to rely on surface water collected
entirely from its 398¼ square miles of land area, which is about
one-fourth larger than New York City. And it has to get the water while
the getting is good; during the annual five-month dry season, the surface
run-off averages only 600,000 gallons a day.

The colony may have been mistaken from the start about its potential
water resources; even before it was established, sailing ships stopped
regularly at Hong Kong Island to draw clear, sparkling water from its
hillside springs. After the island was settled the springs soon fell
short of needs, and five wells were sunk to tap new sources of supply.
Their levels, too, sank as rapidly as the population rose. Governor
Hercules Robinson expressed his concern over the dwindling supplies by
offering $5,000 in 1859 to anyone who could design a reservoir system
adequate for 85,000 residents. S. B. Rawling, civilian clerk-of-works
for the Army Royal Engineers, took the prize with a plan to build a
2-million-gallon reservoir at Pok Fu Lam, on the slopes of Victoria Peak,
and carry the water through a ten-inch pipe to tanks above Victoria City.

Completed in four years, Pok Fu Lam proved to be short of the need even
then, for the population had risen to 125,000. Striving to catch up, the
colony installed a much larger reservoir above Pok Fu Lam, linked it
to a pair of supplementary reservoirs, and discovered that the demand
was still in advance of supply. Before the end of the century, new
reservoirs had been added at Tai Tam and Wong Nai Chung, and the water
finally reached the eastern sections of the city. Filtration through sand
beds was also incorporated into the system.

None of these efforts satisfied the popular needs for long. Completion
of Tai Tam Tuk Reservoir in 1917 near the southeastern end of the island
raised the storage capacity to 1 billion, 419 gallons and everyone
thought the problem was solved at last. A series of punishing droughts
killed that bright hope, and the building of the Aberdeen Reservoirs
rounded out all the parts of the island that could be drained for
storage. Two reservoirs on the Kowloon Peninsula were tied to the island
with underwater pipelines, but this was done only after a spring drought
in 1929 had dried up five of the island’s six reservoirs, making it
necessary to bring in water by ship from as far away as Shanghai.

The rain-gathering potential of the New Territories had been exploited
by the 1930s with the construction of the Shek Li Pui and the Jubilee
Reservoirs. When the Japanese arrived, they found 13 reservoirs with a
storage capacity of 6 billion gallons. They let the mains deteriorate
during their occupation of the colony, applying their own brand of
water-rationing by cutting off all supply to entire sections of the
colony whenever they chose to.

Following World War II, the government tried deep boring to reach
underground water resources, but this turned out to be scarcely worth
the effort. After years of surveying and study, engineers laid out the
Tai Lam Chung Reservoir System, at the central western end of the New
Territories. This called for construction of a two-section dam 2,300
feet long and 200 feet high. This gigantic main dam, built entirely
of concrete, created a reservoir of 4 billion, 500 million gallons.
Twenty-three miles of “catchwaters,” or concrete channels to trap run-off
from the rains, funneled the surface water from 11,000 acres into the
reservoir. It took eight years to construct, being completed in 1960 at a
cost of almost $25 million.

None of these large dams served the needs of the hundreds of small
villages in the New Territories, which still relied on wells and streams
or threw up earth dams in hilly areas to form their own miniature
reservoirs. After World War II the colony government and the Kadoorie
Agricultural Aid Association, a private philanthropic body, furnished
grants of cement to replace these crude and leaky installations with
concrete dams and concrete-lined wells, plus pipes to carry the water
into the villages.

Rice crops in the New Territories were dependent on their own irrigation
systems, traditionally constructed of earth channels and dams. They were
laid out with evident shrewdness to cover the greatest possible area,
but the dams and channels had to be nursed along constantly to prevent
leaking and to keep them from becoming choked with weeds. The government
and the Kadoorie Association also furnished materials to replace these
systems with concrete dams and channels. Nearly 600 dams and more than
220,000 feet of channels have been improved in this way since World War
II.

When the Tai Lam Chung Reservoir was under construction, a very delicate
balance of catchwaters and irrigation channels had to be worked out so
that the reservoir collected all the excess summer rain not required for
irrigation, but did not draw off the sparse winter rains which farmers
had to have. The farmers’ initial assumption when they saw the huge
catchwater channels passing the farms on their way to the reservoir was
that they were being robbed of water; it took considerable diplomacy and
convincing proof to allay their suspicions.

Farmers who learned that their villages were about to be inundated by
the big reservoir were even less happy. They rejected the government’s
proposal to move them to another rural area and insisted on moving, if
move they must, to the developing industrial town of Tsuen Wan. They
received the full market price for their farm property and were resettled
in new houses at Tsuen Wan, with shop space they could rent to replace
their farming income. A few holdouts threatened to stay in their old
homes until the reservoir floated them to glory, but belatedly reversed
themselves and walked out on dry land.

The Tai Lam Chung relocation was hardly concluded when the government
found itself involved in an even knottier problem. Continuing demands
for more water forced the construction of still another dam—Shek Pik,
on Lantau Island. This was a remote part of the colony, much larger
than Hong Kong Island, but completely without roads until 1957. A
few government people visited the island regularly, but its isolated
villages, with their square stone towers or “cannon houses,” were more
likely to regard all visitors as pirates until proved otherwise. Armed
and alert, they holed up in the towers to defend themselves against
marauders who still stage occasional raids in sparsely settled areas.

Two villages in southwestern Lantau, Shek Pik and Fan Pui, would have
to be removed to make way for the new dam. Their people, having no
knowledge of modern technology and no need for a dam, viewed the project
with fear and hostility. The dam was not, in fact, being built for them;
its collected water was to be carried by pipeline to Hong Kong Island,
Kowloon and Peng Chau. Fan Pui, the smaller village, had to be treated
with diplomacy and compensated before its 62 people consented to move to
another rural area on the island. Inhabitants of Shek Pik elected to move
to Tsuen Wan, settling in new five-story blocks. The oldest inhabitant,
an eighty-six-year-old woman, made the transfer with full official
ceremony, her sedan chair borne by four policemen. The ancestral tablets
and household gods also made the trip on the shoulder-poles of respectful
bearers. Anything less than this diplomatic ritual would have made the
entire relocation impossible.

Preliminary work on the Shek Pik Dam became a trail-blazing venture
into unexplored territory. A ten-mile paved road had to be built along
the edge of the sea from the sheltered harbor at Silver Mine Bay to
the future dam site. Test borings at the foot of Shek Pik Valley where
the dam was to cross disclosed that the ground was a porous mixture of
gravel, boulders, and rotten granite down to 137 feet below the surface.
Since the ground stood only 15 feet above sea level, seawater would be
able to seep into the reservoir and the fresh water in the reservoir
would escape beneath the dam, undermining it.

If a regular concrete dam were to be built on such ground, its
foundations would have to go down at least 137 feet, a frightfully
expensive procedure. Engineers produced a reasonable alternative by using
the recently developed technique called grouting. In this process, a
mixture of water, cement, and clay is pumped into porous ground under
high pressure, sealing off the foundation without requiring excavation to
bed rock. A series of tests established that this process was feasible
for Shek Pik, and preparations to build an earth dam were made in 1958.

The dam was to be 2,300 feet long, with a maximum height of 180 feet. It
would back up 5 billion, 400 million gallons; a third of the colony’s
total water storage. A ten-mile tunnel was to carry the water from the
treatment works near the dam to Silver Mine Bay. From there it would be
pumped under the sea in twin 30-inch-diameter pipelines to reach Hong
Kong Island, eight miles east of Lantau. Fifteen miles of catchwaters
were to drain about twelve square miles of land, aided by the fact that
rainfall on Lantau Island is generally ten percent heavier than on Hong
Kong Island and is more evenly distributed throughout the year.

One of the tunnels was delayed for a time by a peculiarly Chinese
problem; its “fung shui” was regarded as injurious to a resident dragon.
The fung shui, a very important consideration among local people, meant
that any proposed change in the local landscape had to be undertaken
with great care. It would never do to nip off the top of a hill that was
shaped like a dragon, for that might blind the mythical beast and put a
hex on the countryside. The thing to do was to hire a fung shui expert
from a nearby village; for a suitable fee, he would propitiate the dragon
and the work of dam-building could proceed.

In a more practical way, the engineers had to install concrete channels
and pipelines to make certain that sufficient quantities of water were
diverted to irrigate farms near the catchment area. Hillsides above the
big catchwaters had to be faced with chunam, a mixture of straw, lime,
clay and cement which keeps the hillside soil from washing into the
catchwaters and clogging them.

By early 1962, the southwestern portion of Lantau was criss-crossed by
deep catchwaters and the earth dam was rising at the foot of the valley,
with its core of impermeable clay being made ready for a covering of
ordinary clay and dirt. Up in the mountains at the head of the valley,
Buddhist monks and nuns continued their quiet, contemplative existence
in the Po Lin Monastery, almost untouched by the dam project. Even when
a few more guests stayed overnight at the Po Lin hostel, the pattern of
prayer and work did not change.

Construction of the dam, pipelines, tunnels, and catchwaters became an
international venture, with French, English, American, and Hong Kong
contractors sharing the work under supervision of government engineers.
The entire $40 million job is to be completed late in 1963.

There were no claims that the completion of Shek Pik would give the
colony all the water it required. The new dam on Lantau and the water
pumped in from China would be helpful, but far short of indicated needs.

Two factors balanced each other in planning further exploitation of the
colony’s water resources. More reservoirs of the type already in use
would displace more farmland than Hong Kong could afford to lose. But the
introduction of grouting, the foundation technique successfully employed
at Shek Pik, made it possible to consider reservoir sites which would
have seemed ridiculously unsuitable a few years earlier. And these sites,
it appeared, could be developed without invading farm areas.

In the late 1950s, engineers of the Public Works Department and two
consulting firms directed their search for more water toward the thinly
settled scrub country of the eastern New Territories. This part of
the colony consists of two peninsulas with the irregular outline of
an ink-blot, separated by the broad, ten-mile-long Tolo Channel. Both
peninsulas are chopped into by dozens of deep bays, coves and inlets
bordered by high, rocky hills. Hundreds of inshore fishermen ply the
surrounding waters, but most of the region is too barren and mountainous
for farming.

Survey engineers made two recommendations which startled laymen: (1)
Build a 6,600-foot-long dam across the entrance of Plover Cove, a
four-square-mile inlet from Tolo Channel, and cut it off from the sea.
(2) Build a similar but much shorter dam to seal off Hebe Haven, an inlet
about one-fourth as large as Plover Cove. When the dams were finished all
that would be necessary would be to pump the seawater out of the inlets
and let the rains fill them with fresh water. The two reservoirs would be
enough to double the storage capacity of the colony’s water-supply system.

These basic recommendations in further discussions evolved into an
integrated scheme of tremendous size and complexity, covering the entire
eastern half of the New Territories. It included a series of service
reservoirs and pumping stations along a main pipeline extending from
the Red China border to Kowloon. These would be linked to Plover Cove
and Hebe Haven by another system of tunnels. Virtually all the surface
rains in the eastern end of the New Territories would be fed through
catchwaters into the two main reservoirs. Since Hebe Haven might collect
more summer rain than it could hold, the excess water could be conveyed
by tunnel to Plover Cove, with its much larger capacity. Even the water
brought by pipeline from Red China would be fed into the integrated
system. Three balancing reservoirs, to maintain a controlled and even
flow of water, and two large new filtration plants, to purify the water
before it made the last stage of its journey to urban consumers, were to
become part of the system.

Many of the connecting pipelines were to be designed to convey water
in either direction, making the utmost use of storage capacity. By
these refinements of the original recommendations, the capacity of the
integrated scheme would be raised to 100 million gallons a day when it
came into full use.

The first stage of the gigantic new system had made remarkable progress
by the early part of 1962. The Lion Rock Tunnel had already been begun by
cutting through the side of a mountain to connect the filtration plant at
Sha Tin with a pair of service reservoirs in Kowloon. The tunnel, 32 feet
in diameter, will carry three pipelines, each four feet in diameter, and
a two-lane, 24-foot-wide auto road three-fourths of a mile through Lion
Rock Mountain. Excavation work on the Lion Rock Reservoirs, with a total
capacity of 41 million gallons, had almost been completed. At the other
end of the tunnel, at the Sha Tin filtration plant and pumping station,
a hillside site as extensive as four football fields had been excavated
and the spoil was being used to fill a shallow inlet. Construction of
ten miles of tunnels and the 10-foot-high Lower Shing Mun Dam were well
advanced.

Meanwhile, engineers were probing the soil structure at the entrance
of Plover Cove. Working from barges in 35 feet of water, they bored
down through 35 feet of soft clay, reaching to almost twice that depth
before they found impermeable clay and rock to form the foundation for
their earth-fill dam. When complete, the dam will extend 35 feet above
the water and 70 feet below it, with grouting to provide a watertight
foundation. The main section of the dam will cross the cove’s wide
entrance. Two shorter sections will close off side entrances to the cove.

The first stage of this integrated scheme will be rounded out in 1964.
Both Hebe Haven and Plover Cove should be ready by 1970, though any
completion dates beyond 1964 are likely to be elastic. At each stage,
improvements are introduced and existing goals altered.

In addition to these broad-scale developments, the colony has taken
immediate measures to conserve the present supply of fresh water by
making it possible to use salt water for such purposes as flushing and
fire-fighting. Since 1958, salt-water mains have been installed in four
densely populated sections of Kowloon and two on Hong Kong Island.
Fluoridation of the entire water supply began in March, 1961.

The possibility of distillation of seawater for producing a fresh-water
supply has been examined by engineers, but thus far the outlook is
discouraging; the cost remains far too high. There is even a faint,
faraway hope that some day atomic energy may be employed to distill an
unlimited supply of fresh water from the ocean at low cost.

If every phase of Hong Kong’s integrated scheme is in operation by
1970, its water shortage may be over. Similarly, if all the reclamation
projects now under consideration are brought to fulfillment in the next
decade, there may be enough land to meet all ordinary requirements.

The determination of these requirements, however, will derive from the
Department of Public Works only secondarily. The primary determinant will
come from the Registry of Marriages.

Any recent visitor to the Central Marriage Registry would appreciate the
difficulties in predicting the population of Hong Kong even five years
hence; there the walls of two long corridors are so thickly papered with
overlapping notices of marriage that not much more than the names and
occupations of the prospective couples remain visible.

Neither land nor water is likely to become a surplus commodity in
tomorrow’s Hong Kong.



CHAPTER SIX

A New Day for Farms and Fisheries

    “On our small and peculiar land area, it would be impossible to
    reach a high order of self-sufficiency in food production.”—W.
    J. BLACKIE, former Hong Kong Director of Agriculture, Fisheries
    & Forestry


For more than a thousand years men have wrested a precarious living from
the farms and fishing grounds of the New Territories, yet they remained
outside the economic and social orbit of Hong Kong until a few months
after World War II.

Politically, the New Territories had been part of the British crown
colony since 1898. Nevertheless, the people of this scrambled-egg land
mass and the 235 islands around it had held their interest in its British
rulers to the legal minimum. The British themselves, passing through the
New Territories on their way to the Fanling golf course or the Chinese
border, viewed the region and its people with the fixed indifference of a
New York commuter rolling over the swampy monotony of the Jersey meadows.

This reciprocal insularity broke down at last under the pressure of
two events which have touched and twisted the lives of almost everyone
in contemporary Hong Kong: the Japanese Occupation of World War II and
the rise of Communist China. To the people of the New Territories, the
Japanese interlude was an economic disaster; denuding their forests,
depleting their livestock and impoverishing their fishing fleet. Both
the Japanese and the Communists drove thousands of refugees into the New
Territories to compete with resident farmers for scarce marginal land.
The Communists further disrupted things by closing the China market to
New Territories produce and by forcing colony fishermen to keep twelve
miles away from its coast and its islands.

The four main Chinese groups in the New Territories, the Cantonese and
Hakka farmers, and the Hoklo and Tanka fishermen, were no more severely
shaken by all this than were the British. When the Japanese and the
Communists had done their work, the British and the urban Chinese of
Hong Kong found themselves dependent as never before on the fish and
produce of the New Territories. The picturesque, faraway people of the
countryside had come into sudden, sharp focus as instruments of the
colony’s survival.

No one seriously expects the farmers and fishermen of Hong Kong to
produce enough food to sustain more than 3,000,000 inhabitants, but the
more they can bring to market, the greater the colony’s chances for
survival.

The total area of farmland under cultivation has averaged about 33,000
acres for many years, except for a sharp drop during the Japanese
occupation, but the size and nature of its yield have changed radically
in the last fifteen years. The maximum farmland area cannot exceed much
more than 40,000 acres, and even then much of it would look more like a
rock garden than a farm. American and European farmers would consider
most of the colony land already under cultivation as unworthy of their
time and effort.

In 1940, rice was the chief crop, occupying seven-tenths of all
cultivated land in the colony. Since the war, rice has steadily lost
acreage to vegetable-growing, and in spite of its greater productivity
per acre through improved irrigation and a more judicious use of
fertilizers, it has fallen far behind vegetables in cash value. Vegetable
crops today yield almost three times as much money as rice; $7,614,000
for the 1960-61 vegetable crop, compared with $2,870,000 for rice.
Vegetable production has more than quadrupled since 1947.

When the Japanese were driven from the colony in 1945, they had reduced
the livestock population to 4,611 cattle, 659 water buffalo, 8,740 pigs
and 31,000 poultry. A count at the end of 1960 showed 18,000 cattle,
2,000 water buffalo, 184,000 pigs and 3,405,000 poultry. This tremendous
increase stemmed directly from the expansion of the domestic market,
but it was made possible by the colony government’s postwar plunge into
marketing cooperatives for farm and sea products, the introduction of
private and public loans for farmers and fishermen at reasonable interest
rates, and the application of scientific methods to every phase of the
farming and fishing industries.

Agricultural production of every kind totaled $40,506,000 in 1960-61.
In descending order of value, this included poultry (chiefly chickens),
vegetables, pigs, rice, various animal products such as hides, hair
and feathers, fresh milk, sweet potatoes and other field crops. Among
other products of special interest are fruit (litchi, limes, tangerines,
olives, etc.), pond fish (mullet and carp), export crops (water
chestnuts, ginger, vegetable seeds, etc.) and such flowers as gladiolus,
chrysanthemum, dahlia and carnation.

That $40,506,000 farm-income figure has a momentarily impressive ring
until one sees how it is divided. The average vegetable farm is about
two-thirds of an acre, and the average “paddy,” or shallowly flooded unit
of rice-growing land, usually runs to two acres, with an upward limit
of five acres. There are several larger farms of 100 acres or more, but
these are share-cropped by tenant farmers for exporters of special crops
such as water chestnuts or ginger. The size of almost all other farms is
dictated by the amount of hand labor one farm-owning family can perform;
the only extra-human labor comes from the plow-pulling power of the
dwarfish Brown Cattle and water buffalo. On these postage-stamp farms,
tractors would be prohibitively expensive and as destructive as an army
tank. Even a hand-operated power cultivator would be far too costly for a
typical family farm.

By Western standards, any farm of less than two acres would barely
qualify as a truck garden, but the Chinese of the New Territories
cultivate the land with unique intensiveness. A fresh-water paddy
produces at least two rice crops and often an additional “catch crop”
of vegetables each year; six to eight crops are harvested annually on
all-vegetable farms.

Farm income is as subdivided as the land. There are an estimated 30,000
farm families and a total of 250,000 persons who rely on farming for
their living. The per capita income of the farming population therefore
runs around $162 a year, or $13.50 a month, less the forty to sixty
percent of crop value they must share with the landowner, leaving a
meager net income of as little as $81 a year, or $6.75 a month. Things
have been worse; in 1955 the annual per capita net income of farm people
was about $30.

What the farm worker has, in one of the lowest-paid and most arduous jobs
in the colony’s industries, is a place to live, enough to eat and an
almost irreducible minimum of money for clothing and other expenses. In
thousands of cases, his lean resources are supplemented by remittances
from his relatives overseas, but he could not have survived in the
postwar economy without the basic reforms in marketing, credit and
research that began in 1946. One expensive event such as a wedding ($200)
or a funeral ($100) could keep a tenant farmer in debt for years to loan
sharks who charged him interest of eight to thirty percent a month. In
numerous instances, it still happens.

For generations Hong Kong farmers had lived in permanent bondage to
the “laans,” or middlemen, who controlled the marketing of farm and
fishery products, paying the producers as little as possible and cutting
themselves a thick slice of profit for the relatively simple process of
taking the goods to market. They advanced money to farmers and fishermen
at extraordinary usury rates, further tightening their strangle-hold. The
Japanese Occupation, by grinding the farm and fishing population into
desperate poverty, unintentionally broke the grip of the laans.

When the British Military Administration took control in the fall of
1945, it acted decisively to save the primary industries. Two men,
Father Thomas F. Ryan, Jesuit missionary and the colony’s first Acting
Superintendent of Agriculture, and Dr. G. A. C. Herklots, naturalist and
author, were designated for the task.

Many years later, Father Ryan, who had long since returned to teaching at
the Jesuit Wah Yan College on Hong Kong Island, said when asked about his
1945 assignment:

“I really knew very little about agriculture, but Dr. Herklots and I were
asked to help with the vegetable and fish marketing. It was obvious that
the laans were beginning again to take all the profits.”

The Jesuit priest and the naturalist learned a lot about marketing in a
hurry. The vegetable and fish marketing organizations they set up under
government control ended the dominance of the laans, but not without some
anguished howls from the displaced profiteers. For a standard ten percent
commission, the vegetable marketing organization transported and sold all
vegetables grown or imported into the colony at the government wholesale
market in Kowloon. A Federation of Vegetable Marketing Cooperative
Societies grew out of the original organizations. It extended credit to
farmers and has progressed steadily toward ultimate control of the market
by the co-op societies. As the co-ops take charge of organization work,
three percent of the ten percent commission is refunded to them. The
Vegetable Marketing Organization also distributes fertilizer in the form
of matured nightsoil, i.e., human excrement treated to reduce its germ
content.

The Fish Marketing Organization, established along the same general lines
as the Vegetable Marketing Organization, controls the transport and
wholesale marketing of marine fish, charging a six percent commission on
sales. It created loan funds to help fishermen rehabilitate and mechanize
their boats. Evolution of the Fish Marketing Organization toward a
wholly cooperative set-up has been impeded by the fact that only fifteen
percent of the fishermen can read or write, compared with a colony-wide
literacy rate of seventy-five percent. Living and working aboard their
boats, fisher folk could not attend school. This ancient pattern has
been altered in the last few years because more wives and children of
fishermen are living ashore. About 4,000 children of fishermen attend
schools on land, and there are special classes for adult fishermen.

Father Ryan and Dr. Herklots laid the foundation for the first Department
of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, which came into existence in 1950
after a series of preparatory steps had been taken. Father Ryan initiated
a survey of the colony’s primary industries and personally directed
the renovation and replanting of the Botanic Garden and other public
park areas, as well as the first postwar reforestation of the scalped
hillsides in the reservoir catchment areas. In 1947, he relinquished his
colony post to become the Jesuit Superior in Hong Kong. In recent years
he has conducted a local radio program of classical music as a sideline.

Long-term assistance to farmers came from another private source in
1951: Horace and Lawrence Kadoorie, two Jewish brothers who shared
positions of prime importance in the Hong Kong business community. Sir
Elly Kadoorie was a former official of the colony government and one
of its early business leaders. His two sons were members of a family
which came to Hong Kong from the Middle East in 1880 and built a large
fortune. The brothers were partners in the business house named for
their father and directors of more than thirty other companies. Both had
earned reputations as shrewd, tough businessmen; but Horace, the bachelor
brother, had acquired a special fame among ivory collectors as the author
of the seven-volume book, _The Art of Ivory Sculpture in Cathay_.

The Kadoories, observing the general poverty of colony farmers and the
even worse situation of the refugees who crowded into Hong Kong in the
late 1940s, decided to do something to help these displaced persons get
on their feet. Knowing the Chinese to be a predominantly agricultural
people, they chose a form of help that would make impoverished farmers
self-supporting; that of raising pigs donated by the Kadoories.
Pig-raising is a fairly simple venture that makes good use of marginal
land, and pork is always in demand at local markets.

Reaction to the idea was chilly; other businessmen considered it
unworkable and farmers regarded it skeptically, looking for a catch
in it. The Kadoorie brothers agreed to put it to a test, choosing 14
families with no farming experience for the experiment. The group
included a handyman, a carpenter, a beggar, a semi-invalid and a
stonebreaker. The Kadoories gave them cement, bamboo straws and a few
hand tools and invited them to build their own pigsties.

“Every one of those families made good,” Horace Kadoorie recalled in
a 1961 interview. “Today they all have excellent farms. Their success
in proving that you can really help people who are willing to help
themselves was what convinced us we were on the right track.”

The brothers, working independently at first, and then in close
collaboration with the officials of the Department of Agriculture,
have given various forms of assistance to over 300,000 people in 1,092
villages.

They functioned through two allied agencies, the Kadoorie Agricultural
Aid Association, which makes outright gifts, and the Kadoorie
Agricultural Aid Loan Fund, which makes interest-free loans. The two
Kadoories and colony agricultural officials are jointly members of
the boards of directors of the two institutions. The Association has
donated the equivalent of $3 million-plus in agricultural gifts. The
Fund, established by the Kadoories with an initial gift of $44,000, has
been increased to $306,000 by the government. The J. E. Joseph Fund,
another farm-loan fund, established in 1954, is also administered by the
government; its initial capital of $79,000 is loaned at three percent
interest.

In an economy like that of the United States, $3 million in gifts would
disappear like a pebble in a lake, but with that amount the Kadoorie
philanthropies have changed the face of the New Territories. The list of
improvements is awe-inspiring, and it is no exaggeration to say one can
hardly walk a mile anywhere in the rural district without seeing evidence
of their eminently useful contributions.

They contributed junks and sampans to isolated villages, and then built
27 piers to accommodate them. Dirt paths were the only routes between
many villages and farmers either walked or sloshed through the mud,
sometimes using bicycles and carrying five or six members of the family
or possibly a live pig lined up on the fenders and handlebars. The
Kadoorie Association has provided 150 miles of concrete paths, six motor
roads and 142 bridges to make the going easier.

Often villages depended on mountain springs for their drinking water, but
these had an unfortunate habit of sinking back into the ground before
they had served the thirsty villagers. The Association disciplined the
vagrant waters with thirty miles of concrete channels, 293 dams, 400
wells, 51 sumps and 8 reservoirs. Rogue rivers and the invading sea had
eaten away valuable farmland, and the Kadoorie Association produced
restoratives with 29 seawalls, 30 retaining walls and a variety of
culverts and floodgates. Odds and ends, helpful in diverse ways, ranged
from rain shelters to compost pits, poultry sheds to outhouses.

Pigs were popular because, as Horace explained, “It’s the only animal you
can see expanding daily.” Thousands were given away, and advice on caring
for them was supplied by the agricultural stations.

One group that was the especial beneficiary of pig gifts were farm
widows ranging from seventeen to ninety-six years of age. Horace, as the
roving scout of the Kadoorie Association, had noticed that hundreds of
women whose husbands had been killed by the Japanese or had died natural
deaths had not only lost the family rice-winner, they lost the “face”
or community status they enjoyed with their husbands. Custom frowned on
their remarriage, so they could do little but linger disconsolately on
the fringes of village life. The Kadoories talked it over and decided
that a gift of pigs, cows, ducks or chickens would give these widows
something to occupy themselves with and enable them to earn some money.
In a period of two years 10,000 widows received these animals and
enclosures for them. Feed they obtained through the Kadoorie Agriculture
Aid Loan Fund. Blind and elderly women were able to care for flocks of
chickens; younger ones received pigs and cows. The usual pig gift was
six purebred Chinese sows from the Kadoorie Experimental and Extension
Farm at Pak Ngau Shek; all pigs were inoculated against disease and the
Agricultural Department specialists showed the widows how to care for
the animals. Many women tripled their small incomes by breeding pigs and
selling their offspring. As the owners of livestock, they became persons
of consequence in their villages.

With the aid of government experts, the brothers bought hundreds of
foreign pedigreed pigs, and bred Berkshires, Yorkshires and middle whites
with the local animals to produce a larger and hardier strain. Cows and
water buffaloes, indispensable as draught animals, were distributed by
drawing lots in the villages, and the drawings became lively public
gatherings with soft drinks and cakes served all around. Gifts or loans
financed the construction of numerous fish-breeding ponds, with the seed
fish supplied gratis.

The 25,000 loans made through the Fund covered livestock, seeds and
fertilizer, building materials, insecticides and spraying equipment, land
development and other purposes. Over 95 percent of the loan applications
are approved, and the repayment rate has remained very high.

Creating new land for farming has been an important part of Kadoorie
efforts. Horace came upon a group of squatters who had been moved
from the city to make room for a new road; he found them moping about
forlornly on a rocky field which was the site of a cemetery from which
the bodies had been removed. Horace suggested that they use the rocks
to build pigsties, promising them the needed cement and two pigs for
each sty. On his next visit he found many pigsties completed, but was
temporarily baffled when the settlers asked him to buy for them a nearby
hillside rock, fully 100 yards wide and stretching from the bottom of the
hill to the top. He acquired the rock, and the settlers, working from the
bottom upwards, covered it with terraced growing lands.

At Nim Shue Wan village, a hillside settlement along a steep shore, the
Kadoorie Association built a seawall, mixed the sticky red earth of the
hillside with beach sand, and produced a good soil for vegetable-growing
which now supports 100 families in the area. At Pak Ngau Shek, the
Kadoorie farm on the high slopes of Tai Mo Shan, highest (3,140 feet)
mountain in the colony, the brothers began to experiment with plants and
animals, chiefly because the land had been judged worthless for farmers.
If they could make anything thrive there, they believed, it might teach
them some way to utilize the colony’s heavy proportion of wasteland. They
had many failures, such as typhoons uprooting all their shallow-rooted
peach trees, but they discovered that even trees and vegetables
considered unsuitable for high lands did very well. Some vegetables,
growing more slowly on the mountainsides, reached the market when lowland
crops were less plentiful, and therefore brought better prices. The farm
operated at a financial loss, but gave full value as an agricultural
testing site.

The Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association meets once every two weeks,
considers 50 to 100 applications for help, and tries to assist about 15
new families every day. It has given away 7,000 pigs in less than three
months. Many situations won’t wait for committee meetings; some farmers
in dire straits have walked up to Boulder Lodge, Horace’s home at Castle
Peak, to ask for help in the middle of the night. Horace, who often works
a 13-hour day and spends Sundays roaming around the farm districts, is
more flattered than annoyed by these occasional late-hour callers.

“Speed is of the essence in this work,” he said. “When a typhoon heads
this way, we assemble building materials for repair work and all the
quick-growing seeds we can buy; then we’re ready to help the farm people
get back into operation and plant vegetables as soon as the flooding
subsides.”

Fire is often a total disaster to the rural poor, wrecking their homes
and frequently killing their livestock. When an entire village was wiped
out by fire in 1960, the Kadoories threw a round-the-clock emergency
staff into a four-day rescue operation, providing new furniture, clothes,
two months’ food supply, extra cash, livestock, bicycles and rebuilding
all the houses.

Hundreds of artificial limbs donated by Kadoorie Association have enabled
crippled people to earn their living as farmers and fishermen. The
Association doesn’t scatter its benefits recklessly; all applicants are
thoroughly investigated to discover whether they will work to improve
themselves when they receive aid. When a man or woman receives a gift of
livestock, he may not sell it for one year without Kadoorie Association
consent; if disease or unavoidable accidents kill the stock, the
Association replaces them free.

“Our idea has been to find out the wants of those in need,” Horace said.
“It is worth more than anything else.”

The contributions of the Kadoorie brothers and the many other religious
and philanthropic bodies working in the colony serve as a valuable
supplement to the main task of directing and improving the primary
industries. The principal responsibility lies with the Department
of Agriculture and Forestry, and with the Department of Cooperative
Development and Fisheries, which was separated from Agriculture and
Forestry in 1961.

The Chinese farmers of the New Territories can grow a garden on the side
of a rock—as Horace Kadoorie found out for himself—but they know little
about scientific farming, and until the 1950s, there was no one to teach
them. Now the Agriculture & Forestry Department conducts three-week
general agricultural courses, followed by one-week specialized courses
in paddy cultivation, pond-fish culture and other phases of farming.
There are vocational courses, lectures to cooperatives, radio farming
broadcasts, film shows, guided visits to experimental stations and an
annual Agricultural Show at Yuen Long with prizes for the best farm
products.

At the Sheung Shui Market Garden Experimental Station, only two miles
from the Red China border, S. Y. Chan, an assistant agricultural officer,
directs a five-acre center for testing every species of foreign and
domestic vegetables and flowers he can lay his hands on. Chinese white
cabbage, Taiwan radishes, sugar peas, chrysanthemums, 30 varieties of
English and American tomatoes, chives, and corn each have their small
test patch to show whether they can survive in Hong Kong’s climate.
Roses, for example, wilt and die in a few seasons, but the station is
seeking new strains with greater durability. Unlike plants and flowers in
most sections of the United States, the majority of Hong Kong vegetables
and flowers grow best in winter, the local summers being too wet.

At Ta Kwu Ling Dryland Experimental Station, the problem is how to get
some use out of the thousands of acres of former farmland abandoned
because of poor soil or insufficient water. The station, started in
1956, made little progress at first. Then it added compost of manures
and chemical fertilizers to the soil, and tried deep plowing to retain
moisture in the earth. Large white local radishes as big as yams did
well in this ground, and so did sweet potatoes. The department experts
found that windbreaks of sugar cane helped to offset the drying effects
of strong winds. Several types of fodder, including six varieties of
grasses, were tried out in sample patches. Five of the station’s eleven
acres are devoted to improvement of local pig breeds by crossing them
with exotic strains.

The Castle Peak Livestock Experimental Station, located in an area of
badly eroded hills, is the chief center for artificial insemination of
pigs. Semen from selected strains of Berkshire, middle white, and large
white and improved local boars is injected into local sows, producing
larger and hardier litters. Various breeds of chickens are crossed to
develop poultry which thrive under local conditions and are acceptable
to Chinese tastes. A complete laboratory treats and experiments with
every known disease of poultry, pigs and cattle. Pig semen is carried by
bicycle, truck and helicopter to outlying sections of the New Territories
to service local sows.

Artificial insemination of pigs, based on its highly successful use in
Japan, has become increasingly important in Hong Kong, with more than
1,000 instances of its use in 1961.

In the northwestern lowlands near Yuen Long, the department has developed
a fast-growing source of food in the fish-raising ponds. From the top
of a small hill, Yu Yat-sum, fisheries officer, is able to point to a
speckled, silvery expanse of such ponds, covering 700 acres in individual
ponds from one to 10 acres each. Each acre produces about a ton of fish
every year.

Mr. Yu explains that a five-acre pond, equipped with sluice gates and
surrounded by dirt embankments, could be built for $2,700. Usually they
are owned by a village or a co-op society. They are only five feet deep,
but packed with 3,000 to 3,600 fry an acre, each about the length of a
paper clip. The fish would all be crushed and battered if it were not
for their superior adaptation—big head and silver carp cruise near the
surface, grass carp favor the mid-levels, and grey mullet and mud carp
gravitate to the bottom. Fed on rice bran, dry peanut cakes and soya
bean meal, they fatten at a prodigious rate and are ready for the market
within a year, selling at 21 to 30 cents a pound. For the pond owners,
it’s a net return of twenty percent per year. There are more than 1,000
acres of these ponds in the New Territories, and they are increasing at
the rate of 60 acres a month.

The Chinese have their own strict ideas of what fresh fish means; to
them, the only fresh fish from a pond is a live one, so the carp and
mullet travel to market in tubs, still alive. The job of Mr. Yu and other
departmental experts is to see that the fish do not perish before their
time because of diseases or excessive salinity in the pond water.

The Tai Lung Forestry and Crop Experimental Station concentrates on the
expansion of the colony’s forests, which almost disappeared during World
War II. Here the six-inch seedlings of Chinese pine, eucalyptus, China
fir and other species are placed in polythene tubes and covered with soil
by patient Hakka women who do the work by hand. After a few months in the
shade and a brief maturing period in full sunlight, the polythene tube
is removed and the tree is planted on a hillside in one of the reservoir
catchment areas. Spaced about six feet apart on all sides, they go in at
the rate of 2,500 an acre. Tai Lung produces 1,500,000 of these plantings
each year. A month after they are placed on the hillsides, their progress
is checked by an inspector; if more than twenty percent have died, the
area is replanted. A second check is made a year later.

Four main forest areas stretching across the New Territories from Tolo
Harbor to Lantau Island now total more than 11,500 acres. In ten years
some of the lean China pines have shot up to 30 feet high. The overworked
forestry staff has been so busy planting trees and keeping a close watch
on forest fires that it has had little time for the next stage of the
reforestation, which is thinning overcrowded areas. Other complications
confront them when a firebreak is cut through the hillside forests; the
cutover strip erodes quickly in the summer rainstorms, damaging the tree
plantations and sending silt into the reservoirs.

If forestry is the youngest of Hong Kong’s primary industries, fishing
is indisputably the oldest, and for many centuries, the largest primary
income producer. Until fairly recent times, fishermen were inclined to
demonstrate their versatility and supplement their income by piracy.
Fast, steel-hulled naval ships with long-range guns have taken much of
the lure out of part-time piracy, especially for the crews of slow-moving
junks, and the fisher folk have become a law-abiding group. Today they
number around 86,000 and catch approximately $10 million worth of fish
every year. Not included in their ranks are the keepers of fish ponds,
who are regarded as farmers, or those who live on boats but earn their
living by hauling cargo, running water-taxis or selling merchandise from
their boats.

The fishing people, chiefly Tanka but including other Chinese like the
Hoklo and Hakka, are concentrated at Aberdeen and Shau Kei Wan on Hong
Kong Island and seven settlements in the New Territories. By environment
and preference, they are deeply conservative, disinclined to mix in the
affairs of landlubbers. Nevertheless, the irresistible winds of change
which have swept through the colony since World War II have shaken them
loose from their traditional moorings.

Like the farmers, they were able to free themselves from the iron grip
of the laans when the Fish Marketing Organization put the middlemen out
of business. The Fish Marketing Organization gave them a fair return
on their catch, established cheap credit to improve their boats and
equipment, provided boats and trucks to get their fish to the five
wholesale markets and founded schools for their children. CARE and
other relief organizations came to their aid. The Fisheries Division
offered classes in navigation, modern seamanship and boat design, marine
engineering and the use of up-to-date fishing equipment, with classes
being adapted to the fishermen’s working schedules. A fisheries research
unit from Hong Kong University became a regular part of the departmental
organization. The 240-ton otter trawler _Cape St. Mary_ cruised the
fishing grounds from the Gulf of Tong King, west of Hainan Island, to
Taiwan in the east, gathering data on ocean currents, water temperatures
and depths and the feeding habits of fish. A fishing master was appointed
and careful studies were made of pearl- and edible-oyster culture.

All these are routine procedures in present-day fishing centers, but
they were virtually unknown in Hong Kong until 1946. Since then, despite
harassment and inshore fishing restrictions enforced by Red China, the
tonnage and market value of the annual catch have almost tripled.

Red China has maintained a certain disinterestedness in its mistreatment
of fishermen. During the last five years the Communists demanded so great
a share of the fish caught by their own people that thousands of their
fishing boats never returned. Some sailed far out in the China Sea, then
turned back toward Hong Kong and became refugees; others slipped through
Chinese shore patrols at night and defected to the British colony.
Between 1957 and 1962, the new arrivals swelled the colony fishing fleet
from 6,000 to the present 10,550 units.

The most radical change in the colony’s fleet, however, has come from
within. The Chinese junk, famous throughout the world as the symbol of
Hong Kong, has dropped its picturesque sails; more than 4,000 of them now
churn along under Diesel power. The Chinese junk is as diverse in its
size, shape and function as the infinitely varied Chinese people. There
are sixteen different classes of junks in Hong Kong alone, and none of
them closely resembles a junk from any other part of China. They are
single-, double- and triple-masted; they are little craft 25 feet long or
lumbering giants of 100 foot length. To a colony fisheries expert, “junk”
is only a loose generic term; he immediately classifies it according
to the job it is designed for, as a long-liner (four classes by size),
seiner (two main types, depending on the net it uses), trawler (four
main types, depending on the kind of trawling it does), gill-netters,
fish-collecting junks and several miscellaneous varieties.

Since the British came to Hong Kong, the junks operating in local waters
have borrowed design features from European ships. The big fishing junks
of Hong Kong, with their high stern, horizontal rails and the large,
perforated rudder pivoting in a deep, vertical groove on the stern,
resemble no other junks in the world. Like junks from all parts of China,
and even the boats of ancient Egypt, they have an oculus, or painted
image of the human eye, on their bow. In fishing junks, the center of the
eye is directed downward so that it can keep a close watch on the fish;
trading junks have the eye aimed higher so that it can scan the distant
horizon. The bow eyes of the old-fashioned sailing junks no longer have
much to look forward to. The deep-sea trawlers, operating as far as
250 miles out, are all mechanized. The sailing junks operate closer to
shore, but the cargo-carrying junks in Victoria harbor are predominantly
mechanized. To anyone who has crossed the harbor recently it is obvious
that the sails are disappearing at an alarming rate.

The fishermen who live and work on junks instead of viewing them
abstractly from a distance have not yet formed a Committee for the
Preservation of the Romantic Junk. After approaching mechanization with
reluctance and suspicion in 1948, they became convinced that the big
sailing junk is through. Motorized junks can reach the distant fishing
grounds much faster, they catch a lion’s share of the fish, and they
return to market far ahead of sail competition. Because of their greater
speed and stability, they can venture out in the typhoon season when sail
craft are obliged to stick closer to shore. Within ten years, fishing
authorities say, the sailing junk will have become virtually extinct.

It has been proposed that the Hong Kong Tourist Association hire a
couple of junks to sail up and down the harbor for the sole delectation
of tourists, but no official action has been taken. Tourists can travel
40 miles west to Macao where the harbor is still crowded with sailing
junks. Here the sails persist only because the Macao fishing industry
lacks the low-interest loans available to Hong Kong fishermen through the
Fish Marketing Organization and the fishing co-ops. Without such credit,
very few fishermen could afford Diesel engines or other motor-driven
equipment. In Hong Kong, even the little 4-horsepower engines of sampans
are bought on credit.

Now that progress has reached the fishing fleet, it will not be satisfied
until it changes everything. Under the direction of such knowledgeable
men as Jack Cater, co-op and fisheries commissioner, Lieutenant Commander
K. Stather, fishing master, and Wing-Hong Cheung, craft technician on
modern junk design, the whole junk-building industry is being turned
upside down.

For centuries, the junk has been built without plans or templates, with
the designers proceeding entirely by habit and skill. This is relatively
easy in building a 15-foot sampan, but when it is extended to 100-ton
vessels of 90-foot length it becomes both art and architecture. The size
of the investment, by local standards, is staggering: $40,000 for a large
trawler and its mechanized equipment, and around $7,000 for a mechanized
40-footer.

There are nearly 100 junk-building yards in the colony, but no more
than ten of these are capable of building a junk from blueprints. The
fisheries department is conducting boat-design classes in three major
fishing centers, Aberdeen, Shau Kei Wan and Cheung Chau, and training
builders to read plans. The classes are held at night to avoid conflict
with working hours, and the courses are for three months.

The junk-building yards present a vivid picture of a civilization in
transition. At one yard, a workman is laboriously breaming the hull of
a sampan—killing marine borers by passing bundles of burning hay beside
and beneath it—and a workman or two in an adjoining yard are covering
the hull of another boat with anti-fouling paint. The object of the two
operations is identical, but the anti-fouling paint protects the wood
about four times as long as breaming and takes no longer to apply. On the
port side of an 86-foot trawler, a Chinese carpenter is using a half-inch
electric power drill; on the starboard, another man is drilling holes
with a steel bit spun by a leather thong with its ends fixed to a wooden
bow.

Lu Pan, the Celestial master builder who transmitted the secrets of
carpentry and shipbuilding to mankind, is honored with a tiny shrine
in an obscure corner of every yard. Joss sticks are lighted before a
statuette of this practical divinity, and his birthday observance on the
13th day of the Sixth Moon is a holiday in the shipyards. Lu Pan has not
yet betrayed any overt sign of annoyance at the invasion of his domain by
power tools and Diesel engines.

The timber that is cut for these all-wooden ships is tough and
durable—China fir, teak, and various hardwoods chiefly from Borneo, like
billian, kapor and yacal. The planks are hewn at mills near the yards,
and bent to fit the curvature of the hull. The curving is accomplished by
heating the center of the plank with a small fire and weighting its ends
with heavy stones to set the curve. The 3-inch-thick planks are secured
to the upright framing members with 14-inch steel spikes, and the main
stringer, just below deck level, is fastened with threaded bolts. Despite
the general disarray of the open yards and the lack of precise plans,
the junk almost invariably turns out to be a nicely dovetailed, exactly
balanced boat, good for twenty or thirty years of service in the rough
weather of the China Sea.

The long-liner ranks as the giant of the junk fleet, having an overall
length between 80 and 100 feet. Junks of this class fish from 20 to 60
miles south of the colony, cruising above a vast expanse of underwater
flats where depths seldom exceed 90 feet and the muddy bottom makes other
kinds of fishing unfeasible.

A typical long-liner under construction at the Yee Hop Shipyard in Shau
Kei Wan has a 90-foot length and the elephantine stern characteristic of
its class. Its high poop carries bunks for 16 men, with additional bunks
located forward and a total crew capacity of 57 men, sandwiched in with
no more than a yard of clearance between upper and lower bunks. Eight
sampans can be stowed along its deck and lowered over the side when the
fishing grounds are reached. Despite its traditional outline, it has
Diesel engines, twin-screw propellors and a 20-ton fishhold lined with
modern insulation material.

Costing about $36,000 with full equipment, one long-liner, for example,
was ordered by Hai Lee Chan, a Shau Kei Wan fisherman who already owned
another like it, plus two smaller junks. During the two and one-half
months that 35 carpenters required to complete it, Mrs. Chan and her
twelve-year-old daughter remained on or around the junk to keep a
watchful eye on its construction. A long-liner of this kind may put out
as many as 100,000 hooks on lines attached to its bow and stern or strung
out by its covey of sampans. A single trip to the fishing grounds may
keep it at sea for a week or more and bring a ten-ton catch of golden
thread, shark and lizard fish.

Comparable in size but differing completely in design are two deep-sea
trawlers built at the Kwong Lee Cheung Shipyard in Kowloon. These are
sister ships, 86 feet long, and the first ones of their size that
faithfully followed the modern specifications laid down by Mr. Cheung and
the Fisheries Department. They were the first big trawlers constructed
according to written plans and framed around modern templates or patterns
in Hong Kong.

As they neared completion late in 1961, the twin wooden trawlers of 100
tons each looked more like dismasted clipper ships than junks. The old
type of high poop had been cut down and crew quarters moved forward. The
fat, bulging stern had been slimmed down to improve the streamline, and
the traditional rudder-slot was gone. The deck was level and uncluttered,
with far more working space than older junks provided. The outline of the
hull was slim and graceful, giving more longitudinal stability than the
tub-bottomed junk. The free-swinging tiller and massive wooden rudder had
been replaced by a ship’s wheel and a much smaller rudder of steel that
turned on a metal shaft. Powered winches would be welded to their decks.
Mechanized and streamlined, the new trawlers could deliver more speed
than a motorized trawler of conventional shape, and require less fuel to
do it.

When the two partners who had ordered the trawlers, fishermen Lee Loy
Shing and Cheng Chung Kay, smilingly greeted visitors to the yard,
pointing out the features of their new ships with considerable pride,
it was evident that they regarded the old-style junk as an expensive
antique. Mechanization has already proved itself; although mechanized
boats number less than half the fishing fleet, they take 80 percent of
the catch. Many fishermen are beginning to believe that modern ship
design is as important to the future of Hong Kong’s fishing fleet as
mechanization.

Steel-hulled trawlers of the Japanese “bull” type are already being used
by the fishing companies in the colony. One dozen of them operate in the
Gulf of Tong King, near Hainan Island. However, they are much too costly
for most fishing families.

Colony fishing methods are as varied as the boats used. The deep-sea
trawlers, generally working in pairs, drag a huge bag-shaped net along
the sea bottom, gathering in horsehead and red snapper, or red goatfish
and golden thread. Purse-seiners, working in pairs and fairly close
to shore, stretch a big net between them at night and use a bright
light to lure such smaller fish as anchovies and carangoid into the
net. The Pa T’eng seiners set gill nets along the bottom for yellow
croaker, and drift nets for white pomfret and mackerel. Other types
include gill-netters, shrimp beam-trawlers, and three smaller classes of
long-liners. About twenty kinds of fish form most of the catch, and among
these are conger pike, big eyes, grouper, young barracuda and red sea
bream.

The ship carpenters of Hong Kong are far above average ability, so much
so that the Chinese Communists have attempted, without notable success,
to induce them to build junks in China. Demand for their skills has,
however, raised their wages about one-third in the last two years.

The fishermen have had their rigid conservatism shattered by the changes
around them. In spite of their usual illiteracy, they have learned the
rules of navigation at fisheries department schools. More advanced
classes have qualified for licenses as engineers, pilots, navigators
and boat-builders. For the first time they have lodged their families
on shore, with the wives becoming used to housekeeping and the children
attending schools.

Many Westerners, seeing this upheaval in the fine, free life of the
fisherman, deplore the passing of the old ways. The fishermen, always
quicker at grabbing for prosperity than in clinging to romantic
illusions, are moving forward at top speed without a thought to their
suddenly disappearing past.



CHAPTER SEVEN

Crime, Power and Corruption

    “We have absolutely no doubt from the evidence and statistics
    we have studied that corruption exists on a scale which
    justifies the strongest counter-measures.”—HONG KONG ADVISORY
    COMMITTEE ON CORRUPTION, January, 1962


The British crown colony of Hong Kong came into existence under
circumstances bearing less resemblance to the majesty of British law
and order than they did to a territorial dispute between the Capone and
O’Banion mobs during the Chicago of the 1920s. Its founding fathers were
dope peddlers whose ability to bribe Chinese customs officials made the
traders rich and goaded the Chinese Emperor into a war that cost him the
loss of a worthless island called Hong Kong.

The Rev. George Smith, an English missionary who visited the colony
during its first five years, approached the place with the exalted
conviction that his country had “been honoured by God as the chosen
instrument for diffusing the pure light of Protestant Christianity
throughout the world.” He went ashore to discover a polyglot Gehenna with
no market for the Word.

“The lowest dregs of native society flock to the British settlement in
the hope of gain or plunder,” he wrote. “There are but faint prospects
at present of any other than either a migratory or a predatory race
being attracted to Hong Kong, who, when their hopes of gain or pilfering
vanish, without hesitation or difficulty remove elsewhere.”

The Rev. Smith was no more favorably disposed toward his fellow
countrymen. He felt the British rulers were too harsh with the Chinese,
permitting the general population to be exploited by a few Mandarins.
As for the merchants and traders, he regarded their behavior as setting
a bad example for the Chinese. Saving souls in Hong Kong, he decided,
demanded more miracles than he had at his disposal, and with considerable
relief, he transferred his missionary efforts to the more congenial
atmosphere of South China.

Other missionaries accepted the long odds against grappling successfully
with the devil in Hong Kong, but the struggle left many of them
disheartened. When the merchants and sailors were not engaged in the
opium traffic, they frequently busied themselves by purchasing Chinese
mistresses from the Tanka boat people. Many of the Eurasians of South
China were the issue of this type of transaction.

Law enforcement in the colony was a farce. The few Europeans who could
be induced to join the underpaid police force were the scourings of the
Empire, remittance men or wastrels who accepted the jobs because they did
not dare go home to England.

Householders, disgusted with the ineptness of the police, hired private
watchmen who went about at night beating bamboo drums to advertise their
presence. This noisy custom was later forbidden, and burglary, highway
robbery and harbor piracy increased. Sir John F. Davis, the colony’s
second governor, tried to persuade property owners to improve police
protection by paying more taxes for it, but the merchants demurred,
setting a precedent which was applied to many proposed improvements in
years to come. The attitude seemed to be: Progress is fine, provided one
doesn’t have to pay for it. Sir John attempted to keep track of known
criminals by obliging every colony resident to register, but was forced
to abandon the idea when the Chinese staged a three-month general strike
in protest.

Piracy, smuggling, opium-smoking, prostitution, semislave trading in
contract laborers, gambling, and graft flourished for many years,
resisting the sporadic attacks of a succession of governors. In 1858, for
the first and last time, an exceptional balance was achieved. Licenses
for the sale of liquor, the favorite Western vice, and revenue from
opium, the leading weakness of the Chinese, each brought 10,000 pounds of
income to the colony government.

Under such powerful governors as Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell (1866-72)
and Sir Arthur E. Kennedy (1872-77), the colony made significant
advances in the control of piracy and urban crime. The quality of police
protection improved and both men won the applause of local merchants by
their Draconic policy of branding, flogging and deporting law-breakers.
The Chinese Emperor and the liberal elements in the British Parliament
disapproved of the severity applied but did not intervene to stop it.

The Chinese government never ceased its opposition to the smuggling of
opium from Hong Kong, although many of its venal officials shared in
the profits of the traffic. For two decades, from the mid-1860s to the
mid-1880s, China attempted to enforce a blockade against smuggled salt
and opium, but opium continued to represent almost half its total imports.

A joint Sino-British commission agreed to place some limitation on the
trade in 1886, but the British zeal for enforcement was diluted by the
desire for continuing profits. Even after controls were repeatedly
tightened in the early 1900s, the returns held steady; in 1906, the opium
trade was valued at 5 million pounds and yielded $2 million in colony
revenue. Unfavorable world opinion gradually narrowed the trade, but the
nonmedical sale and use of the drug was not entirely banned until World
War II.

In the last several decades, the Hong Kong Police Department has outgrown
its disreputable origins and has become an efficient law-enforcement
organization. Nevertheless, the image of the colony that persists in the
imagination of many Westerners who have never been there is a cesspool of
iniquity such as the one that horrified the Rev. Smith.

Just how wicked and criminal is today’s Hong Kong?

A layman’s comparison of the crime rates of the United States and
Hong Kong for the year 1960, as published by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Hong Kong Police Department respectively, gives an
objective picture of their relative lawlessness.

Both sets of figures are for predominantly urban areas, covering ten of
the most comparable categories of crime. The figures give the actual
number of crimes per one million population. Because of inherent
differences in the manner of classifying and reporting crimes, a margin
of error of ten percent should be allowed in their interpretation.

    1960—CRIME RATES PER 1 MILLION POPULATION

    CRIME CATEGORY   UNITED STATES   HONG KONG
    Murder                  55             8
    Rape                    74            50
    Serious Assault        645           178
    Burglary             1,358           157
    Larceny              2,785         2,562
    Forgery                234            60
    Prostitution           319           527
    Narcotics              289         4,677
    Drunkenness         16,375           257
    Robbery                361            30

Such statistics are always subject to many different interpretations,
which will not be made here. But they confirm one impression shared by
virtually everyone who has spent many nights (either at home or on the
streets) in both New York City and Hong Kong: You’re a lot safer in Hong
Kong.

The most glaring disparity between the rates is, of course, in the
comparative number of arrests for drunkenness. The American rate is more
than 60 times higher than that of Hong Kong, and it is a safe inference
that a fair share of the colony arrests for drunkenness are made among
Europeans and Americans, who comprise less than two percent of the
population. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Hong Kong drink beer,
wine or hard liquor, but a Chinese drunk in public is a rarity.

In major crimes of violence—murder, rape, serious assault and
robbery—America has a much higher crime rate. With the stated allowance
for error, the United States and Hong Kong could be considered about
equally inclined toward larceny—a legal term which covers the more
popular forms of stealing. Stealing automobiles, however, has not really
caught on in the colony; there is practically no place to hide a car
after stealing it. Bicycle theft is more common there.

Prostitution is one of the two categories in which Hong Kong has a higher
rate than America. A highly intelligent missionary who has dealt with the
problem for many years had this succinct comment:

“The problem hinges on two factors; the British Army Garrison and the
fact that Hong Kong is a recreation port for the United States Navy.
Remove these and the problem vanishes.”

For a variety of realistic reasons, this missionary does not expect
the problem to vanish, though the police and the clergy, working from
different directions, are doing their best to reduce its incidence. Both
groups recognize poverty as one major cause of prostitution that can be
fought with education and better jobs.

The comparative rates of narcotics offenses in the United States and
Hong Kong indicate that such crime is sixteen times more prevalent in
the colony than in America. They also confirm a fact recognized by every
law-enforcement unit in Hong Kong: Drugs are the No. 1 colony crime
problem. By government estimates, there are no less than 150,000, and
perhaps as many as 250,000 drug addicts in the colony. In the entire
United States there are between 45,000 and 60,000 drug addicts.

The gravity of the colony’s narcotics problem is best illustrated by the
type of addiction practiced there. Almost all addicts use either opium or
heroin, with heroin users three times more numerous than opium addicts.
The trend toward heroin has grown more powerful every year since World
War II, because the tight postwar laws against opium drove the drug
sellers to a much more potent narcotic and one that could be smuggled
more easily. Heroin is a second cousin to opium, being derived from
morphine, which, in turn, has been extracted from opium.

Heroin, commonly called “the living death,” is from 30 to 80 times
stronger than opium. An opium smoker may go along for years, suffering no
more physical damage than a heavy drinker; a heroin addict, who may be
hooked in as short a time as two weeks, sinks into physical, mental and
moral ruin within a few months.

A peculiar kind of economic injustice operates among drug addicts, who
are most often found among the poorest segments of the colony’s Chinese
population. Even in the years when the British traded openly and without
compunction in opium, they almost never became addicted to it, and today
a British addict in Hong Kong is an extreme rarity. A number of young
Americans living or visiting in the colony have picked up the habit,
probably under the impression that they are defying conventions. They, at
least, can afford the price of the rope with which they hang themselves.
This is not so for the Chinese addict, whose habit costs him an average
of $193 a year (HK $1,100), or much more than he can earn in a similar
period. Unless he has saved enough money to keep him going until the
drugs kill him, he turns to various kinds of crime to support his habit.

Opium-smoking is a cumbersome process requiring a bulky pipe, pots of the
drug, a lamp to heat it and scrapers to clean the pipe. Smoking produces
a strong odor which makes a pipe session vulnerable to police detection
and arrest. There are no opium dens in Hong Kong; the usual term is opium
divan, implying an elegance seldom encountered in the addicts’ squalid
hangouts.

Heroin, odorless and requiring no bulky apparatus, is taken in various
ways. “Chasing the dragon” is done by mixing heroin granules and base
powder in folded tinfoil, then heating it over a flame and inhaling the
fumes through a tube of rolled paper or bamboo. When a matchbox cover is
substituted for the tube, the method is called “playing the mouth organ.”
A third technique involves the placing of heroin granules in the tip of a
cigarette, which is lit and held in an upright position while the smoker
draws on it; this is known as “firing the ack-ack gun.” Needle injection,
and the smoking or swallowing of pills made by mixing heroin with other
ingredients are additional methods.

The opium poppy may only be grown illegally in Hong Kong, but the few
farmers who attempt to raise it in isolated valleys have produced hardly
enough for their own use. Practically all of it comes in by ships and
planes in the form of raw opium or morphine, which can be converted to
heroin within the colony. On ships, the drugs are hidden in the least
accessible parts of the vessel or concealed in cargo shipments; they
can also be dumped overside in a waterproof container with a float and
marker as the ship nears the harbor, to be picked up by small, fast boats
which land them in sparsely settled areas. Variations of the same methods
are used by incoming planes, with a prearranged airdrop sometimes being
employed.

With thousands of ships and planes arriving and departing every year,
the chances of stopping all narcotics smuggling are practically nil. A
complete search of every arrival would be physically impossible, and
even in cases where the police or the Preventive Service of the Commerce
and Industry Department have been tipped off to an incoming shipment,
it may take a full day to locate the hiding place. The drugs may be
packed inside a cable drum, buried in bales of waste, concealed in
double-bottomed baskets, cached inside the bodies of dolls or surrounded
by bundles of firewood; the hiding places are as inexhaustible as the
cleverness of the smugglers.

Where do the narcotics come from? Harry J. Anslinger, United States
Commissioner of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, had been telling the world
for at least a decade that Red China was the chief source of supply.
Anslinger said the Chinese Communists were up to their necks in the
traffic because it brought them the foreign exchange they desperately
needed and simultaneously undermined the morale of the West by spreading
drug addiction among its people.

Not one official in the British crown colony accepted Mr. Anslinger’s
thesis for a minute. Hong Kong Police Commissioner Henry W. E. Heath,
the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, and the Preventive Service of the
Commerce and Industry Department unanimously declared that there was
absolutely no evidence that any large amount of the drugs smuggled into
the colony came from Red China. American customs officials in Hong Kong
were inclined to sustain the British view.

Anslinger had named Yunnan Province in southwestern China as the leading
opium-growing area. Colony officials will concede that some opium may be
grown in Yunnan, but they believe that a much greater share is cultivated
in northwest Laos, northern Thailand and the Shan States of eastern
Burma. These four areas are so close to one another that the difference
between the two hypotheses is more political than geographic.

Regardless of which field the poppy comes from, colony officials have
found that more than half the opium seized upon entering Hong Kong has
arrived on ships and planes that made their last previous stop at
Bangkok, Thailand. It is presumed that few drugs arrived bearing the name
and address of the manufacturer or the stamp giving the country of origin.

In 1960, the colony’s antinarcotics units set what they believe to be
a world record for drug seizures, grabbing 39 shipments that included
3,626 pounds of opium, 153 pounds of morphine, 337 pounds of morphine
hydrochloride, 5 pounds of heroin and 155 pounds of barbitone. On
November 30, 1960, the Preventive Service captured 1,078 pounds of raw
opium hidden in bundles of hollowed-out teakwood on a newly arrived ship.
Less than two weeks later they discovered another vessel trying the same
trick and made a haul of 769 pounds of raw opium, 16 pounds of prepared
opium, 45½ pounds of morphine and 293 pounds of morphine hydrochloride.
There were 50 seizures in 1961, putting a further serious crimp in the
smuggling racket.

Feeling persecuted and hurt, many smugglers shifted their base of
operations to Singapore. Even so, it was not an unqualified triumph for
Hong Kong’s antinarcotics force; by pinching off the drug supply they
forced its market price sky-high, and desperate addicts began stealing
and robbing to pay for their dope.

Halting the manufacture of heroin within the colony is as difficult as
catching dope smugglers. A heroin “factory” requires little space and
can be set up in some obscure corner of the New Territories or lodged in
an expensive top-floor apartment on Hong Kong Island; the profit margin
is so great that production costs are but a small obstacle. Enforcement
costs are almost as steep. In 1959, the Preventive Service trebled its
manpower. In February, 1961, maximum penalties for drug manufacturing
were raised from a fine of $8,750 and ten years in prison to a $17,500
fine and life imprisonment.

Almost two-thirds of all prisoners in Hong Kong jails are drug addicts,
but the jailing of addicts, however necessary to protect society, offers
no cure for addiction. The colony government has sought to meet this
phase of the problem by setting up a narcotics rehabilitation center at
Tai Lam Chung Prison and a voluntary treatment section in the government
hospital at Castle Peak.

Dr. Alberto M. Rodrigues, a colony-born physician of Portuguese ancestry
and an unofficial member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, became
chairman of a voluntary committee formed in 1959 to help drug addicts.
With government approval, his committee took over Shek Kwu Island near
Lantau in 1960 to establish a center where about 500 addicts could be
accommodated if they volunteered for treatment. The island was chosen
because it was isolated, and with proper security measures, could keep
the addict entirely away from drugs until medical and nursing care had
put him back on his feet. Gus Borgeest, the refugee rehabilitation
pioneer who established a welfare center on Sunshine Island, helped in
the early planning of Shek Kwu Chau, which began operations during 1962.

Sir Sik-nin Chau, who has served on both the Executive and Legislative
Councils, headed an antinarcotics publicity campaign which was solidly
backed by the British and Chinese newspapers. The Kaifong associations
joined in the drive with lectures and leaflet-distribution among the
Chinese community. The public was urged to report any information about
narcotics sales or divans, but the response was slow and timid; many
ordinary citizens were obviously afraid of beatings and reprisals by the
Triad gangs engaged in drug-peddling. Others hung back in obedience to a
deep-seated Chinese tradition of not sticking your neck out by reporting
on the other fellow’s dirty work. Some headway has been made against this
attitude, but the general feeling of the drive’s publicity people is that
their campaign must be sustained for years to overcome it.

Hong Kong’s drug problem is unlike that of New York City, where drug
addiction among teen-agers is cause for grave concern. Few Chinese
youngsters seem to be attracted to the habit. It is the middle-aged, the
unemployed, and most of all, the desperately poor who chase the dragon
for a brief sensation of well-being, ease and warmth that is succeeded
by a crushing letdown, physical collapse and eventual death. Abrupt
withdrawal of the drugs is like an earthquake from within, causing
cramps, vomiting, excruciating bodily pain and pathological restlessness.
Only a gradual withdrawal under close medical supervision will bring
about a cure, and even that carries no guarantee if the rehabilitated
addict is turned back to joblessness and squalor.

Much of the drug traffic into Hong Kong is not intended for local
consumption, but for reexport to America and Europe. The crossroads
position of Hong Kong on international air and shipping routes makes it
particularly advantageous to this trade, and internal enforcement is
insufficient to cope with it. To bolster their defenses against this
traffic, colony drug-suppression officials depend on close coordination
with police in Southeast Asia, with the World Health Organization
Committee on Drugs Liable to Produce Addiction, and the Commission
on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
The colony police force has opened its own sub-bureau of Interpol
(International Criminal Police Organization) to strengthen its offensive
against international drug peddlers.

One oddity of the colony’s widespread drug addiction is that it is
seldom apparent to the average visitor; he may spend weeks there without
seeing a single identifiable drug victim. Trained observers can often
spot an addict by his dazed expression or emaciated appearance, but
even in these cases they need further evidence to verify the appraisal.
Dragon-chasers don’t charge through the streets like rogue elephants—not
in the colony, at any rate—they stay hidden and comatose in their
squatter shacks or divans.

Police find the Triad gangs perennially active in the sale of narcotics,
just as they are in pimpery, extortion and shakedown rackets. Congested
areas such as Yau Ma Tei and Sham Shui Po have the highest crime rates
and the largest Triad membership. Only about five percent of the 500,000
Triad members are engaged in major crimes, yet the threat of vengeance
from this militant minority is generally sufficient to keep the other
members silent and submissive. The mere implication of Triad backing, in
a threatening letter sent to a rich Chinese, usually produces cash to pay
off the letter writer, although police have recently had more success in
persuading prospective victims of these menaces to contact them instead
of paying off. Kidnapings are rare, though at least one case made the
headlines in 1961.

The makeup of the police department closely reflects both the hierarchy
and the numerical grouping of the colony’s population. The line force
of uniformed men and detectives in all grades totaled 8,333 in 1961.
Nine-tenths were Chinese and less than 500 were British, with less than
200 Pakistanis and a handful of Portuguese. The top 50 administrative
posts were almost solidly British, however. The force also includes a
civilian staff of 1400.

For the purposes of the ordinary citizen, a colony cop is a Chinese cop,
for these are the only officers he sees regularly. Taken as a group,
they are an alert-looking, smartly uniformed body, predominantly young,
slim and athletic. Day or night, they appear to be very much on the job,
and the worldwide complaint that a cop is never there when you need him
seems peculiarly inapplicable to Hong Kong. The Chinese officer quite
obviously is proud of his job, but the swaggering bully-boy pose is alien
to his nature.

A few Chinese officers, like police in all other cities, go bad. When
they are drummed out of the force, it is generally for shaking down
a hawker or a merchant. More serious cases involve the protection of
gambling, prostitution, after-hour bars, or even collaboration with Triad
gangsters who split their protection money with the man on the beat.
Once in a great while a case like that of Assistant Superintendent John
Chao-ko Tsang crops up, with a high-ranking Chinese officer involved in
spying for a foreign government—Communist China, in this instance. But
such is the exception and does not change one lesson the British rulers
have learned in 120 years of hiring almost every kind of recruit from a
Scotsman to a Sikh; that of them all, the rank-and-file Chinese cop is
the finest the colony has ever had.

The command structure of the police department, which is highly
centralized under an all-British top administration, is reflected in
almost every branch of the colony government. There are approximately
15,000 natives of the British Isles in the colony, excluding members of
the armed forces and their families, and they occupy virtually all of the
top government posts.

A number of writers have expressed the view that Hong Kong is actually
controlled by about twenty persons, and while this could be criticized
as extreme—and certainly impossible to prove—it could just as well be
said that it is controlled by not more than ten persons: The governor;
the colonial secretary; the financial secretary; the director of Public
Works; the managing director of Jardine, Matheson & Co. (the most
powerful and longest-established business house); the general manager of
the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (the leading financial institution); the
two most influential Chinese members of the Executive and Legislative
Councils; and the most prominent Portuguese and Indian member of the
Executive or Legislative Council. Perhaps the best way to test this
top-ten theory would be to try running something in opposition to these
ten, and no one has ventured that yet.

There is no important elective office in Hong Kong, no widely qualified
electorate and no open agitation for universal suffrage. Nor is there
any sign of a forcibly suppressed yearning for democratic rule on the
part of the general population. The Communists, of course, loudly profess
their love of elective government, but the British and a majority of the
Chinese construe this to mean the entering wedge for Red China to annex
the colony. This is an old-fashioned colonial autocracy, completely
dominated by a small minority at the top, but even without a vote it
appears to enjoy more confidence from its subjects than do the Reds on
the mainland of China.

The greatest strength of the colony government is that in spite of
its pin-point degree of representation, it can rule in an orderly and
efficient manner without the excesses of tyranny or dictatorship. For
ultimately, it is not the governing few but the law that rules in Hong
Kong.

The Hong Kong government is a subsidiary of the British Crown. It gets
its orders from the Colonial Office and they are carried out by the
governor and two advisory bodies, the Executive and Legislative Councils.
The governor is the head of both councils. Five persons have seats
in both councils by virtue of their office—the commander of British
forces in the colony, the colonial secretary, the attorney general,
the secretary for Chinese affairs, and the financial secretary. In
addition, one colony official is nominated to the Executive Council,
and four other government officials are nominated for the Legislative
Council. The governor goes outside the official family to nominate six
unofficial members of the Executive Council and eight unofficial members
of the Legislative Council. Altogether, there are 31 places in this
policy-making hierarchy. Since several of its members hold two jobs
in this selective directorate, there are at present a total of 23 men
participating in top-level government.

The governor must consult with the Executive Council on all important
matters, but he decides what must be done. If he takes action against
the express advice of his Executive Council, he owes a full explanation
for doing so to the Colonial Secretary. The governor makes the laws with
the advice and consent of the Legislative Council, and he must have its
approval for all public spending. British common law, adapted where
necessary to local conditions and Chinese customs, is the legal code of
Hong Kong.

Thus the colony presents a unique governmental phenomenon. Approximately
ten to twenty English-speaking men holding undisputed sway over 3,300,000
subjects, of whom not one in ten understands the language of his rulers
and hardly fifty percent can claim Hong Kong as their birthplace.

By all visible signs, the colony is one of the best-run governments in
the Far East. Its roads are paved and traffic moves in an orderly way
in spite of the highest vehicle concentration per mile of road anywhere
in the world. The same order prevails in the incessant shuttling of
harbor vessels. Public transportation is swift, frequent and generally
on schedule. Poverty and privation are everywhere, but starvation is
virtually non-existent. Business and trade thrive and unemployment is
low. Wages seem minuscule when compared with American standards, yet are
higher than in most of the countries of Asia. A majority of its people
are indifferent to the government, but they are not afraid of it. When
something has to be done, there are people at the top with the resolution
and the intelligence to do it without trampling human rights.

Is Hong Kong’s autocracy, therefore, a model for the world? On the
contrary, there is hardly another place where its practices would be
applicable. Hong Kong’s exasperating uniqueness has defied even the
efforts of the Colonial Office to make it conform to British government
practices.

With all its efficiency, however, Hong Kong has the weaknesses of its
governmental structure and its political environment. Because of its
extreme centralization, its almost ingrown character in relation to
its constituents, it is often out of touch with the people it governs.
Enormous barriers of language and culture block its view, and graft and
corruption threaten it from every angle. In Asia, graft is the deadliest
enemy of every form of government which pretends to deal justly with its
citizens, and Hong Kong is not invulnerable to its attack.

From the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese people who emigrated
there were fugitives from restraint and oppression. Many of them were
outright fugitives from justice. Whatever their virtues or vices, they
had found existence under the government of their homeland so intolerable
that they willingly submitted to the rule of an alien people they neither
trusted nor admired. From centuries of bitter experience in China, they
believed that no government was to be trusted. The secret of survival
was to avoid all open defiance of governments and to go on living within
the framework of one’s family and clan as though the government did
not exist. One did not cheat the other members of his clan, because
retribution could be swift and terrible. Relations with civil rulers were
not an ethical compact; they were a battle of wits, a stubborn struggle
for self-preservation in which the cunning of the individual was the only
weapon against the greed and power of the state.

How much more applicable these lessons were when those rulers were
foreign devils who did not speak one’s language! One did not rebel
against the headstrong foreigners and their military superiority; he
obeyed them in externals, so far as it was necessary to escape reprisals,
and went on quietly building his own internal mechanisms of graft like a
busy termite in an unsuspecting household. If the people of the household
mistook the termites for industrious but harmless little ants, it was all
the easier for him.

The metaphor need not be done to death, for it is no longer as apposite
as it once was. But there is no question that graft and corruption
continue to eat away at the structure of the colony government.
In a hundred casual conversations with a hundred different colony
residents—English, Chinese, American, Portuguese, governmental and
nongovernmental—the visitor will almost never hear that the ruling powers
have railroaded some poor devil off to jail without cause, swindled him
out of his property to benefit the state, or hounded the populace into
semistarvation with unbearable taxation. If these evils exist, they are
neither frequent enough nor sufficiently conspicuous to engage people’s
passions.

But on the subject of graft—the innumerable, small nicks taken from
merchants, builders, and the ordinary citizen seeking any type of
official favor or permit—the floodgates of complaint are wide open. Much
of this is generalized, unproved, even irresponsible, operating at about
the same intellectual level as a taxi-driver’s jeremiad. Nevertheless,
there is a core of solid complaint that cannot be ignored.

Within the colony government, there is a large segment that bridles
at the least intimation of official graft. The motto of this segment
is: Don’t rock the boat. We know we’re not perfect, they seem to be
saying, but don’t go around kicking over beehives, or the first thing
we know, the Colonial Office will be down on our heads with all kinds
of inquiries, full-dress investigations and a fearful flap. We’ll all
be sacked, sent home in disgrace, and it won’t change one thing for the
better. So let’s keep quiet, muddle along as best we can and try to
eliminate the grafters quietly, one at a time. We’re really not a bad lot
of chaps, you know.

Fortunately, some of the colony’s chief officers do not subscribe to the
theory that corruption can be defeated by a public pretense that it does
not exist.

Something like a civic shock-wave was recorded in Hong Kong on January
11, 1962, when Chief Justice Michael Hogan opened the Supreme Court
Assizes by coming to grips with the issue of corruption.

“No one would claim we are entirely immune from this evil,” Sir Michael
said. He noted that the heavy penalties prescribed for corruption
offenses must be enforced without recourse to “the surreptitious whisper
in the corridor; the accusation made behind his (the accused’s) back; or
the anonymous letter. If such methods should come to be accepted, then we
would have another evil just as bad, if not worse, than corruption.”

The Chief Justice proceeded to put his finger on one of the main
obstacles to the exposure of corruption:

“There is a reluctance to come forward and give information; to come, if
necessary, into court and face the possibility of a cross-examination,
attacking character, credit and the power of recollection—in fact a
reluctance to pay the price that the rule of law demands.”

He contrasted this attitude with the recent case of a Mr. Tong, who
captured and held on to a sneak-thief despite six stab wounds, and asked:

“Does this mean that physical courage is more plentiful than moral
courage in Hong Kong today?”

He reached the heart of the matter with the observation that a citizen
will be very slow to come forward with a complaint against an official if
he knows that perhaps tomorrow or the next day or the day after, he has
got to come and ask that official, or some colleague of that official, or
somebody apparently identified with him in interest, for a concession, or
a privilege, or some act of consideration.

It is only when men have clearly defined rights, he continued, that they
enjoy the security to challenge the abuse of power and the ability to
choke off corruption. If an official can grant or withhold permission
“without the necessity of giving public reasons for the decision,” the
Chief Justice declared, “you immediately create an opening for corruption
or the suspicion of it.”

The Chief Justice’s address, particularly in its allusion to
“closed-door” decisions and a lack of moral sense in the community,
produced headlines and editorials in the local press and acute twinges
of discomfort among those who either benefited by corruption or feared
any public admission that it existed. In itself, the address was
neither an exposé nor an indictment, but its delivery by the brilliant
and articulate Chief Justice in one of the most solemn ceremonies of
the governmental year rang a clear warning from the citadel: If the
corrupters were haled before the courts, they could expect no easy-going
tolerance for their misdeeds.

During the previous July, Governor Black had moved to correct one
weakness peculiar to Hong Kong. Because of the Chinese tradition that
personal contact with the government is to be avoided, many residents
were reluctant to approach an official for such routine information as
where to apply for an identity card or how to locate a lost pet. If they
plucked up the courage to ask a question, they assumed that some fee,
to be paid either above or below the table, would be exacted for any
answer given. The situation offered a happy hunting ground for grafters,
either those on the government payroll who dealt with the general public
or the self-appointed private “fixers” who directed the applicant to a
particular official for a small fee. Sometimes the fixer and the official
were in cahoots and sheared the lamb at both ends of his journey.

Why it took the colony 120 years to plug this rat hole is a baffling
question. It was done at last by creating a Public Enquiry Service with
an all-Chinese staff capable of speaking virtually any local dialect and
of supplying direct and accurate answers to every kind of question about
the government and its functions. Coming under the general authority of
the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, it is headed by Paul K. C. Tsui,
a native of Hong Kong and a colony administrative officer since 1948.
Controller Tsui spent months roaming the colony, talking to editors,
listening to gossip in goldsmiths’ shops and to the complaints people
dictated to sidewalk letter-writers or expressed to housing and tenancy
offices.

When he felt that he had gained some idea of the questions and problems
on people’s minds, Mr. Tsui sought the answers to them from the
appropriate departments. He then assembled a small staff, compiled and
cross-indexed a vast store of information in readily accessible form,
and established an office in the entrance hall of the Central Government
Offices, West Wing, on July 3, 1961. There his three information
officers, who had expected to have to handle 80 requests for information
a day, found them streaming in at the rate of about 135 a day. Early
in 1962, a similar office had to be opened in Kowloon to meet the same
demand. When the Chinese people were satisfied that they could get
specific, friendly answers to their problems without having to pay a fee,
they were both amazed and grateful.

Mr. Tsui, taking a tip from the operators of goldsmiths’ shops, put his
staff on hard chairs and the public on soft chairs, permitting them to
talk comfortably across a low counter in a pleasant, informal atmosphere.
At times it takes an agitated inquirer fifteen minutes to blow off steam
before he can get around to stating what it is he really wants to know,
but the staff will patiently wait him out. A married woman about thirty
years of age appears to represent the favorite official type of most
questioners, although they like also to have an older male official
handy as a corroborating reference. Queries in English are handled as
efficiently as are those in Chinese.

Once the news of this service reaches all colony residents—many English
and Chinese had still not heard of it in 1962—one of the most prevalent
forms of petty graft and ill-will toward government will have been
eliminated.

Chief Justice Hogan’s attack on “closed-door” decisions and official
impropriety was followed a week later by the sixth report of the
Advisory Committee on Corruption, composed of a five-man body appointed
by Governor Black from the membership of the Executive and Legislative
Councils.

The report found the highest susceptibility to corruption among the
departments dealing directly with the general public—police, public
works, urban services, commerce and industry and refugee resettlement.
Inspection services of all kinds, it said, showed the greatest
vulnerability to graft.

So far the report only echoes a truism known to every municipal
administration; that when the government comes to bear on some
individual’s right to perform a particular function, usually for money, a
few gold coins in an inspector’s pocket will often expedite a favorable
decision.

The Advisory Committee on Corruption has recommended clearly defined,
simple licensing procedures and the introduction of bilingual (Chinese
and English) application forms and explanatory booklets. A corollary
recommendation that all new government employees receive a pamphlet
detailing the penalties for corruption has already been accepted.

The Committee called for legislation that would require a public servant
to explain exactly how he came to be in possession of any property
that was not in keeping with his income, and to face a penalty if his
explanation did not hold. They also sought a law giving the courts
the power to seize any money involved in a corruption charge, plus a
recommendation for stiffer punishments against corruption.

The report urged that the names of officials convicted of corruption
be made public, and that figures showing the total number of officials
dismissed be published at certain intervals. At present, there are
numerous angry cries that when a crooked British official is caught and
sacked, he is spirited out of the colony without a word about it; whereas
a Chinese official fired for a similar offense receives unrelenting
publicity and back-handed treatment that implies, “Well, what else can
you expect from these Orientals?”

The Anti-Corruption Branch of the police department is now the chief
agency responsible for detecting corruption in all departments of
government. The Committee has invited direct reports of corruption from
the public, some of which have led to the prosecution and firing of
several officials. During the first eleven months of 1961, the police
department received an additional 422 complaints charging corruption.
Americans are usually surprised to find that the colony’s police
department is charged with detecting corruption in other government
departments. In America it is done the other way around; other government
departments seem to be investigating the police force for signs of
corruption.

Generally unsubstantiated but endlessly repeated to visitors, are
the popular charges that the police are shaking down shopkeepers and
peddlers, or that building inspectors are blinded by gold when a builder
is detected extending a structure over a sidewalk in violation of local
codes and ordinances.

The report, last of the series issued by the Committee, suggested that
it would be desirable to hold the givers of bribes equally guilty with
the civil servants who accepted them. This is a sticky issue in any
community, despite the unassailability of its ethical position. If it
were rigidly enforced, it would infringe the freedom of speech of many
prominent persons who deplore dishonesty in government, because it would
put them in jail.

The Advisory Committee has also warned civil servants to deal only
with the applicants in person, or with professional representatives in
order to exclude corrupt middlemen from all transactions. This warning
is especially appropriate in Hong Kong, where a middleman with no
discernible function except his ability to collect a fee will attempt to
worm himself into every business deal.

All of the Committee’s recommendations are made directly to the
governor, who in turn discusses them with the Colonial Office before
taking action.

Colony newspapers have printed long excerpts from all the reports, and
the _China Mail_ declared that they simply said what the newspaper had
been publishing for two years.

What Chief Justice Hogan and the Committee have jointly accomplished is
to raise an issue of critical importance in the survival of the colony
government. Whether it will be resolved as decisively as it has been
faced may require months and years to answer.



CHAPTER EIGHT

Two Worlds in One House

    “Care must be taken not to confound the habits and institutions
    of the Chinese with what prevails in other parts of the
    world.”—BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS (circa 1880)


Hong Kong has furnished the Sino-British answer to a universal question:
What’s in it for me? Its progress from the earliest days has been more
powerfully influenced by the lure of gold than by the Golden Rule, with
its British and Chinese residents having little in common except their
human nature and an equal dedication to the maximum profit in the minimum
time.

“They don’t even speak the same language!” is a convenient expression
of the ultimate separation between peoples, but while it is true that
nine-tenths of Hong Kong’s Chinese do not speak English, the linguistic
gap is only one of the many chasms that stand between them and their
British rulers.

The British traders and fighting men who muscled their way into
possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841 were looked upon with fear and
loathing by the Chinese governing class, who considered them gun-toting
barbarian brawlers. To the English, the Chinese seemed a docile
subspecies of humanity. It has taken most of the intervening 121 years
to convince a majority of both sides that the initial judgments may have
been wrong.

The differences between nineteenth century Chinese and European
civilizations were wide. Europeans, when they thought about religion
at all, worshipped one God in a variety of antagonistic churches; the
Chinese worshipped hundreds of gods, sometimes subscribing to several
contradictory creeds simultaneously, without apparent conflict. Europeans
were monogamous by law and custom; the Chinese, without odium, could be
as polygamous as their means would allow.

None of these theological or moral disparities weighed heavily on the
English while they were securing a foothold in China and building the
opium trade. On the contrary, when they noted the willingness with which
Chinese customs officials accepted their bribes, they felt they had
established a kind of moral bond with the East. These people, whatever
their eccentricities, were ready to do business in the accepted Western
way.

When the British settled down to the business of governing their new
colony, they collided at every turn with the language barrier. Except for
a few conscientious missionaries and a minuscule number of lay scholars,
the British were wholly ignorant of Cantonese, the prevailing Hong Kong
tongue, and they were loftily disinclined to learn it. The extremes
to which this arrogant insularity sometimes went were demonstrated by
Governor Samuel George Bonham (1848-1854), who denied promotions to
those subordinates who learned Chinese; he felt that the language was
injurious to the mind, robbing it of common sense. In other respects,
Governor Bonham was not so benighted as his linguistic convictions would
indicate. Nor was he alone in his attitude toward the Chinese people;
Governor Hercules Robinson (1859-1865) once wrote that it was his
constant endeavor to “preserve the European and American community from
the injury and inconvenience of intermixture” with the Chinese population.

Since all government business was (and continues to be) conducted
in English, British officials frequently had to rely on Portuguese
interpreters who had moved to Hong Kong from Macao. The Portuguese,
facile linguists and unburdened by delusions of racial superiority,
filled the role admirably. But in the colony courts, the simple task of
swearing a witness in presented obstacles even to the best interpreters.
Having never sworn an oath in the English fashion, the Chinese viewed it
as just one more instance of outlandish mumbo-jumbo. At first the English
tried cutting off a rooster’s head as a testament of the witness’s
intention to tell the truth; then an earthenware bowl was broken to
signify the same thing. A yellow paper inscribed with oaths or the name
of the witness was burned in court as another form of swearing-in.
Governor Bonham instituted a direct oral affirmation in 1852, but the
complications that ensued must have intensified his conviction that the
Chinese language was an insult to logic. If a defendant were asked, “Do
you plead guilty?” the question was rendered in colloquial Cantonese as
“You yes or no not guilty?” If the respondent answered “Yes, I am not
guilty,” it could mean either “Not Guilty” or “Guilty.” Somehow the oaths
were sworn, but not without a certain despair among the court attendants.

Although the European community seldom concerned itself with Chinese
customs, it managed to raise a considerable storm over their “places of
convenience” during the 1860s. These creations of the colony’s Chinese
merchants were a sort of employee-retirement plan which consisted of
taking one’s elderly or ailing workers to a crude shelter located on the
north slope of Victoria Peak. There the faithful employee was rewarded
for his long service by being given a quantity of drinking water and
a coffin and left to die; if he were blessed with friends, they might
visit him at this place, offer him an occasional scrap of food or a
fresh ration of drinking water, and finally bury him. Often he died
alone and without proper burial. This was too much, even for European
opium traders, and Governor Richard Macdonnell stilled their protests
by offering a free site for a Chinese hospital at Possession Point.
This replacement of the terrible “dying-houses” was financed by the
wealthier Chinese for their destitute countrymen. It became the first
of the Tung Wah Chinese hospitals, now greatly expanded and modernized.
The inevitable outcry that provision of the simplest medical care for
the destitute would cause these facilities to be jammed by hordes of
undeserving poor was raised—as it still is today—and proved false.

Sanitary conditions among the Chinese were horrible when the British
arrived and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. The
colony government made many attempts to improve them, but it was
regularly stymied by the tenement dwellers who opposed any form of health
inspection as an invasion of privacy, and by landlords who resented
any proposal which threatened their profit margins. During the bubonic
plague epidemics of the 1890s, the government provided a special plague
burial-ground and offered the families of the dead quantities of lime to
render the bodies of the victims noninfectious. The Chinese responded by
abandoning their dead in the streets or throwing them in shallow graves;
the donated lime was sold to building contractors.

The surviving tenements of the Western District of Hong Kong Island
are still a shock to visiting Westerners. Still, their dark, dirty and
overcrowded condition is a distinct improvement upon the disease-ridden
pestholes of the last century. Sanitary inspectors, no longer detested
and attacked by the population, can go anywhere and they carry full
police powers for enforcing corrective action. The Chinese, never any
fonder of dirt than the English, have been converted to the belief that
the once-hated British methods can help them to achieve cleanliness.

Because of their tenuous contact with the Chinese residents of
the colony, the British rulers tended to deal with them through
intermediaries. This function was at first performed by the Mandarins,
or members of the Chinese official class, who were as willing to gouge
their countrymen for the British as they had been to do it for the
Emperor; provided, of course, that they were able to deduct their usual
cut. Governor Arthur Kennedy (1872-1877), who was the first to invite the
Chinese to receptions at Government House, relied on the committee of the
Man Mo Temple to control Chinese affairs.

Man Mo Temple, an ancient building still standing on Hollywood Road in
the congested Western District, was a mixture of Buddhist and Taoist
elements. Its leaders were Kennedy’s very potent allies, all working
secretly to control Chinese affairs, acting as commercial arbitrators,
negotiating the sale of official titles, and welcoming visiting
Mandarins. Man Mo Temple, now administered by the Tung Wah Hospital
committee, remained a respectable institution, but a number of other
temples sprang up to challenge its influence.

In numerous cases the so-called temples were nothing more than a
sanctimonious swindle. Privately promoted as a business speculation,
they solicited funds from the public with fraudulent claims of divine
or political influence. Abuses of this sort became so flagrant that
the colony government, after long delay, enacted the Chinese Temples
Ordinance in 1928, which provided for registration of the temples and
an accounting of their funds to the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs.
Certain long-established temples were exempt from various provisions of
the Ordinance, but the founding of temples as a private business venture
was forbidden. Surplus funds of the existing temples—the amount remaining
after all maintenance and operating costs had been met—were transferred
to a general Chinese charities fund.

The Chinese Mui Tsai custom, that of selling young girls as servants,
troubled British and Chinese relations in Hong Kong for half a century.
From ancient times, Chinese families had purchased little girls from
impoverished parents and put them to work as household drudges. The
colony officials raised their first strong objections to the practice in
1878, condemning it as thinly disguised slavery. Speaking of slavery, the
Chinese retorted, what about the licensed brothels where 80 percent of
the inmates had been sold into prostitution?

A committee appointed by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1877-1882) found
that hundreds of the Mui Tsai, when they had outgrown their household
enslavement, were being resold as prostitutes for shipment to Singapore,
California and Australia. A species of Caucasian scum who lived in the
colony were active partners in the trade. Governor Hennessy and Chief
Justice John Smale forwarded the committee’s reports to the British House
of Lords with urgent recommendations for tight corrective laws. The
Lords, suddenly revealing an unsuspected concern for the integrity of
Chinese customs, killed most of the proposed reforms.

Establishment of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of
Virtue, helped to limit the kidnaping of women and girls, but the
institution of Mui Tsai was to persist well into the twentieth century.
The English eventually outlawed licensed brothels after decades of
criticism from many countries.

Covert prostitution continues at a brisk pace in Hong Kong today, with
sailors favoring the Wanchai district and the bars of the Tsim Sha Tsui
section of Kowloon. The Chinese are more inclined to patronize the
western areas of Hong Kong Island. The dance hall and cabaret girls of
Wanchai, whose ranks include some spectacularly beautiful women, charge
their eager patrons about four dollars an hour for the privilege of
dancing with them, sharing a plate of melon seeds and drinking tea. The
cabarets are murky dens, furnished in Chinese warehouse modern, with
a third-rate jazz band dragging the tempo along in the semidarkness.
There is no guarantee of intimacies—emphatically not on the premises—and
the prospective suitor is obliged to continue shelling out his money
for repeated visits until the girl decides whether he has the kind of
bankroll she could care for. If he is too repulsive to her, not even that
will do.

A cabaret girl can earn $300 a month or more, or about five times as
much as a schoolteacher earns. Few of these girls speak English, but
this ability has never been regarded as a prerequisite. Apart from the
moral considerations of the job, its competitive aspects are becoming
more intense all the time. Bar girls, who have little respect for the
traditional preliminaries, may bestow their favors on five customers
while the cabaret charmers are fencing with one.

The singsong girls, formerly held in great esteem as entertainers and
prostitutes, have almost disappeared from the colony. Many of them were
Mui Tsai who had been trained to sing seemingly interminable Cantonese
songs in a falsetto voice for their tea-shop patrons, accompanying
themselves on a kind of horizontal stringed instrument which they tapped
with padded hammers. In the later evening, they moved about from one
businessmen’s club to another in the West Point section of the island.
Not all were prostitutes, and there is still at least one tea shop along
Queen’s Road Central where entertainment is confined to music. Westerners
who hear their music often find themselves thinking of older days.

Considering the fact that Hong Kong is a world seaport, the rate of
venereal infection is surprisingly low. To a greater extent than in most
Western cities, poverty is a basic cause of prostitution, but here too
sheer laziness, greed and stupidity play their part in the provision
of recruits. As usual, the greatest profits from the trade go to its
protectors—Triad gangsters and corrupt policemen.

The entire subject of the status and treatment of women has provided a
continual source of animosity and disagreement throughout the colony’s
history. The rich Chinese Taipans, with their numerous wives and
mistresses lodged in separate establishments, have remained the envy
of many a Western man who could not emulate them without violating the
laws of the colony and placing himself beyond the pale of polite Western
society.

Since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, well-educated
Chinese women have not looked happily on polygamy. Their convictions
were solidified and shared by millions of other Chinese wives when Red
China tightened the marriage laws, making monogamy not only legal but
practically mandatory. These improvements in the status of Chinese
women have not gone unnoticed in Hong Kong, where a British, Christian,
monogamous community finds itself in the embarrassing position of
tolerating plural marriage among its Chinese subjects long after the
institution has been outlawed in China.

There is nothing in this thorny problem which lends itself to edicts
and sweeping judgments. It is charged with the most delicate emotional
considerations, involving not only the legality of existing marriages,
the legitimacy of offspring and the fundamental rights of women, but
also the division of property and the inheritance of estates. Colony
officials are aware that the work of solving it must be approached with
the greatest subtlety.

To begin with, there are six kinds of marriages to be considered, all
with different premises. Two are classified as Chinese Modern Marriages;
those contracted in Hong Kong under Nationalist China laws, and those
contracted in China or any other place outside the colony under the
same Nationalist laws. Marriages contracted under Chinese custom as it
existed and was recognized in 1843 are Chinese Customary Marriages.
Marriages under the colony’s laws, Christian or otherwise, are called
Registry Marriages. There are also Reputed Marriages, which is the colony
designation for common-law marriages, and, finally, a group called
Foreign Marriages, which includes all those contracted outside the
colony under foreign laws, particularly those performed and registered
in Red China under its monogamous marriage law. Thus, the usually simple
question, “Are you married?” when fully answered in Hong Kong, may take a
considerable amount of the inquirer’s time.

Chinese Customary Marriages, still popular in the colony, are generally
recognized as valid, but there is no single definition which covers them.
There are any number of ancient prescriptions for them which contradict
one another, but they are alike in that they follow the accepted rites
and ceremonies of the families of the bride and groom. Chinese women
with a modern consciousness of their rights have no affection for such
unions, since they permit a husband to divorce his wife for any reason
and give her no right to leave him if she really feels inclined to do so.
Furthermore, and this is an equally sore point, it permits the husband
to take concubines, though the notion that a wife might adopt a similar
polygamy is quite inconceivable.

Chinese Modern Marriages in the colony far outnumber all other types—more
than 200,000, by an official estimate—although Registry Marriages have
recently gained in number. All that is required to make them valid is an
open ceremony witnessed by two persons. The Nationalist laws applicable
to such unions give the man no legal right to acquire a concubine,
despite the fact that some husbands in the colony find it convenient to
pretend they do. The “extra” girls are naturally flattered to be told
they are concubines (i.e., secondary wives with full domestic rights),
rather than mistresses with no legal or social standing.

In everyday relationships with the courts and the government, Chinese
Modern Marriages are recognized as respectable unions. None the less,
they have no legal validity when contracted in Hong Kong, for they
are neither entered at the Marriage Registry nor are they celebrated
according to “the personal law and religion of the parties,” as colony
laws require.

Reputed Marriages are, in many respects, exactly like common-law
marriages in the United States: two people live together, sometimes have
children and are regarded by themselves and their friends as married,
unless they should grow weary of each other and part. In Hong Kong,
however, a concubine is sometimes added, making the institution look
something like a house of cards with an annex. Foreign Marriages, or
unions contracted abroad and according to the laws of the country where
the couple formerly lived, present few legal obstacles. If they were
married in Red China, and the marriage was registered there, the union
is monogamous; when the couple move to Hong Kong, their marriage has the
same standing as that of an American or European couple living in the
colony.

The complications arising from this matrimonial disparity have been the
subject of intensive study since World War II. In earlier days, the
marital customs of the Chinese community were of little interest to the
British. One did not associate with the Chinese unless it was required
for the purposes of political window-dressing. But the glacial snobbery
of old colonialism suffered a disrespectful mauling during World War
II from which it has never quite recovered. At that time the Chinese
penetrated all but the tightest circles of Hong Kong society, and
hundreds of British and Chinese intermarried without loss of “face” in
either group. This last was the boldest departure, for while it was true
that outcasts of both races had intermarried since the founding of the
colony, a socially acceptable member of either race who attempted it was
snubbed by both English and Chinese.

British-Chinese intermarriages are monogamous, and in spite of the
inevitable interference of aunts, uncles and cousins, have generally
worked out better than either race would have expected them to two
decades ago. Of themselves, these mixed marriages are not a social issue
in the colony, but they have indirectly breached the barrier between
the two racial communities. Marriage laws of all sorts have become the
concern of the entire colony population.

The 1948 Committee on Chinese Law and Custom defined many of the marital
contradictions which persist to this day. Then, as now, one of the
most vexing questions was the legal status of the “secondary wife”
or concubine sanctioned by Chinese Customary Marriages. The English
meaning of “concubine,” connoting a mistress or secret paramour, was not
applicable to the Chinese concubine; she joined her husband’s household,
with or without the principal wife’s consent, and it was his obligation
to support her. Her children were legitimate, but her husband could
divorce her more readily than he could his principal wife.

But what were the rights of real and pseudo-concubines? Could they and
their children be discarded without support? To what extent might they
challenge the rights of the real wife? The 1948 Committee produced no
definitive answers to these questions, nor did it urge any precipitate
action to change the status of concubines. It did recommend that after a
certain date, the taking of new concubines be declared illegal.

Sir Man Kam Lo, a Chinese member of the Hong Kong Executive Council,
subsequently wrote a dissent to the 1948 report, saying that he believed
the concubine should be allowed to remain in cases where the principal
wife was ill or unable to bear children. As he noted, the birth of a male
heir is of the greatest importance to the succession of a Chinese family.
Very few families, he felt, would regard an adopted son as a suitable
heir.

Arthur Ridehalgh, former Attorney General, and John C. McDouall,
Secretary for Chinese Affairs, made a detailed study of Chinese
marriages in the colony in 1960 and submitted a variety of
recommendations intended to clear up some of the ambiguities and
contradictions.

It was their proposal that the government set a definite date for
outlawing Chinese Modern Marriages and to validate all marriages of this
type which had been previously contracted as monogamous unions, provided
that neither spouse was lawfully married to anyone else. The so-called
concubines of husbands who had been parties to a Chinese Modern Marriage
would receive no further legal recognition, and in fact they had never
been entitled to any.

Regarding Chinese Customary Marriages, the study favored the recording
of these marriages to establish their validity, and the banning of all
future marriages in which either partner is under sixteen years of age.
As to Reputed Marriages, the study advocated remarriage of the couples
under colony law with the right to back-date the marriage to the time
they had begun to live together.

The Ridehalgh-McDouall report also favored several changes in the
divorce laws. One change would permit a principal wife in a Chinese
Customary Marriage to get a divorce with maintenance until her death
or remarriage if the husband, after a date to be set by law, acquired
a concubine without the principal wife’s consent or knowledge. Another
recommendation, after a date set by law, would bar divorce in a Chinese
Customary Marriage without the free consent of both parties.

The study warned against any all-out banning of concubines in Chinese
Customary Marriages, but supported gradual restriction of the right
to take concubines. As for mistresses in other types of marriages who
posed as legal concubines, the study urged the government to expose the
practice as a popular fallacy with no lawful basis. It also gave its
backing to laws which granted a legal concubine full rights to seek a
divorce and obtain maintenance for her children, and legislation which
empowered a principal wife to sue a husband for divorce and support of
herself and children.

Other recommendations proposed added protection of the rights of wives in
Chinese Modern Marriages against infringement by pseudo-concubines, and
legal provision to assure the support of illegitimate children.

All these findings are still being weighed by the colony government
and quick action on them is unlikely. To a large degree, the proposed
changes in marriage laws represent a new offensive in the long war for
women’s rights, and it might be noted that the women of this century have
compiled an impressive list of victories in this regard. With enough
nagging and prodding, they should be able to carry the day in Hong Kong
too.

In the discussion of such pervasive issues as the difference between
Chinese and British marriage customs, it is convenient to view the
Chinese as a single group of people constituting 98.2 percent of the
colony’s population. Since 95 percent of the population speak Cantonese,
it would seem to follow that Hong Kong is a homogeneous community, except
for a light top-dressing of “foreign devils.” But this superficial
impression is as wide of the mark as the saying “All Chinese look alike.”

There are scholars who object to the word Chinese as the description of
one people, arguing quite persuasively that there are so many racial
strains in China that no single label adequately describes them. The
point is drawn a bit fine for the majority of Western observers, yet
anyone who spends a few weeks in Hong Kong will begin to appreciate the
racial diversity of the Chinese people.

By the unverified judgment of the eye, the colony’s Chinese people are
two or three inches shorter than the American of average height, and
noticeably taller than the average Japanese or Filipino. But that is
perhaps the limit of any valid comparison between Americans and Chinese
as far as appearance goes.

The Chinese one sees on the street range from jockey-sized runts to
towering giants; from tiny women weighing perhaps 90 pounds to queenly
six-footers; from the palest of white skins to a deep walnut brown. Many
have features which seem more Slavic or Polish than anything classifiable
as Chinese. There are almond eyes and pop eyes; slit eyes and bug-eyes.
Noses tend to be a little less prominent and less sharply defined than
European noses, but exceptions occur. The bloated red nose of the
dedicated drinker never shows itself, except on a Caucasian face. Dark
hair is almost universal and bald heads less common than in an American
crowd. Pudgy types occur with some regularity, but tremendously fat
people are rarely seen.

About half the people who live in the urban areas were born in the
colony and most of their ancestors came from Kwangtung, the Chinese
Province immediately north of the Hong Kong border. Kwangtung was also
the birthplace of the majority of the recent refugees from Red China.
Eight-tenths of the city-dwellers speak the dialect of Cantonese used
in Canton City, where the British traders were based before Hong Kong
became a colony. This dialect and others closely related to it are
the _lingua franca_ of the colony’s urban Chinese, but there are 96
Cantonese dialects in existence, many of them unintelligible to users
of the Canton City dialect. The babble of urban tongues includes Hoklo,
Sze Yap and Hakka, all from different parts of Kwangtung, Shanghainese
(chiefly heard at North Point and Hung Hom in the colony), Chiuchow (in
the Western District), Fukienese (at North Point) and Kuoyu, or Mandarin
(near Hong Kong University and at Rennie’s Mill Camp).

In the New Territories, where even a Westerner can detect differences of
dress and custom, the Cantonese hold most of the flat, fertile farmland
and speak a dialect which puzzles city Cantonese. Ancestors of the
Cantonese farmers have lived in the New Territories for nine centuries.
The Hakka people, whose women may be identified immediately by their
broad-brimmed straw hats with a hanging fringe of thin black cloth,
settled the same area at about the time of the earliest Cantonese, but
were pushed into the less desirable farmland and generally dominated by
the Cantonese. They fought each other intermittently for centuries, but
the feud has died down and they now share several villages peacefully,
frequently intermarry, and restrict their warfare to husband-wife
squabbles. The Hakkas of the eastern New Territories operate their own
single-masted, high-hull boats for hauling farm produce and ferrying
passengers.

The Hoklos, a smaller group with a knack for handling light, fast boats,
once lived entirely on boats and worked as shrimp fishermen. They moved
ashore many years ago and now have their chief settlements on Cheung Chau
and Peng Chau, a few miles west of Hong Kong Island.

By the testimony of historians, the Tanka people, who dominate the
colony’s fishing industry, are the oldest surviving group in Hong Kong.
Antedating the Chinese, they lived in the area when the Cantonese came
along to push them off the land and generally treat them like despised
inferiors. They lived entirely on boats, and when the British traders
arrived, the Tanka had no compunctions about dealing with them in
defiance of the Chinese Emperor’s orders. Over 90 percent of them speak
Cantonese, with a small number speaking Hoklo and other dialects. Hardy
and conservative, they avoid city ways, live on their junks and sampans
and follow their own distinctive festivals and religious ceremonies.
Since World War II they have begun to send their children to schools
ashore and to become more directly involved in the economic life of the
colony.

World War II provided a turning point in the fortunes of those boat
people who operated cargo lighters in the harbor. Heartily disliking the
Japanese, they used false-bottomed boats to secrete food stolen from
their cargoes and then distributed it among the half-starved population
ashore. They were the only residents permitted to eat in the large hotel
restaurants like those at the luxurious Peninsula in Kowloon. Most of
them, wholly unfamiliar with chairs, ate by squatting on the chair-seats
as they had squatted on deck while eating at sea. Nowadays, they are more
sophisticated, and in spite of their non-Chinese origin, as intensely
Chinese as any group in the colony.

Because of the floodtide of tourists which has swept into Hong Kong in
the last few years, it has become a conversational bromide to say that
the influx will soon destroy its colorful Chinese community. To accept
such a doctrine is to overestimate the impact of tourism and underrate
the resistance of the Chinese.

The Hong Kong tourist is a highly localized phenomenon. Except for a fast
motor tour through the main roads of the New Territories and a short
whirl around Hong Kong Island, he rarely wanders more than a mile from
the island and Kowloon terminals of the Star Ferry. He shops, gawks, eats
at a few restaurants which are more tourist-oriented than Oriental, and
is gone, leaving nothing but the click of the shopkeepers’ abacuses to
mark his passage.

It may seem incongruous to characterize nearly one-fourth of the human
race as clannish, but it is undeniable that the Chinese, no matter where
they have lived, have retained their home ties, customs and culture. They
are rock-ribbed individualists rather than nationalists, but when they
live abroad, whether in Hong Kong or the Chinatowns of San Francisco and
New York, they remain distinctly and unalterably Chinese. In Singapore
and Manila they are resented for their commercial shrewdness and their
stubborn insistence on remaining Chinese. If their next-door neighbors
can’t change them, what reason is there to believe that the tourists of
Hong Kong can do so?

There are certain comic aspects to the relations of the British and
Chinese in Hong Kong. Living side-by-side for 121 years, they have told
each other—sometimes directly, more often by implication—“You can’t
change me!” To a large extent, they have both held out, like a silent
couple eating at opposite ends of a long dinner table. Lately the table
has been contracting, but the prospects of a cozy twosome are still
somewhat distant.

Meanwhile, the Chinese go on living by their own calendar, celebrating
festivals and family events according to their traditions, and following
their ancient religions. The rural people cling to their belief in
fung shui (literally, wind and water), a form of geomancy which guides
them in locating their houses and burial places on the particular site
most pleasing to the living and the dead. On the other hand, the old
superstitious fear of Western medicine has been overcome; in the 1961
Hong Kong cholera outbreak, 80 percent of the population flocked to
government centers for inoculations.

Neither the British, the Nationalist Republic, nor the Chinese
Communists—all of whom favor the 12-month Western calendar—have been able
to wean the colony’s Chinese people from their ancient lunar calendar.
The old calendar was supposedly devised in 2254 B.C. by astrologers
working under the orders of Emperor Yao, who wanted it to serve as a
crop-planting guide for his predominantly agricultural subjects. It is
the gauge by which all festivals are set and varies in length from 354
to 385 days. The years proceed in cycles of twelve, each being named
for a particular animal such as the rat, rabbit, rooster and horse
until the twelfth animal is reached and the cycle repeats. Each year is
subdivided into 24 solar “joints and breaths,” which being based on close
observation of weather and the growing season, tick off the seasonal
changes with remarkable accuracy.

Because of its variable length and its nonconformity to Western ideas of
what a calendar should look like, the Chinese calendar causes endless
confusion for foreigners. Most of them cling firmly to the Gregorian
calendar and keep a close eye on the colony’s newspapers to learn when
the next festival is due. The religious significance of the festival
means nothing to them and it does not need to; the ceremonies and
celebrations attending the day are so animated and colorful that they can
be enjoyed for their spectacle alone.

Chinese New Year, generally occurring between the middle of January and
the third week of February, is celebrated on the first three days of
the First Moon. It marks the beginning of spring, and gives the Chinese
population sufficient time to recover from the shock of seeing the
Westerners booze it up on New Year’s Eve. Chinese employees receive
a bonus of an extra month’s pay, the shops close and firecrackers,
permitted by colony law for a two-day period, keep up an unending
cannonade. A tourist wandering into the uproar feels like a dude in a
frontier saloon; everybody seems to be shooting at his feet.

Red papers lettered with gold are stuck on boats and the doors of shops
and houses inviting the lucky spirits to lend a hand. The fearful din of
the firecrackers is a pointed hint to malicious spirits, advising them
to get out fast. All debts are paid, finances permitting, and the past
year’s feuds and grudges are wiped out, so far as human nature will allow.

The heart of the observance takes place in the home, with all members
of the family dining together on the last night of the old year and the
children receiving “lucky” money in red envelopes to assure them of safe
passage through the coming year. After dinner, everyone adjourns to the
courtyard where branches of sesame, fir and cypress have been strewn;
these are stepped on and burned as a symbol of the departing year.
Firecrackers are set off to discourage the prowlings of the Skin Tiger,
a kind of reverse-action Robin Hood who steals the cakes of the poor to
give them to the rich; as the Skin Tiger views it, the poor have lived
off the wealthy all year, so isn’t it time to square accounts?

A lighted lamp is placed before the shrine of the Kitchen God, who is
expected back from his trip to divine headquarters. Every door is sealed
and locked until 5 A.M. the next day, when the entire household gets up
to see the master of the house reopen the doors, remove the seals and
extend a welcome to the New Year. Incense sticks are lighted, Heaven,
Earth and the family ancestors are honored and the Kitchen God, now
returned from his journey, is properly greeted. New Year’s Day is the
occasion for a complete family reunion, with outsiders being excluded. No
meat is eaten, since the use of a knife on this day would imply cutting
off a friendship, and no sweeping is done, for a broom might sweep away
good luck. Later, gifts are exchanged, with baskets of food being rated
as thoroughly acceptable. The season’s greetings—“Kung Hei Fat Choy”—ring
out everywhere.

In Hong Kong, a local newspaper and the radio promote a Fat Choy Drive
to provide a New Year’s feast for even the poorest families. When the
family phase of the celebration is over, there is a day for visiting
friends, and with true Chinese practicality, a final day to worship the
God of Wealth, making certain that he does everything divinely possible
in the year ahead to boost the family’s fortunes. In former days it
was customary to prolong the observance for fifteen days or more, but
the demands of modern business limit it to three or four days in most
instances.

The birthday of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, is celebrated
on the 19th day of the Second Moon, and she is regarded with such
affection that practically all of the Taoist temples honor her as well.
Legend describes her as the youngest daughter of an ancient prince who
attempted to force her into marriage to perpetuate the family line.
She objected, was murdered by her father in some ambiguous fashion and
descended to Hell, where by sheer charm she transformed the place into a
paradise. Returned to earth, she found her father dying of a skin disease
and cut off parts of her own body to preserve his unworthy hide. Women
are especially devoted to her, bearing birthday gifts of food, paper
clothing, chickens and roast pig to her image in the temples. Until the
thirteenth century, Kuan Yin was often represented as a male divinity,
probably with the connivance of early defenders of male prerogatives,
but she has become exclusively female since then, for only as a woman
could she possess an ear sympathetically attuned to the troubles of
mortal women.

The Ching Ming Festival, occurring toward the end of the Second Moon or
at the beginning of the Third Moon (late March or early April in our
calendar), provides an occasion to honor one’s ancestors. The worship of
ancestors is the keystone of Chinese religious beliefs, as well as the
strongest link binding them together as a single people. Its profound
influence on every phase of Chinese life is seldom fully appreciated by
foreigners, who regard it as morbid, backward-looking and intellectually
sterile. But even foreigners in Hong Kong share some of the Ching Ming
spirit by using the day to tidy up the graves of their own departed and
place flowers by the headstones.

The Chinese do no cooking and eat no hot food on the day preceding Ching
Ming, acting in deference to a long-gone official who was accidentally
burned to death by his dunder-headed confreres. Women and children wear
a sprig of willow on the day itself to safeguard themselves against the
posthumous horror of returning to this life in the form of dogs. The
family visits its ancestral graves, makes any needed repairs and sets out
a feast for the dead. Paper replicas of money and clothing are burned to
let the deceased know that their interests are being looked after, and a
little diversionary fire is lighted nearby to distract evil spirits and
keep them from butting into the main sacrifice. Having made its gesture
of feeding the dead, the family then falls to and eats the feast itself.

Because land is scarce in the colony, graves are rented only for a
limited period. Six or seven years after a member of the family has
died, his survivors obtain an exhumation permit and visit the grave
on Ching Ming to dig up his coffin. The bones are removed from the
coffin, carefully sorted and cleaned with sandpaper, and packed into an
earthenware urn with the skull on top. The undertaker, accompanied by
members of the family, then removes the urn to a hillside site in the New
Territories, selecting a location with a favorable fung shui, where the
deceased presumably will be able to enjoy a pleasant view.

Chinese coffins are a massive, rough-hewn product, resembling a four-leaf
clover in outline; if they are still in sound condition after their first
tenant is evicted, they may be resold at a discount for rehabilitation
and put to use again.

Many Occidentals would pale at the thought of sandpapering and
reassembling the last of Aunt Matilda, but the Chinese entertain no such
qualms. They take a calm and realistic view of death, handling the bones
of the dead with complete respect, but without morbidity or gloom. Ching
Ming is a time of remembrance rather than lamentation.

T’ien Hou, the Taoist Queen of Heaven, celebrates her birthday on the
23d day of the Third Moon. For the boat people, it is the most important
festival of the year; T’ien Hou is their chief patron, keeping her benign
eye on such matters as a good catch and fair weather. Her shrines are
in the cabin of every junk, and her 24 temples stand in every village
that overlooks the sea. In her earthly days, the story goes, she was a
fisherman’s daughter. Once she fell into a trance while her parents were
far out at sea. Dreaming that a storm was about to drown them, she roused
herself and pointed directly at their boat. It was the only one in the
fleet to return safely.

Her ship-saving talents led directly to her deification, and she has
since acquired two invaluable assistants, Thousand-Mile Eyes and
Fair-Wind Ears. Her principal temple is at Joss House Bay on Tung Lung
Island, about two miles east of Hong Kong Island. On her birthday, an
all-day ferry service brings her worshippers from the main island, and
the boat people arrive in sea-trains of junks towed by a launch, flying
dozens of flags and Happy-Birthday banners. Every boat is packed to the
gunwales with men, women and children jostling one another as they reach
for sweet cakes, tea and soft drinks. At Joss House Bay, the passengers
swarm ashore as if the boats were about to sink and climb a wide granite
stairway to the temple. Incense sticks are lighted, roasted animals and
red eggs are placed before the Goddess and a small contribution is handed
to the temple attendant.

Bursting firecrackers, lion dances and processions enliven the
celebration until the men of the various fishing guilds wind it up with
a hot scramble for “the luck,” a bamboo projectile with a number inside.
It drops into the crowd like a bride’s bouquet, but the free-for-all that
follows is no place for a bridesmaid. The winning team makes the year’s
luck and gets possession of an elaborate portable shrine to the Queen of
Heaven. Rich and poor, humble and great join without class distinction in
having a gossipy, boisterous holiday.

The people of Cheung Chau feel obliged to say a kind word for all the
animals and fish who were executed to feed mankind during the past
year, and this debt is squared by the four-day Bun Festival on their
dumbbell-shaped island. Its date is set by lot, and usually falls in the
last few days of the Third Moon or the first ten days of the Fourth Moon.
No animals are killed and no fish are caught during the festival. Troupes
of actors are imported to perform in an enormous temporary theater, with
its roof of coarse matting supported on a bamboo framework tied together
with rattan strips. Daily and nightly presentations of Cantonese Opera
are put on with the performers in elaborate costumes, shrilling their
lines above the tireless clamor of cymbals.

The festival centerpiece consists of a triple-peaked bun mountain,
or conical framework covered with varicolored buns from its base to
its 60-foot summit. As soon as it is completed, it is covered with a
tarpaulin to protect the buns until the climactic ceremony on the final
day of the festival.

The various guilds on the islands compete in a long procession which
passes under floral arches on the village streets. The perennial
feature of the procession is a series of tableaux enacted by children
on platforms borne on the shoulders of several men. The subjects are
mythological, and by the ingenious use of a well-concealed steel
framework, make a mere toddler appear to be dancing nimbly on the tip
of a fiddle held by a child standing beneath the dancer. It’s all an
amiable fake, understood as such by the crowd, but executed with such
aplomb by the children that it never fails to delight the spectators.
Images of Gods and Goddesses are also carried in the line of march,
with lion dancers and clowns to add further excitement. A mass for the
recently departed fish and animals is celebrated on the final night, and
their hungry souls are permitted to take a few ghostly nips at the bun
mountain. An officiating priest decides when they’ve had enough, takes a
careful look around to see that no latecomers from the Great Beyond have
been neglected, and signals the slavering bystanders to pitch in. The
young men of the island scramble up the bunny slopes in a mad dash for
the topmost bun, but there are thousands of edibles at all levels, so no
climber need go hungry.

The Dragon Boat Festival, coming on the fifth day of the Fifth Moon (late
May to late June), probably attracts more attention from the foreign
population than any other Chinese celebration. It is hotly competitive,
pitting large teams of rowers against each other in all-day races at
Aberdeen, Kennedy Town, Tai Po and elsewhere. The individual heats are
short, close together and accompanied by loud cheers and the booming of
the pace-setting drums in every boat. A carved dragon’s head ornaments
the bow and the stern is a simulated dragon’s tail; in between lies 80 to
100 feet of low, fairly narrow hull, with the rowers flailing away in a
fast circular stroke. The crews, who train for three or four weeks before
the annual races, also keep the boats in shape, and one European crew
that includes a number of government employees competes at Tai Po.

It was a government employee who gave rise to the festival in the fourth
century, B.C. He was the honest Chu Yuan, an official who tried to
persuade the Chinese Emperor to correct the corruption of his court;
when his pleas were ignored, he drowned himself by leaping into the
Nih Loh River. A group of sympathetic villagers rowed out to the site
and cast silk-wrapped dumplings into the water, hoping to attract his
wandering spirit, or in another version of the legend, to lure the fish
away and protect his body from their attack. The bow man of today’s
Dragon Boats preserves the tradition by casting rice cakes or dumplings
wrapped with bamboo leaves from his craft. The principles of cleanliness
exemplified by Chu Yuan are practiced a few days in advance of the races,
when every family cleans house and sets off firecrackers to stampede
lurking cockroaches into panicky flight. The races themselves exercise a
purifying influence, for most of the rowers are thoroughly drenched by
the splashing paddles.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated on the 15th day of the Eighth Moon,
belongs entirely to women, and is marked by them in the privacy of the
home. The feminine principle in nature is in the ascendant and the moon,
which is considered a female deity, is at the apogee. A table is set
in the courtyard, and the moon is offered gifts of tea, food, burning
incense and the seed of the water calthrop. The service takes place at
night, illuminated by lanterns and moonlight, and includes a prayer
to the honored satellite, who is also quizzed about the matrimonial
prospects of her devotees. Fruit and moon cakes are essential to the
feast that follows, and as always, firecrackers are exploded. Wealthier
households may set up a midnight moon-viewing party, with a banquet
and a group of blind musicians singing an ode to the moon. These blind
musicians, numbering about 100 in all, have their own colony at the west
end of Hong Kong Island and earn about $12 for a party booking. Recorders
and lutes are their usual instruments, giving their music a quaint
Elizabethan flavor.

Ancestral graves are visited for the second time each year on the ninth
day of the Ninth Moon; summer weeds and grass are cleared away and
sacrifices of money and clothing are offered to keep the deceased wealthy
and warm through the coming winter. The date coincides with that of the
Cheung Yung Festival, when it is said to be lucky to climb to a high
place. Burial urns rest fairly high on the hillsides, so it is easy to
combine both celebrations and top them off with a picnic in the open.

On Cheung Yung, thousands of Chinese ride up Victoria Peak on the tram,
buying toys and other presents for the children at improvised stalls
along the way. Picnickers cover the top of every hill in the colony.
Kite-flyers observe the day by the curious sport of kite-fighting, which
involves manipulating one kite so that it knocks another out of the sky
or snaps its string. The hill-climbing custom supposedly began when a
Chinese father of long ago saved his family from a plague by taking them
into the mountains.

A veritable regiment of gods, ghosts and spirits—some beneficent, some
wicked—have their special observances during the year. Buddhist and
Taoist deities have a tendency to overlap, just as followers of Taoism
may be equally ardent Buddhists. Once the two religions battled and
persecuted each other like the religions of the West, but they have long
since settled down to peaceful coexistence. There is no reliable count
of their membership in Hong Kong, though the Buddhists claim around
500,000 adherents. An unspecified, but probably small number of Chinese
are Buddhists, Taoists and Christians simultaneously, or at least they
consider themselves so.

Confucianism also has its following in the colony, but its places of
worship are generally merged with Buddhist and Taoist temples.

Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have been at work in Hong Kong
from its beginning as a colony, founding schools and caring for the poor.
Neither group made much headway in attracting converts until the late
1940s, perhaps because of the ironbound Chinese resistance to every form
of foreign influence. But the Communist regime on the mainland has proved
a stimulant to Christianity in Hong Kong.

The well-financed and highly effective work of Protestant churches,
particularly among refugees from Red China, has won them many converts,
and the number of Protestant parishes has greatly increased in the last
few years. Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and
other denominations have made substantial gains.

The number of Roman Catholics, who are equally active in educational and
welfare fields, has grown from 43,000 in 1951 to 180,000 in 1962. They
are currently making about 15,000 converts a year, and 12,000 of these
are adults. Some of their mission priests, who have found conversions
much more difficult to achieve in Japan, believe that the terror and
hopelessness of life under the Chinese Communists have turned many
Chinese refugees to Christianity. Enrollment in Catholic schools of
the colony is well over 100,000, and two-thirds of their enrollment
is non-Catholic. Like every other Christian group in the colony, the
Catholics have given help without drawing denominational lines.

The Portuguese, of whom there are about 2,000 in Hong Kong, are the
descendants of former Macao settlers who arrived with the first wave
of British traders, acting as their interpreters. They were adaptable,
quick with figures and gifted linguists, establishing themselves as
clerk-interpreters in business and financial houses. A few invested
wisely in land and became millionaires. In more recent years, they have
turned to professional work, becoming lawyers, doctors and engineers.
Starting with J. P. Braga in 1929, the Portuguese community has had
several representatives on the Executive and Legislative Councils. Its
present outstanding leaders, in addition to professional people, include
exchange brokers, importers and exporters and manufacturers’ agents.

A second wave of Portuguese came to the colony from Macao after World
War II, hoping to discover the business opportunities denied by the
sleepy, static little overseas province of Portugal. But they faced stiff
competition from young Chinese women who had entered office work and had
received superior English education in the colony schools. Few had been
to college and they lacked the drive demanded by the rough-and-tumble
economy of Hong Kong; before long, most of the new arrivals moved on to
Canada, Brazil or the United States.

Indians, including Parsees, Bhohras, Khwojas, Sindhis and Sikhs, came to
Hong Kong in the early days as traders, soldiers and policemen. Today
they are primarily merchants and traders, although there are still a
few Indian and Pakistani residents who preserve their uniformed role as
policemen, soldiers, or private guards for banks and financial houses.
The Indian community is about the same size as the Portuguese—between
2,000 and 3,000—and like it, has produced a few top-level government
officials, doctors and lawyers, and millionaire merchants.

Americans are still a very small minority, but they have money and a keen
appetite to make more. If they also have ability, they fit smoothly into
the competitive economy of the colony. The importance of American aid,
both private and public, in caring for the colony’s refugees is deeply
appreciated by both the government and the Chinese population, and the
effect is only slightly marred when some Yankee tourist tries to give the
impression that it all came out of his personal funds. Such tourists, it
may be noted, are exceptional.

Despite their historical background of anticolonial insurrection,
Americans have been well received in Hong Kong during most of its
existence. It was once said that a young Hong Kong Englishman could
not marry outside the charmed circle of the British Isles, Canada or
Australia unless he chose an American girl; otherwise, he would lose
his social position and probably his job. This has not been true for
some years now, but it leaves a lingering question in the minds of some
Americans: Why did they include us rebels?

Another question that occurs to almost every American who has seen the
colony is: How do 15,000 British run this place? (Actually, there are
about 33,000 people from all parts of the British Commonwealth living
in Hong Kong, but the ruling group comes from the British Isles and
barely exceeds 15,000.) It is evident from the most perfunctory glance
around the streets that the British do run Hong Kong; autocratically,
efficiently, firmly, sometimes unimaginatively, never with any pretense
of popular rule, but almost always with strict justice. There is
contained corruption, but less of it than anywhere else in the Far East.
At times an unwonted conviction of Britannic righteousness roils the
overseas visitor. This reaction is often encountered in one type of
American who insists he does not want to run the world, and means he
wants it run his way—by somebody else.

Americans are quite surprised when they strike the unexpected vein of
iron that lies under the polished surface of British manners. These
British are tough people; disciplined, well-educated, capable of decision
and resolute action. Because they possess these qualities to a degree
unexcelled and perhaps unmatched by any other country in the world, the
British in Hong Kong are a corporal’s guard commanding an army.

But one might pause here to consider the young American woman who stood
at the rail of an excursion boat in Hong Kong harbor, looking wistfully
up at Government House, the seat of majesty.

“If only they were a little more lovable!” she said.



CHAPTER NINE

Rambling around the Colony

    “The journey of a thousand miles commences with a single
    step.”—CHINESE PROVERB


At the upper terminus of the Peak Tram, two-thirds of the way up Victoria
Peak, a narrow promenade called Lugard Road winds around the mountain
until its name changes to Harlech Road and then continues along the south
face of the mountain to return to the Peak Tram terminus. By strolling
along this route on a fine clear day, a visitor can see the whole of Hong
Kong stretching out in all directions.

Often the view is cut off by thick jungle growth, stretching over the
road like the green arches of a natural cathedral. But there are narrow
gaps and occasional wide, treeless spaces where the stroller can look up
the rocky slopes to discover the mansions of the Taipans, jutting through
the tangled trees. Rococo palaces of pink, yellow, and dazzling white
stand isolated from one another and the life of the community by the
intertwining trees that hide their approach roads. Their isolation is
fortified by barbed-wire fences, warning signs and snarling watchdogs.
The only uninvited guest that breaches these barriers is the heavy mist
that envelops the Peak above the fog line for six months of the year,
covering furniture and clothes with green mold unless drying closets and
dehumidifiers are kept in full operation.

Once the British held exclusive title to the foggy heights; in the days
before auto roads were built to the top, they chartered the Peak Tram to
carry their party guests to its upper end, where they were met by sedan
chairs which took them the rest of the way. Now Chinese millionaires
share the majesty and the mist of the Peak, and there are tall apartment
buildings for more exalted government employees and prosperous civilians.

To tourists and Taipans, the heights of Victoria Peak offer a matchless
view of the harbor. The distant deep-blue water crinkles in the wind as
the sun glints on its surface. Dozens of ferryboats point their arrowhead
wakes at Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, or head outward for the coasts and
islands of the New Territories. An American aircraft carrier rides at
anchor off Wanchai with its escort vessels near at hand.

West of Kowloon Peninsula, a triple line of cargo ships turn lazily
around their anchor buoys; each one having enough room to make a full
circle without touching another ship. Six rows of junks and sampans,
each row lashed to the sides of a freighter while they transfer its
cargo, move in unison with the freighter’s slow swing, looking like a
gargantuan, improvised raft. Unattached junks duck in and out, anywhere
and everywhere, clearly with the special blessings of T’ien Hou, for they
rarely collide.

North of the harbor, beyond the wedge-shaped outline of Kowloon, past the
Kai Tak airstrip that cuts through Kowloon Bay like the white streak of
a torpedo, is Hong Kong’s “Great Wall”—a line of hills that looms jagged
and forbidding across the southern fringe of the New Territories. These
are the “nine dragons” from which Kowloon got its name, but they are
difficult to single out, except for unmistakable ones like Lion Rock and
Kowloon Peak, because they are so tightly packed together.

Even Ti Ping, the Sung Emperor who was prodded into naming them the Nine
Dragons, complained that he could find only eight, until an obliging
courtier reminded him that the dragon is the symbol of the Emperor, thus
making him the ninth peak. Ti Ping, quite young at the time, was placated
by this rationalization.

Due west of Victoria Peak, small islands string out like steppingstones
until the eye stops at the ridge-backed mass of Lantau, largest island
in the colony and nearly twice the size of Hong Kong Island. Some of the
defeated followers of Ti Ping are reported to have settled there after
the death of their Emperor, but until a few years ago it was a barren and
remote isle, inhabited only by a few thousand farmers and fishermen and a
few monasteries.

Halfway down the western slope of Victoria Peak, a small mound of
earth thrusts itself against the mountainside. Dong Kingman, the
Chinese-American watercolorist who grew up in the crowded tenements at
the foot of the Peak, recalls that he and his young friends used to watch
that mound with considerable apprehension. From where they stood, it
looked exactly like a turtle climbing the mountain. The Chinese consider
it to be a real turtle, and believe that when the turtle reaches the
summit of the Peak, Hong Kong will sink into the sea. Dong and his
fellow-watchers made regular checks to see that the turtle hadn’t stolen
an overnight march on them.

The most beautiful side of Hong Kong Island lies to the south and east
of Victoria Peak, with forested hillsides and a green valley that
slopes down to Pok Fu Lam, the colony’s first reservoir. Lamma Island,
a favorite digging ground for colony archaeologists, looms large to the
south.

When visitors grow squint-eyed from the panoramic view, they often wind
up their excursion by stopping at the little restaurant near the Peak
Tram terminus to eat a sandwich or some Chinese small cakes. Spirits
revived, they linger on the breezy terrace to watch the sun go down
beyond Lantau.

The Peak Tram is almost as famous as Victoria Peak, and needs no
endorsement except to note that its fares are very low and that it hasn’t
had an accident since 1888. In eight minutes, the tram carries its
passengers down to the edge of the Central District, where they may catch
a bus or a taxi.

Government House and the Botanic Garden are just across Garden Road
from the lower end of the Peak Tram. Looking like a Franciscan Mission
of early California with its white walls and square tower, Government
House is the private residence of the colony governor. The sightseer
may look around the outside, and with luck, see all hands snap to when
the governor’s black sedan enters or leaves the circular driveway,
displaying red crowns at front and rear instead of license plates. The
English manage their official exits and entrances with great style, and
everything moves precisely on time.

The Botanic Garden is a land of split-level Eden planted with thousands
of subtropical plants and flowers. Its small zoo and aviary are popular
with children, and the bird collection is a bright splash of brilliant
colors. Small signs in English and Chinese identify the plants and
animals. A good deal of family snapshot-taking goes on around the
fountain at the lower end of the garden. It might be a scene in New
York’s Central Park, except that Chinese children are better behaved.

Albert Path, a serpentine walk shaded by tropical shrubbery, winds down
from the Botanic Garden past Government House to Ice House Street and the
rear of the First National City Bank. Ice House Street continues downward
a couple of blocks to the West Wing of the Central Government offices at
Queen’s Road Central.

On Battery Path, directly in front of the West Wing, a lampshade stand
operates on what is obviously government property. It’s all quite
official; the owner has a permit from the Department of Public Works. Sin
Hoi, late father of the present owner, Sin Hung, had sold lampshades on
the site for thirteen years before the West Wing was built in 1954. Lady
Maurine Grantham, wife of the former governor, was a frequent shopper
at the stand, and when she saw it threatened with displacement by the
government offices, she put in a word for Sin Hoi. His son now runs it
under the grand name of The Magnific Company, selling lampshades and
small china animals.

One block north on Ice House Street and a block east on Des Voeux
Road is Statue Square, where parked cars outnumber the statues 200
to 1. This area is more than the center of the colony’s financial
institutions; it is an ideal cross-section of colony architecture. The
honeycomb-and-gingerbread design of the Hong Kong Club is typical of what
most of the colony’s buildings looked like in 1890, as is the Prince’s
Building on the opposite side of the square.

Post-World War II buildings like Union House, two blocks west along the
waterfront, represent a kind of “no nonsense modern”—big, plain and
blocky. The tower of the Bank of China, just east of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Bank, rises massively above its old established neighbor. The
Red Chinese operate it now and many of its upper offices are vacant; the
bank itself is a quiet institution with fewer guards than most local
banks have. The Chartered Bank, on the other side of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Bank, is the newest, tallest and most curious of the three
moneyed giants, with a fortresslike tower and a green façade that
resembles a vast electronic switchboard.

The Hongkong and Shanghai building, older than either of the banks beside
it, surpasses them in architectural distinction, with its bold vertical
lines and its solid central tower surrounded by lower wrap-around
structures and crowned by a ziggurat roof that tapers upward like a
truncated pyramid. It looks like a building that nothing could push over,
which seems the right emphasis for a bank.

Directly south of the Hong Kong Club lie three and a half acres of the
most valuable land in the colony, all of it laid out in cricket fields
except for a small corner occupied by the building of the Hong Kong
Cricket Club. If the land were for sale, bidding would start at about
$175 a square foot; but the British would as soon sell the playing fields
of Eton. Cricket is an integral part of life under the Union Jack. Most
Americans find it too strenuous, even as a spectator sport; they often
become exhausted by the effort of trying to figure it out.

If a visitor drops by the Cricket Club on any Saturday morning between
October and April, he can scarcely find the cricketers for the
red-and-white-capped youngsters bounding about in various sectors of the
field, playing a dozen different games without apparent confusion. All
the players are from four to twelve years old; mostly boys, with a few
girls here and there. It is the weekly workout of the Tingle Athletic
Association, one of the colony’s honored institutions. Billy Tingle,
an ex-boxer and lifetime physical culture instructor, has taught 50,000
children to kick, throw, catch, swim and master the rudiments of cricket,
soccer, rugby and basketball. Billy is a short, compactly built man about
sixty, who speaks softly but accepts no back talk; discipline is as much
a part of the job as athletic skill, he believes.

Parents are permitted to look on from the grandstand while Billy and his
nine assistants put 350 children through a three-hour workout. These are
“upper-class” boys and girls, but Billy also conducts classes among the
shack dwellers in Wanchai. The colony’s schools, with 700,000 pupils,
often resort to three daily shifts to accommodate them. Very few schools
can afford any physical training program.

At the seaward end of Statue Square, the government has remedied a
deficiency of many years by erecting a City Hall, a five-unit complex
with a 12-story tower, concert hall, theater, banquet hall, library,
museum, art gallery and municipal offices. Architecturally, it is modern,
rectangular and unadorned, in sharp contrast to the curlicues of the
Hong Kong Club next door. Part of the hall was opened in 1962, with the
rest planned for completion in 1963. Sir Malcolm Sargent and the London
Philharmonic Orchestra launched the concert hall with suitable fanfare,
presumably ending the long, lean era in which visiting artists had to go
from one private hall to another, hoping that music lovers would find
them.

The Star Ferry terminal, right beside City Hall at the waterfront, is the
tie that binds Kowloon and Hong Kong Island together. Every day, 100,000
commuters cross the harbor on these spotless new boats at a first-class
fare of 3½ cents or second-class at less than 2 cents. The ferry stops
running at 1:30 A.M. on most nights, and for the late prowler it’s a
“walla-walla” and a 50-cent trip on this rolling, pitching, cross-harbor
motor launch. Walla-walla is the Cantonese equivalent of “yak-yak,” and
memorializes the endless bickering over fares that the launch owners
indulged in before a flat rate was set by the government. Sir Lancelot,
the Calypso King who plays many Hong Kong engagements, was trapped on one
of these wallowing tubs and composed a “Walla Walla Calypso,” celebrating
“the rockin’ and the rollin’ and the quakin’ and the shakin’” they
inflict on night owls.

Walla-wallas and sightseeing boats operate from the Queen’s Pier in Hong
Kong and the Public Pier in Kowloon, both less than a block east of the
Star Ferry terminals. There is more of the flavor of the old days at
Blake Pier, a few hundred feet west of the Star Ferry terminal on the
Hong Kong side. Private yachts and mailboats discharge there, and there’s
always a bustle of arrivals and departures. But the colony’s reclamation
scheme will before long swallow up Blake Pier and its works. The General
Post Office, a moldering antique opposite Blake Pier, is also to be
replaced soon; until it goes, it is a handy place to mail packages or to
buy Hong Kong government publications.

Wyndham Street, which runs south off Queen’s Road Central, is the last
resting place of another antique, the sedan chair, which was the favored
conveyance when roads were too steep or too rough for rickshaws. Of the
four registered sedan chairs left in the colony, two are generally parked
there, waiting patiently for a fare. A few of the older Chinese residents
still use them, but Europeans have grown chair-shy, possibly worried
about what kind of picture they present while riding between two poor
fellows panting along in the traces. And well they might be.

A line of rickshaws also parks along Wyndham Street, but their business
is better than that of the sedan chairs. Tourists and many Chinese
continue to hire them; tourists enjoy the picturesque novelty and the
Chinese find them practical for funeral processions or for hauling
packages too large to carry on a bus or tram without causing a riot.
Police report 866 registered rickshaws, with the number declining each
year. Many people shun them as degrading and inhumane; others are
unwilling to risk their lives by weaving through motor traffic in such
a flimsy craft. Rickshaw drivers, subjected to alternate sweating and
cooling, are particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis.

The alleys and side streets of the Central District are a source of
wonder and surprise to tourists. Pedder Lane, branching off Pedder Street
directly opposite the Gloucester Hotel, is lined with open-air cobblers.
Hundreds of shoes, mended and unmended, are racked behind the repair
stands, and the cobblers are as busy as Kris Kringle’s toy-builders on
December 23d. Shoeshine Alley, a short section of Theater Lane which runs
from the west end of Pedder Lane to Des Voeux Road Central, has ten to a
dozen shoeshine boys stationed along the pavement. Customers stand in the
alley with rickshaws and motorbikes brushing their coattails while they
get shoeshines.

Shoeshine Alley is no silent workshop; a steady stream of walla-walla
flies back and forth among the boys, and if a passing pedestrian pauses
or glances in their direction, several boys pounce on him, demanding his
patronage. The moment he selects one lad for the job, the others shower
the winner with Cantonese insults and heckle him while he works. The
victim pays no attention; it’s an accepted professional hazard. Besides,
the boy is too busy studying the customer, trying to decide whether he’s
an American. Americans are easy marks; always willing to pay three times
the going rate. With an American, the canny lad can simply say “thanks”
and pocket twice as much change as he’s entitled to. Fifty cents Hong
Kong or 8½ cents American is a generous rate, but few Yankee tourists
seem conscious of the local scale.

For the tourist whose curiosity extends beyond the Central District, one
of the major departure points is the Hongkong and Yaumati Vehicular Ferry
Pier, four blocks west of Pedder Street, at Connaught Road and in front
of the Fire Brigade Building. Several different passengers ferry lines
and the Kowloon truck-and-auto ferry use the pier. The paved area at the
pier entrance is the main depot for bus routes to all parts of Hong Kong
Island.

Until the new Hang Seng Bank building was erected, the Li Po Chun
Chambers was the tallest building on the western fringe of the Central
District. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong occupies the
penthouse of the building, named for its owner, seventy-five-year-old Li
Po Chun, eighth son of Li Sing, late multimillionaire merchant who was
a founder of the Tung Wah Hospital. Li Sing, one of the most colorful
of Hong Kong’s early Taipans, once donated $100,000 for a flood-control
project at San Wui, his native village in Kwangtung Province. About
a century ago, when a foreign ship carrying thousands of Chinese to
California struck a rock near Hong Kong, he chartered a steamer, stocked
it with food and sent it to the rescue, saving everyone aboard the
stranded vessel.

The Central Market, a bare concrete building located a block south of the
Vehicular Ferry Pier, offers every kind of meat, vegetable, fish or fowl
eaten by the people of Hong Kong. Everything is fresh, because Chinese
customers reject any sort of tired produce. It exudes a wide range of
smells, with fish out-smelling all the rest. An inexperienced shopper
must move cautiously or he may be sideswiped by a hog carcass as it
bounces along on a man’s shoulders en route from a delivery truck to one
of the meat stands.

Visitors who grow tired of walking may increase their range by riding the
Hong Kong Tramway. Its green, double-decked streetcars cover the full
length of the island waterfront. First-class passengers sit on the upper
deck, where the fare is 3½ cents. Starting from the Central District, the
car marked “Kennedy Town” goes the farthest west, and the Shau Kei Wan
car runs to the eastern extremity of the line.

The trolley tourist may hop off the car at any corner that interests
him. In the evening, the street market beside the Macao Ferry Pier on
the western waterfront presents a pavement-level carnival. Merchandise
is spread out on the asphalt paving—combs, flashlights, toys, food and
clothing—with gasoline lanterns lighting the scene. Several spaces are
reserved for pitchmen who, though they speak in Cantonese, are obviously
delivering a spiel about products guaranteed to double the customer’s
life-span, make him an eternal delight to women and quadruple his earning
power—all at prices so low it would be folly not to snap them up.

The tram shuts down around midnight, but there is hardly an hour of day
or night when street stands are not open. Families run most of them,
with each member taking his turn at waiting on trade. Children are on
the streets all night—sometimes because they have no place else to go.
The 1961 census turned up thousands of families who rented a bedspace
for eight hours a day, sharing it with two other families entitled to
the same eight-hour shift. When one family is asleep in the cubicle, the
other two are either working or wandering the streets. Visitors must walk
carefully in the Western District at night, not for fear of attack, but
to avoid sidewalk sleepers.

During racing days of the October to May season at Happy Valley Jockey
Club, every tram is packed. Not far from the jockey club on the tram line
is Victoria Park, finest of the colony’s public recreation grounds. A
statue of Queen Victoria overlooks the park, honoring the royal matron
who treated the acquisition of Hong Kong as a family joke. The Causeway
Bay Typhoon Shelter raises a forest of masts and spars at the seaward
edge of the park.

Happy Valley, studded with schools, sports arenas, cemeteries and
hospitals, comes down to the waterfront at Wanchai. The tightly packed
tenements of Wanchai have refugee shacks on their rooftops and rows
of sailors’ bars and cabarets at street level. When night comes on,
subsidized intimacy is available on every street corner, but the eleven
movie theaters in the area are less expensive.

North Point, the next waterfront community east of Wanchai, is the
“Little Shanghai” that boomed after 1949, when refugee industrialists
from Shanghai established factories there. It has a prospering night life
zone along King’s Road, and introduced “key clubs” to the colony. These
were semiprivate bar-and-girl flats to which the member gained admission
by paying $50 to $100 for a key. The clubs spread to the Central District
and Kowloon before police raids began to hit them. A number survive,
drawing their clientele from open-handed tourists and tired but hopeful
businessmen. In contrast to these nocturnal playpens, some of the best
new housing projects line the North Point waterfront.

To the east of North Point, the towering cranes of the Tai Koo Dockyards
jut up along the shore. Shau Kei Wan, at the end of the tram line, is a
fishing and junk-building center.

Tram lines don’t serve the towns and resorts on the south side of the
island; to reach these, the tourist must take buses, taxis or guided
tours.

The south shore town of Aberdeen is important to the colony as a fishing
and marketing center, but visitors will remember it for its floating
sampan population and its floating seafood restaurants, the Sea Palace
and the Tai Pak Fong. The latter, decorated with unsparing flamboyance,
are dazzlingly outlined in lights after dark. Fish dinners are netted
from large tanks at the rear of the restaurants. The service is as much
a part of show business as it is of the food trade. Both branches are
represented on the dinner check.

There are two ways for the visitor to reach the floating restaurants.
The first is to take a taxi across the island to Aberdeen, then hail
a girl-powered sampan for a short trip across the harbor. Another
thoroughly luxurious way is to board the 110-foot luxury cruiser _Wan Fu_
any evening at Queen’s Pier or the Kowloon Public Pier, making the entire
trip by sea around the west end of the island. The _Wan Fu_, a modern,
Diesel-powered ship, is a fully rigged brigantine built along the lines
of the early opium-trade escort vessels, with 18 simulated gun-ports on
its sides. It makes the evening cruise to Aberdeen, stops for dinner at
the Sea Palace, and returns to town about midnight. Cost of the meal and
trip totals $10. Its skipper, Mike Morris, is a former Marine Police
Inspector.

Aberdeen is on the regular itinerary of the daytime round-the-island
automobile tours which take four hours. A car meets the traveler at the
top of the Peak Tram, winds down the mountainsides to Happy Valley
and includes a stop at Tiger Balm Gardens, the fantastic creation of
Aw Boon Haw. The late Mr. Aw made his fortune by selling Tiger Balm—an
“infallible” cure for every form of psychosomatic ill. He has furnished
his gardens free-style, throwing in everything from folklore to scenes
from the Buddhist Hell. There is even a 165-foot pagoda, which has repaid
its cost a dozen times by its use on Hong Kong travel posters. The whole
place is living proof of the swathe a Chinese millionaire can cut when he
feels like splurging. Texans seem tame by comparison.

Mr. Aw’s tastes were no more extravagant than those of Mr. Eu, who built
two medieval castles on Hong Kong island—Eucliffe and Euston. Eucliffe
is at Repulse Bay, a summer resort and the next stop on the island motor
tour. The legend of Mr. Eu has several versions, but they generally
agree that he was a Chinese who, several decades ago, settled in Malaya
with his mother. When the two struck hard times, Mr. Eu felt that his
fellow-Chinese were indifferent to the family’s difficulties, and he
vowed never to help other Chinese or to return to China—an extraordinary
act for any Chinese. He indentured himself as a miner, saved enough to
buy his freedom, and married a woman who owned a small grocery store. The
couple pooled their earnings to buy an abandoned tin mine where he had
formerly worked. Either he knew something or played a hunch, because the
mine yielded rich quantities of ore that made him a millionaire.

But his mother never reconciled herself to his anti-Chinese vow and hired
a fung shui expert who reported that the real trouble stemmed from the Eu
family tomb, which faced south, away from China, influencing her son to
turn his back on his homeland. The tomb was realigned to face north, and
Mr. Eu relaxed his anti-Chinese prejudices sufficiently to return to Hong
Kong—if not to China.

He began erecting two enormous stone castles, acting on a Chinese belief
that he would live as long as its building continued. Mr. Eu has passed
on, but his castles survive. When completed, Eucliffe was crammed with
European suits of armor and several upstairs rooms were hung with oil
paintings of nudes. Euston, at 755 Bonham Road, on the northern slope
of Victoria Peak, is a seven-storied anachronism. Its twin towers and
mullioned windows give no evidence of Chinese design, but they may
represent the Chinese reply to functional architecture.

Repulse Bay, with a curving beach and the luxurious Repulse Bay Hotel,
is the colony’s best-known summer resort. Like the upper Peak area, or
Shek-O and Stanley in the southeast part of the island, it has many
wealthy residents and large homes.

The auto tour passes Deep Water Bay Golf Club—one of several golf
courses in Hong Kong—and the Dairy Farm, a major source of the colony’s
fresh milk. Queen Mary Hospital lies along the route near the west end
of the island; an outstanding institution that emphasizes the scarcity
of first-class hospitals in the colony. There are less than 10,000
hospital beds for 3,300,000 people, and the majority of the hospitals
are overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated and well below first-class
standards of care. The colony government is in the midst of a campaign
to raise the capacity and standards of its hospitals, however. More than
1,000 beds are to be added by the end of 1963, but Hong Kong will remain
well below English and American norms of hospital care.

Nevertheless, Hong Kong has made substantial medical progress during the
last decade. Tuberculosis causes about eight times more deaths than all
other infectious diseases, but the T.B. death rate has been reduced from
158.8 per 100,000 population in 1952 to 60.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1961.

Hong Kong University and the Chinese business section of the Western
District are the last sightseeing attractions of the motor tour before it
returns to the center of town. A motor trip around the island costs $7,
plus the price of meals for the tourist and his driver-guide.

The Western District is seldom included on tourist maps of Hong Kong
Island; the assumption seems to be that if a traveler ventures beyond the
Central District, he will instantly be swallowed up by the earth. This
assumption is twaddle. Jan Jan’s Map of Hong Kong, sold at bus and ferry
terminals, gives an excellent layout of the Western District, but even
without its help, a sightseer may visit a number of places in the Western
District without getting lost.

Pottinger Street, in the section running south off Queen’s Road Central,
has a lively array of ribbon, button and zipper stands. Cochrane Street,
parallel to Pottinger and one block west of it, has a few stores selling
silk “dragons” (actually, lions’ heads). Such dragons, made to order, may
cost as much as several hundred dollars each, and at least three weeks
are required to fashion a large one.

These dragons, priced according to their overall length and elaborateness
of detail, weave through the streets on Chinese holidays operated by a
line of men marching under the flexible silk-covered framework.

Wing On Street, a dark narrow alley between Queen’s Road Central and Des
Voeux Road, is hemmed in on both sides by dozens of stands selling cotton
and wool yard-goods. Everything is open to the street, and there is no
charge for inspecting the bewildering assortment of cloth and color.

Goldsmiths’ shops are strung along Queen’s Road Central in the vicinity
of the Kwong On Bank at Gilman’s Bazaar. They stock every kind of gold
jewelry—a particular favorite of Chinese women. But what the women enjoy
most is sitting at the counters and gossiping with the clerks and shop
owners. Such conversations often go on for as much as an hour, yet the
dealer does not fly into a rage if the prospect fails to buy; it is
even possible that the talk hardly touches on buying. Most women buy
eventually; meanwhile, a pleasant exchange of gossip is enjoyed by both
parties.

Wing Sing Street, running north off Queen’s Road, is a cavernous alley
resembling a silent-movie setting for a dark tale of Oriental intrigue.
Actually, its most frightening characteristic is its nickname: “Rotten
Egg Street.” Piles of crates line its wholesale and retail egg stands,
yet there is nothing to indicate that the eggs have lingered beyond their
normal retirement age. The nickname is simply a local joke applied to all
egg-selling streets.

A dozen or so glass-enclosed shops, each no larger than a pair of
telephone booths, are located on Man Wa Lane, between Des Voeux Road and
Wing Lok Street. All are engaged in cutting dies for business cards,
seals and stamps, and the passer-by is welcome to watch their craftsmen
at work.

Ladder Street, a flight of steps leading off Queen’s Road Central, takes
the inquisitive shopper to Upper Lascar Row, popularly called Cat Street.
Cat Street’s dingy shops sell everything from jade carvings to used
bottles, from rare china to chipped and broken junk, valuable antiques
to outright fakes. The customer has nothing but his own wits to protect
him. Americans would be unduly optimistic to expect a Comprehensive
Certificate of Origin from merchants who don’t know and seldom care
whether their goods are “hot” or legitimate. But Europeans who know
Chinese antiques thoroughly have come to Cat Street, bargained shrewdly,
and resold their purchases at home with sufficient profit to pay for
their Hong Kong vacations.

Man Mo Temple, at 128-130 Hollywood Road, stands a short way back
from the street. Buddha enjoys the most prominent altar in its gloomy
interior, but the temple mixes Buddhist and Taoist elements, with
Kwan Tai and Man Cheong as two of its honored deities. Legions of
minor divinities line the walls, including several seated in tall,
glass-enclosed boxes. In former days, such boxes were equipped with long
handles so that the faithful could carry them through the streets in
times of disaster to soothe the angry spirits.

Visitors are free to enter the temple if they behave as they would in
any other house of worship. Straight and spiral incense sticks burn
before the numerous shrines, and the many statues looming in dark corners
suggest a spiritual serenity.

A more urgent reminder of other worlds may be had at the Tak Sau coffin
shop, 252 Hollywood Road. Massive pine coffins, ordered in advance of the
prospective occupant’s death and tailored to his physical dimensions,
are stacked about in plain sight. An ordinary model, costing from $50
to $150, can be turned out by a pair of carpenters in about 20 hours.
The larger boxes once required 16 men to carry them, but modern trucks
have now assumed the burden. A millionaire’s coffin, lined with silk
and elaborately carved, may cost $3,000 or more. To demonstrate their
continuing concern for the departed, surviving relatives visit a nearby
shop which sells notes written on the “Bank of Hell.” No one likes to
deliver these notes personally, and so they are burned to assure the
deceased that his credit rating will be maintained in the spirit world.

Most of the Western District may be covered on foot, but taxis are
necessary for trips to more distant points, such as Stanley or Shek-O,
particularly at night. Drivers often have only a sketchy knowledge of
English, but the passenger can usually make his destination clear by
pointing to it on a road map, or by printing the address on a sheet of
notepaper; if the driver cannot read it, he will find a colleague to
translate it for him. Taxis are about 25 cents for the first mile and
18 cents for each succeeding mile on Hong Kong Island. Kowloon taxis
are slightly lower. Holders of valid drivers’ licenses from their home
country, or international drivers’ licenses, may hire cars for $11.50 a
day or $70 a week, plus gasoline costs. In the English fashion, all cars
have right-hand drive.

Sightseers operating on a tight budget may cover almost every part of
the island on its 18 bus routes. Most of these start from the Vehicular
Ferry Pier and their routes are fully outlined on the reverse side of
Jan Jan’s Map. Trams give smoother rides and more frequent service along
the island’s densely populated waterfront, but the only low-cost means
of visiting outlying places, such as Shek-O, Stanley and Sandy Bay—all
worth seeing—is by bus. This transportation is not for the timorous or
those with queasy stomachs; Hong Kong bus-jockeys are competent, but they
slam and jolt their passengers about as they whirl through a never-ending
succession of upgrades, downgrades and hairpin turns.

Foreign passengers unfamiliar with Hong Kong public transportation
may be startled at times to hear their fellow-riders yelling at one
another. What sounds to a greenhorn like a violent exchange of insults
is nothing more than cheerful gossip. The Cantonese are naturally gabby
and exuberant, and only the Gwai-lo (foreign devil) seems subdued and
inscrutable.

Transportation to Kowloon, directly across the harbor from Hong Kong
Island, is by Star Ferry for most tourists, although there are many other
trans-harbor ferries. The Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon is the focal
point of practically every kind of transportation on the peninsula. Most
Kowloon bus lines turn around directly in front of the ferry terminal.
The Kowloon-Canton Railway, which runs through Kowloon and the New
Territories to the Red Chinese border, is situated next to the bus
terminal. Taxis and rickshaws start from the same area—a big, multiple
loop that keeps vehicles moving with a minimum of congestion or delay.
The Kowloon side of the colony has no streetcars, but its double-deck
buses are almost as bulky as trams.

The greatest concentration of tourist shops and hotels is in the Tsim Sha
Tsui section at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula and within a five-minute
walk of the Star Ferry terminal. Nine-tenths of the Kowloon hotels and
luxury shops are strung along Nathan Road, the central thoroughfare, and
its intersecting streets. At its best, Tsim Sha Tsui is a tourists’ Happy
Hunting Ground; at its worst, it is an outrageously over-priced deadfall.

The refugee resettlement estates spread across the upper end of the
Kowloon Peninsula, several miles north of Tsim Sha Tsui. Visitors
who want to see what has been done to help the colony’s refugees—and
to appreciate how much must still be undertaken—should visit the
resettlement estates and the remaining squatter shacks with either a
guide or an experienced Hong Kong welfare worker. The terrain is too
irregular and the estates too extensive to be covered on foot.

Visitors with an archaeological turn of mind may want to have a look
at the Li Cheng Uk tomb in Sham Shui Po, about a mile north of the
Kowloon-New Territories boundary. Workmen excavating for the Li Cheng Uk
Resettlement Estate discovered the tomb in August, 1955. Its T-shaped
chambers and barrel-vault roof containing pottery and bronze objects from
the Later Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220) and Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589)
indicate that the Chinese may have settled in Hong Kong and neighboring
Kwangtung Province many centuries earlier than had been supposed. The
colony government preserved the tomb by encasing it in an outer shell of
concrete, built a small garden and museum around it, and opened it to the
public in 1957.

A guided motor tour, probably the best way of seeing the New Territories,
carries the visitor through the manufacturing center at Tsuen Wan, then
west past the beaches and eroded hillsides to Castle Peak. The tour
proceeds through some of the colony’s best farmland to the marketing and
shopping center at Yuen Long.

Brown cattle and water buffalo are the only aids to human labor on these
farms, and every square foot of land is fertilized, weeded, irrigated and
tilled with unsparing diligence. Walled cities, such as Kam Tin, appear
along the way. Once they were fortresses to protect the farming families
against marauding bands; today they are packed with poor people living in
cubicles.

If border conditions are stable, the driver may continue to Lak Ma Chau,
a hillside overlooking Red China’s farming communes on the far side of
the Sham Chun River. The return route is through the fishing settlement
at Tai Po, with a view of Tolo Harbor, one of the finest in Hong Kong. In
the Shatin Valley, with its intricate pattern of terraced rice fields,
the sightseer may catch a glimpse of Amah Rock, a natural formation
resembling a woman with an infant on her back.

Chinese legend depicts the rock as the survival of a woman whose husband
left to fight in China many centuries ago. For days and months she
climbed the hill and looked out to sea, awaiting her husband’s return.
Their child was born before she at last caught sight of her husband’s
ship, and she was so overcome by excitement and joy that she died on the
spot. After her death, her neighbors were astonished to see a heap of
rocks take on the appearance of a woman carrying a child on her back.

As the car passes through the reservoir area above Kowloon, a wild rhesus
monkey of the surrounding forests may be seen begging for a roadside
handout. Game of any kind is not abundant in the colony, but there are
a few ferret-badgers, civet cats, otter, barking deer, rodents and an
exceedingly rare leopard. There are 38 kinds of snakes, including the
banded krait, king cobra and pit viper, although deaths from snake bites
very seldom occur. Over 300 species of birds have been identified.
Hundreds of kinds of tropical butterflies, including the Atlas Moth, with
a maximum wing-spread of nine inches, present the brightest specks on
the countryside, sometimes covering a forest grove like an extra set of
leaves.

Since Hong Kong embraces 237 islands besides the Kowloon Peninsula and
the mainland portions of the New Territories, a tourist must take to the
boats if he is to see more than a fraction of its varied topography. Boat
service to the larger inhabited islands is frequent and cheap.

Every Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock an excursion boat leaves the
Vehicular Ferry Pier for a three-hour circuit of Hong Kong Island.
It cruises east along the waterfront, through Lei Yue Mun pass at the
eastern harbor entrance, then turns south off the island’s east coast.
The rugged coast and fine homes of Shek-O are at the right, with the
outlying islands of Tung Lung and Waglan at the left. The course swings
past the south shore resort coast, around the west end of the island
and back to the starting point. This trip, at 50 cents for adults and a
quarter for children, is the seagoing bargain of Hong Kong.

A more leisurely round-island voyage, taking 4½ hours, leaves the Kowloon
and Queens piers every morning, and includes a close-up of the Yau Ma Tei
Typhoon Shelter on the west side of Kowloon Peninsula. Going west around
the island, it sails as far as Repulse Bay, turns back toward Deep Water
Bay and stops at Aberdeen for lunch before returning around the west end
of the island to its starting point. A variation of the trip permits the
excursionist to leave the boat at Aberdeen and complete the tour with
a motor trip via Stanley, Tai Tam Reservoir, Shau Kei Wan, Tiger Balm
Gardens, Wanchai, and Victoria Peak. Lunch and soft drinks are included,
but this is not a low-price attraction.

A two-hour afternoon water tour offers tourists a view of the harbor,
including the island waterfront, Kai Tak airstrip and the harbor islands.
If one prefers travel in a craft rather loosely resembling a junk, he may
cover most of the same harbor points visited by the regular launch.

The brigantine _Wan Fu_, in addition to its evening cruise to Aberdeen,
puts on a plush inter-island tour lasting five hours, with cocktails,
canapés and a catered buffet luncheon served aboard. The _Wan Fu_ sails
through Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter, westward past Stonecutters Island,
Lantau, and the little island of Peng Chau before tying up at Cheung
Chau for an informal walking tour around this fishermen’s settlement,
scene of the annual Bun Festival.

Cheung Chau is one of the pleasantest islands in the colony, with neat
vegetable gardens planted in its interior hollows, a long stretch of
sandy beach and a cluster of English summer homes on its low hills. The
village shopping area is a busy place, with narrow, crowded streets, an
old temple and a sidewalk shrine to a tree-god. Cost of the _Wan Fu_
cruise is in line with its luxurious accommodations.

Ferry services to Cheung Chau, Peng Chau, Tsing Yi Island and Lantau
are operated by the Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry Co. Excursion boats may
also be hired at fixed rates for reaching any of these islands. Once the
visitor gets to the islands, he will have to depend mostly on his feet to
get around. As a matter of course, he should determine in advance when
the next boat is scheduled to return to Hong Kong Island; otherwise, he
may spend the night in some rural retreat with no tourist hotels.

Peng Chau, with a population of about 4,000 persons, has several small
industries typical of an earlier day in Hong Kong, such as tanning and
lime burning. It was an important match manufacturing center before Macao
competition overshadowed it. It also harbors small farming and fishing
settlements.

Hei Ling Chau, a nearby island, houses the colony’s leprosarium, run
by the local auxiliary of the Mission to Lepers. It has 540 patients,
including refugees from Red China who were turned out of a leprosarium
near Canton when the Communists closed it down. A visit to the island
may be arranged through the Mission in Hong Kong and is worthwhile on
two counts; it will clear up many common misconceptions about the
disease and show the visitor how far medicine has progressed in treating
a disease that was once considered fatal. When a Chinese became a known
sufferer from the disease, he was, until a few years ago, driven from the
community and his family were subjected to abuse by their former friends.

Hei Ling Chau conveys no sense of hopelessness today. Its well-kept
stone cottages, workshops, hospital and chapel are arranged around a
thriving vegetable garden cultivated by the patients. The unsatisfactory
chaulmoogra oil treatment has been replaced by streptomycin, sulfones
and other new drugs. Surgery has helped to restore the function of hands
crippled by the disease. It is not true that the fingers of lepers drop
off; the bones shrink if the disease is not checked.

Most cases on the island are infectious, but chances that a visitor
will catch the disease are almost nil. Its chief victims are the
undernourished poor. Although leprosy is not hereditary, children may
contract it from parents. About 30 young victims of leprosy presently
attend a primary school on Hei Ling Chau while being treated. Their
chances of recovery are excellent. Early, mild infections can often be
cleared up within a year; advanced cases may take many years to cure.

Under staff instruction, many patients have become competent tailors,
embroiderers, carpenters, cabinet makers or basket weavers. Very few are
bedridden, unless they have an additional disease such as tuberculosis.
About a third of the patients are women. Everything concerned with the
operation of Hei Ling Chau reflects intelligence and devotion in helping
lepers to find their way back to useful living.

Tsing Yi Island, off Tsuen Wan, has a few minor industries such as lime
burning and brick making, and its steep hillsides grow an especially
sweet variety of pineapple. There is also a community of fishermen and a
small village with stores where one may purchase food and soft drinks.
Chickens and chow dogs, unmenaced by autos, roam its streets. When cold
weather comes, some of the chows will vanish. Many Chinese regard chow
meat as a delicacy that will keep the consumer warm in winter, increase
his strength and fortify his virility. Killing chows for food is illegal,
but every winter the police arrest dozens of dog killers, and the courts
hand them high fines and jail sentences.

Lantau Island has only one stretch of paved road in its 55-square-mile
extent, but it is a favorite spot for hikers and religious pilgrims.
There is a good bathing beach at Silvermine Bay, where the ferry stops,
and the paved road, traveled by a new bus line, connects it with the
dam-building site at Shek Pik.

Some years ago the island was so isolated that its people built stone
towers as redoubts against the forays of pirates. By government
permission, residents were allowed to keep arms to defend themselves
against raiders. Several of the old towers still stand.

The Buddhist monastery of Po Lin Chi, on a mountain plateau two miles
north of Shek Pik, is inhabited by a small community of monks and
nuns living from the produce of its fruit trees and gardens and the
contributions of pilgrims who struggle up a mountain path to visit
the retreat. Visitors are welcome and may stay overnight at a guest
house on the grounds. Meals are prepared on wood fires in an ancient,
smoke-stained kitchen. Surrounded by its orchards and with two or three
massive tombs on the surrounding hills, Po Lin Chi is a quiet echo of
James Hilton’s _Shangri-La_.

There are other monasteries on Lantau, with the Trappist Monastery at Tai
Shui Hang, in the northeast part of the island, perhaps the best-known.
In the last decade its community of 22 priests, lay brothers and novices
has planted and redeveloped its large farm acreage.

Tai O town, on the west coast of Lantau, is its largest settlement, with
nearly 8,000 inhabitants. Tai O has a community of Tanka fishing people
living in wooden huts raised on stakes over a muddy inlet. A regular
ferry service brings hiking parties from Hong Kong Island to toil up
the hillsides to Po Lin Chi. They stay overnight at its guest house and
descend on the opposite side of the mountains to catch the ferry at
Silver Mine Bay for the trip home.

For a completely different kind of scenery, the inquisitive traveler may
visit Tap Mun Chau, an island at the eastern edge of the New Territories.
The Kowloon-Canton Railway takes him to Tai Po Station on Tolo Harbor,
where he may catch the Tap Mun Chau ferry. The boat nudges up to the
foot of Ma On Shan, a craggy, 2,300-foot peak, unloads a cargo of pigs
and a few Hakka farmers, and pushes east through Tolo Channel, bordered
by round hills. Three Fathoms Cove is the boat’s second stop. It is just
south of Plover Cove, the deep inlet from Tolo Channel which colony
engineers propose to seal off, pump out its salt-water contents, and
replace with a fresh-water reservoir.

Most of the stops along this six-hour run are made offshore, disembarking
passengers reaching land in small sampans. The boat turns south at the
seaward end of Tolo Channel and travels the length of Long Harbor between
high, barren hills. Looking at these hills, the passenger may understand
how easily Chinese pirates of the last century could slip out of this
hidden harbor, pounce on passing ships and make their escape behind the
sheltering mountains.

Villages are strung along the water’s edge at intervals, but their
shallow harbors and small docks cannot handle the ferry boat. The usual
sampan, sometimes adroitly propelled by a pair of half-grown boys, rows
out to meet the larger boat. There is a dock-side stop at Tap Mun town,
where the harbor is crowded with fishing junks, but the layover is too
short to permit a walk ashore.

Darkness comes on slowly while the boat heads back, non-stop, to Tai Po,
but there are bright patches of light along the water—fishermen using
gasoline lanterns to lure their catch into a net spread between two
boats. The stars look down from a cloudless sky, and through a gap in
the bulky hills, the lights of Hong Kong Island glow in the distance. By
early evening, the traveler has gotten his train and is back in Kowloon.

There is so much to see in this colony that no one can compress it into
a single visit. Many tourists have returned a dozen times, knowing that
each trip would bring some new revelation of unsuspected beauty, some
fresh insight into the character of Hong Kong’s people.

No book, map nor brochure can tell a colony visitor exactly what to
expect. He walks down a street and comes upon the unexpected every day.
It may be a Chinese funeral procession with a marching band playing “Bye
Bye Blackbird.” Or a professional letter-writer, taking dictation with a
stylus at his sidewalk table. Or the clatter of Mah Jongg players as they
slam the pieces on the table.

It may be a visit to Temple Street in Kowloon, with its odd restaurants
and all-night bustle of activity. Or the Kee Heung Tea House at 597
Shanghai Street, Kowloon, where customers bring their caged birds and
discuss them while they sip.

Even the hardiest tourist will be exhausted long before he has exhausted
the sights and sounds of Hong Kong.



CHAPTER TEN

Shopping before Dinner

    “The culinary art is certainly above all others in Hong
    Kong.”—HAROLD INGRAMS, _Hong Kong_, 1952


Something happens to the spending habits of all tourists when they reach
Hong Kong. Wallets fly open, purse-strings snap and money gushes forth in
a golden shower.

It is a matter of record that in Hong Kong more tourists spend more
money in a shorter time than in any other port of the Far East or the
Pacific west of the American mainland. They shell out $120 a day during
an average visit of five days, and almost 70 percent of the $600 five-day
total is spent on things the tourist intends to take home. (The figures
come, not from Hong Kong, but from an exhaustive study of Pacific and Far
Eastern tourism made for the United States Department of Commerce.)

This $120-a-day spending average is applicable to all the colony’s
civilian visitors except Overseas Chinese. In 1961, the total of such
visitors was 210,000, and it was made up of 72,000 Americans, 67,000
British and 71,000 visitors of other nationalities. The number of
tourists has more than doubled in the last four years. The Department of
Commerce study estimates that the total may climb to 490,000 in 1968,
and that tourists could be expected to spend $270 million in the crown
colony during the same year. If all this comes to pass, it will carry the
merchants of Hong Kong into the full sunlight of a golden age.

But how about the tourist? What does he get for his money that causes
him to run hog-wild in Hong Kong shops? The answers are as varied as the
shrewdness or the gullibility of the individual tourist.

Let’s consider the gullible ones; they are so numerous and vulnerable.
The plump lady stuffing herself into a form-fitting Cheongsam. The
overnight Beau Brummel, swallowed alive by the 24-hour “custom-tailored”
suit he bought without taking the time for proper fittings. The customer
who accepts the first price quoted by a Chinese merchant. The photography
bug who buys a standard West German camera at the most exclusive
department store in the heart of the high-rent district, when he could
get the same thing for 20 percent less at a number of small, reliable
photo-supply shops. The optimist who thinks he can persuade a British
clerk to knock down a fixed price. The lamb who lets a sidewalk “shopping
guide” lead him to a fleecing. The poor soul who buys a Swiss watch, a
Japanese camera, or any other name product without comparing prices of
several Hong Kong shops or knowing the minimum sale price of the same
article in his own country. The woman who buys a particular line of
famous pearls from anyone except the authorized dealer.

Above all, the American who buys a piece of rare jade without a
Comprehensive Certificate of Origin, and consequently has it confiscated
by Customs when he reenters the United States. For that matter, any
American who buys a “presumptive item”—an article which the U.S.
government suspects was made in Red China or North Korea—without a
Comprehensive Certificate of Origin.

This business of the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin is a recurrent
pain in the neck to American shoppers and Hong Kong merchants alike.
Nevertheless, as an item of United States foreign policy, it must be
deferred to by American tourists in Hong Kong. Many reputable shop-owners
will not apply to the colony’s Commerce and Industry Department for the
right to issue Comprehensive Certificates of Origin, because it involves
so much paperwork, red tape, and delay that the shops would just as soon
skip the American market and concentrate on the British and others who
can buy without these pesky certificates.

The list of items considered to be presumptive is by no means clear-cut,
and the items on it may change from time to time, further clouding the
issue. Some of the articles considered presumptive are: brassware,
brocade, ceramics, cotton goods, embroidery, figurines, wood furniture,
greeting cards, handicrafts, ivory ware, jade, semiprecious jewelry,
lacquerware, porcelain ware, woolen rugs, silks and wallpaper.

The nonpresumptive articles, or those that can be freely imported into
the U.S., include: binoculars, cameras, cashmere items, enamelware,
furs (but not all furs), precious stones, leather goods, mosaics,
mother-of-pearl, plastic articles, rattan ware, sporting goods,
umbrellas, watches, wool clothing and yachts.

These lists are merely indicative; up-to-date and official information
can be obtained in Hong Kong by calling the Foreign Assets Control
division of the U.S. Consulate General. If in any doubt about the
status of a purchase, pay no attention to the merchant who declares that
a Comprehensive Certificate of Origin is unnecessary; if his advice is
erroneous, he will not post the buyer’s bail.

A Comprehensive Certificate of Origin costs five Hong Kong dollars,
or 87.5 cents, and will cover many articles bought at the same store,
provided that their value does not exceed HK $1,500, or US $262. It is
applied for when the purchase is made. The store sends it to the colony
government for official clearance, and when this comes through, usually
in about a week, the articles are shipped to the U.S. address designated.

The amount of duty-free goods an American tourist could buy abroad was
cut from $500 to $100 in 1961, but merchants of the crown colony say it
has not seriously affected their business. At Hong Kong prices, Americans
apparently feel they can pay duties and still have a bargain. They are
still permitted to buy duty-free any number of items intended as gifts
valued at less than $10 each, provided they do not mail more than one
gift a day to the same person.

Colony shops with the right to issue Comprehensive Certificates of Origin
always post a sign in their windows to advertise the fact; it helps to
attract American customers. But there are a few tricksters who will
attempt to palm off a fraudulent or nonapplicable certificate. The only
certificate of value to an American purchaser, it should be stressed, is
the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin.

There are two main shopping areas in the colony: the Central District of
Hong Kong Island, and the Tsim Sha Tsui section at the tip of the Kowloon
Peninsula. Both areas can easily be covered on foot, and the shopper’s
budget is guaranteed to wear out much sooner than his shoe leather.
King’s Road, the main avenue through North Point in the northeastern
part of Hong Kong island, is also a good shopping area for tourists. The
Chinese and knowledgeable Caucasian residents, however, shop over a much
wider area on both sides of the harbor.

Central District shopping for tourists runs west along Queen’s Road
Central, Des Voeux Road Central, Chater Road and Connaught Road Central
from Statue Square, opposite the Star Ferry terminal, to the Vehicular
Ferry Pier at Jubilee Street. The best British department stores are
toward the eastern end of this small zone, such as Whiteaway Laidlaw &
Co. on Connaught Road near the General Post Office, and Lane, Crawford’s
on Des Voeux Road. Both have Kowloon branches as well, and their prices
range from fairly high to forbidding. They are comparable to top-quality
department stores in New York or San Francisco, and their marked price is
unalterable. No dickering. Even so, they undersell many stores overseas
because Hong Kong is with very few exceptions a duty-free port.

The American shopper will need to keep the Comprehensive Certificate of
Origin problem in mind constantly as he branches out to other stores, but
there’s no harm in looking. The larger Chinese stores in the area include
Chinese Arts & Crafts and China Emporium, both on Queen’s Road, and the
Shui Hing Co., The Sincere Co. and Wing On, Ltd., all on Des Voeux Road.
The Man Yee Building on Des Voeux Road has two floors of shops with
radios, typewriters, curios, watches and tape recorders, plus many other
articles; they are well worth checking, either to buy or for comparing
prices. The Japanese have opened a large department store, Daimaru, at
Causeway Bay, just west of the North Point section.

The Gloucester Building at Des Voeux Road and Pedder Street has an
extensive shopping arcade with many quality shops. Alexandra House, just
across Des Voeux, also has its quota of fine shops, and there are other
first-rate stores throughout this area. The streets intersecting with
Queen’s Road and Des Voeux Road should not be overlooked either. Only a
dozen blocks or so are involved, but the shops are so numerous and their
goods so varied that it will take even an industrious shopper a full day
to see them and compare prices. Wise tourists looking for values usually
spend a day surveying the shops and their merchandise before they are
ready to spend a cent. It is a sound procedure, for hundreds of hasty
shoppers have prematurely congratulated themselves on a wonderful buy,
only to see the same article in another shop the next day for 15 to 25
percent less than they have paid.

What are the good buys in Hong Kong? They particularly include
custom-made clothes for men and women, because the workmanship is cheap
and the quality high—this applies to coats, suits, dresses and shoes.
For women, silk and woolen garments are good buys, especially when they
require extensive hand work on beading and embroidery. If planning to
wash the garment, make sure that the outer material and the inner lining
are pre-shrunk and color-fast.

The Cheongsam, with its side-slit skirt and carefully fitted collar,
is worth individual attention here. The Cheongsam is a closely fitted,
shape-clinging dress that shows to best advantage on a slim, small-boned
Chinese girl. Put the average Western woman in one and she looks
beefy, which certainly isn’t the effect she is striving for. If she’s
overweight, the sight of her in a Cheongsam is enough to make Chinese
children hide behind their mother’s slit-skirt where their howls and
giggles won’t be too evident.

Men can get excellent bargains in custom-tailored suits of English
woolens, Japanese woolens, Dacron, mixed silk and wool, or cashmere
and wool. Pure cashmere looks and feels luxurious in the shop, but it
is extremely expensive and doesn’t wear as well as a cashmere-and-wool
combination. If the tailor puts in cheap lining, the collar and lapels
will look like an elephant’s hide after a few cleanings. If he skimps
on the thread, and some do, the suit may pull apart under strenuous
circumstances. The worldwide story about the $20 Hong Kong suit that
can be perfectly fitted in 24-hours may have been circulated by some
show-business comedian trying to impress his friends; it is not, and
never was, true.

Assuming that a good Hong Kong tailor is located—and there are scores of
them—a man will be able to get the finest kind of custom-made suit for a
little less than he would pay for a ready-made suit of the same materials
in the United States. That would be around $75 for a pure cashmere sport
jacket, $40 for a cashmere-and-wool jacket, $70 for a tuxedo of English
worsteds, and $40 to $60 for a suit, with the higher-priced one of
English woolen and the cheaper of a lightweight wool. A custom-tailored
shirt of Sea Island cotton will cost about $6—considerably less than an
American ready-made shirt of the same material.

The chances are that an established Hong Kong tailor will start by
asking a higher price for all of these articles. By patient haggling and
comparison-shopping, he may be wheedled down by 5 to 20 percent. And
don’t be afraid that hard bargaining will drive him out of business; he
always allows a comfortable profit margin for himself. Ignore his claims
based on the famous people he has made suits for; they may have been
given the ultimate in special care at a price far below the going rate
for serving to advertise the shop.

One thing a tailor cannot do is to turn out a well-fitted suit without
three or four fittings. This will require no less than five days, and
two weeks would yield even better results. In busy periods, before the
Christmas and Chinese New Year holidays, a tailor might need three weeks.
One can buy a better-looking ready-made suit in the United States than
almost any Hong Kong tailor can turn out in 24 hours; he’s good, but he’s
not a miracle worker.

Women shopping for top-grade American and British ready-made clothing
should have a look at Mackintosh’s in Alexandra House, Paquerette (in the
Gloucester Arcade), Lane, Crawford’s, and Whiteaway Laidlaw & Co. A wide
range of high-style tailored clothing for women is offered by Charlotte
Horstmann of Duddell Street and Town and Country of Queen’s Road, both on
the Hong Kong side, and at three Kowloon shops in the arcade of the Hotel
Peninsula: Dynasty Salon, Betty Clemo, and Star of Siam.

Men’s tailoring shops are most numerous on the Kowloon side, and many of
them also make women’s clothing. A sample survey might include Y. William
Yu and Frank L. Chan of Kimberley Road, Ying Tai & Co., and Harilela’s of
Nathan Road, James S. Lee & Co. of Nathan Road (and Gloucester Road, Hong
Kong), and Tailor Young & Co. of Humphreys Avenue. In the blocks from
Mody Road to Kimberley Road, all branching east from Nathan Road, tailors
seem to occupy about every third storefront. Take nothing for granted at
any of them, and be watchful to see that the cloth ordered is supplied.

Hong Kong has outstanding bargains in hand-made shoes, handbags, jewelry,
watches, cameras, radios and furniture. It is desirable to know prices
and to shop around extensively, comparing values. The Man Yee Building,
previously mentioned, the Gloucester Arcade, and the arcades of the
Ambassador and Miramar Hotels in Kowloon should give an idea of what’s
available, though they may be undersold by some side-street shop.

Kowloon has dozens of small shops, often combined with back-room
“factories,” where one can buy Chinese handicrafts or watch them being
turned out by superlative craftsmen. These products are duplicates
of those that China has produced for centuries, and may require a
Comprehensive Certificate of Origin to get them through U.S. Customs.

Hankow Road, just west of the Hotel Peninsula, has the greatest number
of wood-carving shops. They all stock sets of wooden horses in several
sizes; also Buddhas, Gods and Goddesses in profusion, wild animals, fish
and birds. The asking price is outrageous, but can be whittled down as
much as 50 percent by patient haggling. A well-made carved horse about
four inches high can be bought for 75 cents. It would cost six times as
much in New York.

No other article more convincingly demonstrates the skill of the Chinese
craftsman than carved ivory. There are ivory factories along Nathan
Road and its side streets that produce beautifully carved chess sets,
intricately fashioned concentric balls of ivory, and miniature temples,
flower boats and pagodas.

Fine cabinetmakers turn out highly polished teak and rosewood chests
trimmed with brass and lined with silk. Each one is a masterpiece of
workmanship, but there’s one catch—if the wood has not been carefully
kiln-dried, the chest may split when it is shipped home. This is a point
on which a customer will want to quiz the dealer, then decide whether his
answers are satisfactory. Carved and lacquered screens can be an artistic
delight, but don’t forget to include the shipping costs when figuring
their price. Carved and full-rigged Chinese junks are sold in a wide
range of sizes.

The shopper can forget about the give-no-quarter type of bargaining when
he enters one of the stores operated by Hong Kong welfare organizations
for the benefit of physically handicapped refugees. These are strictly
nonprofit operations, with all but basic overhead costs being turned
over to the needy people who make the handicrafts. The quality of their
products is high and their prices are reasonable. Two of these shops are
the Welfare Handicrafts on Salisbury Road, opposite the Kowloon Post
Office, and The Rice Bowl, on Minden Row. To find The Rice Bowl, turn
east off Nathan Road at Mody Road; Minden Row is the first street south
off Mody. Both stores have Comprehensive Certificates of Origin.

The Tsim Sha Shui section of Kowloon is developing so rapidly that it
will probably have a dozen shopping arcades by the end of 1963. The
Central District of Hong Kong Island is also planning new arcades.

Tourists may wind up a day’s shopping by attending one of the 72 movie
theaters in the colony. Of these, 16 show English-language films and
13 are first-run houses. Foreign films reach Hong Kong as soon as they
appear in the world market. In Kowloon, Nathan Road is the main movie
avenue; in Hong Kong, they are spotted along the principal streets from
Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan. All seats are reserved, and selected from
a seating-chart at the box office; daily show-times are carried in the
local press. Chinese films have a big following, but many colony Chinese
prefer American movies with plenty of action and spectacle. English
films strike them as stodgy and slow, European art films bore them, and
sexy importations from Italy and France offend their sensibilities.
English-language films usually carry Chinese subtitles which look like
embroidery to Western viewers.

If it’s night clubs the tourist is looking for, there’s nothing to
get wildly excited about. Floor shows run to jugglers, acrobats and
pony chorus lines, with an occasional comedian as a star attraction.
Vaudeville isn’t dead; it simply shuffled off to Hong Kong. Prices are
steeper than the entertainment warrants. Most of the musicians are
Filipinos; individually able, but their band arrangements follow the
blast-off traditions of American stage bands in the 1930s.

For a predinner cocktail with a magnificent view, two of the best
locations are the lounge on top of the Imperial Hotel, Nathan Road, and
the 11th floor Marigold Lounge of the Park Hotel at Cameron and Chatham
Roads, both in Kowloon. Just as the finest daytime view is from the
upper slopes of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, the most satisfying
after-dark panorama is from Kowloon. From either of these lounges you can
see the banks of lighted apartment houses along the Hong Kong hillside,
tied together by festoons of streetlamps as the roads zig-zag up the
slopes, shining blue at the lower levels, then turning to vapor-piercing
amber as they climb above the fog line. The Imperial has the closest
view of the multi-colored neon signs glowing along the Hong Kong side of
the harbor in English and Chinese characters. The Park Hotel overlooks
the whole sweep of Kowloon Bay and the wavy, mountainous horizon of
the island, with the brilliantly lighted boats of a dozen ferry lines
criss-crossing the harbor in every direction. A line of lights passes
directly under the window—a Kowloon-Canton train returning from a trip to
the Red China border. If one could compress all of his memories of Hong
Kong into a single glance, this would be it.

Kowloon holds two-thirds of the colony’s fifty hotels, and many of these
are quite new. Hong Kong Island will add two major hotels in 1963, the
1,000-room American and the 600-room Queen’s, but Kowloon will retain its
leadership in room capacity for many years. Altogether, about a dozen
hotels will be added by the end of 1964 if business holds up.

The tremendous surge in hotel growth means that after years of lagging
behind, Hong Kong has finally roused itself to meet the needs of
tourists, in room capacity, at least. The expansion has been so frantic
that a number of the newer hotels have shaved every possible corner in
construction, skimping on the number of elevators and unduly shrinking
the size of rooms to squeeze every cent out of their cubic-foot capacity.
Hotel help is scarce, and as each new hotel opens, it raids the staffs
of existing hotels; this raises wages slightly, but saves the raider the
time and expense of training his own people. It also lowers the quality
of service and leaves the older hotels to scramble for replacements.

With these limitations in mind, it is remarkable that hotel service is
as good as it is, and much of the credit must go to the staff people
themselves. They are hard-working, cheerful and obliging to a degree
seldom seen in large cities. Because of inadequate training and the
inevitable language difficulties, they are sometimes caught off-base, but
when they know what a guest wants, they will do everything possible to
get it. Americans and British whose democratic principles do not always
prevent them from getting pretty high-handed about the way they are
served will just have to be a little less fussy.

The Peninsula Hotel and its jointly managed addition, the Peninsula
Court, occupy the same place in the colony that the Plaza does in New
York—smart, eminently respectable and expensive. The Park, the Imperial
and the Ambassador are among the best of the large, new hotels in
Kowloon. The Gloucester has the greatest status of the Central District
hotels, and the Repulse Bay, on the south shore of Hong Kong Island,
rates as the island’s most luxurious resort hotel. There are about a
dozen other first-rate hotels and approximately 30 additional ones that
range from satisfactory to catch-as-catch-can. All those recommended
by the Hong Kong Tourist Association are acceptable, but their quality
varies with their rates, though not always in proportion.

Two outlying hotels worth noting are the Carlton and the Shatin Heights,
both in the New Territories but not far from Kowloon. The Luk Kwok in
Wanchai, once the locale for Richard Mason’s _The World of Suzie Wong_,
prospered so handsomely from the publicity that it is now a quiet,
middle-class hotel.

Confirmed hotel reservations, arranged well in advance of your arrival,
are advisable for all tourists who are not thoroughly familiar with
Hong Kong. Certainly it would be unwise to arrive without them and be
forced to rely on sheer luck or the noisy touts who besiege incoming
passengers at Kai Tak. The touts are kept behind a fence nowadays, but if
the unsuspecting visitor lets them steer him to a hotel, their kick-back
will be added to the bill. Experienced visitors sometimes check into a
modestly priced hotel for the night and spend the next day bargaining
for the lowest rates at one of the better places which, when business is
slow, regularly knock 30 percent off the stated charges. For newcomers,
this is seldom done.

Some European and American visitors cannot be persuaded to try Chinese
food. Either they think it will make them ill, which it certainly will
not, or they believe they’ll look silly fumbling with chopsticks. It
must be conceded that inexperienced users of chopsticks usually look
rather foolish, but practically every Chinese restaurant will provide a
knife and fork if asked for them.

No difficulty should arise from a determination to stick to one’s usual
diet. Every first-class hotel serves an international cuisine. Prices are
tailored to the room rents; high at the Peninsula, cheap at the Y.M.C.A.
next door to it. In general, the meals are as good as those at American
hotels and they cost considerably less. Steaks are tougher than Choice U.
S. beef, and occasionally one resembles a small portion of a welcome mat.
Apart from the hotels, there are about a dozen good European restaurants.

In Mandarin Chinese, there is a saying that “food is the heaven of the
ordinary people,” and the Chinese in Hong Kong, like their countrymen
all over the world, do their remarkable best to impart a foretaste of
heaven to their cooking. Their food reaches the table in edible form,
and does not have to be slashed and hacked before the guest is ready to
eat it. Chopsticks are all that is needed to lift the food to the mouth.
(Foreigners take weeks to get over the shock of seeing a three-year-old
Chinese child manipulating chopsticks; it seems so infernally clever.)

Chinese restaurants of the colony serve four different kinds of cuisine:
Cantonese (from southern China); Shanghainese (from east-central China);
Pekinese (from northern China) and Szechuan (central China).

Cantonese is the type most familiar to Americans, since most of the
Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are owned by Southern Chinese. Chop suey
and chow mein are not Chinese at all, except that they were invented by
Chinese cooks in the United States to please their American customers.
None the less, Cantonese restaurants serve them in Hong Kong, as well
as egg rolls, egg foo yung, and sweet-and-sour pork, if only to keep the
visiting foreigners happy.

Authentic Cantonese dishes are strong on seafoods. Steamed fish seasoned
with ginger, mushrooms, spring onion, salted black soya beans, garlic,
salad oil, sherry, soy sauce, and sugar is a particular favorite. Shark’s
fin soup which includes not only the fins but crab meat, sliced chicken,
chicken broth, cornstarch, and peanut oil is a floating potpourri.

Other Cantonese delicacies are gut lee hai kim, shelled fat crabs dipped
in butter, fried in deep oil and served with a tart wine-and-vinegar
sauce; goo low yuk, the Cantonese name for sweet-and-sour pork; and ho
yau ngau yuk, slices of beef tenderloin quick-fried with an oyster sauce
and garnished with greens. Cantonese cooks are sparing in their use of
salt and grease.

A lunchtime specialty of Cantonese restaurants is dim sun (tiny bits of
food), which includes twenty different kinds of sweet and salty dishes;
among them, steamed biscuits with various meat fillings, rice cakes,
sweet buns and chicken rolls.

A few of the better Cantonese restaurants are: Tai Tung, 234 Des Voeux
Road; Golden City, 122-126 Queen’s Road Central; Miramar and Ambassador
(both in hotels), Nathan Road; and the Sky, 8 Queen’s Road Central.
They’re accustomed to tourists, and will help with the ordering, if need
be. Tai Tung is typical of the large Cantonese restaurants, catering to
family parties and group dinners. Kam Ling, at 484 Queen’s Road West in
the West Point section of the island, is another Cantonese giant.

Dinner at one of the multi-story Chinese restaurants may cause a shock
to the nerves from a series of violent and unexpected explosions. The
blasts, which sound like closely bunched machine-gun fire, seem to be
coming from right outside the window. No cause for alarm—it’s just a
string of firecrackers celebrating a wedding or some other joyous family
event. A solid string of firecrackers is suspended from a crane at the
top of the building, then lighted at the bottom; as the bursting crackers
eat their way up the string, a man with a guide rope slowly lowers the
string to keep the explosions at street level, thus preventing the paper
from blowing all over the surrounding streets. A portable, circular wire
screen is also placed around the explosion zone to confine the mess,
and a policeman stands by to see that the fireworks are being handled
according to law. All large restaurants have a swing-out firecracker
crane, and when they book a family party for a special celebration, a
police permit is obtained for the noise-making. The rattle of explosions
often lasts ten minutes or more, costing the host from $100 to $300,
depending on the length and elaborateness of the string.

Shanghainese cooking, which became more popular in Hong Kong after the
arrival of Shanghai refugees in the late 1940s, is sweeter and more salty
than Cantonese food, and uses a lot more oil. Its characteristic dishes
include: la dze jee ding, fresh chicken diced and fried with peppers and
flavored with soy sauce; chao ha yen, small shelled shrimp garnished with
green herbs or bean sprouts; and sze tze tao, pork sautéed with Chinese
white cabbage and often served in a casserole.

Beggar’s chicken is highly regarded by colony residents, both Chinese and
English, and can be ordered at Tien Hong Lau on Woosung Street, Kowloon;
or other Shanghai places such as Winter Garden, Nathan Road; or Four Five
Six, 340 King’s Road, North Point. Bamboo shoots, boiled crab and fried
eel, in season, are also Shanghai treats.

Szechuan food is hot and spicy, with such representative dishes as: suan
la tang, sour peppery soup; dried beef with peppers; and Szechuan duck,
deep-fried to cook both the skin and the flesh brown, spiced with pungent
black pepper and served with the meat so tender that it may be picked
off the bones with chopsticks. The Ivy, at 11 D’Aguilar Street, in the
Central District, is a familiar Szechuan establishment. There are others
in the Diamond Hill section of New Kowloon, north of Kai Tak Airport, but
one would probably need the guidance of a long-time colony resident to
find them.

The Pekinese cuisine is best known for Peking duck, served as a suitable
entrée for a meal that begins with assorted cold meats and proceeds
through chicken and walnuts to the celebrated bird. The duck is basted
with salad oil and roasted until brown, then the skin is dipped in soya
paste with scallions and wrapped in thin pancakes to be eaten as a kind
of sandwich; the meat is dipped and eaten in a similar manner and the
bones of the duck are made into a soup with cabbage and mushrooms. Toffee
apples and caramelized bananas (sugared and deep-fried, then immersed in
cold water) top off the feast.

Two of the popular Pekinese restaurants are the Peking, 1 Great George
Street, Causeway Bay; and the Princess Garden, Kimberley Road, Kowloon.

Hard to classify but too good to miss is the Mongolian steamboat, a
cooking utensil used for Northern and Cantonese dishes. Hot coals are
placed in the bottom of the vessel from which the heat rises through a
chimney at the center. Water or soup stock boils in a little open-top
tank that encircles the chimney. In the Cantonese style, tiny baskets
of sea food, meat and vegetables are hung into the boiling water until
they are done, then the contents are fished out with chopsticks. In the
Northern Chinese variation, a soup stock is put in the reservoir with
very thin slices of meat and sea food being dipped in until they are
cooked, which takes only a few seconds. Both styles use various sauces
and condiments to flavor the food after it is cooked and drawn out with
chopsticks. The steamboat sits in the center of the table, puffing
energetically, and every diner has a fine time dipping and fishing for
his food.

The Peking Restaurant at Causeway Bay and the Wong Heung Min, at
191-193 Gloucester Road along the Wanchai waterfront, are two steamboat
anchorages of note.

The various styles of Chinese cooking do not differ so radically that the
same restaurant cannot prepare food in two or more regional ways. Many
restaurants do so and quite capably. Americans sometimes choke at the
thought of bird’s nest soup, which is made from the saliva that swallows
use to build their nests. The saliva is separated from the straw and
feathers by boiling and evaporation, and the dried saliva extract is
added to a stock of chicken broth, combined with sliced ham and minced
chicken. The end-product, served in most Chinese restaurants, is a prince
among fine soups.

If one wants to prowl around a bit, he can locate a restaurant or two
that serves snake meat or civet cat. The Chinese have a theory that
they can make anything taste good with the right amount of cooking and
a judicious use of sauces, spices and condiments. What is more, they
usually prove to be correct. But a taste for snake meat is like the
appreciation of Cantonese opera; it takes years of conditioning.

For those who enjoy sukiyaki and other Japanese dishes, they are
available at the Tokyo Restaurant, on the 17th floor of the Imperial
Hotel, and in the dining room of the Daimaru department store at Causeway
Bay. The Bombay Restaurant at 19 Prat Avenue, Kowloon, has a good
selection of Indian dishes. For Russian specialties, especially fine
cakes and pastries, Rikki’s restaurant at Cameron and Carnarvon Roads,
Kowloon, is a plain but acceptable spot.

Assuming that one has had at least a one-week stay in Hong Kong, and has
applied himself to eating, shopping and sightseeing to the limit of his
energies, there is every reason to believe that he will go home happy,
stimulated, exhausted, and broke.

It is the common lot of Hong Kong’s 210,000 annual visitors.



Index


    Aberdeen, 58, 191, 195, 271, 281

    Aberdeen reservoirs, 165

    Acheson, Dean, 144

    Advisory Comm. on Corruption, 201, 222-5

    Afro-Asian Conference, 98

    Agriculture, 120, 177-8

    Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry Dept., 181

    Agriculture & Forestry Dept., 182, 184, 187

    Air France, 159

    Air-India International, 98

    Albert Path, 263

    Amah Rock, 279-80

    Ambassador Hotel, 130, 301

    American Marine, Ltd., 138-40

    American military visitors, 132

    Americans, 256-7

    Animals, 177-8

    Anslinger, Harry J., 94, 209

    Anson’s Bay, 21

    Anti-Corruption Branch, 223-4

    Ap Chau, 71-2

    Applegate, Richard, 94

    Apprentice system, 135

    Armed forces, China and Hong Kong, 87

    Army in “Double-Ten” Riots, 104

    _Arrow_, The, 28

    Artificial insemination of pigs, 188-9

    Atomic water distillation, 173

    Attlee, Clement, 76

    Austin Road, Kowloon, 103

    Au Tak, 159

    Aw Boon Haw, 272


    Bank of China, 263-4

    Bank of Hell, 276-7

    Bargains, 294

    Barnett, K. M. A., 59, 60

    Barton, Hugh, 148-9, 150, 152

    Beriberi, 42

    Beverage industry, 119

    Bias Bay, 27

    Black, Gov. Robert Brown, 11, 221-2

    Blackie, W. J., 175

    Blake Pier, 266

    Blind musicians, 253

    Blown, Capt. Phillip, 95-8

    Boca Tigris, 17, 19

    Bonham, Gov. S. G., 228-9

    Border, length of, 81

    Borgeest, Gus, 58-9, 60-5, 211

    Borgeest, Mona, 58-9, 60-5

    Borgeest, Naomi, 60

    Borghese, Villa, 62

    Boss, Martha, 55

    Botanic Garden, 29, 34, 181, 262-3

    Bowring, Sir John, 28-30

    Boxer Rebellion, 40, 74

    Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Assn., 67

    Boy Scouts, 63

    Brazil, 48

    Brinkley, David, 132

    British-Chinese intermarriage, 237-8

    British common law, 216

    British East India Co., 16, 18, 19

    British House of Lords, 227, 232-3

    British Overseas Airways, 133

    British rulers, their character, 257

    Buddhists, 254

    Building construction, 120, 130-1

    Bun Festival, 250-1, 282

    Byrnes, James F., 75


    Canada, 48

    Canned goods, 119

    Canton, China, 16-18, 27-9, 31, 37, 40, 241

    Cantonese, 176, 241-2

    Cantonese cuisine, 302-3

    Canton River, 17, 20, 22

    Cape Bastion, 95

    _Cape St. Mary_, 192

    CARE, 71-2, 191

    Carlton, Cedric, 95

    Carlton Hotel, 301

    Castle Peak, 79

    Castle Peak Exper. Station, 188-9

    Cater, Jack, 194

    Cathay, Ltd., 147

    Cathay Pacific Airways, 95-8, 133

    Catholic Relief Services, 61, 66-7

    Cattle raising, 118

    Causeway Bay, 37, 270

    _Celestial_, 116

    Celestial Empire, 18, 20, 41

    Central District, 49, 162, 262, 267, 269, 274, 293

    Central Market, 268

    Central Relief Records Office, 68

    Certificate of Origin, Comprehensive, 45, 123, 275, 291-3, 298

    Chadwick, Osbert, 36

    Chai Wan, 69

    Chan, S. Y., 188

    Chartered Bank, 264

    Chemicals industry, 124

    Cheng Chung Kay, 198

    Cheongsam, 294

    Cheung Chau, 195, 242, 250, 282

    _Cheung Hing_ incident, 91

    Cheung Sheung, 63

    Cheung Yung Festival, 253-4

    Chiang Kai-shek, 47, 52, 75

    China, Republic of, 41

    _China Mail_, the, 128, 225

    Chinese calendar, 244-5

    Chinese clannishness, 244

    Chinese dialects, 241-2

    Chinese, diversity of, 240-1

    Chinese food, 301-6

    Chinese New Year, 90, 245-7

    Chinese Temples Ordinance, 232

    Ching Ming Festival, 248-9

    Cholera, 25

    Chuenpee, 20

    Chunam, 169

    Church, Beatrice M., 146-7

    Church, Capt. Charles, 147

    Churchill, Winston S., 75

    Church World Service, 54, 67, 69, 70-1

    Chu Yuan, 252

    City Hall, 162, 265

    Clear Water Peninsula, 138

    Cochrane St., 274

    Collective bargaining, 135

    Colonial Office, 215, 217, 219, 225

    Colonial Secretary, 216

    Comm. on Chinese Law and Custom, 238

    Communist agitation, 92

    Communist “relief mission” riot, 92

    _Concord_ incident, 92

    Concubines, 236-40

    Confucianism, 254

    Connaught Road, 268

    Contract labor, 30-1

    Coop. Dvlpmt. and Fisheries Dept., 187

    Cosmetics industry, 119

    Cottage industries, 120

    Cotton spinning, 123

    Cotton weaving, 123

    “Covenanters,” Mission Church of Norway, 50

    Crime rates, U.S. and Hong Kong, 204-6

    Curfew in Double Ten riots, 106


    Dairy company, 119

    Dairy Farm, Ice & Cold Storage Co., 119, 73

    _Dampier_, H. M. S., 99

    Deep Bay, 81

    Deep Water Bay, 273, 281

    Department stores, 293

    Des Voeux Road, 263, 267

    Dixon, Donald, 94

    Dixon-Applegate incident, 93-5

    Donovan, Gen., 36

    Double Ten riots, 99-107

    Dragon Boat Festival, 251-2

    Drug addiction, 53, 63, 65, 212-3

    Drug addicts, treatment of, 211

    Dulles, John Foster, 98

    Dying-houses, 230

    Dynasty Salon, 141


    East Asian Film Festival, 145

    Electorate, 215

    Electrical apparatus industry, 124

    Electric batteries and flashlights, 119

    Electro-plating, 120

    Elliott, Capt. Charles, 20-2

    Employment, 120-1, 123-4, 133, 151, 152

    Enamelware, 120, 129

    Engineering construction, 120

    Epidemics, 23-4, 42

    Eu, Mr., 272-3

    Eucliffe and Euston castles, 272-3

    Executive Council, 148, 215-6

    Exports, 121


    Faith Hope Nursery, 70

    Fanling, 81

    Fan Pui, 167-8

    Far East Refugee Program, 73

    Farm acreage, 176-8

    Farm income, 178-9

    Federation of Veg. Marketing Coop. Societies, 180

    Feng, I., Enamelling Co., 128

    Films about Hong Kong, 132

    Filtration, 165

    Fire Brigade Building, 268

    Firecrackers, 304

    Fires, 23, 76-7, 92

    First Natl. City Bank of N.Y., 136

    Fish and Veg. Marketing Orgs., 58, 180, 191, 194

    Fishermen’s schools, 195, 199

    Fishing, Communist restrictions, 108

    Fishing industry, 120, 191, 198

    Floating restaurants, 271

    Florence Nightingale Award, 58

    Flour mills, 118

    Flower-growing, 188

    Fluoridation, 173

    Food manufacturing, 124

    Foreign Assets Control Division, U.S. Consulate General, 292

    Foreign Correspondents’ Club, 268

    Fou Wah Mills, 141

    Fowler’s Flying School, 159

    France, 38, 40

    Freezinhot Bottle Co., 128

    French, Graham, 71-2

    Frontier Division, Police, 81

    Fruit, 178

    Fukien, 27

    Fung Shui, 169, 244, 249, 272

    Furniture industry, 119


    Garment manufacturers, 123, 142

    Gates, Dr. Elbert E., Jr., 69, 70

    Gates, Mrs. June (Elbert E., Jr.), 69, 70

    General Post Office, 266

    Geneva Textile Agreement, 143

    Germany, 38, 40, 42

    Gifts, 292

    Ginger, preserved, 117-8

    Gloucester Hotel, 301

    Godfrey, Arthur, 132

    Gold rush, 30

    Goldsmiths’ shops, 275

    Government, character and efficiency, 216-7;
      Chinese view of, 217-8;
      weaknesses of, 217

    Government construction, 131, 159-60

    Government House, 33, 231, 257, 262-3

    Governor, powers of, 215-6, 225

    Graft and corruption, 201, 218-24

    Grandview Film Co., 145

    Grantham, Gov. Alexander, 93

    Grantham, Lady Maurine, 263

    “Great Leap Forward,” the, 86-7

    “Great Wall,” 261

    Green Island Cement Co., 118

    Grouting, 168, 170, 172

    Gunboats, Communist, 79, 80


    Hai Lee Chan, 196-7

    Hakka, 64, 176, 190-1, 242

    Handicrafts, 297

    Hang Hau, 140

    _Hangsang_ incident, 92

    Hang Seng Bank, 268

    Hankow Road, 297

    Happy Valley, 270

    Happy Valley Jockey Club, 270

    Harbor, 25, 156

    Harcourt, Rear Adm. C. H. J., 43

    Haven of Hope Sanatorium, 54, 57

    Heath, Police Commr. H. W. E., 209

    Hebe Haven, 171-2

    Hei Ling Chau, 64, 282

    Hennessy, Gov. John P., 34-6, 232

    Henningsen, Anker B., 136-8

    Henningsen, A. P., 136

    Henwood, Rosalind, 146

    Herklots, Dr. G. A. C., 179-80

    Heroin, 206-8, 210

    Hire cars, 277

    Hogan, Chief Justice Michael, 219-22, 225

    Hoklo, 176, 191, 242

    Holden, William, 132

    Hong Kong Annual Report (1956), 47

    Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf & Godown Co., 150

    Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp., 148, 151-2, 264

    Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co., 116-7

    Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry Co., 282

    Hong Kong Club, 263-5

    Hong Kong Commerce and Industry Dept., 122-3

    Hong Kong Council of Social Service, 68

    Hong Kong Cricket Club, 264

    Hong Kong Fed. of Trade Unions, 92

    “Hong Kong Fever,” 22

    Hong Kong Housing Authority, 77

    Hong Kong Housing Society, 78

    Hong Kong Island, 16, 19, 21-4, 59, 102, 111, 118, 130, 148, 158,
      167-8, 173, 260-2

    Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, 63, 67

    Hong Kong Rope Mfg. Co., 118

    Hong Kong Royal Engineers, 72

    Hong Kong Technical College, 135

    Hong Kong _Tiger Standard_, 144

    Hong Kong Tourist Assn., 133

    Hong Kong Tramway, 269

    Hong Kong University, 135, 192, 274

    Hong Kong Welfare Society, 61

    Hospitals, 273

    Hotels, 300-1

    Howatson, Fr. P. J., 67

    Hung Siu Tsuen, 31

    _Hyacinth_, 20


    Immigration, 48, 78-81

    Imperial Airways, 132, 159

    Imperial Hotel, 130, 299, 301, 306

    Imperial Preference, 116, 152

    Imports, 121

    India, 143

    Indian cuisine, 306

    Indians, 256

    Industrial expansion, postwar, 123-4

    Industries, early, 114-16

    Industry, 45;
      liabilities of, 115;
      natural assets, 115-16

    Inflation, 134

    Ingrams, Harold, 289

    International cuisine, 302

    Interpol, 212

    Irish governors, 32

    Irrigation, 166

    Ivory carvings, 297


    Japan, 38, 40, 42, 75, 122

    Japan Air Lines, 133

    Japanese cuisine, 306

    Japanese industry, 122

    Japanese trade, 30

    Jardine, Matheson & Co., 148-50

    Jardine Dyeing & Finishing Co., 149

    Jatar, Capt. D. K., 99

    Johnson, Linden E., 140

    Joseph Fund, 183

    Joss House Bay, 250

    Jubilee Reservoir, 165

    Junk Bay, 52-3, 138

    Junk Bay Medical Council, 55

    Junks, 139-40, 192-8


    Kader Industrial Co., 124-5

    Kadoorie, Lawrence and Horace, 72, 181-7

    Kadoorie Agric. Aid Assn., 182-7

    Kadoorie Agric. Aid Loan Fund, 182-7

    Kaifongs, 73, 211

    Kai Ho Kai, Sir, 159

    Kai Tak Airport, 25, 132-3, 159-61

    Kam Tin, 279

    Kee Heung Tea House, 286-7

    Keeshen, Commr., 21-2

    Kelly, Elma, 146-7

    Kennedy, Gov. Arthur, 33-4, 231

    Kennedy, President John F., 143

    Kennedy Town, 118, 269

    _Kert_, the, 94

    Kingman, Dong, 261-2

    Korean war, 44, 113-14, 117

    Kowloon Bay, 39, 159, 160-2

    Kowloon-Canton Railway, 91, 278, 299

    Kowloon Peninsula, 29, 159, 165, 168, 173, 260

    Kowloon Tong, 73

    Kowloon Walled City, 39, 49

    Krasner, Capt. Benjamin, 94

    Kuan Yin, 247-8

    Kwan, Adm., 21

    Kwangtung Province, 16, 241-2

    Kwong Lee Cheung Shipyard, 197

    Kwong On Bank, 275

    Kwun Tong, 111, 156, 161-2

    Kwun Tong Road, 161


    Laans, 179-80, 191

    Labor unions, 134-5

    Ladder Street, 275

    Ladrone Islands, 92

    Lak Ma Chau, 279

    Lamma Island, 79, 262

    Lamont, Capt. John, 116

    Lancelot, Sir, 266

    Land, 155-6, 158, 163

    Land Border Police, 81-2

    Language barrier, 228-9

    Lantau Island, 79, 94, 167, 261, 284-5

    Lappa Island, 79

    Lap Sap Mei, 94

    Lapworth, William, 139

    Law enforcement, 202-4, 210

    Lease of New Territories, 39, 111-2

    Leather industry, 120

    Lee Loy Shing, 198

    Legislative Council, 148, 215-6

    Lei Yue Mun pass, 25, 43, 53, 160

    Lema Island, 92

    Li Cheng Uk, 101-3, 105, 279

    Li Chy, 117

    Lin Dai, 145

    Ling Ting Island, 92

    Lin Tse-Hsu, 19, 20-1

    Lion Rock Tunnel, 172

    Li Po Chun, 268

    Li Po Chun Chambers, 268

    Li Sing, 268

    London _Times_, 23, 30

    Long Harbor, 285

    Lower Shing Mun Dam, 172

    Lo Wu, 42

    Lugard-Harlech Road, 259

    Luk Kwok Hotel, 301

    Lu K’u, Gov. of Canton, 15

    Lu Pan, 195

    Lutheran World Federation, 61

    Lutheran World Service, 71

    Lu Wang-tse, 94


    Macao, 11, 16, 26, 119

    Macao Ferry incident, 93

    Macao Ferry Pier, 269

    Macdonnell, Sir Richard G., 32-3, 230

    McDouall, John C., 238-40

    Machinery industry, 120

    MacIntosh, Police Commr. Duncan, 93

    Mandarin Textiles, Ltd., 140-1

    Man Kam Lo, Sir, 238

    Man Mo Temple, 231, 276

    Manson, Sir Patrick, 118

    Man Wa Lane, 275

    Ma On Shan, 285

    Mao Tse-tung, 47, 51, 85

    Marden, John L., 148, 152-3

    Marine Police, 78-80

    Marriage Registry, 173

    Marriages, the six kinds, 235-7

    Maryknoll Fathers, 66-7

    Match-making industry, 119

    Mechanized fishing boats, 192-8

    Men’s tailoring, 295-6

    Metal products, 123-4

    Mid-Autumn Festival, 252-3

    Mines and quarries, 156-7

    Mirs Bay, 27, 39, 81

    Mission to Lepers, 64

    Mongkok, 103-5

    Mongolian steamboat, 305-6

    Morris, Capt. Mike, 271

    Motion picture industry, 120, 144-6

    Movie theaters, 298-9

    Mui Tsai, 35, 232-4


    Nail and screw industry, 119

    Nanking, Treaty of, 29

    Napier, Lord, 18

    Nathan Road, 130-1, 278

    National Cash Register Co., 136

    Nationalist China, 39, 44

    Nationalist Chinese, 86, 91, 99, 101, 105-7

    Natural resources, 23-4

    _Nemesis_, 21

    Net Domestic Product, 121

    Newcombe, Madge, 68

    New Territories, 156, 158, 165-6, 170-1, 175-6, 183, 191, 242, 260-1,
      279

    Newton, John, 138

    Newton, Robert J., 138-40

    Newton, Whitney, 138-40

    Night clubs, 299

    Nim Shue Wan, 185

    Noodles, 66-7

    North Korea, 114

    North Point, “Little Shanghai,” 124, 270


    Oaths, swearing of, 229

    Opium, 17-8, 201-12, 228

    Ottawa Agreements of 1932, 116


    Paar, Jack, 132

    Pakistan, 143

    Pak Ngau Shek, 184-6

    Palmerston, Lord, 20-2

    Pan American World Airways, 132-3, 159

    Paquerette, Ltd., 136

    Park Hotel, 130, 299, 301

    Pa T’eng seiners, 198

    Peak Tram, 259-60, 262, 271

    Pedder Lane and Street, 267

    Pekinese cuisine, 305

    Peking, 29, 40

    Peking, Convention of, 29

    Peng Chau, 64, 119, 168, 242, 282, 283

    Peninsula Hotel, 130, 300-1

    Piracy, 16, 23, 27-8, 32-3, 42, 203

    Pirates, airborne, 27-8

    Plague, 25, 37-8, 40

    Plastic flowers, 124

    Plastic wares, 124

    _Pleasantville_ incident, 92

    Plover Cove, 171-2, 285

    Pneumonia, 41

    Pok Fu Lam, 164, 262

    Po Leung Kuk, 35, 233

    Police, nationality of, 213-4

    Po Lin Monastery, 170, 284-5

    Pond fish, 178, 189-90

    Population, 32, 38, 42, 76, 78, 150

    Population, density of, 24

    Portuguese, 16, 27, 229, 255-6

    Po Toi Island, 72, 108, 148

    Pottinger Street, 274

    President Hotel, 130

    Preventive Service, 208-10

    Prince’s Building, 263

    Princess Alexandra of Kent, 147

    Printing industry, 119, 124

    Prostitution, 205-6, 232-4

    Protestants, 254

    Public Enquiry Service, 221-2

    Public Pier, Kowloon, 266

    Public Works Dept., 170, 173, 263

    Purse-seining, 198


    Quarry Bay, 116

    Queen Mary Hospital, 273

    Queen’s Pier, 266

    Queen’s Road, 158, 266


    Radio and television shows about Hong Kong, 132-3

    Radio Hong Kong, 147

    Ramon Magsaysay Award, 64

    Rawling, S. B., 164

    Reclamation, 37, 156, 158-9, 162-3, 173

    Recorded workshops, 120

    Red China, 44-5

    Refugees, 24, 26, 31, 41-2, 48, 73-6, 78-83

    Registered factories, 120

    Relief expenditures, 73

    Rennie’s Mill Camp, 52-3, 55, 56, 138

    Repulse Bay, 272-3, 281

    Repulse Bay Hotel, 273, 301

    Reservations, hotel, 301

    Resettlement cottages, 77

    Resettlement estates, 77, 278

    Rice, 177

    Rice Bowl, the, 298

    Rickshaws, 266-7

    Ridehalgh, Arthur, 238-40

    Rio de Janeiro, 25

    Robinson, Gov. Hercules, 29-31, 164, 229

    Rodrigues, Dr. A. M., 211

    Roman Catholics, 254-5

    Romaniello, Msgr. John, 66-7

    Roosevelt, President F. D., 75

    Royal Naval Launch incident, 93

    Rubber products, 119, 124

    Ruling group, 214-5

    Russell & Co., 136

    Russia, 38, 40

    Russian pastries, 306-7

    Ryan, Fr. Thomas F., 179-81


    Sai Kung, 72

    _St. Bride’s Bay_ incident, 93

    Salt water use, 173

    Sanitary conditions, 36-7, 230-1

    Sargent, Sir Malcolm, 265

    Saunders, Doris, 141

    Schools, 32

    Seamen’s Strike of 1922, 26

    Seawall, 158

    Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, 209, 216, 221, 232

    Sedan chairs, 266

    Shakespeare, 113

    Sham Chun Reservoir, China, 110

    Sham Chun River, 38

    Sham Shui Po, 104, 213

    Shanghai, 115, 124, 149

    Shanghainese cuisine, 304

    Sha Tin, 172

    Shatin Heights Hotel, 301

    Shatin Valley, 279

    Shau Kei Wan, 191, 195-6, 269-71

    Shaw Brothers film studio, 145

    Shek Kip Mei, 61, 76-7, 101

    Shek Kwu Chau, 64, 211

    Shek Li Pui Reservoir, 165

    Shek-O, 273

    Shek Pik, 167-70

    Shell-button factories, 118

    Sheung Shui Exper. Sta., 188

    Shipbuilding, 30, 114, 116-17, 124

    Shipping, 30, 150

    Shoeshine Alley, 267

    Shopping arcades, 294

    Shopping areas, 292-3

    Sik-nin Chau, Sir, 211

    Silver Mine Bay, 168-9, 285

    Singer Sewing Machine Co., 136

    Sin Hoi, 263

    Sin Hung, 263

    Skau, Sister Annie M., 49-58

    Smale, Sir John, 35, 232

    Smallpox, 42

    Smith, Rev. George, 201-2, 204

    Smuggling immigrants, 79-81

    Social conditions, 24

    Society for Aid and Rehab, of Drug Addicts, 64

    _South China Morning Post_, 90

    South China Sea, 95

    South Sea Textile Mfg. Co., 126-7

    Sparkman & Stephens, Inc., 139

    Spies, Nationalist Chinese, 109

    Squatter shacks, population, 78

    Squeeze on parcels to China, 89-90

    Stalin, Josef, 75

    Standard of living, 134

    Stanley, 273

    Star Ferry terminals, 162, 265-6, 278

    Starling Inlet, 80

    Stather, Lt. Cmdr. K., 194

    Statue Square, 263, 265

    _Steel Rover_ incident, 91-2

    Stonecutters Island, 29, 111

    Suez Canal opening, 34

    Sullivan, Ed, 132

    Sung Wong T’oi, 74

    Sunshine Island, 60-5

    Sun Yat Sen, Dr., 41, 74

    Szechuan cuisine, 304-5


    Tai Hang Tung, 77, 103, 105

    Taikoo Dockyard & Engineering Co., 116-7, 270

    Taikoo Sugar Refinery Co., 118

    Tai Lam Chung Reservoir System, 165-7

    Tai Lung Forestry and Crop Experimental Station, 190

    Tai Mo Shan, 185

    Tai O, 285

    Tai Ping Rebellion, 31, 74

    Tai Po, 279, 285-6

    Tai Shui Hang Monastery, 285

    Tai Tam, 33, 72, 165

    Tai Tam Bay, 79

    Tai Tam Tuk, 165

    Taiwan, 48, 99

    Tak Sau coffin shop, 276

    Ta Kwu Ling Exper. Sta., 188

    Tang, P. Y., 124, 116-8

    Tanka, 176, 191, 202, 242-3

    Taoists, 254

    Tao-Kuang, Emperor, 21-2

    Tap Mun Chau, 285-6

    Tariffs, 24

    Taxis, 277

    Telegraph link to England, 34

    Temple Street, 286

    Textile exports, 128, 141-2, 149-50

    Three Fathoms Cove, 285

    T’ien Hou, 249-50, 260

    Tientsin, 29

    Tiger Balm Gardens, 272

    Ting, H. C., 124-6

    Ting, Prof., 61

    Tingle Athletic Assn., 265

    Tingle, Billy, 265

    Ti Ping, Emperor, 73-4, 261

    Tobacco industry, 120

    To Kwa Wan, 119

    Tolo Channel, 170-1, 285

    Tolo Harbor, 279

    Tong King, Gulf of, 192, 198

    Topography, 157

    Tourists, 243-4, 289-92

    Tourist trade, 131-33

    Trade, Hong Kong, 16-7, 88-9

    Transistor radios, 125

    Transportation industry, 120, 133

    Trawling, 198

    Trevelyan, Humphrey, 98

    Triads, 101-4, 106-7, 211, 213-4, 234

    Tsang, John Chao-ko, 109-10, 214

    Tsim Sha Tsui, 130, 278, 292, 298

    Tsing Yi, 72, 283-4

    Tsuen Wan, 69, 105-7, 126, 156, 162, 167-8

    Tsui, Paul K. C., 221-2

    Tuberculosis, 25, 273-4

    Tung, John, 124, 128-9

    Tung Lung Island, 250

    Tung Wah Hospital, 35, 38, 230-1

    Turner, Sir Michael, 148, 151-2

    Typhoons, 23, 34, 41, 60, 157-8

    Typhus, 25


    Union House, 263

    United Church of Canada, 61

    United Kingdom, 69

    United Nations, 44

    U.N. Econ. and Soc. Council, 212

    U.N. Embargo, 120

    United States, 39, 40, 48

    U.S. Navy, 87, 98

    U.S. Tariff Commission, 143-4

    Upper Kowloon, 100

    Upper Lascar Row, “Cat Street,” 275-6

    Urban Council, 148

    U Tat Chee, 117


    Vegetables, 177, 188

    Vehicular Ferry Pier, 268, 277, 281

    Victoria, Queen, 22, 117, 146, 270

    Victoria City, 164

    Victoria Park, 270

    Victoria Peak, 49, 158, 164, 230, 253, 259-62, 299

    Views of Hong Kong, 299

    _Volage_, 20


    Wages and working conditions, 133-5

    Wah Yan College, 180

    Walla-Walla, 265-6

    Wanchai, 49, 158, 260, 270

    _Wan Fu_, 271, 281-2

    Water supply, 23-4, 155-6, 163-73

    Weather, 157

    Welfare handicraft shops, 298

    Wells, water, 164, 166, 183

    Western District, 231, 269, 274, 277

    Wheelock, Marden & Co., 148, 152

    Wild animals, 280

    Wing-Hong Cheung, 194, 197

    Wing On Street, 274

    Wing Sing Street, 275

    Women, 33-5, 146-8;
      executives and professional, 147;
      in industry, 146-7;
      status and treatment, 234-5

    Women’s clothing, 296

    Wong, Steve, 97-8

    Wong Nai Chung, 165

    Wong Tai Sin, 68-9

    Wood-carving shops, 297

    Wooden chests, 297

    Woods, Aileen, M.B.E., 147-8

    Workmen, quality of, 135

    Workmen’s Compensation, 134

    World Health Organization, 212

    _World of Suzie Wong, The_, 301

    World Refugee Year, 69

    Wyndham Street, 266


    Yalta Conference, 75

    Yangtze River, 21

    Yau Ma Tei, 37, 213, 281

    Yee Hop Shipyard, 196

    Yuen Long, 119, 187, 189, 279

    Yu Yat-sum, 189-90

    YWCA, 70





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