The Hong Kong History Podcast

In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage.

The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong Kong, usually began with expats doing their thing…and too often doing it with a nasty racist bias. That’s partly because one leg of that arrival, as it were, lay in the importance of sport to British military life. Both routes led sooner or later to the establishment of clubs and associations that did not exclude people on grounds of their ethnicity…well, not so much.

On the way we’ll see how the origins of one of Hong Kong’s best known sporting outfits – the South China Athletic Association – had its origins in what became China’s first national football team. 

You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network –  slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B. But if one means what we’re all familiar with, timetabled services run by companies with several identical or similar vessels, the story is more nuanced. Ferries were right in there at the start with respect to linking Hong Kong to the PRD. But as far as links within HK itself - what most of us think of as a ferry - they’re actually quite a late comer. By the time the first ferry service of the sort we’d all recognize started up, modern Hong Kong was over half a century old. How come? It’s an intriguing story of changing maritime technology on the one hand and, on the other, the effects of socio-economic change on demand for properly organized local public transport ferry services.

Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But, assisted by a bit of fossicking in archives, maps can also tell stories all by themselves. Maps of Hong Kong tells lots of them. Like the way the small island everyone these days knows as Ap Lei Pai came to have that name…and how it’s the wrong one. Or how a reservoir for a flour mill came to be called Little Hawaii. Or that Round Island (Ngan Chau) off Repulse Bay got be charted as Ma Kong for 80 years and longer. Or why Tai Mo Shan was once called Lantau Falso. Or that Violet Hill on Hong Kong Island nearly became Mount Hamilton. And, of course, that Hong Kong Island wasn’t called that at all.

1.     Wrecks were pretty commonplace in 1892 and were at best usually a nine days wonder. However, the loss of the P&O Company’s SS Bokhara was something else. News stories ran all over the world for almost two years. A presentation silver plate was sent by Queen Victoria to the head of the rescuers of the few survivors. There was involvement by the Governor of Hong Kong, a visit by the C-in-C of the Royal Navy’s China Station and the presence of three ships of the Royal Navy. A publicly subscribed memorial was put up by the British Army’s Royal Engineers on an uninhabited islet in China. Memorial windows were dedicated in the cathedrals of Shanghai and Hong Kong. But why? Well, the wreck drowned most of the Hong Kong interport cricket team on their way home from Shanghai. And it was carrying gold bullion for the HSBC and the Sassoon family worth almost HK$500,000,000 today. Money and cricket featured large in the British Empire. Cricket representing supposed Imperial values. Money representing the reality.

Shanghai and Hong Kong have been the starting point for more ‘sail a Chinese built junk across the seas’ than anywhere else. Hans van Tillburg has identified sixteen 19th century junks reported arriving on the west coast of North America. I’ve tallied thirty three reported on from around 1900 to c.1990. In Hong Kong the story starts with the Keying in 1846 and ends – maybe – with the Taiping Princess/Taiping Gongzhu in 2008. On the way would be the ill-fated voyages of Richard Halliburton’s Sea Dragon and Aussie J. Peterson’s Pang Jin. The botanical expedition followed by the wartime service of the whopping Cheng Ho – the only junk ever to serve in the US Navy. The first solo crossing of the North Pacific under sail in the High Tea. The Rubia that sailed to Barcelona…and the Golden Lotus that made it to Auckland. The ill-fated Tai Ki. There was the 1950s Hong Kong Junk Racing Club, with more modest local ambitions. The Chuen Hing Shipyard in Shaukeiwan that built at least four modified junks for export to the USA. There was a lot of cross-cultural fertilization going on too – the junks for export were designed by Ronald Clegg, Butterfield and Swire’s Radio Supervisor!

There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, for example, but looking at all the known ships that have had ‘Hong Kong’ in their names (about 127 of them) offers interesting perspectives on Hong Kong’s maritime story. Who called their ships after our home city? Not the big local colonial shipowners like Jardine’s or Butterfield & Swire is one answer. The ship names with Hong Kong in them are revelatory not just of Hong Kong’s story either. Looking at the kinds of ships and when they were in business tells us a lot about the development of the technical worlds of ships and cargo carrying in general. Developments on which the fortunes of Hong Kong were built and that are still important today.

Imperialist Britain spread modern-style, rules governed, organized sport – very much the creation of a newly leisured, comparatively affluent early Victorian world – all over the world. One of those sports, though never up there in popularity and participation like football and cricket, was sailing. Hong Kong was a home for recreational sailing almost as soon as the British grabbed it in 1841. It also became a home of local Chinese boatbuilders who learned to build – and often improve – Western designs. Via a fellow Hong Kong sailor, a few years ago I was given access to a late 19th century yacht’s logbook from Xiamen. It opened up the world of 19th century expats in China, of the building of western style boats in 19th century Hong Kong…and revealed how Waglan lighthouse was built by a relation of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce, who also designed a royal palace in Seoul, South Korea.

The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are not movers and shakers. Yet it is those lives, humdrum and invisible though they often are, that actually make moving and shaking possible. In being moved and shaken, it’s we nobodies who actually do the moving and shaking. Chance can sometimes reveal one of the moved and shaken caught up in larger historical patterns…and through their personal stories lead to undermining received assumptions. In 2015 a small brass label was discovered under five metres of mud in Victoria Harbour. It belonged to a Royal Marine called Edgar Goodman. His story reveals that HMS Tamar was not always Hong Kong’s 20th century naval base…and that there were Hong Kongers at Gallipoli.

Almost wherever you are there will be streets named after town worthies, or national eminences, or significant entities and events. Sometimes, particularly in larger towns, the names can reveal additional historical detail. What the main trades were and where they concentrated, for example. In Hong Kong over one hundred street names reveal details of Hong Kong’s maritime story, particularly in its early decades. One of them, long lost – or perhaps mislaid – I have recently rediscovered. The streets – there were two – were named after a major early Chinese shipowner, mover and shaker. Kwok Acheong may not now be much celebrated, but he was one of the founders of the Tung Wah Hospital and at one time Hong Kong’s biggest taxpayer. 

Over around a century and a half Hong Kong’s story has been told by professional and amateur historians. A few names became scores following the explosion in Hong Kong studies after the 1970s. Today there are as many and more netizens and bloggers. We don’t often know much detail about any of the handful of colonialist pioneers of the 1890-1960 period. They’re just authors’ names. Most of them are interesting though, and knowing about them helps one ‘read’ the histories they wrote. One of them, who wrote under the byline of ‘Colonial’ in the 1930s SCMP, and often seen as a sort of early begetter of the late 20th century Hong Kong Studies movement, illustrates the point well. Vincent Jarrett’s life is revelatory of the complex cultural reality and extended geographical links that have always been a signal feature of Hong Kong.