R emembered HONG KONG
Fergal Keane
HONG KONG REMEMBERED
From Past Imperative to Future Indicative u
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Few cities have encompassed, in so short a span of time, as much change as Hong Kong witnessed in the 155 years that separated its inception as a British colony in 1842 from its return to China in 1997. By the early 1930s, as this aerial photograph of Central District shows, the shoreline had advanced several hundred metres into the harbour, supporting a diversity of ornamental architecture which, with the exceptions of Flagstaff House (upper left), St. John’s Cathedral and the adjoining French Mission Building (mid left), the Supreme Court (centre left) and the Cenotaph (then located on the waterfront), have since entirely disappeared. Even Government House, seen just to the top right, below the Botanical Gardens, was destined for complete remodelling in the course of the Japanese occupation of 1941-45. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
Gilding the Lily u
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If one were to select a single escutcheon that branded Hong Kong with an international identity, recognised even by those who had never been here, it would have to be the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, seen here in its third manifestation of 1935. It stood as the city’s tallest landmark until, in 1952, the Bank of China was built directly alongside, seemingly in a determined attempt to overshadow it. As if rising to the challenge, ‘The Bank’, as it was already widely known, gilded its own lily the following year by wearing a crown and other regalia to celebrate the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Its immediately adjacent rival, representing the new People’s Republic of China that had sprung into being four years earlier, studiously ignored these ostentatious trappings, reserving its annual display of festive livery for the 1st October celebrations marking the communist government’s rise to power in 1949. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
Building Blocks of Civil and Military Authority u
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Murray Barracks, in the foreground of this picture, were constructed between the 1840s and 1874, within the area presently bounded by Cotton Tree Drive, Kennedy Road and Queensway. Together with Victoria Barracks Wellington Barracks and Admiralty Dock, they formed a key link in the British military stronghold that long remained entrenched in the heart of the city. Part of the land was returned to the Hong Kong government in 1967 and most of the rest was transferred to government ownership in 1979. Beyond the barracks, to the left, stood the colonnaded and cupolatopped structure of the French Mission Building, built on a site that had originally been home to the first Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Pottinger, who resided here from 1843 to 1846. This site would subsequently be occupied by Augustine Heard and Co., Hong Kong’s first American trading firm, established here in 1842. To the right was the Art Deco structured Bank, bounded by the Supreme Court in the foreground and Prince’s and Queen’s Buildings in the background. At extreme right was the Hong Kong Club and, just in front of it, the Hong Kong Cricket Club. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
A More Measured Pace u
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In the less hurried early years between the two World Wars, when automobiles were infrequent and rickshaws still predominated, it was perfectly acceptable for both to park in the middle of Chater Road. Looking west along this thoroughfare towards Jardine House, where trams were in operation along Des Voeux Road at its junction with Pedder Street, one saw in the foreground (left) Royal Building with Alexandra Building beyond, and opposite these St George’s, York and Union Buildings. Jardine House was the second of Jardine’s buildings on this corner site. The China Mail had lamented the passing of its predecessor when that twostoreyed colonial landmark was demolished in 1907 to make way for this more spacious four-storeyed building, designed by Palmer and Turner in a cheerfully eclectic, Italianate style. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
The Spell of the Dragon u
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Pièce de rÊsistance of the 1935 Silver Jubilee parade was this extravagantly long dragon, sinuously coiling its way amid the boisterous crowd as if swimming through a turbulent sea. The predominant colours for street attire were black and white, and it was fashionable in those days for men to wear pith helmets, also known as solar topees, and for women to employ umbrellas, in both cases as protection from the sun. Every window ledge, balcony and awning offered a vantage point from which to observe the procession, in some cases so overloaded as to endanger their occupants. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
Coolie Town u
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Travelling west along the Praya towards Kennedy Town, one penetrated the heart of what was unmistakably “coolie town�. Here the impetus of the ceaseless city became less cerebral and more physical, its evidence no longer concealed behind shuttered windows and within the deeper recesses of vaulted offices but right out there in the street and more intensely tangible. Here the crowded waterfront was thronged with shipping of all shapes and sizes, from ocean steamers to river barges. Here, bare-backed or blackshirted, cane-hatted and unshod labourers toiled to drag their heavy cargoes betwixt dockside and store front, with helpers placing and removing wheel blocks every few yards to prevent the heavy loads from rolling backwards. u
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HONG KONG REMEMBERED
The Closing Chapter u
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The last of old Hong Kong drained away into the recesses of history when the remnants of its armadas of junks sailed over the horizon into the oblivion of their final sunset. Until steadily replaced by motorised trawlers in the sixties and seventies, fleets of these stately vessels would wend their labyrinthian courses out to deeper waters of the South China Sea from their home ports of Aberdeen, Cheung Chau, Castle Peak, Sai Kung and Tai Po, where this assemblage was photographed in 1959, with Tolo Harbour as its backdrop. What should have been a legacy is now barely a memory. Today the junk lives on only in the few specious facsimiles that continue to ply Hong Kong waters as pleasure craft and in the increasingly archaic and irrelevant logo of the Hong Kong Tourism Board. u
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Hong Kong, as it once was, is now well beyond the reach of living memory. Nobody alive can claim to have experienced this city in its classic age, when it captured the imaginations of such writers as Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Jules Verne. All we have to go on is the written word and the photographic plate. With the very few exceptions of the scattered structures that survive, virtually all of the physical evidence of that age has been swept away as if it never was. Their Hong Kong may have been very different to the one we know, but it was just as valid. And without it, we would have been denied our legacy and left with nothing to build upon.
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