easels aboard their anchored ships, did their best to idealize it. It was only when you went ashore, expecting perhaps a trim and finished colonial seaport, that you realized how crude and straggly a place it was, and how infinitely remote from home. It was more like a gold-rush town than an imperial foundation. Victoria, the main settlement, extended sporadically for about a mile along the shoreline, in a muddle of the orderly and the haphazard – here a few pleasant houses or some well-organized offices, next door a wasteland or a shambles – at one corner a Baptist church or the Catholic Chapel of the Conception, at another a sleazy pub. Untidy mat-shed structures were all over the place. Camps and depots were deposited wherever the military authorities felt like it. Queen’s Road, the settlement’s main thoroughfare, was hardly more than a rough track still, in dry weather thick with dust, in wet ankle-deep in mud, and its spasmodic grandeur was interspersed with warehouses, mat-sheds and knock-about seamen’s taverns.
More disconcerting still to the ingenuous new arrival, the streets of Victoria were full of Chinese – hawkers with pack-ponies, country boys riding water-buffaloes, coolies with long shoulder-poles, drunks, beggars and idlers. Only a few hundred yards along Queen’s Road, Chinatown began, a muddle of sheds and squatters’ huts, with ramshackle theatres, opium divans, schools, temples formal and improvised, duck-pens, pig-sties, gambling halls, eating-stalls, and all the tumbled accessories of Chinese life – a terrible shock to unaccustomed European sensibilities. By 1845 there was a shifting population of some 20,000 Chinese on the island, including not only merchants of substance, artisans and tradesmen of every kind, thousands of Tanka boat-people and Lamqua the well-known portraitist from Macao (whose sign proclaimed him Handsome Face Painter), but also, or so it sometimes seemed, half the riff-raff of Guangzhou.
The British thought the proximity of this motley crowd terribly unhealthy. The colony’s first decade was full of ups and downs – typhoons, fires, shifts of confidence – but the colonists were chiefly troubled by disease. Quite apart from the toxic emanations of Chinatown, Hong Kong’s climate was authoritatively defined, by the Hong Kong Directory itself, as ‘about the most unhealthy upon the face of the globe’. Some said the very island rocks gave out pernicious influences. Malaria and dysentery were endemic, there were frequent epidemics of typhus and cholera, and among the military garrison, in particular, the death-rate was appalling. In 1842 one contingent of Scottish soldiers was described poignantly as being no more than ‘a mass of emaciated dying lads’, and in 1848 one in five of the European soldiers died.
No wonder few early observers had much good to say about the place. Robert Montgomery Martin, an early Colonial Treasurer, arriving in 1844, dismissed it almost at once as ‘small, barren, unhealthy and valueless’, and thought it ought to be handed back to China. Robert Fortune, author of
Three Years’ Wanderings in China
, spoke disparagingly of its stunted trees, lack of birds and superfluity of wild goats, and feared that ‘viewed as a place of trade’ it was sure to be a failure. Orlando Bridgeman, a subaltern of the 98th Regiment, thought it ‘a horrid place – inferior to Sierra Leone for the fact of its being less healthy, less amusing and less near England’. Undoubtedly Hong Kong had yet to prove itself as an asset to the Crown. It consisted still only of Hong Kong Island itself, and in 1845 fewer than 600 Europeans, including some ninety women, had yet decided to risk their fortunes or their lives in the colony.
It was not like other colonies: the presence of that far larger Chinese community, itself a community of settlers, with its smells and its noises, its disregard for privacy and its unsettling air of indifference, made the infant
More disconcerting still to the ingenuous new arrival, the streets of Victoria were full of Chinese – hawkers with pack-ponies, country boys riding water-buffaloes, coolies with long shoulder-poles, drunks, beggars and idlers. Only a few hundred yards along Queen’s Road, Chinatown began, a muddle of sheds and squatters’ huts, with ramshackle theatres, opium divans, schools, temples formal and improvised, duck-pens, pig-sties, gambling halls, eating-stalls, and all the tumbled accessories of Chinese life – a terrible shock to unaccustomed European sensibilities. By 1845 there was a shifting population of some 20,000 Chinese on the island, including not only merchants of substance, artisans and tradesmen of every kind, thousands of Tanka boat-people and Lamqua the well-known portraitist from Macao (whose sign proclaimed him Handsome Face Painter), but also, or so it sometimes seemed, half the riff-raff of Guangzhou.
The British thought the proximity of this motley crowd terribly unhealthy. The colony’s first decade was full of ups and downs – typhoons, fires, shifts of confidence – but the colonists were chiefly troubled by disease. Quite apart from the toxic emanations of Chinatown, Hong Kong’s climate was authoritatively defined, by the Hong Kong Directory itself, as ‘about the most unhealthy upon the face of the globe’. Some said the very island rocks gave out pernicious influences. Malaria and dysentery were endemic, there were frequent epidemics of typhus and cholera, and among the military garrison, in particular, the death-rate was appalling. In 1842 one contingent of Scottish soldiers was described poignantly as being no more than ‘a mass of emaciated dying lads’, and in 1848 one in five of the European soldiers died.
No wonder few early observers had much good to say about the place. Robert Montgomery Martin, an early Colonial Treasurer, arriving in 1844, dismissed it almost at once as ‘small, barren, unhealthy and valueless’, and thought it ought to be handed back to China. Robert Fortune, author of
Three Years’ Wanderings in China
, spoke disparagingly of its stunted trees, lack of birds and superfluity of wild goats, and feared that ‘viewed as a place of trade’ it was sure to be a failure. Orlando Bridgeman, a subaltern of the 98th Regiment, thought it ‘a horrid place – inferior to Sierra Leone for the fact of its being less healthy, less amusing and less near England’. Undoubtedly Hong Kong had yet to prove itself as an asset to the Crown. It consisted still only of Hong Kong Island itself, and in 1845 fewer than 600 Europeans, including some ninety women, had yet decided to risk their fortunes or their lives in the colony.
It was not like other colonies: the presence of that far larger Chinese community, itself a community of settlers, with its smells and its noises, its disregard for privacy and its unsettling air of indifference, made the infant
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