by Joanna Waley-Cohen
Reprinted from Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855 - 1910, 1997, Asia Society Galleries, published in conjunction with a photo exhibit, Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855 - 1910,, showing at the Asia Society Galleries in New York from June 11 to August 17, 1997. Edited for AskAsia.
Copyright, Asia Society 1997.
Related Lesson
Chronology
Hong Kong fulfilled multiple roles in the first half-century or so after it became a British colony in 1842. During that period, Hong Kong occupied the front line in the development of Chinese nationalism; it served as a major conduit for Chinese emigration; and it offered many Chinese their first exposure to both good and bad aspects of "the West."
In 1842, China ceded to Britain forever the island of Hong Kong, located just off China's southeast coast. This forced transfer of sovereignty was one provision of the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) that followed China's defeat in the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War (1839\-42), a treaty usually described as the first in the series of "unequal treaties" that the Western powers and Japan imposed upon China between 1842 and 1919. Within twenty years, the 1860 Convention of Peking (Beijing) that concluded the second Opium War (1858\-60) led among other things to a further permanent cession of territory by China to Britain, this time of the Kowloon Peninsula, on the Chinese mainland opposite Hong Kong Island. In 1898, as the Western nations and Japan scrambled to establish competing spheres of influence in China in the wake of China's defeat by Japan in 1895--a wide-ranging landgrab that prompted many Chinese to express the fear that their country would be "carved up like a melon" by the foreign powers--Britain insisted that the government of the Qing dynasty (1644\-1911) grant a ninety-nine year lease on the "New Territories," beyond Kowloon. No rent was provided for in this second Convention of Peking, in which Britain confined itself to taking a lease rather than outright possession in order to discourage competing foreign powers from seizing control over other Chinese territory.(see note 1) Under a Joint Declaration made in 1984 between Britain and China, in which Britain acknowledged Hong Kong's dependence on the mainland for such vital resources as drinking water, the entire colony--Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories--reverts to China upon the expiration of the lease on the New Territories at midnight on 30 June 1997.
Britain and China fought the Opium Wars over China's right to restrict foreign trade in general and the opium trade in particular. In the eighteenth century, the European passion for things Chinese, particularly silk, ceramics and tea, had led to a thriving international commerce that was highly profitable for China. However, the Manchu Qing dynasty restricted foreign merchants to the southeastern city of Canton (Guangzhou). They did not do so out of any disdain for commerce, as is sometimes mistakenly assumed, but because, given spreading European colonialism in Asia, they were extremely wary about the possibly detrimental effect on imperial control of permitting an unrestrained foreign presence in China.
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the China trade was dominated by the British East India Company, to whom Parliament had granted a commercial monopoly. But the Company fell into financial difficulties because they had to pay for Chinese products almost entirely in silver, owing to a lack of Chinese enthusiasm for European merchandise. British traders then hit on the idea of exchanging opium, grown in Britain's colonial possessions in India, for Chinese goods. In order to avoid the appearance of direct involvement in the opium trade, the East India Company developed an elaborate system whereby it sold licenses to trade in Indian opium to private Western traders. These men deposited the silver they derived from the opium trade in China with Company agents in Canton in return for letters of credit, and the Company then used the silver to buy Chinese goods to sell in England.
This strategy produced quick results. Within a few decades the once favorable balance of trade had shifted against China. The Qing government's imposition in 1800 of a ban on importing opium was followed by a second in 1813 that outlawed opium use, but in vain. By then opium was much too pervasive and the profits from the burgeoning trade much too considerable to be readily abandoned. A massive illicit trade sprang up between, on the one hand, British and other Western suppliers, who anchored outside Chinese harbors, and, on the other, local dealers willing to incur the risks of buying opium from the foreigners' ships and distributing it through existing networks of interregional trade. Opium addiction continued to spread rapidly, and silver poured out of instead of into China.
This reversal was, of course, partly the consequence of aggressive foreign trading in opium in defiance of Chinese prohibitions, particularly after British abolition of the East India Company's monopoly in 1834 caused the rapid expansion of the opium trade. But there were also other reasons. One was a slump in the tea trade. Another related to the fact that the domestic situation within China had for some time been deteriorating as the result, directly or indirectly, of the doubling of the population in the eighteenth century and its surpassing three hundred million. This extraordinary demographic growth had produced unprecedented problems of overcrowding, intensifying competition for limited resources and leading to increased crime, which the overtaxed Qing government was ill-equipped to combat. The consequent social and economic dislocations created a widespread malaise within China, which in turn disposed many Chinese to seek new solutions, including opium. Thus at the very moment the British began pushing opium in China, conditions within China provided them with a receptive market.
In 1839, after wide-ranging debates on the relative merits of legalizing or banning opium, China launched vigorous efforts to eradicate the opium trade. British traders' refusal to stop trafficking in opium led to their expulsion first from Canton and then from nearby Macao (Aomen), an island occupied as a trading base by Portugal, with tacit Chinese consent, since the sixteenth century.(see note 2) For some time, British merchants had been proposing the establishment of a commercial outpost close by the Chinese coast but out of reach of Qing jurisdiction. Hong Kong, a small island not far from Canton, was an ideal location for this purpose. For it boasted a fine, well-sheltered, deepwater harbor, the only one between Shanghai and Britain's existing colonial possession in Singapore, and it lay right on the main trading route to China.
In 1841 a small party of British occupied Hong Kong Island, despite the energetic resistance of the approximately four thousand inhabitants, who with the encouragement of Qing authorities in Canton poisoned wells and refused to cooperate with the British in any way. The establishment of Hong Kong as a colony was much desired by British China traders but it met with considerable ambivalence in London, where policymakers saw little advantage to taking over a "barren island with scarcely a house on it." The governments of both China and Britain rejected the draft treaty of Chuenpi, drawn up that year between the Qing governor-general based in Canton, Qishan, and British trade superintendent Charles Elliott, which among other things purported to cede Hong Kong to Britain. But the traders remained on the island, proclaiming it British territory, and since the beleaguered Qing authorities were too weak to expel them, de facto Hong Kong became a British possession. The formal transfer of sovereignty under the Treaty of Nanking thus acknowledged a preexisting reality.
Among other things, the Treaty of Nanking also provided that, in addition to Canton, China would open four more ports to foreign trade: Ningpo (Ningbo), in Zhejiang province; Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen), in Fujian province; and Shanghai, strategically located where the Yangzi river meets the sea. Shanghai rapidly superseded antiforeign Canton and the others as the leading center for international trade and for British economic interests in China. But unlike Hong Kong, Shanghai never became a British colony.
In 1858 Britain and France took advantage of a pretext to launch a second Opium War intended to compel treaty revision. Hong Kong was a key base of Western operations in this war, which was disastrous for China. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) and its immediate successor, the 1860 Convention of Peking, contained many unfavorable provisions in addition to the transfer of sovereignty over Kowloon. They stipulated for the opening of ten new treaty ports, including four inland along the Yangzi river as far as Hankou (subject to the defeat of the Taiping rebels still in control of some parts of the region); the establishment of permanent Western diplomatic establishments in Peking; toleration of Christianity; permission for foreigners, including missionaries, to travel throughout China, by road or by steamship; the limitation of customs and inland transit duties on foreign goods; and another huge indemnity. And although it was still illegal under Qing law to sell or take opium, the treaty imposed conditions on the opium trade, including a limited import duty.
The Colonial British Administration
Britain administered Hong Kong through a governor appointed by the Colonial Office in London. The governor was aided by two councils, executive and legislative, and, after 1856, a Chinese-speaking registrar-general with particular responsibility for liaison with the Chinese community. Until 1880, no Chinese officially sat on either council, although after 1850 unofficial and hence effectively powerless Chinese members were appointed to the legislative council. British residents of Hong Kong resisted sharing power with Chinese residents, partly out of a sense of manifest superiority, and partly because of a concern that to do so would lead to an insidious transfer of control back to China. At first the colonial authorities mostly left the Chinese community to its own devices, so long as it did not pose a threat to internal order or external trade. They endorsed the formation of elite Chinese organizations that would serve the interests of the entire Chinese community in Hong Kong and would represent it in any dealings with the British. Thus their control over the Chinese residents of Hong Kong remained, for the time being, largely indirect. As we will see, however, towards the latter part of the nineteenth century British authorities began to integrate members of the Chinese elite into the colonial government, thereby facilitating closer direct control over the entire Chinese community.
British resistance to the establishment of any kind of formal Chinese presence in Hong Kong remained strong throughout the first half-century or so of the colony's existence. China's desire to establish a consulate in Hong Kong to represent its substantial Chinese population was a leading aspect of the vigorous diplomatic activism of the late Qing. But the British, assuming that the main function of such an office would be espionage of one kind or another, dragged their feet for two decades on this question. They feared that the presence of a Chinese official in Hong Kong, the vast majority of whose population was Chinese, would undermine their own authority. Chinese negotiators were at pains to point out that it was untenable to deny the Chinese a consulate, given the presence of Japanese and other diplomats in the colony. A Chinese consulate eventually opened in Hong Kong in 1891.
Hong Kong as a Center of International Commerce and Emigration
The British established their colony in Hong Kong for "Diplomatic, Commercial, and Military purposes"(see note 3) and they ran it according to the principles of "free" trade that they wished all Asia would embrace. Hong Kong's early growth was driven primarily by the expansion of international commerce between the Western nations and East Asia. As a British colony, Hong Kong's commercial development benefited distinctly from Britain's rise to predominance as an industrial and mercantile power. And the maritime trading route between Europe and East Asia was greatly shortened in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal.
At first Hong Kong served primarily as a way-station for the triangular opium trade between Britain, India and China. But other trading areas--notably Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States-- and other commodities--textiles, sugar, rice, weapons and munitions--came to be just as important. By 1880 approximately one-third of China's growing foreign trade passed through Hong Kong.
The dual expansion of trading partners and trading commodities in the second half of the nineteenth century was in part the result of an even more important aspect of Hong Kong's commercial expansion: its role as one of the leading ports of embarkation for Chinese emigrating overseas. For Hong Kong served as a major conduit for outbound Chinese. Under Qing law emigration was still technically illegal, but it was not difficult for Chinese to reach the nearby foreign enclaves of British Hong Kong or Portuguese Macao. Once would-be emigrants arrived in either place, there was little that Qing authorities could do to prevent their leaving for points overseas.
The reality was that they made little effort to do so. Many Qing officials valued emigration as a safety valve in their heavily populated provinces. From their point of view, it was clearly preferable for impoverished people to leave altogether than to become vagabonds, bandits or state dependents. Furthermore, emigrants often sent home infusions of money that helped the overburdened local and national economies. So the emigration prohibitions went largely ignored. (see note 4)
Qing officials' hope that the overseas Chinese would prove to be a source of funding was soon realized. By as early as the 1880s, annual remittances to China from abroad amounted to as much as twenty million dollars. Perhaps half of this flowed to the Canton area, from which a majority of emigrants hailed. But actual remittances were only a part of the story. Trade funneled to China as the result of connections with the overseas community was estimated at several million dollars annually. This benefit flowed in particular to Canton and Hong Kong; although the latter was under British rule, the livelihood of a majority of its population depended on international trade.
Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong Society
Hong Kong society soon formed into three distinct groups divided along both racial and class lines. These groups were, first, the Chinese elite, consisting primarily of the commercially successful, not of scholars as in China proper; second, and most numerous, the Chinese workers, ranging from stevedores to rickshaw pullers to domestic servants; and third, the British community, at first composed mainly of members of the armed forces and scions of the great merchant companies whose fortunes were built on the opium trade. There were other groups, including assorted Europeans and Americans, Sikh policemen imported from British India and Parsee and South East Asian traders and seamen.
Neither the Chinese nor the British community in Hong Kong was particularly cohesive; each was characterized by class distinctions in the colony as in the home society. The Chinese community was further subdivided by dialect differences between Cantonese, Hokkienese from Amoy and Teochiu from Swatow (Shantou). As for the British community in Hong Kong, opium princes and military men were only its most conspicuous members. A record dating from as early as 1846 shows that among the British already in the colony were "shipbuilders, lawyers, auctioneers, newspaper editors, and storekeepers." The occupations of other known British inhabitants shows that early settlers did not rely on the Chinese community to provide them with essential services: the British included "bakers, tailors, doctors, architects, civil engineers, blacksmiths, plumbers, hotel keepers, watchmakers."(see note 5) When it came to disputes between the two communities, however, the British community found unity in common national identity despite its internal stratification, just as, in disputes with the British, the Chinese community generally overcame its internal divisions.
The Chinese population of Hong Kong grew rapidly as the consequence of changing conditions on the mainland. First, the new economic order that followed the first Opium War brought hardship to many southern Chinese. Apart from sharp tax increases imposed to help pay postwar indemnities, the introduction of competitively priced foreign manufactures and the advent to coastal waters of foreign vessels much fleeter than the Chinese boats that had traditionally dominated the seaborne trade put thousands of Chinese out of work. Second, the prevailing antiforeignism in Canton and its environs, and to a lesser extent in the Fujian-province treaty ports, put a damper on commercial growth. While some entrepreneurs and laborers flocked to the boom town of Shanghai, others turned to the new prospect of Hong Kong.
By 1844 the Chinese population of the colony had already expanded to nineteen thousand. During the 1850s, the extraordinary instability brought on by the Taiping Rebellion (1851\-63) drove many more Chinese of all social classes to seek refuge in Hong Kong; the Scottish missionary James Legge (1815\-97) regarded this decade as the turning point in Hong Kong's spectacular expansion. By 1861 the Chinese population had expanded sixfold, to over one hundred sixteen thousand, in a total population of some one hundred nineteen thousand, and this expansion continued steadily. Only four years later, after the end of the Taiping Rebellion, the Chinese population of Hong Kong had risen by another five thousand. This demographic pattern, whereby Hong Kong's Chinese population grew sharply whenever conditions on the Chinese mainland deteriorated to an unbearable degree, continued throughout most of the colony's history. What changed was that at first, as in many early overseas Chinese communities, there was a severe gender imbalance; in the 1870s the ratio of Chinese men to women was more than three to one. But as the migration of whole families became more common, this problematic imbalance gradually diminished.(see note 6)
Ordinary Chinese in Hong Kong seem to have had a clear sense that their numerical superiority gave them a degree of political power--thereby belying the traditional view of the common people as politically inert and passive victims of imperialism. As early as 1844, for instance, when the British imposed a regulation requiring Chinese to register and pay a poll tax, Chinese laborers went on strike, while some businessmen joined the protest by threatening to leave Hong Kong, thereby jeopardizing the smooth operation of British trade. Three thousand Chinese--a sizable proportion of the entire population--actually did leave the colony, effectively halting business. The colonial administration was forced to abolish the tax and limit the registration requirement. In the meantime it had rashly helped a Chinese community somewhat divided by dialect and class differences to develop a sense of solidarity in the face of adversity.
Yet, on the mainland, patriotic Chinese reformers struggling to resist foreign pressure were at best equivocal about nationalist activities in Hong Kong. In a startling foretaste of Beijing's ambivalence in the 1990s about the anti-Japanese activism of Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan over the disputed Diaoyu Islands, they feared the spread of antiforeign activism to the mainland via Canton that, should it get out of control, might turn against the rulers of China themselves. Moreover, having secured a measure of British cooperation in their quest to revitalize China, the Qing reformers were highly reluctant to risk letting nationalist fervor in Hong Kong provoke British hostility, for fear that China could find itself once more internationally isolated.
Hong Kong as a Refuge for Reformers and Revolutionaries
The network of connections between Hong Kong and Canton ensured that Hong Kong occupied a special position in the unfolding events of late-nineteenth-century Chinese history. Of special significance was the fact that a number of important Chinese intellectuals and statesmen, including some future leaders, had their first direct encounter with Western society in the colony. In Hong Kong, for instance, the future Taiping rebel leader Hong Ren'gan (1822\-64) was baptized into the Christian faith. As a relative of the original Taiping leader, Hong Xiuquan, Hong had been captured by Qing officials, but he managed to escape and flee to Hong Kong in 1853. Hong Ren'gan's account was a principal source of Western knowledge of the Taipings.
Many other Chinese gained their first exposure to Western society and culture in Hong Kong. In the atmosphere of rising revolutionary activity around the turn of the century, it offered some a safer haven from the long arm of Qing law than did the foreign concessions of Shanghai and other treaty ports. Thus, for example, the leading reformer Kang Youwei (1858\-1927) escaped by way of Hong Kong to Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform movement in 1898. Most famous among Chinese leaders whose sojourns in Hong Kong had some impact on their future career was Sun Yatsen (1866\-1925), the "father of the Chinese revolution." Sun, a Cantonese, grew up in Hawaii, became a Christian and graduated from the Hong Kong College of Medicine in 1892. He then went to London to continue his studies, but Qing agents alerted to his revolutionary aspirations arranged for him to be kidnapped and held in the Chinese embassy. It was in part through the good offices of his former British teacher at medical school in Hong Kong that Sun was able to effect his release. But the British government agreed to Qing requests to exclude Sun from Hong Kong, where his presence was thought too dangerous and the likelihood he could illegally re-enter China too strong. Banned from the colony more than once, Sun went to Japan, from where he organized a series of uprisings against the dynasty. His direct experience on the colonial authorities' list of proscribed persons added fuel to the fire of anti-imperialism.
In sum, Hong Kong's significance between 1842 and 1910 lay, on the one hand, in its own evolving identity as a developing colony, with all the complex social and political arrangements that involved, and, on the other, in its relationship to the progress of revolution in China.