Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 6

So-a 'ridiculous dwarf of a Colony' a 'Cinderella' 'Paradise on the Dole' 'Distress on St Helena' 'Bleak Outlook-Colonial Office largely responsible' 'Hard Times on Forgotten Isle' 'Famous Island the World has forgotten'. These were all headlines from the Forties and Fifties. And there were smaller, more human tragedies-like the story of the island's only leper, who lived alone on Rupert's Bay, and who was sent a second-hand gramophone by a well-meaning lady in Eastbourne. The Government charged him threepence duty on every single record.

Or the time there was a bus crash on Christmas Eve, and ten islanders were hurt. The Governor found he couldn't alert anyone in the Foreign Office for seven days, and it took the best part of a month before a doctor came out. The only recorded remark from an island Colonial Service man was that he was sorry for some friends of his, because the crash had meant they had lost a good cook. Delays in answering telegrams are still considerable; John Ma.s.singham, a recent Governor, complained publicly of the second-rate clerks who manned the island 'desk' in London, and said it often took months, and several reminders, before a simple request would be answered, or even acknowledged.

Successive British Governments, in short, have little to be proud of in their running of this lovely place. Poor decisions, ignorance, insouciance, obstruction and unkindness have characterised British rule in the past. It seems so unfair a lot for so good-hearted and so loyal a people.

The memory of them that will remain with me for a long, long while is of a Sunday morning at the Sandy Bay Baptist Church, a tiny stone chapel perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Twelve people had toiled up the hills to Matins, and the old minister, his ancient and threadbare suit b.u.t.toned, his shoes lovingly polished, was leading them in song. There was no organ, nor a piano. Just thirteen devout old islanders, dogged, perspiring in the summer heat. Their thin voices rose out into the valley. 'Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us...' they sang.

It might have been Devon, or c.u.mberland, or Suffolk, on a summer Sunday morning. When the service was over the people shook the minister's hand and then, in small family groups, straggled off down the hillside, and back for a Sunday lunch of tuna and rice, blackberry duff and island-brewed beer.

Life continues to a n.o.ble and unmistakably British routine on St Helena. It has for 300 years. It probably will for many more, though times will get harder, the suits will get a little shabbier, lunches will get more frugal still. As it was for Napoleon, so this island has become a rock of exile for a British way of life-a way of life now only to be found in Britain in isolated rural retreats.

Unwittingly the St Helenians have preserved it and, come what may, they seem determined to preserve it for a long while still to come. Five thousand miles from their imagined home the Saints, forgotten and forlorn, go marching on.

7.

Hong Kong

It was Easter Sat.u.r.day and there was a watchnight service at the cathedral church of St John, in the part of Hong Kong which the old-timers call Victoria, and which today's millions simply call Central.

It was April, and the steamy heat of South China rolled like a fog through the open doors of the half-empty church, to be beaten down, for the comfort of the wors.h.i.+ppers, by the relentlessly thwacking fans. The fans looked as though they had been twirling and swaying away through a million Matins and an eternity of Evensongs, and looked most unsafe, as all tropical fans do; they were suspended on long iron rods from the vaulting, and paris.h.i.+oners would glance up from time to time, to make sure all the nuts were secure, and that decapitation was not imminent.

St John's is a church built very much in the Imperial mould. The foundation stone was laid in 1847, just six years after the colony was established, and the gothic building, with its solid square tower and great stained-gla.s.s east window was placed ideally for the spiritual benefits of the colonial servants and grandees. Government House was but a few steps away-though up the very devil of a slope, the locals grumbled-and Flagstaff House, and the Club, the barracks, the parade ground, the cricket ground and the City Hall were all nearby, downhill, towards the harbour and the bustle of the shops.

On the old maps, the cathedral stands squarely and centrally, in apparently comfortable charge of the colony's purpose and well-being, as the Church of England so very often was. It is on Queen's Road (Albert Road is just above and beyond, as we might expect), and Victorian prints show it rising well above the mess of vaguely Italianate warehouses. It was, in all the prints, white-limed and pristine, modelled on the una.s.suming churches of the English provinces, those in Cheltenham, or Carlisle, or Weston-super-Mare. The building was unspectacular and pleasing, made to rea.s.sure rather than to impress, a cosy chunk of home, out here in the merciless Orient.

Today it is more difficult to find. In all today's cla.s.sic pictures of modern Hong Kong-whether they are taken from the Peak, or from the crowded waterway below-there seems to be no church. It does, however, still exist, though it is well hidden by skysc.r.a.ping monsters of steel and gla.s.s, monuments to the newer religions of the market-place. There is one view, taken from the upper terminus of the Peak Tram, where you can see Government House and the Botanical Gardens, and some of the green of what they now call Chater Gardens (and which was the cricket pitch, beside the Bank of China, where teams once had to play beneath huge pictures of Mao Tse-Tung, and exhortations to the Cantonese proletariat). You can see some of the reliquary pieces of old British Hong Kong-but you cannot quite see the church. Unless you look very closely; and then, behind the east wing of the Government buildings and hunkered down under the glittering slabs of the Hilton Hotel, there is the tower, the limewash a little faded, the brickwork a little crumbled, but unmistakably and rea.s.suringly C. of E. Once it rose as the emblem of all that the Colonial Empire liked to think it stood for; today it has been utterly submerged by more mercenary realities.

Similar watchnight services were, no doubt, being conducted at a dozen other old Imperial cathedrals and chapels in the nearby time zones. The Archbishops of Auckland and Papua New Guinea, the Bishops of Busan and Kuching, of West Malaysia and Riverina, of Gippsland and w.a.n.garatta, would be leading their flocks in the Nicene Creed and the Eucharist conducted in a variety of languages and accents. In all those churches, though, the congregations would, largely, be locals-Malays or Aussies or pidgin-speaking Papuans: only a few expatriates, businessmen on short term a.s.signment, or diplomats, would be there, sharing in the hymns, listening to the sermon.

But in Hong Kong the devout were nearly all Britons. A few Christian Cantonese were there, in pews near the west door; but the cathedral looked that night as though it still was peopled by those for whom it was first built-the governing elite of this most distant, most extraordinary colony. The typical colonial family was at every pew, kneeling on red woollen sacks prepared by the Ladies' Volunteers, reading from prayer books furnished by the British and Foreign Bible Society, gazing up at bra.s.s plaques commemorating the pa.s.sing of the various Governors and Chief Secretaries, Chief Justices and Commissioners who had kept the place ticking over for the century and a half of its colonial existence.

We lit candles, and held them in small wax paper cups; they guttered in the breeze from the fans. Outside the palm trees thrashed as a squall pa.s.sed over, and the choristers had to work hard to make themselves heard over the jungle noises. The organ-one of the finest in the East, said the old Kelly and Walsh Kelly and Walsh guide-squawked and rasped, and as we kneeled to pray for Her Majesty the Queen and all her subjects there was a sheet of lightning and a rumble of thunder from a storm coming eastwards from Lantau Island. guide-squawked and rasped, and as we kneeled to pray for Her Majesty the Queen and all her subjects there was a sheet of lightning and a rumble of thunder from a storm coming eastwards from Lantau Island.

With Communion over we strolled out of the cool old building. It was just after midnight-Sunday morning now, and still very warm. Heavy drips of rainwater were falling from all the leaves, the pavements were slimy underfoot, and steamed gently. The Bishop shook hands as we left the porch, and bade us all a peaceful holiday. Down a flight of stone stairs, along a small gorge made of granite blocks, all covered with moss and foliage, and then, suddenly, with a blaze of light, a clatter and a shriek and the urgent banging of a great jackhammer, we were back in the Hong Kong of today.

Ahead was a sea of multicoloured neon-all glaring steadily red and orange and white, for the laws of the colony do not permit neon signs to flash or twinkle. Taxis hooted, trolleybuses clanked, roadside stalls did business to unending streams of pa.s.sers-by, selling steamed prawns and plastic dolls, small radio sets and diamonds, and all under the friendly hiss of pressure lamps with their attendant clouds of flying insects. Gleaming shopping centres were still open, their escalators lifting the crowds out of the crowded streets into the luxuriant acres where you could still, even at this hour, have a suit made, buy a computer, have your palm read or buy anything up to forty flavours of American ice cream, in any currency or with any small sliver of creditworthy plastic you could name.

Newspaper stalls were on every corner: the first editions of the South China Morning Post South China Morning Post were out, with the football results from England; there was the were out, with the football results from England; there was the Asian Wall Street Journal Asian Wall Street Journal, the previous day's Melbourne Age Melbourne Age and and Sydney Morning Herald Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times and West Coast edition of the and West Coast edition of the New York Times New York Times. Dozens of papers in Cantonese-and a smaller number in Mandarin-jostled for s.p.a.ce, and there were a thousand magazines, most of which seemed either to have something to do with girls, popular computers, horse racing or yachting. The stallkeepers, who also sold cigarettes and matches, chewing gum and trinkets, were yelling the news of the arrival of the Post Post, and were collecting custom, too; business was evidently good this Sunday morning.

The jackhammers thudded constantly. The sound came from a gigantic half-finished building which soared into the dark sky, though great arclights turned every inch of steel into silver, and the workers who crawled and clambered up its spars were like theatrical performers, acrobats spotlit in some magnificent aerial circus. This was the project of which the colony was currently most proud-the new headquarters of the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, the colony's largest (half of Hong Kong's total bank deposits are held by the 'Honkers and Shankers' and another third by a.s.sociate banks), the world's most valuable (in terms of its stock market worth), and the most powerful and influential commercial force in the north-western Pacific Ocean.

The building work, which went on twenty-four hours a day (although the Governor, who lived nearby, had at first asked that no jackhammering be permitted during the night), was once going to create the tallest, most architecturally adventurous and most luxurious building in the East, which would loom above the colony's other skysc.r.a.pers and remind everyone of the bank's complete dominance of every aspect of colonial life. But then the Chinese Government hired an even more flamboyant and reputable architect and announced it was planning a new HQ for the Bank of China, which would be even taller, grander and more impressive. And cheaper, into the bargain.

Both banks have outside their front doors a pair of lions-stone ones at the Bank of China, bronze for the HongKong and Shanghai. There is something a little peculiar about them. Neither pair, on close inspection, appears to be aligned as perfectly as one might expect them to be if they were in Cheapside, or on Wall Street. They are set oddly, though subtly, on the skew: the effect, to Western eyes, is slightly unsettling.

But they weren't put there for the benefit of Western eyes. They were designed to promote prosperity for the banks, and for all the thousands of Chinese workers inside, and the Chinese customers outside. And so, when both sets of lions were put in place, the bank directors called in the fung shui fung shui man-that specialist in cosmic alignments whose job it is to ensure, so far as he is able, that all furniture, doors, windows-and sculpted lions outside-are so placed as to command the greatest advantage for all, and so the fortune-bearing winds that blow across and around the great buildings are deflected and diverted in as profitable a way as it is possible for earthbound mortals to divine. A building with good man-that specialist in cosmic alignments whose job it is to ensure, so far as he is able, that all furniture, doors, windows-and sculpted lions outside-are so placed as to command the greatest advantage for all, and so the fortune-bearing winds that blow across and around the great buildings are deflected and diverted in as profitable a way as it is possible for earthbound mortals to divine. A building with good fung shui fung shui can be expected to enjoy a prosperous existence; one that has not sought the advice and blessing of the can be expected to enjoy a prosperous existence; one that has not sought the advice and blessing of the fung shui fung shui man suffers (one big skysc.r.a.per on the Hong Kong waterfront, and which supposedly has bad man suffers (one big skysc.r.a.per on the Hong Kong waterfront, and which supposedly has bad fung shui fung shui, has experienced severe difficulties in attracting Chinese workers, and has picked up-because of its circular windows-the nickname 'the house of the thousand a.r.s.eholes', which must be even less propitious).

Two hundred yards, a narrow palm-shrouded alley, and a busy street named after a long-dead Queen-Empress, separate St John's Cathedral from the fung shui fung shui man's lions at the front door of the bank. At times the distance that separates old Empire from Hong Kong's contemporary reality, or the gulf that divides both Western colonial and Eastern merchant from the ancient principles of Confucius, seems like a million miles. The one seems, on one day, not to understand the other, nor to like the other, nor even to respect the other; and on another day, in another set of circ.u.mstances, Chinese businessman, British taipan and every sorcerer and necro-mancer, priest and divine known to theology will come together for a common purpose. The mixture that is today's Hong Kong is almost impossibly rich and varied, its elements so often in theory repugnant to one another, the potential for explosion enormous. man's lions at the front door of the bank. At times the distance that separates old Empire from Hong Kong's contemporary reality, or the gulf that divides both Western colonial and Eastern merchant from the ancient principles of Confucius, seems like a million miles. The one seems, on one day, not to understand the other, nor to like the other, nor even to respect the other; and on another day, in another set of circ.u.mstances, Chinese businessman, British taipan and every sorcerer and necro-mancer, priest and divine known to theology will come together for a common purpose. The mixture that is today's Hong Kong is almost impossibly rich and varied, its elements so often in theory repugnant to one another, the potential for explosion enormous.

And yet, mirabile dictu mirabile dictu, it works-far more successfully than any part of the Empire ever did. No one has yet managed to fathom precisely why this is-why in so small and cramped a territory, so filled to bursting by refugees and immigrants, so corrupt and so cruel, so informally directed and so constantly under threat, so temporary and so little loved-why, despite social ills that make New York, by comparison, seem like a template for the welfare state, this tiny speck of British China is so rich, so powerful and so magical.

Hong Kong is perhaps the only place on earth to witness the vision of what mankind can do if, his talent unleashed and his ambitions unchecked, he sets out quite ruthlessly to manufacture a fortune. Some may look upon Hong Kong as the natural consequence of a cla.s.sic experiment in the nature of success; others may regard the place as the vision of nightmare. Whichever is likely to be the verdict of history there is no colony like it, nor, after 1997 when Chinese sovereignty is again restored, will there ever be such a place again.

Most visitors from the West come in by air, as I did first in the mid-1970s, from New Delhi. The approach to Kai Tak airfield is unforgettable-though not at first: the plane usually contrives to come in from the western side of the colony, and the last few miles of the journey are over the brown and undistinguished hills of Kw.a.n.gtung province of Southern China, and the muddy estuary of the Pearl River. (The British have been this way, evidently: even the airline maps show the southernmost point of China, just off to the starboard side, was once called Cape Bastion, and there is a Macclesfield Bank and a Money Island out in the South China Sea, barely visible from five miles up.) But then the sea begins to swarm with s.h.i.+pping. Big freighters can be seen lumbering northwards, contained in channels between a clutch of tiny, tree-covered islets. Red and white hydrofoils scurry to and fro leaving trails of white foam, and stately ferry boats plough across the straits. As the plane gets lower still we can see the country boats-skiffs and punts and a few elegant sailing junks, each a superb piece of Eastern imagery with its three lugsails stiffened with long battens, and a lone crewman fis.h.i.+ng from the stern.

We sink lower still, and flash over a small island where there seems to be a barrack block, and a clutch of radio towers. And then, in a bewildering rush of concrete and steel and neon, Kowloon is below, and blocks of flats stream past at 200 knots. They say the locals hang their was.h.i.+ng out for a warming blast from the pa.s.sing jets; we clear the roofs by no more than a hundred feet, and then make a sharp right turn and, twenty seconds later, touch down at Kai Tak, on the runway which is built out into the bay, and from which all Hong Kong can be seen, draped like a great wall of whiteness against the lush green foliage of the Peak.

It is a mesmeric, intoxicating sight, a view to make one gasp. A hundred years ago there was almost nothing: just a thin line of warehouses, a few church towers, the mansions of the taipans up on the slopes, and Government House on Upper Albert Road with the Union flag waving lazily in the steamy air. Today a vast white winding cloth of concrete, steel and gla.s.s has been bolted on to the hillsides, obscuring the contours, turning a world once dominated by the horizontal and the gentle diagonal into a pageant of the vertical. On the waterfront-on land reclaimed from the harbour-are the glittering towers of the 'mighty Hongs'-Jardines, Swires, Wheelock Marden, the Honkers and Shankers, Hutchinson Whampoa, Hong Kong Land, and all the other guardians of capital might.

'I began to wonder,' Sun Yat Sen once wrote, 'how it was that Englishmen could do such things as they have done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within seventy or eighty years, while in 4,000 years China had achieved nothing like it...' His wonderment was spurred, no doubt, by the prevailing contemptuous Chinese view of Western inadequacies. XuJiYu, a scholar of the nineteenth-century mandarinate, described Britain as merely 'three islands, a handful of stones in the western ocean...her area is estimated to be about the same as Taiwan and Hainan.' To both mandarin and revolutionary the name 'China' meant the same thing-'the area beneath heaven'. No other upstart nation-and certainly no mere handful of stones in the western ocean-could contemplate changing the aspect of the Chinese island of Hong Kong, even a little.

And how it has changed! Huge tower blocks, with flats costing three thousand pounds a month to rent; six-lane motorways, streaming with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes (more Rolls per head than anywhere else on earth); palaces of gleaming black reflecting gla.s.s, each connected to the other by aerial walkways; ma.s.sive housing projects with population densities of up to a third of a million people per square mile; tunnels, railway lines, yacht harbours, container ports, ice rinks, roller-coasters, spy stations, cable terminals, a planetarium, two race courses and all the paraphernalia of urban life, jammed on to a tiny chunk of granite once described as 'a plutonic island of uninviting sterility, apparently capable only of supporting the lowest forms of organisms' but which now (the commentator was writing in 1893) 'stands forth before the world...as a n.o.ble monument to British pluck and enterprise.'

The first view of Hong Kong from the air is impressive enough. But to arrive in Hong Kong from her motherland, from the mainland China from which she draws her people and her inner strengths, and to which, it is internationally agreed, she will return three years before the end of this century, is to see all the drama of an Imperial extravaganza, and to be allowed to make comparisons between the two systems under which modern China has been run.

I had flown into Peking with the Royal Air Force, aboard a VC-10 that was taking Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, to the Chinese for another in what then seemed an interminable series of negotiations over the colony's future. The journey seemed interminable, too, only enlivened for me by our brief stop in Delhi, where the British High Commissioner's Rolls-Royce was waiting, driven by the Imperial chauffeur, who had the splendidly down-to-earth name of Mr Omo, and whose charge was, naturally, pure white.

We landed in Peking in the mid-afternoon, and everything was strangely silent: no band, no guard of honour, no cheering and no applause. The plane's engines ceased their whining, and the great quiet murmur of China took over, wrapping us all in its strange soft blanket. It was cold, too, and dusty, and the skies were heavy with the fine yellow sand from the Gobi desert. The streets, thronged with cyclists, were quiet and dusty too, and the whole city looked shabby and tired, as though its citizenry and its buildings were emerging from a long sleep, and were blinking their rheumy eyes towards the light.

I took the Canton train a few days later, and experienced one of those intense bitter-sweet moments that becomes ineradicably etched on to the memory. It is not strictly relevant to the saga of Empire, perhaps, but it lies at the centre of my great affection for China, and had something to do with my mixed feelings about Hong Kong.

I had been on the platform at Peking central railway station a few weeks before as a great express, the 3.54 p.m. to Chongqing, pulled out. A young woman, dressed in dark blue Mao overalls, was saying her tearful farewells to a baby, probably her own, that someone was holding at a carriage window. A guard blew on her whistle, the woman began to weep softly but uncontrollably, and the train, with painful slowness, started to move out of the station. But as it did so the loudspeakers on the platform began to sound a melody of wonderful sweetness, a tune so sad and grand and gentle that I knew it had been written especially for a departure platform, and particularly for that young woman and her child.

Some days later I was in Hong Kong, whiling away one late evening in a bar, talking to an old British actor I had met in the lift. He was a forlorn figure, a man for whom his bottle now seemed more comforting than his lines, and who was reduced to playing the Hong Kong hotels in place of the West End theatres he had once known. The Empire takes such people, and makes them briefly feel wanted again.

We were the only ones left in the bar, and ordered a final whisky while the old Cantonese waiters began stacking the chairs, and the girl at the turntable pulled out a last record, sighing deeply as she cued down the needle. The music flooded out into the bar, and my companion's endless conversation faded into a mere hum. It was, of course, the same sweet tune, cascading over this sad old night as though it had been designed for moments like this, too. The girl told me what it was called: 'Fis.h.i.+ng Junks at Sunset'. Cla.s.sical piece, from up there-and she jabbed her thumb towards the harbour, and Kowloon, towards the New Territories, and the fence, and China beyond.

And then I was back in Peking, and down at the station and waiting in the corridor of the 10.43 p.m. from Peking to Canton, while a group of friends stood with a bottle of champagne to wish me G.o.d-speed as I set off for the south, and the Imperial foothold. The guard waved her flag and blew her whistle; the train moved slowly away, everyone was waving and then, above the screech of f.l.a.n.g.e against rail, I heard a shout. 'They're...playing...your...tune!' And I listened over the din, and heard its sweetness once again: 'Fis.h.i.+ng Junks at Sunset', the perfect music for a melancholy China night, and a piece that has haunted me ever since.

The journey lasted for two nights and three days. My travelling companions were, variously, a j.a.panese businessman who either bought or sold pig bristles for use in shaving brushes; a welder from Minneapolis who had come to see his son at university in Shanghai; and Professor Yang, who was in charge of the Tungsten, Tin and Bis.m.u.th Group of the Chinese Geological Society and, to judge from the number of ballpoint pens in the top pocket of his Mao jacket and the fact that he was travelling Soft Cla.s.s, was a very senior cadre of the Party.

In Canton station I found a taxi driver who was prepared to take me to the frontier, a hundred miles away across the delta of the Pearl River. We b.u.mped along rutted roads, crossed wide rivers on rickety ferry-boats, and managed to get a speeding ticket from a policeman who jumped from behind a bush and waved a red flag at us, angrily, but then offered us a cup of chrysanthemum tea by way of consolation. He said he was sorry that a gweilo gweilo-a foreign devil-had been so inconvenienced.

Ten miles away from the frontier, still deep inside a China of timeless rural peace-workers knee-deep in the paddy fields, ducks straggling along the roadside, the occasional bullock-cart lumbering down a muddy lane-we pa.s.sed two unexpected signs of the new, post-Mao order: a petrol station, run by Texaco (though no cars were taking advantage of it), and a tall, electrified fence, with watchtowers and a ma.s.sive and well-guarded border control post, such as you might find when taking the autobahn from Vienna to Budapest.

This was not the frontier with Hong Kong, however. It was a new 'internal' frontier that divided the special economic zone of Shen Zhen from Marxist orthodoxies of the rest of China-the zone being a sort of halfway house, an airlock, between the rigidities of the Communist world and the laissez-faire laissez-faire capitalism of the Crown colony. It is a frantically busy place, with factories and tower blocks and hotels (most of them paid for by wealthy Hong Kong investors) rising out of the paddy fields, and restaurants jammed solid with a new Chinese elite who are making money on a scale of which Mao would never have dreamed. capitalism of the Crown colony. It is a frantically busy place, with factories and tower blocks and hotels (most of them paid for by wealthy Hong Kong investors) rising out of the paddy fields, and restaurants jammed solid with a new Chinese elite who are making money on a scale of which Mao would never have dreamed.

And then, dark on a distant hill, the first sign of a familiar Empire: the square and battlemented outline of a fort. I had seen such things on the brown ridges above the Khyber Pa.s.s, and in the Malakand Hills near Swat. Both there, and here, they looked as if they belonged on a film set for Beau Geste Beau Geste: they are called Mackenzie Forts, after the Bengal Governor who designed them. Elsewhere in the world they are mere relics of a British Raj; they belong now to independent governments, who use them for training, or turn them into museums, or just allow them to fall into ruin.

But on this frontier they are still British Imperial forts, guarding an old British Imperial fortress. A huge Union flag waved from the one I could see from Shen Zhen, and once in a while there was a faint glint as binoculars swept the town, and the border river and the fence. There were British soldiers up there, in their last few years of Empire-watch.

The taxi dropped me at the Lo Wu railway station, where the Friends.h.i.+p Bridge crossed the muddy little border stream. There was a steel gate across the single railway line, and a dozen khaki-uniformed soldiers of the People's Liberation Army stood in front of it, chatting to each other and smoking. They smiled and waved as I walked past them on to the footbridge and into British territory. One of them asked, in sign language, if I had enjoyed the time I had spent in his country, and offered me a cigarette. They seemed genuinely pleased when I told them I had, and they were clapping and laughing when I looked back at them, at the point where the corridor turns and all view of the People's Republic is deliberately blocked. A few days later I thought back to their little group: theirs had been the last gesture of true human friends.h.i.+p from a Chinese stranger that I was to experience for my remaining few days in the East-from now on, in the superheated mercantilism of Hong Kong, civilities and kindnesses were at a premium.

I had breakfast with the British soldiers who hold the line-nearly all of them Gurkhas, members of one of the world's last remaining mercenary armies performing one of Empire's last remaining tasks. They built the fence: it is fourteen feet high, twenty-six miles long, alive with sensors and arclights, but with 150 gates (only three of which are guarded) through which the local Chinese farmers are permitted to wander more or less at will. There is a standard briefing given to visitors: small men from the hills of western Nepal demonstrate high-technology systems, acronyms like CLa.s.sIC (the Covert Local Area Sensor System) and VINDICATOR, maps are drawn showing how many illegal immigrants-or 'eye-eyes', as the troops call them-are seized each month in each of the border's four sectors, slides of helicopters and dogs and tracker-teams are shown with a mixture of pride, puzzlement and embarra.s.sment. The troops have a threefold official role-protecting the 'integrity' of the Sino-British border, collecting low-level intelligence (which means gazing endlessly through those binoculars at the fields and the tower blocks below), and capturing illegal would-be settlers in the colony. But the Gurkhas know that they, as Nepalis, have no business in the matter; the British officers have no real heart for it, now that they know the border will vanish for all time on 1st July 1997, when the lease runs out; and the only pleasure anyone takes in the task is that it is done well, efficiently and, so far as the immigrants are concerned, with despatch and compa.s.sion. (The captives-about eleven a day-are given a cup of tea and handed over to the Chinese border guards at a small ceremony each afternoon at three, and are fully expected to have another try at scaling the fence the very next day. Some, indeed, are regulars, and the soldiers hope that before too long the most persistent will evade the detectors and the tracker dogs, and get into one of the crowded slums of Hong Kong and begin to enjoy what is said, by comparison, to be the good life.) The train from Lo Wu was very different from the slow and rickety antique that had brought me to Canton. No chipped paint and cracked leather upholstery, no lace antimaca.s.sars and bed-time tea, no fronded lamps and grime-crusted window; here, instead, was a gleaming steel arrow, silent, cus.h.i.+oned, smooth and very fast. At the first station, in the New Territories village of Sheung Shui, a pretty Chinese girl got on board: she was dressed in white silk, had a Hermes scarf, carried a costly handbag and wore a gold wrist.w.a.tch as thin as a wafer. She was a picture of perfection-a signal contrast to the last girl I had seen in China, now just a few thousand yards away to the north. She was working at the Lo Wu station, shuffled around in slippers, wore a baggy uniform of rough blue drill, and a flat cap adorned with the red star of the Party. The girl in silk, however, was haughtily disdainful, and shouted at a porter for some unfathomable misdemeanour; the girl in blue drill had smiled happily, and her resignation to her role in the proletariat seemed not to depress her. Whose life, I wondered, was the more fulfilling? Who had the more reason to hope?

And then I was at Kowloon station-the most distant railway station to which it was possible to journey, without interruption, from London. All the chaos and urgency of the colony was here-shouting porters, magazine sellers, hustlers, hawkers, policemen, old ladies with chickens, bewildered American tourists, businessmen being ushered into long black cars, the girl in silk being kissed by an immensely fat Frenchman who whisked her away in a Mercedes to his model agency, or his apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, or to lunch at the Kowloon Club. And there, across the harbour, was the great crystal wall of Hong Kong herself, with the Peak, swathed in a warm and swirling mist, looming faintly above. It was a month since my Easter visit, and the black framework of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building had grown by another hundred feet, and blocked out yet another view, and another bit of the greenery I had been able to see the last time I had stood here, gazing south from Kowloon at the richest colonial possession on the planet.

Hong Kong is-setting aside Anguilla, and the mid-ocean peak of Rockall-the youngest of Britain's remaining colonies. The Convention of Chuen Pee was announced on 21st January 1841, ceding Hong Kong Island to Britain, and to the Honourable Chieftainess Victoria, in perpetuity; the settlement reached between the British Conservative and Chinese Communist Governments in 1984 established that the Victorian interpretation of perpetuity no longer obtained, and it was agreed that sovereignty would revert to China on 1st July 1997. Hong Kong thus knows precisely the duration of British Imperial dominion: 156 years, five months and eleven days-a great deal less than her three and three-quarter centuries in Bermuda, rather longer than the ninety years during which the Crown administered India.

Of all Britain's innumerable Imperial conquests, occupations and annexations, that which won Hong Kong for England was the least honourable. The 'unequal treaty', to which the Chinese understandably objected almost from the moment they were compelled by circ.u.mstance to sign it, had its origins in the mucky trade between British India and China, in the dried cakes of ooze from the seed pods of the pretty red flower Papaver somniferum Papaver somniferum-opium. Hong Kong, however glittering a prize it has become today, is a colony first established for the convenience of the British narcotics business-a fact the Chinese, despite the diplomatic niceties that attended the signing ceremonies of 1984, are loath to forget.

The Javanese Dutch are said to have shown the Chinese the delights of inhaling the pleasurable fumes of opium. By the 1830s between four and twelve million Chinese were addicted. The side streets of Shanghai and Peking were thick with furtively run divans, inside which, in an atmosphere of warm, sweet-scented gloom, Chinese men were able to slip contentedly into the untroubled sleep and dreamy fantasies that the opium induced.

But China grew few poppies, and those that were harvested were not for lancing with the opium-knife. The Imperial court had forbidden the practice, and officially discouraged its import. They condemned what they called the 'foreign mud'-and yet, unofficially, connived at the trade. Americans brought in opium from Turkey, and Pa.r.s.ee traders would bring it in from Persia and Afghanistan. But the best opium, guaranteed unadulterated and most compet.i.tively priced, came from Bengal and Bihar-and from the British East India Company's headquarters in Calcutta.

The opium trade worked to everyone's advantage-except the Chinese mandarinate. The British had been alarmed for some time that the balance of trade between London and Peking was weighted heavily in the favour of China. The English taste for tea, and the London public's liking for silk and later, more unaccountably, for Chinese rhubarb, caused an enormous outflow of silver from the treasury coffers (the Chinese, mistrusting every barbarian product, including paper money, insisted on convertible silver in payment). The British tried to sell them wool-but poor Chinese wore padded cotton, and the rich wore silk and fur, and the wool project was a fiasco. Only the export of Indian opium, it was swiftly realised, would bring that silver back.

And so, at the great factories in Patna and Ghazipur, opium was made into six-inch-wide 'cakes', placed carefully in crates made of mango-wood, and sent downriver to the Company's warehouses on the Hooghly. There it was auctioned to the agents already established on the China coast-of which, pre-eminent, and established since 1832 in both Canton and Macao, was the firm of grocers and traders established by the legendary Scotsmen, William Jardine and James Matheson. If any commercial ent.i.ty can be said to have created Hong Kong-a cla.s.sic reversal of the axiom that 'trade follows the flag'-it is the firm that, until 1984, continued to dominate the colony's reputation as dealer and trader-Jardine, Matheson and Co.

The arrangements for getting the illegal Indian opium into Canton were byzantine in the extreme, and depended largely on the a.s.siduous corrupting of the local Chinese officials-in particular the Canton trade superintendent who was called Hai Kwan Pu Hai Kwan Pu, but whom the British insisted on calling the Hoppo. He, like everyone else, took his cut-the term then was that he 'squeezed' those below him in the trading chain, and was in turn squeezed by those above. So the Hoppo squeezed the Canton merchants (the 'Hongs') who alone were authorised to do business with the round-eyed barbarians; the Governor of Canton squeezed the Hoppo; the Viceroy squeezed the Governor and, it must be a.s.sumed, the Forbidden City in faraway Peking squeezed the Viceroy. It was all strictly illegal, of course; but before long British India was selling 50,000 cases of opium a year to the Chinese, and poppy products were providing a healthy ten per cent of India's annual revenue.

The rules were mysterious, and complicated. The East Indiamen would sail to the mouth of the Pearl River, and to the island of Lin Tin, halfway between Macao and the then barely inhabited (and wholly Chinese) island of Hong Kong. Here a score of floating warehouses were moored for the exchange of the contraband: opium cakes were taken from the s.h.i.+ps, tea and rhubarb were loaded in their place. Barges then took the opium upriver-through a narrow, well defended defile known as the Bogue, to the port of Whampoa, and the foreign factories in Canton.

The factories-warehouses, presided over by foreign factors-were the only places in Canton where barbarians were permitted to live, and then only for the trading season of the summer. They lived well, and drank furiously-especially of a c.o.c.ktail known as Canton Gunpowder, mixed from alcohol, sugar, tobacco juice and a.r.s.enic. Jardine's had a factory in Canton, and came to dominate the opium trade into China, and the export of silks and teas to London.

But then the Manchus decided to crack down-less on moral grounds, more for the simple reason that opium imports were beginning to cause a serious haemorrhage in the Imperial silver reserves. In 1839 a tough, honest opium-hater named Lin Tse Hsu, a man who had already cleaned up the drugs business in his home provinces of Hunan and Kw.a.n.g Tung, was sent down to Canton: he ordered all opium supplies to be surrendered, and warned that anyone found in possession of the drug or of an opium pipe would be strangled in public. And he tackled his British opposite number, Captain Charles Elliot, recently appointed as Superintendent of Trade in China (and, ironically, as opposed to opium as was Mr Lin). Elliot was ordered to cease all trading in opium, under pain of the most severe punishment.

London was outraged. Whatever Lord Palmerston might have thought about opium itself (and there is no evidence he objected-after all, it was regularly included in medicines available in London, and the only peculiar dimension was that the Chinese smoked it, but didn't they wear pigtails, and write from bottom to top, and do other odd things too?) opium trade was free trade. Protection of free trade had been the lynchpin of British foreign policy for forty years: it was imperative that the trade in opium be allowed to continue. (Palmerston's public stance was actually rather different: he said he understood Mr Lin's objections, but would brook no violence done by Mr Lin's henchmen to subjects of the British Crown, in the event that the dispute over the drug became heated.) Violence did, indeed, break out. Lin closed Canton to foreign trade; Lord Napier, who was British Superintendent of Trade at Canton, took a pair of frigates upriver, ran the gauntlet of the Bogue (with Elliot on an unarmed cutter, sheltering from the gunfire under an umbrella) but was turned back at Whampoa. Lin then seized 20,000 cases of British opium, and became involved in a furious row about compensation to its owners. Then, while that was under discussion, in July 1839, there was a drunken brawl in Kowloon, and British and American sailors were blamed for killing a villager. Lin demanded a scapegoat for public strangling. Elliot refused. Lin occupied Macao, and threw out all Britons-whereupon they retreated to their s.h.i.+ps and anch.o.r.ed in the Fragrant Harbour on the far side of the Pearl River-the harbour of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, back in London, William Jardine-known in Cantonese as 'iron-headed old rat' ever since he failed to turn around after being hit from behind with a club at the Pet.i.tion Gate in Canton-was advising Palmerston on just what to do. James Matheson had advocated force once before, but the Duke of Wellington had said no; on this occasion Palmerston agreed that a task force must be sent, to protect the Empire's trading interests, and to ensure the financial stability of the Government of India. By December 1839 Cabinet had concurred: the Jardine paper was an accepted battle plan: a fleet would sail for the East, and rendezvous with Captain Elliot's tiny flotilla, in the harbour at Hong Kong. The mountainous little island, and its sheltered harbour to the north, may not yet have become a British colony. It was, however, a British base.

The task force, a.s.sembled in Madras and Calcutta, arrived in Chinese waters in June 1840. It was ma.s.sive-sixteen men-o'-war, thirty-one other vessels-and it struck fear into the Chinese.

The Royal Navy's demands were essentially Jardine's demands: an apology for the insult at Canton, full payment for the costs of this regrettably necessary expeditionary force, reimburs.e.m.e.nt for the 20,000 cases of opium seized by Lin, and free trade guarantees at five Chinese ports, and no further dealings through the Canton Hongs. The demands were put, with the persuasive addition of cannonfire, to the Chinese at Amoy, at Ting-hai, and Pei-Ho: within weeks the approaches both to Peking and the Yangtze ports were secured by the British. Troops landed on Chusan, less than a hundred miles from Shanghai, and prepared to march into the mainland. The Navy moved down to the Pearl River and seized the forts guarding the Bogue, thus securing all access to Whampoa, and to Canton itself.

The Chinese had no choice, and capitulated. The Emperor's representative sullenly agreed to the Convention of Cheun Pee-already existing in draft form, so confident were the British of eventual triumph. All of Jardine's demands were met, including the additional humiliation: the island of Hong Kong, and the harbour to its north, were to be ceded in perpetuity to the British.

That was on 20th January. Five days later Sir Edward Belcher and the officers of HMS Sulphur Sulphur landed on Hong Kong Island, and drank a toast on Possession Mount, and gave three cheers for Her Majesty. On the twenty-sixth the full squadron arrived from the north: as a contemporary report put it, 'the Union Jack was hoisted on Possession Mount, and formal possession taken of the island by Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer, under a landed on Hong Kong Island, and drank a toast on Possession Mount, and gave three cheers for Her Majesty. On the twenty-sixth the full squadron arrived from the north: as a contemporary report put it, 'the Union Jack was hoisted on Possession Mount, and formal possession taken of the island by Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer, under a feu-de-joie feu-de-joie from the marines and the Royal Salute from the s.h.i.+ps-of-war'. Five days later still all native residents of Hong Kong were told that, whether or not they approved, they were now subjects of the Crown, under the benign protection of the Queen of England. from the marines and the Royal Salute from the s.h.i.+ps-of-war'. Five days later still all native residents of Hong Kong were told that, whether or not they approved, they were now subjects of the Crown, under the benign protection of the Queen of England.

It was still not clear that the island was to be British for ever. The Chinese were still fighting. The Emperor declared that he would 'seek another occasion for attacking and destroying [the British] at Hong Kong, and thus restore the ancient territory'. But a year later, after reverses that rubbed salt into his wounds, the Emperor was forced to a final, abject surrender. Nanking was about to be attacked; Shanghai had already fallen. He had no choice.

The famous Treaty of Nanking was the outcome of this sad occasion. Ratifications were exchanged on 26th June 1843-the official birth of the colony. It stated baldly that the Island of Hong Kong was 'to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors, and to be governed by such laws as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain shall see fit to direct'. (In fact the draft Treaty had left a blank at the name of the island to be annexed. Some in London favoured Chusan, with its proximity to Shanghai. But Jardine and Matheson favoured Hong Kong, and that was the name eventually inked in to the doc.u.ment.) The Chinese were bitterly dejected, and closed the meeting with their conquerors with the haunting words: 'All shall be granted-it is settled-it is finished.'

But it wasn't quite. Two more opium wars followed, and not until 1860 was all the perpetual cession completed. The tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, and the tiny Stonecutter's Island, were given up, for all eternity, when a joint Franco-British force was at the gates of Peking, and had already sacked the Emperor's Summer Palace, and forced the proud and ancient nation to its knees. By the end of that year Britain had absolute control of the finest port in the Orient, the perfect base for trade, for quartering the Royal Navy, and for exerting dominion over all the East.

But it was not enough. Hong Kong Island soon became wretchedly overcrowded, and the paranoia of Empire-the feeling that a piece of British territory was never big enough, or secure enough, and that there was always a mountain or an isthmus or a harbour from which it could be attacked by the barbarian hordes-soon led to demands for its expansion. The Chinese Emperor concurred, though from a position of great military weakness. Not one he was prepared to display to his subjects, though: he ended his address to them with the characteristically Imperial warning-'Let every one tremble and obey! An Important Special Notice!'

The agreement that was signed in Peking, in quadruplicate, in both Mandarin and English, on 'the twentyfirst day of the fourth moon of the twentyfourth year of Kuang Hsu' (or, more prosaically, 9th June 1898) was designed for the short-term gain of the colony. But unknown to all concerned the agreement held the seeds of the colony's ultimate destruction. It was called simply 'the Convention of Peking, 1898' it allowed Britain to lease an extra 350 square miles of Chinese territory-which the British insisted on calling the New Territories, even when they were quite old-and it can be regarded as one of the most significant and underrated doc.u.ments in British Imperial history.

It was signed on the one side by two officials of the Tsungli Yamen-which is what the Chinese then called their Foreign Office-and on the other by the great Imperialist figure of the British Minister in Peking, Sir Claude MacDonald, who was known as 'Gunboat' MacDonald and was described by The Times The Times correspondent as 'the type of military officer rolled out a mile at a time and lopped off in six-foot lengths'. (His colleague in Peking at the time was another celebrated personage, Mr H. Bax-Ironside, whom everyone knew as Iron Backside.) correspondent as 'the type of military officer rolled out a mile at a time and lopped off in six-foot lengths'. (His colleague in Peking at the time was another celebrated personage, Mr H. Bax-Ironside, whom everyone knew as Iron Backside.) But the land was not Britain's to keep. The Convention of Peking was only a lease, ninety-nine years long. It had come into force on 1st July 1898. It was due to expire at midnight on 30th June 1997. The British may have liked to regard the extra real estate as a new possession, an integral part of the Empire on which the sun would never set; some academics said that the phrase 'ninety-nine years' was a cunning Chinese device that meant 'for ever and ever' without actually saying so. The Colonial Office wrote papers insisting that Hong Kong had been expanded in just the same way as any other colony might have been. Territory had merely been added, for British convenience. The New Territories, a memorandum said, were 'part and parcel of Her Majesty's Colony of Hong Kong, in like manner and for all intents and purposes as if they had originally formed part of said Colony'. They may have liked to regard the land as such-but if they did so, they engaged in the most wishful thinking, and were to get their eventual come-uppance. The Chinese are a patient people, and they have long memories.

The New Territories stretch north from Kowloon-they begin, appropriately, at Boundary Street-and up to the Shen Zhen River, where we meet the Gurkhas, the fence, and the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army. They present a marvellous contrast to the overpopulated, superheated dynamo of the harbourside cities-here are wild mountain ranges, remote bays dotted with rock-bound skerries, meadows and lakes, paddy fields and forests. This is where the practices of China, ancient beyond the reach of memory, meet the ceaseless rhythms of the Imperial merchants: here are the workers in the rice-fields, the walled villages, the China of willow-pattern and temple-bell, of mao-tai and the courtly bow. It is being developed now, furiously-high-rise flats, fast railway lines, motorways, dockyards-but it is still a remote and peaceful place, with wild birds and animals and room to move, and air to breathe. People stuck in Hong Kong used to complain of a kind of hyperclaustrophobia, as though they lived in a pressure-cooker: the lush tranquillity of the New Territories provided them with a means of escape.

One small enclave has, however, remained resolutely Chinese. The Walled City of Kowloon, neither truly a city, nor having any walls-the j.a.panese knocked them down in the Second World War-was specifically mentioned in the Convention as the one place that would remain under Chinese administration 'except insofar as may be inconsistent with the military requirements for the defence of Hong Kong'. The British unilaterally revoked that particular clause of the Convention a few months after the lease had begun, and tossed the Chinese officials out. But the Walled City has never accepted colonial rule-it is a teeming, dirty little slum, unpoliced, unorganised, unfriendly and dangerous. There was never any town planning, though the Kai Tak airport authorities insisted recently that some buildings be lowered to an appropriate height, and so police moved in and obligingly lopped some storeys off. There has never been any sanitation, and electricity is siphoned from the main Kowloon grid, illegally. Fifty thousand people live in this single speck of China inside the Empire (which is itself, of course, a tiny speck of Empire inside China); the city is dangerous, stepping to the rhythm of a different drum, and likely to be unchanged by whatever forces come to dominate the future of the colony itself.

The British had few early doubts about the purpose behind the annexation of Hong Kong. The island had been placed there for the exclusive convenience of the British Empire, and its acquisition could only lead to one thing. 'It is a notch cut in China,' it was said at the time of the original Nanking Treaty, 'as a woodman notches a tree, to mark it for felling at a convenient opportunity.' Victoria, Empress of India, might soon add 'Empress of China and Queen of Corea' to her vast string of t.i.tles-and Hong Kong would surely be the vehicle by which she might do so.

But it was not to be. China was to be penetrated, but never vanquished. The British pierced the Manchu Empire one other time in 1898, when they forced a leasehold deal for the port of Weihaiwei, which lay across the Gulf of Chihli from the Russian enclave of Port Arthur. The British renamed their possession Port Edward, for the sake of symmetry. The Royal Navy loved the place and its people who were, as a journal reported at the time, 'a comfortable set, easy to deal with'. But Weihaiwei was not to remain in the British Empire for long: the American Government, which disliked the idea of foreigners muddying the western Pacific waters, urged the British to give up the lease. They did, and abandoned the colony in 1930-the first part of the Empire to be given up voluntarily. (It was almost immediately overrun by the j.a.panese, and China did not get her little port back until 1945.) The importance of Hong Kong was at first more symbolic than real. It gave the Royal Navy theoretical charge of the China Sea and, with the battles.h.i.+ps and destroyers based at Esquimault on Vancouver Island, the northern Pacific Ocean. It was, as Lord Curzon wrote, 'the furthermost link in the chain of fortresses which...girdles half the globe'. Or it was, as that most Imperially minded of admirals, Sir John Fisher, noted, 'one of the keys to the lock of the world'. The s.h.i.+ps came steaming in from Calcutta and Sydney and Aden and Gibraltar, the flag flew proudly over the Peak, and a naval cannon was fired at noon each day. And still is: Jardine's got into hot water once for firing a twenty-one-gun salute to welcome home the 'Honourable Merchant', as they call their boss. The Royal Navy set the firm a forfeit: a single cannonshot would be fired each noon as a colonial time signal. Noel Coward records the fact in his ditty about Mad Dogs and Englishmen-'In Hong Kong they strike a gong and fire off the Noon Day Gun.' Visitors have been recently known to fire the gun. One simply phones up Jardine's, and asks permission.

There is no more potent symbol of British rule over Hong Kong than the existence of His Excellency the Governor. His rule is absolute. His authority is positively dictatorial, deriving from the Letters Patent and Royal Instructions written in 1917, and empowering the Crown's personal factotum to 'do and execute all things that belong to his said office...according to such instructions as may from time to time be given to him'.

'What-no one interested in the job?' asked one commentator, when told of some difficulty in finding a replacement. 'Direct personal authority over five million people? Incredible that no one should want it.' Someone-a fluent Mandarin speaker, as it happens-was promptly found.

The University of Hong Kong conducted a study in 1973 of the nouns most commonly used in the colony's daily paper, the South China Morning Post South China Morning Post. The word 'Governor' came third. (A similar survey of the fifty-four daily Cantonese-language papers would have produced, one suspects, a rather lower figure.) He is omnipresent-making speeches, issuing declarations, presiding over meetings of the ruling committees, flying to London for talks, opening flower shows and concerts and exhibitions, or sidling off for weekends at his splendid country house at Fanling, in the New Territories. (Mountain Lodge, the Victorian grange built to help His Excellency survive the colonial summers, proved unsuitable: it was invariably shrouded in thick mist. It was pulled down in 1946.) The Governor of Hong Kong has not always been the highest-paid of the colonial chieftains. In 1930 he took home six thousand pounds; the Viceroy of India received three times as much, the Governor of Northern Ireland was paid two thousand pounds more, and he was pipped by all the Indian State Governors, the Governors-General of the Dominions, and the Governors of Malaya, Ceylon and Nigeria (the latter getting an extra ten pounds a week). But regard the list of those who fared less well-Jamaica, Baluchistan, Uganda, Tasmania, the Falkland Islands, Somaliland, and nearly forty others. The Governor of Hong Kong was paid six times as much as his opposite number in St Helena.

Today he is the best-paid Colonial Governor-hardly surprising, since his Chinese charges outnumber all the other colonial citizens by some seventy-two to one. He is driven in an unnumbered Rolls-Royce Phantom, the only Colonial Governor to be thus chauffeured (at least two of his colleagues, in Grand Turk and Port Stanley, make do with London taxis: the remainder tend to Fords. Not even a British government minister rates a Phantom. Only the royal family has that privilege). He is also supplied with a private government launch, the Lady Maurine Lady Maurine-though one critic publicly voiced the view that some Governors needed neither the Maurine Maurine nor any other boat for the purpose of crossing the harbour. They behaved, he said, as though they thought they could walk on the water. nor any other boat for the purpose of crossing the harbour. They behaved, he said, as though they thought they could walk on the water.

Almost every Governor of Hong Kong is favoured by having something named after him. Sir Henry Pottinger has a peak, Sir John Davis a mount, Sir Samuel Bonham a strand, Sir John Bowring a town. There is a Robinson Road, though Sir Hercules Robinson has not endeared himself to Chinese memory: he introduced an early version of apartheid, 'to protect the European and United States communities from the injury and inconvenience of intermixture with the Chinese'.

There is a Hennessy Road, too: Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Governor from 1877 to 1882, decided to give a number of senior government jobs to able Chinese, won all Chinese the permission to visit the colonial library, and ended up with the Cantonese appellation 'Number One Good Friend'. The Colonial Office thought rather less of him for that, and packed him off to Mauritius.

And so the memorials go on: Northcote Hospital, Peel Rise, Sir Cecil's Ride (after Sir Cecil Clementi), and Grantham (who served until 1958, and is quoted as saying that, 'The Governor is next to the Almighty') College. Nathan, Macdonnell, Kennedy, Bowen, Des Voeux, Lugard, May and Stubbs all rated roads as well: and no doubt the final inc.u.mbents will be so honoured-though with the colony reverting to the ministries of Peking, their distinction may not last for ever. (Even the most innocent of British Imperialists were seen to wince when they found their High Commission in Calcutta on a street renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani. Hong Kongers suspect only Hennessy Road will survive the revolution.) One Governor is not commemorated thus, though he is not forgotten, and in fact has left the most impressive memorial of all. Lieutenant-General Rensuke Isogai was Governor of Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945, when it wearily accepted control by its third Imperial suzerain, j.a.pan.

Hong Kong fell swiftly-though not as swiftly as Singapore a year later. Nor did its occupation by the j.a.panese Imperial Army cause particular alarm: it seemed to be accepted that since Hong Kong was a part of China, and j.a.pan had occupied southern China, then it was inevitable-irritating, but inevitable-that j.a.pan should march in. The troops arrived at the colony's border on the day before the Imperial Air Force struck at Pearl Harbor (and on the day that the Hong Kong Chinese Women's Clubs were holding their annual fancy-dress ball at the Peninsula Hotel). At the moment Honolulu was. .h.i.t, so was the airfield at Kai Tak, and the troops poured in across the Shen Zhen River.

Five days later all British troops were pinned down on Hong Kong Island, and the Governor, Sir Mark Young, was arranging for the storage of his furniture and the more valuable paintings from the Government House collection. Sir Mark then went and hid in a cave, and tried to run his fast-evaporating colony from underground. He finally surrendered on Christmas Day, at a brief ceremony in the Peninsula Hotel, and was led away to prison in Manchuria.

General Isogai turned up his nose at Sir Mark's Government House on Upper Albert Road. For one thing, it was ugly; for another, it was cracked, and looked about to fall down. 'Your Governor must be a very brave man to have lived in a building in that condition,' a j.a.panese official told one of the British administrators at the prison camp at Stanley (from where, the British insisted, the true colonial government still functioned). He decided to rebuild it. An architect from the South Manchurian Railway Company did the design, and j.a.panese engineers did the building. The result, Isogai's memorial, is by far the largest Government House still inhabited by a British Governor, and it looks, as might be expected, just like a j.a.panese Imperial railway station.

Isogai never lived there, though he had equipped the mansion with rice-paper screens, tatami baths and raised floors. The British used it for the surrender ceremony. 'It was a scene,' wrote the China Mail China Mail, 'etched against the background of a magnificently rejuvenated Government House, which gave the j.a.panese no opportunity of evading the humiliation of their position, and it was perhaps apt that the ceremony should have taken place in the only building which, judging by the s.p.a.cious grandeur of its interior, had furnished their high ranking officers with moments of pride in achievement.'

Sir Mark Young came back in triumph: someone dug up a bottle of brandy that had been buried in the garden while the j.a.panese were closing in: and the Union flag, raised slowly by an able seaman on surrender day, flew over the colony again. Sir Mark tore out the strange baths and edible screens, levelled the floors and ordered old-rose cretonne from the Ministry of Works in London (which, despite wartime shortages, soon obliged; the colonies still commanded some degree of precedence). Hong Kong and the New Territories were, as was to be said of the Falkland Islands four decades later, 'once more under the Government desired by their inhabitants'.

It was a close-run thing, in fact. The Americans had long wanted Britain to give up Hong Kong, as they had abandoned Weihaiwei, to provide the East with a timely gesture of non-Imperial goodwill. At Yalta, President Roosevelt had suggested to Stalin that it be internationalised, like Trieste, and run as a free port. It was only because Franklin Gimson, the British Colonial Secretary, had the wit to m