Hong Kong (Vintage Departures) [Paperback]

I read and re-read this book while living in Hong Kong in the 90's, both before and after the end of British rule. Through it I learned of mnay fascinating parts of the place far away from the overcrowded urban areas - for example, the wonderful hills of the northern New Territories, full of trails put down in British days and full, too, of beauty and history. There are a thousand wonderful anecdotes in this book.

The description of expats is very good, surprisingly accurate when at its most funny, too - some expats do not appreciate such bluntness!

There is also a wonderful, very moving account of the millions of Chinese refugees who fled China just in the last several decades to make up the population of today. This is a very sad tale, well told, and helped me understand much of the unpleasant behaviour I encountered on the streets and in the crowds that didn't make sense (or make for tolerance) until I had read this account - I had a far better appreciation for the place after reading this. If you plan to visit/live in Hong Kong, do take this book along. The whole refugee story is very painful (understandably) for Hong Kong Chinese to talk about (it causes loss of "face" to do so), and you will not hear much about it in post-Handover Hong Kong, but a knowledge of it is essential for understanding the place. Despite the city's financial centre-status, most of its residents are poor, and most fled to the safety of British Hong Kong to work in sweat shops, which, tragedy of tragedies, made for an improvement in their lives.

I rank this book up with the other usually-mentioned Hong Kong classics: Timothy Mo's The Monkey King; Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman; Austin Coates' Myself A MAndarin and Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong. All of these will give the Westerner a far better understanding of the place than any guidebook or Culture Shock!-tpe guide.

Two lions made of bronze guard the entrance of the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building on the Bund in Shanghai. One looks cross, the other one snarls. Their paws shine from the touch of thousands of hands. Many people hope that some of the lion's power - and some of the bank's wealth - will rub off on them. The two guards of good fortune even had names once. In the 19th century, the snarler was called Stephen, and the cross lion was called Stitt in honor of their resemblance to two senior managers at the bank's offices in Hong Kong.

This piece of trivia is part of the fun of reading Jan Morris's "Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire". As the subtitle suggests, the main focus of the book is on the British influence in Hong Kong. This is particularly evident in the four chapters that deal with selected periods of the history of Hong Kong: (1) the 1840s when Hong Kong was founded on a barren island as the base for British drug trafficking into China, (2) the 1880s when the colony and the British Empire were at the pinnacle of their power, (3) the 1920s when Shanghai began to eclipse the city, and (4) the 1940s when Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese and later became the refuge for Chinese - many of them entrepreneurs from Shanghai - who fled the Communist revolution in China. The historical chapters are well-researched, and Morris enjoys elaborating on the quirks of the British in Hong Kong. The historical chapters are embedded in five chapters that take a more anecdotal look at the social, cultural, administrative, and economic aspects of life in Hong Kong. The chapter on administration is aptly named "Control Systems". Not surprisingly for Hong Kong, the most extensive and interesting chapter deals with business and the economy. "Means of Support" is a very understated title for this aspect of life in Hong Kong. It would be more fitting to call it "Get rich quick!". Jan Morris knows how to sprinkle delightful illustrations of Chinese industriousness and entrepreneurial talent into her tale. With a smirk she revels in the "endless variety of ingenuity, given to the world by such splendid-sounding concerns - the Grand Dragon Universal Sales Company, the Ever-Rich Industrial Company, or the perhaps unfortunately named Flying Junk Industrial Company Ltd.!"

The book has only two shortcomings. One is the fact that most parts of the book have been written in 1987, and only minor revisions were added in 1997, just before Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China. To understand today's Hong Kong, the epilogue to an empire ought to be appended by a prologue to an uncertain future. The other shortcoming is the effect of Ms. Morris's expatriate perspective on Hong Kong. Her point of view omits many aspects that shape the life of the Chinese who have always been the majority of the city's inhabitants. There is still some truth in William Somerset Maugham's observation in the 1920s: the vast majority of foreign residents has not the slightest notion what is happening among the Chinese masses. Yet, in defense of Ms. Morris I want to state that she writes about what she knows best; and that is a writer's job.

Currently Ms. Morris's book is the best work about the vibrant, greedy, contradictory, and ultimately inscrutable city of Hong Kong - a place where it seems that only the temporary is permanent (except for the constant, ubiquitous noise of jack-hammers maybe), nothing is rooted and everyone is trying to move on. There is no simple denominator for this city and its inhabitants. Having lived in Hong Kong for half a year, I can recommend Jan Morris's book as an entertaining introduction to the history and character of this fascinating city. I have enjoyed her Western perspective and her sense of humor as evidenced in her illustration why the Hong Kong Chinese are opportunists of genius: "When communal lavatories were first installed in Hong Kong, Chinese entrepreneurs took to sitting on them for so long that people were obliged to bribe them to come off."

First of all, I greatly enjoyed this classic. Jan Morris is one of the English world's greatest travel writers and this book is a tour de force. It really gives one a sense of what colonial Hong Kong was like for the British, despite the somewhat disjointed approach obliged by its single volume format.

However, as I read the book I grew more and more concerned about its balance and what had been left out. For its first hundred years, Hong Kong basically survived on the opium trade, and what was known as the "pig trade," the trans-shipment of Chinese peasant workers to other areas of the British Empire. I kept waiting to hear about these activities that were so basic to the life of the colony, and its great companies, Jadines, Swires, etc., but Morris hardly touches on them. There was no mention of the "pig trade" at all, and as for opium, it basically revolved around descriptions of beautiful, highly polished, opium clippers racing off to somewhere on the China coast. Such analytical holes automatically bias any balanced analysis of the Hong Kong's history, and tend to confirm that Morris is regarded in many academic circles as "Urban History Lite."

As well, there is her description of Hong Kong's two basic cultures. Morris does a good job of describing the British in the colony with their inherent greed, conceit, and racism. I have studied colonialism in detail here in Canada, and also in the Caribbean, and the variety of racism found in the Far East seems to have been the worst. However, the Chinese which made up 96% of the population, remain throughout the book a mysterious, superstitious mass, stereotyped repeatedly as being cheerful, energetic, and ingenious. There is something suspicious about these repetitions, and my first thought was does Morris speak Chinese. I have always felt that anyone who did not speak the local language should not get involved in writing about the culture. The links are just too vague to get it right.

Finally after all this meandering, Morris makes some pretty strong judgments about Hong Kong's history and the British contribution to it. She feels that Hong Kong was not a parasite as many have characterized it, but rather, gave as much to China as it got. This may be true, but she certainly hasn't proven it with this book. As well, she feels that the British, in spite of their many faults, basically governed the colony well, and ultimately, left Hong Kong honorably, even though they waited till the very last minute, before offering it any form of democratic alternative to their authoritarian rule. This argument also seems terribly weak to me, and rather underlines that the British, right up to the very last minute, were busy feathering their nest with this golden egg.

No this is not the definitive book on Hong Kong, but rather the beginning of the end of a very old, and very self serving British colonial genre. Will the sun every set on this British Empire? Not likely, not for another 1,000 years!

Cheers