Outposts (23 page)

It was Easter Saturday 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 worshippers, 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 parishioners 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-glass 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 unassuming churches of the English provinces, those in Cheltenham, or Carlisle, or Weston-super-Mare. The building was unspectacular and pleasing, made to reassure 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 classic 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 skyscraping monsters of steel and glass, 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 reassuringly 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 Wangaratta, 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 assignment, 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 élite 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 brass plaques commemorating the passing 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 passed 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
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 passers-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
were out, with the football results from England; there was the
Asian Wall Street Journal
, the previous day’s
Melbourne Age
and
Sydney Morning Herald
, and the
Los Angeles Times
and West Coast edition of the
New York Times
. Dozens of papers in Cantonese—and a smaller number in Mandarin—jostled for space, 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
, 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 associate 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 skyscrapers 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
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
can be expected to enjoy a prosperous existence; one that has not sought the advice and blessing of the
fung shui
man suffers (one big skyscraper on the Hong Kong waterfront, and which supposedly has bad
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 arseholes’, 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
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 circumstances,
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
, 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 classic 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 Kwangtung 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 shipping. 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 fishing 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 washing out for a warming blast from the passing 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 glass 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.