“The lowest dregs of native society flock to the British settlement in the hope of gain or plunder,” he wrote. “There are but faint prospects at present of any other than either a migratory or a predatory race being attracted to Hong Kong, who, when their hopes of gain or pilfering vanish, without hesitation or difficulty remove elsewhere.”
The Rev. Smith was no more favorably disposed toward his fellow countrymen. He felt the British rulers were too harsh with the Chinese, permitting the general population to be exploited by a few Mandarins. As for the merchants and traders, he regarded their behavior as setting a bad example for the Chinese. Saving souls in Hong Kong, he decided, demanded more miracles than he had at his disposal, and with considerable relief, he transferred his missionary efforts to the more congenial atmosphere of South China.
Other missionaries accepted the long odds against grappling successfully with the devil in Hong Kong, but the struggle left many of them disheartened. When the merchants and sailors were not engaged in the opium traffic, they frequently busied themselves by purchasing Chinese mistresses from the Tanka boat people. Many of the Eurasians of South China were the issue of this type of transaction.
Law enforcement in the colony was a farce. The few Europeans who could be induced to join the underpaid police force were the scourings of the Empire, remittance men or wastrels who accepted the jobs because they did not dare go home to England.
Householders, disgusted with the ineptness of the police, hired private watchmen who went about at night beating bamboo drums to advertise their presence. This noisy custom was later forbidden, and burglary, highway robbery and harbor piracy increased. Sir John F. Davis, the colony’s second governor, tried to persuade property owners to improve police protection by paying more taxes for it, but the merchants demurred, setting a precedent which was applied to many proposed improvements in years to come. The attitude seemed to be: Progress is fine, provided one doesn’t have to pay for it. Sir John attempted to keep track of known criminals by obliging every colony resident to register, but was forced to abandon the idea when the Chinese staged a three-month general strike in protest.
Piracy, smuggling, opium-smoking, prostitution, semislave trading in contract laborers, gambling, and graft flourished for many years, resisting the sporadic attacks of a succession of governors. In 1858, for the first and last time, an exceptional balance was achieved. Licenses for the sale of liquor, the favorite Western vice, and revenue from opium, the leading weakness of the Chinese, each brought 10,000 pounds of income to the colony government.
Under such powerful governors as Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell (1866-72) and Sir Arthur E. Kennedy (1872-77), the colony made significant advances in the control of piracy and urban crime. The quality of police protection improved and both men won the applause of local merchants by their Draconic policy of branding, flogging and deporting law-breakers. The Chinese Emperor and the liberal elements in the British Parliament disapproved of the severity applied but did not intervene to stop it.
The Chinese government never ceased its opposition to the smuggling of opium from Hong Kong, although many of its venal officials shared in the profits of the traffic. For two decades, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, China attempted to enforce a blockade against smuggled salt and opium, but opium continued to represent almost half its total imports.
A joint Sino-British commission agreed to place some limitation on the trade in 1886, but the British zeal for enforcement was diluted by the desire for continuing profits. Even after controls were repeatedly tightened in the early 1900s, the returns held steady; in 1906, the opium trade was valued at 5 million pounds and yielded $2 million in colony revenue. Unfavorable world opinion gradually narrowed the trade, but the nonmedical sale and use of the drug was not entirely banned until World War II.
In the last several decades, the Hong Kong Police Department has outgrown its disreputable origins and has become an efficient law-enforcement organization. Nevertheless, the image of the colony that persists in the imagination of many Westerners who have never been there is a cesspool of iniquity such as the one that horrified the Rev. Smith.