The differences between nineteenth century Chinese and European civilizations were wide. Europeans, when they thought about religion at all, worshipped one God in a variety of antagonistic churches; the Chinese worshipped hundreds of gods, sometimes subscribing to several contradictory creeds simultaneously, without apparent conflict. Europeans were monogamous by law and custom; the Chinese, without odium, could be as polygamous as their means would allow.
None of these theological or moral disparities weighed heavily on the English while they were securing a foothold in China and building the opium trade. On the contrary, when they noted the willingness with which Chinese customs officials accepted their bribes, they felt they had established a kind of moral bond with the East. These people, whatever their eccentricities, were ready to do business in the accepted Western way.
When the British settled down to the business of governing their new colony, they collided at every turn with the language barrier. Except for a few conscientious missionaries and a minuscule number of lay scholars, the British were wholly ignorant of Cantonese, the prevailing Hong Kong tongue, and they were loftily disinclined to learn it. The extremes to which this arrogant insularity sometimes went were demonstrated by Governor Samuel George Bonham (1848-1854), who denied promotions to those subordinates who learned Chinese; he felt that the language was injurious to the mind, robbing it of common sense. In other respects, Governor Bonham was not so benighted as his linguistic convictions would indicate. Nor was he alone in his attitude toward the Chinese people; Governor Hercules Robinson (1859-1865) once wrote that it was his constant endeavor to “preserve the European and American community from the injury and inconvenience of intermixture” with the Chinese population.
Since all government business was (and continues to be) conducted in English, British officials frequently had to rely on Portuguese interpreters who had moved to Hong Kong from Macao. The Portuguese, facile linguists and unburdened by delusions of racial superiority, filled the role admirably. But in the colony courts, the simple task of swearing a witness in presented obstacles even to the best interpreters. Having never sworn an oath in the English fashion, the Chinese viewed it as just one more instance of outlandish mumbo-jumbo. At first the English tried cutting off a rooster’s head as a testament of the witness’s intention to tell the truth; then an earthenware bowl was broken to signify the same thing. A yellow paper inscribed with oaths or the name of the witness was burned in court as another form of swearing-in. Governor Bonham instituted a direct oral affirmation in 1852, but the complications that ensued must have intensified his conviction that the Chinese language was an insult to logic. If a defendant were asked, “Do you plead guilty?” the question was rendered in colloquial Cantonese as “You yes or no not guilty?” If the respondent answered “Yes, I am not guilty,” it could mean either “Not Guilty” or “Guilty.” Somehow the oaths were sworn, but not without a certain despair among the court attendants.
Although the European community seldom concerned itself with Chinese customs, it managed to raise a considerable storm over their “places of convenience” during the 1860s. These creations of the colony’s Chinese merchants were a sort of employee-retirement plan which consisted of taking one’s elderly or ailing workers to a crude shelter located on the north slope of Victoria Peak. There the faithful employee was rewarded for his long service by being given a quantity of drinking water and a coffin and left to die; if he were blessed with friends, they might visit him at this place, offer him an occasional scrap of food or a fresh ration of drinking water, and finally bury him. Often he died alone and without proper burial. This was too much, even for European opium traders, and Governor Richard Macdonnell stilled their protests by offering a free site for a Chinese hospital at Possession Point. This replacement of the terrible “dying-houses” was financed by the wealthier Chinese for their destitute countrymen. It became the first of the Tung Wah Chinese hospitals, now greatly expanded and modernized. The inevitable outcry that provision of the simplest medical care for the destitute would cause these facilities to be jammed by hordes of undeserving poor was raised—as it still is today—and proved false.
Sanitary conditions among the Chinese were horrible when the British arrived and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. The colony government made many attempts to improve them, but it was regularly stymied by the tenement dwellers who opposed any form of health inspection as an invasion of privacy, and by landlords who resented any proposal which threatened their profit margins. During the bubonic plague epidemics of the 1890s, the government provided a special plague burial-ground and offered the families of the dead quantities of lime to render the bodies of the victims noninfectious. The Chinese responded by abandoning their dead in the streets or throwing them in shallow graves; the donated lime was sold to building contractors.
The surviving tenements of the Western District of Hong Kong Island are still a shock to visiting Westerners. Still, their dark, dirty and overcrowded condition is a distinct improvement upon the disease-ridden pestholes of the last century. Sanitary inspectors, no longer detested and attacked by the population, can go anywhere and they carry full police powers for enforcing corrective action. The Chinese, never any fonder of dirt than the English, have been converted to the belief that the once-hated British methods can help them to achieve cleanliness.
Because of their tenuous contact with the Chinese residents of the colony, the British rulers tended to deal with them through intermediaries. This function was at first performed by the Mandarins, or members of the Chinese official class, who were as willing to gouge their countrymen for the British as they had been to do it for the Emperor; provided, of course, that they were able to deduct their usual cut. Governor Arthur Kennedy (1872-1877), who was the first to invite the Chinese to receptions at Government House, relied on the committee of the Man Mo Temple to control Chinese affairs.
Man Mo Temple, an ancient building still standing on Hollywood Road in the congested Western District, was a mixture of Buddhist and Taoist elements. Its leaders were Kennedy’s very potent allies, all working secretly to control Chinese affairs, acting as commercial arbitrators, negotiating the sale of official titles, and welcoming visiting Mandarins. Man Mo Temple, now administered by the Tung Wah Hospital committee, remained a respectable institution, but a number of other temples sprang up to challenge its influence.