MEMORIES OF HONG-KONG
Hong-Kong exemplifies the national reserve of two great nations. Hong-Kong is the home of countless Chinamen, and the residence of many Englishmen, but the two know little of each other.
After having lived for some months in Hong-Kong, I have concluded that there are no two nations, one Oriental and the other Occidental, that so closely resemble each other as do the English and the Chinese. Englishmen are intensely Western; Chinamen are intensely Eastern. But those are, after all, merely matters involving local colour. Local colour affects the details of daily national life, but does not necessarily destroy or create great basic race characteristics.
Chinamen and Englishmen have, in common, indefatigable industry, indomitable courage, unswerving perseverance, reticence, pride, fidelity to a bargain, love of law and order, faith in the old, mistrust of the new. Both love horses; both were originally hunters; both indulge in games of chance—sometimes too often; both are respecters of rank; both venerate genius; both are considerate of women and children; both have produced great and enduring literatures; both have developed science; both resent the slightest encroachment upon their rights—individual or national; both are slow to anger and slower to forgive; both lack a supreme taste in dress; and in a hundred other ways they resemble each other.
The English race is painted on the canvas of life with stern reliable grays; the Chinese race is painted with dull serviceable blues. The Chinese have the advantage of the more vivid, picture-like background.
Nature is brilliant and aggressive in China. Chinese architecture is fantastic and often crude. But both are softened. The bold, bright scenery is made lovely and almost gentle by endless trails of dainty vines, great clumps and long lines of feathery bamboo, fields of wild white roses, and ragged masses of chrysanthemums. The grotesque Mongolian architecture is toned to beauty and fitness by its antiquity, and by its quaint tent-like outlines.
There is no city in the world more beautifully situated than Hong-Kong. As a matter of fact, there is no city named Hong-Kong, but there is a city called Hong-Kong. The island is named Hong-Kong, and its one city is named Victoria, but it is always called Hong-Kong. It is so much more rational to call a Chinese city by a Chinese rather than an English name—even though the English flag waves over it—that we may adopt the custom and forget the fact.
“The Peak” crowns Hong-Kong naturally and socially. The beauty of the island culminates where the huge ferns break again the lovely broken outlines of the Peak, and the blue sky backgrounds with topaz the big green fronds. The European élite of the island lives as near the Peak as it can, and descends in its coolie-borne chair to the streets and byways of Hong-Kong. The Peak is the climatic salvation of European life in Hong-Kong. When the heat of Hong-Kong the lowly is not to be endured of European vitalities, why then the Europeans of lower Hong-Kong reverse the action of Hong-Kong’s élite. The dwellers in Hong-Kong the lower ascend to the Peak, where it is always delightfully comfortable, invigoratingly cool. But they do not, as a rule, come up in chairs—the middle-class Anglo-Hong-Kongians; they come up on the cable railway, which is far quicker, and only costs, if I remember, ten sen!
But there is one more word to be said in praise of the Peak. Europeans can boast of three gastronomic achievements in Asia. The hotels in the East are, as a rule, bad; but there are a few exceptions; and of those few, three are Bonifaced by Europeans. A dear old American darky presides smilingly over a capital hotel on the Peak.
It poured when we first reached Hong-Kong. But I am always delighted to get on to firm land—even if it is rain-soaked and muddy.