The Hong Kong History Podcast Stephen Davies, DJ Clark

There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, for example, but looking at all the known ships that have had ‘Hong Kong’ in their names (about 127 of them) offers interesting perspectives on Hong Kong’s maritime story. Who called their ships after our home city? Not the big local colonial shipowners like Jardine’s or Butterfield & Swire is one answer. The ship names with Hong Kong in them are revelatory not just of Hong Kong’s story either. Looking at the kinds of ships and when they were in business tells us a lot about the development of the technical worlds of ships and cargo carrying in general. Developments on which the fortunes of Hong Kong were built and that are still important today.

Imperialist Britain spread modern-style, rules governed, organized sport – very much the creation of a newly leisured, comparatively affluent early Victorian world – all over the world. One of those sports, though never up there in popularity and participation like football and cricket, was sailing. Hong Kong was a home for recreational sailing almost as soon as the British grabbed it in 1841. It also became a home of local Chinese boatbuilders who learned to build – and often improve – Western designs. Via a fellow Hong Kong sailor, a few years ago I was given access to a late 19th century yacht’s logbook from Xiamen. It opened up the world of 19th century expats in China, of the building of western style boats in 19th century Hong Kong…and revealed how Waglan lighthouse was built by a relation of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce, who also designed a royal palace in Seoul, South Korea.

The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are not movers and shakers. Yet it is those lives, humdrum and invisible though they often are, that actually make moving and shaking possible. In being moved and shaken, it’s we nobodies who actually do the moving and shaking. Chance can sometimes reveal one of the moved and shaken caught up in larger historical patterns…and through their personal stories lead to undermining received assumptions. In 2015 a small brass label was discovered under five metres of mud in Victoria Harbour. It belonged to a Royal Marine called Edgar Goodman. His story reveals that HMS Tamar was not always Hong Kong’s 20th century naval base…and that there were Hong Kongers at Gallipoli.

Almost wherever you are there will be streets named after town worthies, or national eminences, or significant entities and events. Sometimes, particularly in larger towns, the names can reveal additional historical detail. What the main trades were and where they concentrated, for example. In Hong Kong over one hundred street names reveal details of Hong Kong’s maritime story, particularly in its early decades. One of them, long lost – or perhaps mislaid – I have recently rediscovered. The streets – there were two – were named after a major early Chinese shipowner, mover and shaker. Kwok Acheong may not now be much celebrated, but he was one of the founders of the Tung Wah Hospital and at one time Hong Kong’s biggest taxpayer. 

Over around a century and a half Hong Kong’s story has been told by professional and amateur historians. A few names became scores following the explosion in Hong Kong studies after the 1970s. Today there are as many and more netizens and bloggers. We don’t often know much detail about any of the handful of colonialist pioneers of the 1890-1960 period. They’re just authors’ names. Most of them are interesting though, and knowing about them helps one ‘read’ the histories they wrote. One of them, who wrote under the byline of ‘Colonial’ in the 1930s SCMP, and often seen as a sort of early begetter of the late 20th century Hong Kong Studies movement, illustrates the point well. Vincent Jarrett’s life is revelatory of the complex cultural reality and extended geographical links that have always been a signal feature of Hong Kong.

In this final episode of season two Stephen Davies talks about Hong Kong as a port. He takes us through its gradual rise from after the Second World War up until 2010 when it registered as the world's largest port, and then its slow decline after that. Along the way we talk about Chinese junks and the general modernization of ships in general operated from Hong Kong.