With this volume, the fifth, the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series can be seen clearly as a unique and important set of publications in the field of Hong Kong studies. Sheilah Hamilton continues the trend set by her four predecessors in taking a little-known area of Hong Kong’s history, researching it comprehensively and producing a book that is both interesting and informative. Private policing and security in Hong Kong is a very visible fact of life here, but until now has been an activity the history of which was little known.

The publications in the Studies Series have...

It is no exaggeration that the average law-abiding person in Hong Kong encounters private security personnel on a daily basis. For most people these meetings are much more frequent than their interactions with officers of the Hong Kong Police or the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).¹ Except for small or old buildings, most domestic and industrial premises in Hong Kong employ watchmen or guards. On entering these premises, residents and visitors alike are usually monitored by close circuit television (CCTV) surveillance devices. Nor is this use of surveillance restricted to people of a particular class or financial standing. Occupants of...

In February 1841 the British population that anchored in Hong Kong harbour had been living the life of naval nomads for many months since their eviction from Macao in August 1839. This was due to the decision of Adriano Accacio da Silveira Pinto, the Portuguese governor of Macao, to enforce a policy of strict neutrality with respect to Macao’s participation in the hostilities between Britain and China. Until the Chinese authorities had exerted pressure on the Portuguese enclave, the British population in Macao had been tolerated even though they had ceased being treated as welcome guests. By imposing this latest...

In the 1960s, Mr. John C. McDouall, secretary for Chinese affairs, described the District Watch Force in the above terms. This telling statement by the government’s official in charge of the District Watch between 1957 and 1966 illustrates the opposing views held about the ‘Force’ by various sections of Hong Kong society. Indeed, the solo use of the word ‘Force’, without its more familiar qualification, ‘Hong Kong Police’, would have been an anathema to many members of the Hong Kong Police Force whose officers considered that they, and only they, represented the true ‘Force’. This ‘them and us’ notion neatly...

The 1860s might be regarded as Hong Kong’s ‘decade of security’ although it is doubtful whether that term would have been used at the time. In Chapter 3 we saw how local Chinese merchants combated crime in the Chinese quarter of Hong Kong by introducing their own form of guards, namely the District Watch Force. The same year saw the start of securities trading following the passage of the first Companies Ordinance in 1865.¹ However, it is not the safety of the trading floor that is the subject of this book and the date is mentioned merely to show the...

To most people in modern Hong Kong, the words ‘Government Security Personnel’ suggest police officers, prison officials or even those working in the Customs and Excise Department, the Immigration Department, the Fire Services Department and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). This is understandable because personnel in these departments are responsible for much of Hong Kong’s security. Immigration officers ensure that no one likely to upset the territory’s ‘security’ or traveling on a counterfeit passport is permitted to enter. Similarly, Fire Services personnel do much more than extinguish fires and officers in the Fire Prevention Bureau try valiantly to guarantee...

Before the arrival of the British, the shores around Hong Kong, Lantau, Cheung Chau and the other smaller islands had been a pirate’s dream and tales of legendary pirates such as Cheung Yi and his wife Cheung Po Choi appear in many studies of the colony.¹ The presence of a few hundred foreigners during the port’s infancy did little to scare away the pirates who preyed on traders and fishermen alike. During the 1840s the waters around Hong Kong continued to be plagued by daring piracies and the tiny Water Police was unable to combat these with any degree of...

In June 1898, China leased the New Territories and the outlying islands to Great Britain for 99 years.¹ In so doing, the colony acquired an additional 355 square miles of territory and a vast coastline, much of which had been the haven for pirates for many years. The Chinese people who inhabited the New Territories were very different from those who had settled on Hong Kong Island after 1841. Unlike some of the opportunists who had arrived in Hong Kong from various parts of southern China, many of the clan families residing in the area that became known as the...

The idea of any modern Hong Kong or British municipal police force actively running a security company on a commercial basis is difficult to accept. This does not mean that individual police officers have never moonlighted as security personnel for private organizations and personal gain. Human nature being what it is, such entrepreneurial spirit is almost inevitable. In the early 1880s, no less a person than Isaiah Lees, the chief detective of the San Francisco Police Department, was accused of working as a private detective whilst employed by the city.¹ However, the idea of a private security force operated by...

If a time-traveller, returning to Hong Kong in the 1840s, had bumped into Messrs. D’Aguilar, Caine and Gutzlaff and told them that, 170 years later, private policing was such an accepted way of modern life that more than 83,000 Hong Kong women possessed the Security Personnel Permits (SPPs) necessary for them to work in the territory’s private security industry, these Victorian gentlemen would have been utterly flabbergasted. If they had then been informed that this large number of ‘female’ SPPs was three times that of the entire force of uniformed officers of both genders in the Hong Kong Police, they...