When my father died in 1962 he left me the manuscript of a follow-up to his book Hong Kong: birth, adolescence, and coming of age. The manuscript was entitled ‘Hong Kong 1862-1919: years of discretion’ and had never been published.

The work is not of great historical importance; indeed little of signifìcance occurred during the period to excite the interest of anyone outside Hong Kong. And it is only in comparatively recent years that the people of Hong Kong have shown much concern or appreciation of how this unique outpost evolved.

It was because little, if anything, has been written...

For a description of the colony at its coming-of-age in 1862 we have the choice of several memoirs by military officers employed in the Second China War, and similar birds of passage who have committed their impressions to print. Some were clearly unlucky in the season of their visit and have little good to say of the place. For example, Laurence Oliphant, private secretary to Lord Elgin, thus unburdens himself from the deck of a P. and O. steamer anchored in the harbour in September:

Often for days together we remaíned sweltering on board, from lack of energy and sufficient...

It was not only territorially that Victoria increased its stature as it came of age. Sir Hercules Robinson, energetic and far-sighted, completed his first term in office. As the first Governor to be relieved of the concurrent post of Superintendent of Trade he had been able to concentrate his entire energy and talent on the young colony. The result was that the face and character of the place underwent a transformation. The city had been given its first piped water supply collected in the new reservoir at Pokfulam. For street-lighting, oil had been discarded for the latest thing in gas...

The new Governor, Sir Richard Macdonnell, arrived on 11 March 1866, to terminate an interregnum which had lasted for almost exactly a year.

He was Irish, had graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, and had served a considerable apprenticeship in colonial administration in the Gambia and other parts of Africa.

He entered on his new duties with energy and perhaps a trace or two of native impetuosity. There is no doubt that a substantial programme confronted him; indeed, excepting education, all the main aspects of administration offered problems for solution. While the chronicler may take each in turn and follow it...

The new Governor, Sir Arthur Kennedy, and his predecessor were both Irish and had served in the Gambia. But here the similarity ends for while Sir Richard had come to Hong Kong at the age of fifty-two, Sir Arthur brought to his task the ripe experience of sixty-two. In character the two men presented a great contrast—the one restless, masterful, insistent on personal control, the other calm and suave, well content to leave contentious subjects to the slow digestion of committees and equipped to perfection to pour oil on troubled waters. Without a doubt the Secretary of State had...

Under the appeasing influence of Kennedy the agitations of the previous administration had subsided. An unusual calm had fallen upon the Colony and British and Chinese had settled down side by side to make hay while the sun shone. In these circumstances one might have expected that the continuance of so happy a state of affairs would have been assured, if not by extending Sir Arthur’s term, at any rate by sending a second Sir Arthur to succeed the first. But, if the Secretary of State frowned on excessive exuberance, he was no less fearful of stagnation and accordingly, as...

For twelve months following Hennessy’s departure the Government was administered by W. H. Marsh, the Colonial Secretary, whose services had recently earned him a knighthood.

Sir John had gone ostensibly on leave, but, as Phineas Ryrie, senior unofficial member, had delicately noticed when wishing him bon voyage in the Legislative Council, he had served the full term of five years. In the normal course of events he would have gone for good. But as the weeks passed without news of a successor, speculation arose on the chances of his returning after all and, it must be confessed, as rumour shortened...

On his return to England Bowen had received the high distinction of a privy councillorship and, when a successor, Sir George Strahan,* was nominated to the Governorship of Hong Kong, he looked forward to a quiet retirement after his long colonial service. But on the sudden death of the Governor designate the prospect momentarily faded, for he was asked—and reluctantly consented—to complete his full tour. But in the end other counsels prevailed, the choice falling on Sir William Des Voeux, and Bowen was saved a further journey to the Far East.

For the Colony this meant an interregnum...

The year 1891 was the Colony’s own jubilee, and the occasion was marked by a telegram, dated 21 January, from the Secretary of State conveying to the Governor Her Majesty’s congratulations and good wishes for its continued prosperity. The expression was dictated by notorious facts, for not only had the Secretary of State in his hand Des Voeux’s panegyric of 1889, the Queen had the personal impressions of the Duke of Connaught gathered in 1890. The bare statistics are proof enough, and they conveniently reduce themselves to round figures. In its jubilee year Hong Kong’s non-Chinese population rose to over...

Following the procedure adopted by his predecessor, Sir William Robinson handed over on his departure in March 1898 to his General Officer Commanding, Major General Wilsone Black, and the latter continued to administer the Government for eight months until the arrival in the autumn of the new Governor, Sir Henry Blake.

It was an eventful eight months. In January, Germany, incensed at the murder by bandits of two German missionaries in Shantung, had demanded at the pistol point a lease of Kiaochow by way of redress.¹ In March, Russia, claiming compensation for the upset of the status quo, occupied Port...

On 21 November 1903, Sir Henry Blake, promoted to the Governorship of Ceylon, left Hong Kong after exactly five years’ service and F. H. May, now Colonial Secretary in the place of Stewart Lockhart (who had assumed the Commissionership of Weiharwei) filled the gap until the arrival in July 1904 of the new Governor, Sir Matthew Nathan.

Blake’s departure provides a convenient halting place from which we may once more survey the Colony’s fortunes as they must have appeared at the time. In Victoria the new reclamation now nearing completion is plainly going to add greatly to the business facilities...

Once more Mr F. H. May administered the government for three months until the arrival of the new Governor in July 1907, and the first section of the Tai Tam Tuk waterworks being finished within this period, the honour of declaring open Hong Kong’s latest reservoir fell to him. It was an occasion of general congratulation, for with an addition of two hundred million gallons to the storage capacity the perennial problem of providing enough water for the expanding town was surely solved at last and the water famine of 1902 could be forgotten with impunity. Such at least was...

With the vast upheaval of the Chinese revolution a new chapter in the Colony’s history opens, and before we turn the page it is appropriate to try to provide in some detail a picture and description of Hong Kong as it was then. For this purpose I offer the reader the recollections of an eyewitness of the period.

It is a reconstruction made after a quarter of a century and more,¹ and in details the memory may sometimes play false. But in the main I claim reliability for the portrait. This is no casual cross-section made at random in the...

ln the spring of 1911 Sir Henry May had left on promotion to the Governorship of Fiji, being succeeded as Colonial Secretary first by Mr Warren Barnes and then, when Barnes had died suddenly on the polo ground shortly after taking up his duties, by Mr Claude Severn, also a civil servant from Malaya. The following summer, Lugard announced his own approaching departure to amalgamate the two Nigerias, and also the impending return of Sir Henry May as Governor. He had spent over thirty years in the Colony and, besides long administrative experience and unrivalled local knowledge, he had studied...

With the return of peace I bring this narrative to an end. Subsequent events must be allowed time to recede before they can be viewed with the necessary detachment. Having frequently remarked on the pace at which the Colony progresses it is high time to take stock, to take note of the direction in which it is going and perhaps to extract a moral from the breathless tale.

These are tasks which I invite the reader to undertake and, if acquainted with a more mature Hong Kong, to ask to what extent familiar features are recognizable in the more youthful...