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On not being Macao(ed) in Hong Kong: British official minds and actions in 19671 Robert Bickers The question was: What was to be done with the flag? Inspired by events in Aden, and the removal to safety there in the face of the British withdrawal of the statue of Queen Victoria, Emrys Davies, assistant political advisor in the Hong Kong government, and Hugh Davies (later head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Far Eastern Department, and British senior representative [ambassador] on the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group), but then an FCO language student in Hong Kong, decided to act. Despite the quiet scuttle of British officials from Macao on 25 May 1967, the Union flag had continued to fly over the abandoned Consulate on Avenida de Republica through the long, humid summer, forlornly competing with the slogan-bedecked building in a battle of signs. Most of it had rotted away, but a third still hung limply from the flagstaff, a 'tattered disgrace' and a nice focus for photographs? For some reason, the spare flags were eventually discovered secreted in the Amah's bedroom. Discretion had meant that Davies and Davies were working in the dead of night, and a developing typhoon also meant that they struggled in 'high wind and driving rain' to lower the remnant flag and run up a new one. The pulley was broken, however, so they had to give up, and then instead of a secret and symbolic final lowering of the standard they had to uproot the entire flagpole. Ragged flag in hand, and with suitcases containing some remnant 'secret and confidential material of some antiquity', which they discovered in the Consulate strongroom, they made their way to the very early morning ferry back to Hong Kong, and its sullen leftist crew.3 For a historian of Sino-British relations before the 1950s, the 1967 Macao side-show contains very familiar ingredients. It has the flag, the consular stiff upper lip, the nationalist crowd, the cravenly weak local authority and, lurking in the background, it even has nuns, ever the bane of a China consul's life.4 After a twoweek confrontation with communist demonstrators, the consul, Norman Ions, and his deputy, had snuck out of the colony on the morning of 25 May on a nine 0'clock ferry to Hong Kong. The Consulate was never reopened. The lengthy despatch 54 Robert Bickers outlining the events seems never to have been completed or circulated.5 The episode will be recounted here for its interest as a side-show to the main confrontation in Hong Kong, but also because the events in Macao in May, building on lessons drawn from the Portuguese debacle in December 1966/January 1967, known as the 12.3 or 123 incident - were very much in the minds of British officials and commentators. The political advisor had briefed senior staff about the course of events in the Portuguese colony and their implications on 25 January, and other analyses of the lessons for Hong Kong had been circulated within the administration.6 'Some local people,' reported the correspondent of the Times on 18 April, 'have begun to wonder whether Hongkong may be in for a dose of the "Macao treatment".'7 'Their aim is to Macau us,' Trench told one reporter on 29 June.8 'The Hong Kong governor must learn from Nobre de Carvalho' (the Portuguese governor of Macao) was one of the slogans used in Macao in May. Trench certainly did learn from his neighbour's experience, but not in the manner demanded.9 This chapter explores the ways in which both before and during the 1967 events, Macao was routinely used in the presentation of an alternative colonial model, one which in fact built on much longer-term representations of Macao, which British colonialism had no wish to emulate. Although it had a romantic place in British imaginings of China coast history overall, not least through the work of Austin Coates, Macao - Charles Boxer's 'curious colony' - had never had particularly positive connotations for contemporary British observers, either those who visited or those who fed on the imagined Macao of salacious reportage. It had always stood for unwelcome compromise and cohabitation: with Catholicism, with Portugal and Portuguese power, with China, and with Chinese, and had long been associated with vice.lO From W. H. Auden to Hendrik De Leeuw it was, on the whole, not a place taken seriously.I I Looked at over the longer term...

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