Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong

1 Nineteenth-Century Observatories

1 Nineteenth-Century Observatories Meteorology will not be in working order for two years more: but ‘Hart’ is long, if time is fleeting. Robert Hart, December 18731 Introduction The scientific approach to the physical world which blossomed in Europe from the time of Newton and his contemporaries onwards only slowly diffused to more distant regions, and that encroachment was largely under the cloak of European colonial expansion. The extension of the community of science can hardly be described as a missionary undertaking. The propagation of the ways of thinking of scientists did not preoccupy them in the way that the saving of souls moved religiously minded individuals. Of course, we are not talking of mutually exclusive classes. The role of science was pressed into service in the cause of evangelization on many fronts. Ironically, the successes of these endeavours, as we will see, were particularly favourable to the propagation of scientific thinking, more so than to the conversion of the heathen. The ground for foreign encroachment on traditional patterns of thought was fertile in some places more than others. The bulk of Asia — India, China, Japan — was heir to rich educational traditions that could easily sympathize with the new ways of thinking. We are concerned in this volume with a part of the world, the South China Sea and its littoral, and the subject of meteorology, a subject paradigmatic of the scientific approach to nature, emphasizing systematic observation and rigorous analysis in the solution of problems. MacKeown_01_ch01.indd 1 25/11/2010 9:16 AM 2 Early China Coast Meteorology Meteorology as a subject was of as much interest 150 years ago as it is today, in the early twenty-first century. The scenario to which it relates, of course, has changed immeasurably over the intervening years, but the urgency of its practice was no less attended to then than it is these days. However, the perceived pedestrian nature of its study seems to have eclipsed its role in most chronicles of the times. The story of the military and political endeavours in the advancement of imperial designs by Europeans in other parts of the world in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries has had many tellings. So also have there been many reports on the lives and adventures of the individuals who took part. Botanical and zoological enquiries among colonial servants, as well as casual travellers, have had wide reporting, but it is only recently that medicine, and to a much lesser extent the physical sciences and engineering, have drawn some attention.2 We are concerned with a factual account of the small, specialized subject of meteorology and especially how it was practised on the ‘China Coast’. Astronomy, and geomagnetism, bedmates of the subject in the early scientific age, will naturally also attract some attention. Although it is not our primary purpose, the story related also throws light on the strengths, foibles and prejudices of colonial society, as well as its attitudes to and interactions, in many cases minimal, with the native populations. There is much more to the story of meteorology in the Orient than an account of the role of the Hong Kong Observatory and we will make some attempt to cover these other aspects, but our focus will be on the evolution of the Observatory in Hong Kong and its relations with other Asian observatories. For good or bad, the history of the first thirty years of that observatory is in great part a chronicle of the career of Dr. William Doberck, the Observatory’s founding director and the institution’s feisty leader for twenty-four of those thirty years. His near quarter-century stay there and the shadow he cast for a further six years in the person of his close colleague and successor, Frederic George Figg, who retired in 1912, form a definitive timeframe for the study in hand. Doberck’s fame as an astronomer is also an excuse to treat, briefly, the early history of astronomy in Hong Kong. Its later developments are described elsewhere.3 To some, the very identification of meteorology in the East with its manifestations in Hong Kong will appear offensive. Compared to the contributions made by the observatories in China, Japan and the Philippines, Hong Kong will often appear, at least in the sense of resources, to have been a minor, but also a fractious player in the meteorology of the region in those times. We choose 1912 as the year at which to take stock of the development...