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Chapter 1 The Early Settlers, the First Opium War and Its Aftermath Death and life, the theme of this book, is a reversal of the usual order because the book begins with death, the tombstone and then looks backwards in order to breathe life back into the faded and forgotten names that are so difficult to decipher on the old grey granite stones. It attempts to shed light on the lives of these men, women and children who people the terraces of the vast Hong Kong Cemetery. It aims to put them back into the surroundings they were familiar with and among the friends they spent time with. It looks further back to the factors that formed the society they lived in and brought forth their hopes and fears. Hopefully, a picture of an older version of Hong Kong will emerge that underlies our modern Hong Kong, influencing its development in subtle and often little understood ways. The social history of the early settlers in Hong Kong has been largely ignored. They have been dismissed as a small, troublesome and corrupt group of between about five hundred and one thousand men, rather fewer than the typical roll call of most schools in Hong Kong now. It may be asked why the way in which the early colonists ordered their society has any importance in the larger view of Hong Kong history where recently and rightly the emphasis has been on teasing out the facts that shed light on the history and progress of the Chinese majority who made their home in Hong Kong. It seems though to me that there are two reasons why their lives should be looked at more closely. Firstly, the early settlers in their lack of comprehension and their distrust of the Chinese race were at least partly responsible for relaying to Britain the clichés of the inscrutable, mysterious and inherently untrustworthy Oriental which so coloured the way the Chinese were regarded in the West. They helped to pave the way in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the ‘us’ and ‘them’ way of interacting with and studying the Orient, with the superiority of the ‘us’ faction as a sine qua non assumption. The knowledge that was being busily acquired by the colonists gave the governments back in England a handle in their dealings Lim_txt.indd 30 28/12/2010 4:14 PM The Early Settlers, the First Opium War and Its Aftermath 31 with the ‘them’ of their colony on the outskirts of China. It coloured the way the politicians back in Britain decided on their diplomatic paths in their dealings with the Chinese Empire. In fact, it coloured East­ -West intercourse and the course of history both in Hong Kong and in the wider context of the Far East through the nineteenth century and beyond. As Edward Said says: The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison or manual for scrutiny, study, judgement, discipline or governing. 1 Secondly, the path that the government took in Hong Kong was determined by the early experiences of the European settlers. The way it developed, without being subjected to the usual democratizing influences, was due to the particular circumstances that arose in Hong Kong. Perhaps part of the reason for the lack of a viable opposition to autocratic rule by the governor together with his carefully chosen Executive Council, backed by military power, lay in the fragmentation of society where small groups were set against each other. This layering pushed the various groups and sub-groups of European settlers so far apart that it was almost impossible for the cliques or layers to combine forces and Hong Kong governors in the nineteenth century were, by and large, able to divide and rule. On the few occasions when the whole community, including the Chinese, came together, as in October 1844, to oppose Sir John Davis’s attempt to impose registration and a poll tax on the entire population, the governor was soon forced to climb down and amend the legislation. 2 But even at that early date, the merchant body wrote a letter to the papers, signed by forty-four of their leaders, indignantly denying the governor’s insinuation that they had ‘colluded’ with the Chinese: ‘Not one of them had the slightest idea that the Chinese intended closing their shops or...

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