Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong

Preface

PREFACE By the middle of the nineteenth century meteorology had become a frontier science, but, unlike most frontier sciences, a most valuable one in practical terms. It was a science that should easily have translated to East Asia, where its benefits were transparently obvious. The Japanese, when they set about it, rapidly adapted to the paradigm; the Chinese, fearful of colonial encroachment, were decidedly cool on the subject. What is surprising is how sluggish the development of the subject in the colonial environments was. What were the reasons for this? The present work grew out of an effort to document the history of the physical sciences in Hong Kong. This turned out to be too daunting a task, but from it grew an acquaintance with the unheralded founding director of the Hong Kong Observatory, Dr. William Doberck, a subject who provides a central focus for an account which can make a small contribution to answering this question. I also try to give a more general description of meteorology in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something that has not received much attention from historians to date. Incidental to the whole story is an account of colonial government and society in Hong Kong from a point of view which is complimentary to the more usual politically oriented studies. But the work is more a portrait of events than a researched thesis. No effort has been made to consult Japanese sources, or to track down records from the Manila (largely lost) or Zikawei observatories, and even the records from the Hong Kong Observatory, if we exclude the Government Gazette, are by no means complete. So reliance has often had to be placed on secondary sources, mostly Colonial Office files and contemporary newspaper reports. Not all of the material here is of wide provenance, and I thought it wise to add information to augment some of these sources. My preference for doing so would be signalled footnotes on the page — footnotes being often of greater interest than the text. I’m conscious, however, that many readers find such footnotes distracting so have relegated all such material to the end of the book. MacKeown_00_fm_rev.indd 13 02/12/2010 11:55 AM xiv Preface Minutes from the Colonial Office are from files CO129/297 (1882) through CO129/442 (1917). Materials from the Hong Kong Public Records Office are in files HKRS356 and HKRS842. Different spellings in early documents, Hongkong, Hong-Kong, Kaulung etc. are all standardized throughout to ‘Hong Kong’, etc. A bibliography lists all books cited, as well as journal articles that are referred to in the text more than once, and details of other publications are found in the notes where they are mentioned. In the last days of manuscript preparation I became aware of an unfinished draft of a book, An Introduction to Typhoons, that a late director of the Hong Kong Observatory, Gordon J. Bell, planned to produce, and which is housed in the Observatory library. Some relevant historical material, as well as some material, earlier familiarity with which would have saved me considerable effort, is to be found there. There is a perennial problem of how names of places are to be treated, the variability over time being especially acute in that part of the world. Some accommodation must be found for the form as written at the time and for contemporary versions. Common geographical names, such as Peking, Canton, Hong Kong and Macao which have been anglicized in the same way as have Lisbon, Rome, Dublin and Copenhagen are retained in their familiar English form. More difficult to deal with are the names of other places, especially in China, where forms of a more transitory or corrupted nature were in common use. To make a blanket replacement of Chinese place names by their current Hanyu Pinyin forms, e.g. Yantai for Chefoo, or Nanpengdao for Lamocks, would make for a very perplexed reading of the historical material. For the sake of cross referencing and readability, names are given as in the context where they arise, and the accepted contemporary versions are given in a Gazetteer in an Appendix — in Pinyin transliteration in the case of places in China. In the same interest of readability, text in other than roman script is relegated to the endnotes. The Jesuit observatory at Xujiahui is referred to throughout, except in quotations, as Zikawei, in keeping with the priests’ usage. MacKeown_00_fm_rev.indd 14 02/12/2010 11:55 AM...