“No Day without a Deed to Crown It”

The Ministering Children’s League was founded in Britain in 1885 with the aim of cultivating among children of the rich a desire to feel empathy with the poor and suffering. Examining the work of the league’s branch in Hong Kong in the early 20th century, this chapter argues that the decision by Flora Shaw, the activist wife of the Governor, Sir Frederick Lugard, to include Chinese girls as members broke down the race-bound relations between ‘benevolents’ and ‘beneficiaries’ and, in providing opportunities for Chinese and European children to work together and mingle socially, led to unintended consequences, and complicated the idea that ‘Empire’ was a straightforward story of social division and ethnic segregation. Under the aegis of empire-sponsored philanthropy, children in Hong Kong assumed the spirit of public service while learning to see themselves as part of a multicultural, international fellowship of childhood.

The Parallel Worlds of Seafarers

In the godowns, shipping offices, chandleries and dockyards a medley of voice did business in a multiplicity of languages and dialects. The goods they handled, shipped in from all over the world, represented as many ways of seeing and being, eating and dressing, living and dying. Yet there were disconnections as well as connections in this interface of interfaces. This chapter describes how the colonial government set apart seamen of different ethnic backgrounds by issuing different sets of regulations for seamen’s boarding houses according to whether they were lascars (Indians, Malays and others from South and Southeast Asia), Chinese or Westerners. Deepening the divides was the strong native-place and dialect-basis principle under which Chinese boarding houses were organized, indicating a certain degree of segregation among the Chinese themselves. The separateness is also shown in the different church missions, which ministered to seamen according to their ethnic origins.

The Code of Silence across the Hong Kong Eurasian Community(ies)

This chapter examines the dynamics of Hong Kong’s Eurasian community (from the 1860s to the 1960s) in terms of the community’s perception of its own members, the attitudes of its members towards their own European and Chinese heritage, and the mutual perceptions and interactions with other ethnic groups in the city during the period in question. Despite the fact that many Eurasians have served in various roles in Hong Kong, in both the public and private sectors, from doctors and lawyers to nurses, teachers, clerks and stenographers, particularly since the late 1800s, not much is known about this community. Unlike other ethnic groups such as the Parsee and the Portuguese communities, who shared a common religion common cultural practices identity, the sense of community among Eurasians was nebulous and sporadic. Ironically, one common practice shared by members of this community was a conscious attempt to de-emphasize their membership of this ethnic group and a reluctance to acknowledge their Eurasian heritage both on an individual and collective level.

Western Firms and Their Chinese Compradors

This chapter explores the close and complex relationships between members of the German Jebsen family, steamship entrepreneurs, and their comprador, Chau Yue Ting, a Western-educated member of a merchant family from Hainan based in Hong Kong. Through a detailed examination of correspondence and other business records, the chapter highlights the multiple roles of compradors not only as bicultural middlemen for Western interests but also as clients, customers, co-owners of businesses, employees and employers, creditors and debtors, and family friends. It challenges the simplistic view that foreign steamship companies in the region were tools of empire or spearheads of Western penetration into Chinese markets, stressing instead how Chinese merchants strategically made use of their services to extend and consolidate their own business networks.

Carvalho Yeo and the 1928 Hong Kong Treasury Swindle

In 1928 Carvalho Yeo was accused of stealing more than a quarter of a million dollars from the Government Treasury through an elaborate cheque fraud. Yeo was traced to Shanghai and brought back to Hong Kong, where, after a sensational trial before the Supreme Court, he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. His actions exposed chaotic management in the Treasury and brought into question the competence of senior government officials. Carvalho Yeo was a man of ‘mysterious antecedents and doubtful nationality’ – a criminal wanted by police in other Asian cities before he came to Hong Kong. Possibly of ‘Sino-Siamese’ origins, he presented himself by turns as a Chinese, a Portuguese, and a British subject, and deployed various aliases, fictional partners, and fake companies to carry out his plans. His story fascinated the Hong Kong public as much as it embarrassed the authorities. The chapter asks what Yeo’s manipulation of identities tells us about relations between the communities in early twentieth-century Hong Kong and suggests that, while racial divides were real and often rigid, individual choices sometimes challenged this rigidity, even – as in Carvalho Yeo’s case – to the point of making a farce out of the divides.

The Making of Accomplished Women

In various ways, the wide range of schools in Hong Kong – some secular, others run by a variety of religious organizations - represented a new frontier to girl students, and the cultural exchanges that took place there were multidimensional. Apart from contact with new knowledge through book learning, Chinese girls gained access to other unfamiliar activities such as choral singing, playing musical instruments, sports, and girl guiding. Equally importantly, in some schools girls encountered and mingled with others from very different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds, forming an important socializing experience. The first generation of ‘accomplished women’ from such schools contributed to the redefining of women’s space in prewar Hong Kong. The turbulent years of the 1920s and 1930s also provided unprecedented opportunities for them to exercise their language skills in networking and organization of charity and relief work. This chapter argues that for those women who excelled in public service it was not only the academic training but the all-round education in a multicultural setting that equipped them with discipline and determination, and a vision to build international connections in their service for the common good.

From Dried Seafood to Instant Ramen

This chapter provides an example of how imported foods become integrated into Hong Kong life through the work of cultural intermediaries. Hong Kong is now the biggest market outside Japan for Japanese food items – far greater even than the United States, with a population 40 times that of Hong Kong’s. Using Demae Iccho instant noodles as an example, the chapter shows how a transnational Chinese merchant family in Kobe, using existing Chinese networks for distributing dried seafood, played an indispensable role in the process of diffusing the product in Hong Kong from 1969 onwards.

Wang Tao in Hong Kong and the Chinese “Other”

Wang Tao, a prominent member of the Chinese literati, arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and found it a baffling place, inhabited not only by foreigners but also by southern Chinese, who were (in his view) uncivilized, unable to speak his dialect and possessing weird tastes in food. Merchants, who belonged to an inferior class in China, played a prominent role in society, flaunting their wealth and status with little restraint, funding charitable works, claiming political influence over the colonial government and earning respect from officials in China and Chinese overseas. During his 20 or more years in Hong Kong Wang Tao came to terms with the colony. He made history by founding the first Chinese-language newspaper, the Xunhuan ribao. He came to appreciate the different versions of Chineseness that had at first bewildered him, and molded new versions of Chineseness out of this jumbled assortment of Chinese identity.