The ‘good old days’ when might was right have happily passed away, never, it is to be hoped, to return, and justice is, especially throughout the length and breadth of the British Empire, dispensed with due regard to the common rights of all mankind, and with the important fact ever in view that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire,’ be alien, native, or true-born Briton.Footnote 1
Introduction
In 1895, Hong Kong-born Macanese José Pedro Braga published his first work, The Rights of Aliens in Hongkong.Footnote 2 The pamphlet, partly an ode to the British empire, was a critique of racial inequality in the colony. Braga urged the public to condemn acts of prejudice in the workplace and briefly stirred some noise in the colony and its neighbouring port cities. More than a decade before, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques published A Defeza do Darwinismo, advocating Darwinism and scientific progress to a smaller Macanese audience spread across southern China. Through a close analysis of two individual narratives, this study complicates what we know about polyglot and male Asian urban elites often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions.Footnote 3 It argues that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to generational differences, communal conflicts, shifting global contexts, and personal experience. Both Western-educated and coming from middle-class Luso-Asian backgrounds, Marques and Braga had different visions of ‘progress’. Marques defined progress in terms of the acceptance of Darwinism, which he used in critiquing the Macanese community and Roman Catholic Church for their lack of advancement. Under the influences of an emerging Anglophone public sphere and inter-ethnic associational culture in twentieth-century Asia, Braga developed an international network and worked with other like-minded, non-Macanese publics to create a more progressive Hong Kong society based on internationalist ideas.
Existing literature has traced the presence of educated publics in Asian colonies to the nineteenth century when indigenous advocates worked to disseminate intellectual debates that originated from Europe, specifically at a time before the widespread use of print media.Footnote 4 Studying colonial North India, Christopher Bayly termed these advocates as ‘public men’ who were active in the ‘indigenous public sphere’.Footnote 5 Notably, this group of publics was small in size and scale, with participation restricted to middle-class subjects interested in appropriating and revising the liberal ideologies of their colonizers. They wrote in the Urdu language and spread ideas through personal and institutional letter writing, in hopes of criticizing colonialism and calling for equality. While these debates stimulated discussion in druggists’ stalls and sweet shops, they did not reach a wide audience.Footnote 6 By the late nineteenth century, these Indian public men were responding to, refuting, and recasting intellectual arguments originating from Britain according to local development. They tried to bridge the indigenous population with European intellectual trends, without the intention of striking up an actual conversation with the European writers. Instead, they sought to establish their authority over Indian debates and act as ‘public moralists’, prompting moral imperatives within local society through the spread of European ideas and values.Footnote 7 Notably, nineteenth-century publics are rarely associated with the idea of cosmopolitanism, yet their activities demonstrate a commitment to social change and progress that twentieth-century cosmopolitan publics possessed. In the first section, I use Bayly's idea of ‘public men’ to examine the writings and activities of Lourenço Pereira Marques and his aspiration for creating a progressive Macanese community in Macao through Hong Kong's more liberal atmosphere. His experience will not only show the existence of a Macanese public sphere that encompassed Hong Kong and Macao, but will also shed light on Marques's use of European science to address communal issues.
The early twentieth century saw the transformation of the ‘indigenous public sphere’ into a wider platform that allowed inter-port dialogue and transnational affiliations to mushroom in Asian port cities. The rise of transnational associational cultures paved the way for a new level of interconnectedness between middle-class professionals from different ethnic backgrounds and places of origin.Footnote 8 With this development, cosmopolitanism took an unprecedented turn, marked by interracial cooperation and a consciousness of living in an increasingly integrated world.Footnote 9 Associations like Rotary clubs had multiracial membership and advocated civic sensibility amongst members, allowing them a platform on which to participate in the public sphere and challenge existing colonial and social hierarchies once defined by skin colour.Footnote 10 With the rise of inter-ethnic associations, middle-class men and women from all walks of life interacted through the Anglophone public sphere, where they shared an interest for discourses of ‘internationalism’ and discussed universal ideas such as liberalism and equality. For one, this resulted in the construction of various new identities, including a ‘global’ consciousness amongst members of civil associations, a ‘domiciled identity’ amongst Straits Chinese in Singapore, and a ‘global Chinese’ identity in Straits Chinese figures like Lim Boon Keng.Footnote 11 For another, the Anglophone public sphere provided a new platform for middle-class professionals to look beyond the geographical boundaries of their settlements and respond to global issues through local initiatives and vice versa.Footnote 12 As will be shown in the second section, it was through such transformations that José Pedro Braga tried to call for the equal treatment of Hong Kong-born ‘aliens’. He later became associated with other like-minded middle-class professionals to form a multiracial civil association aimed at bettering the British colony as a ‘home’ not only for Britons, but also for settlers who shared a collective affection for the city.
Apart from reflecting the transition from an indigenous public sphere in the nineteenth century to a wider arena for inter-port dialogue in the early twentieth, the individual experiences of Marques and Braga will further demonstrate the complexities of cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis other coexisting identities. Existing literature has broadly demonstrated cosmopolitan publics as a unified entity of educated middle-class subjects participating in a global civil society, but the Macanese experience reveals that subjects faced intra-communal disputes over questions of cultural representation and citizenship status that conflicted with their cosmopolitan orientation.Footnote 13 On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework.Footnote 14 Just as Marques and Braga found solidarity with other non-Macanese publics, they simultaneously faced scrutiny from the Macanese community for identifying with Eurasian and British publics, and were perceived as becoming less ‘Portuguese’. This study, thus, further proposes understanding cosmopolitan men beyond their shared educational backgrounds and internationalist visions, perceiving them instead as individuals whose identities were self-defined and diverged according to setting, time, citizenship, experience, and pursuits.
The entrance of foreign settlers to colonial spaces helped to shape polyglot port cities in Asia. British colonies, in particular, served as liberal spaces for the formation of an inter-port public sphere that encouraged the creation of new intellectual cultures.Footnote 15 Through the case of the Macanese, this study further examines the role that British Hong Kong played in cultivating inter-port interaction. While Hong Kong has long been hailed as a ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ city for its history as a British colony, a small body of literature has only recently emerged to uncover the city's extensive networks to the outside world.Footnote 16 British Hong Kong's position as a hub of cross-cultural exchange was built upon its role as, quoting Elizabeth Sinn, an ‘in-between place’ for migrants, trade, and intellectual endeavours.Footnote 17 The experiences of Marques and Braga point to Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’ of sorts. For one, it was a space where the British and Portuguese empires intersected through the unfolding of Macao's issues in Hong Kong and the blossoming of a Lusophone public sphere on British territory. For another, it provided the space for the diversification and eventual segregation of the Macanese between an Anglophile Hong Kong-born community and a pro-Portuguese Macao-born cluster.Footnote 18 As the Macanese population grew from 1,367 in 1871 to 3,177 in 1931, 2,088 entered as ‘Portuguese citizens’ and 1,089 identified as ‘British subjects’ by the 1930s.Footnote 19 Macao-born Macanese often saw Hong Kong's Anglophile Macanese as ‘denationalized’ due to their education, civil participation, and naturalization as British subjects.Footnote 20 This study reveals the differences between two Macanese groups that shared the same racial origins yet differed in terms of birthplace, upbringing, and sometimes nationality, at its early stages.
Notably, the absence of sources limits our understanding of both Marques's and Braga's readership, yet these two figures were acknowledged publics of their times in the Macanese sphere, particularly when a large proportion of the community silently worked as clerks, bookkeepers, and administrative staff in public offices and private enterprises. In addition, the transformation of Macao's Luso-Asians has yet to be widely discussed, and their Hong Kong experience offers us an opportunity to reveal the cultural plasticity of a migrant community from the perspective of two generations and under the influence of both local and global forces.Footnote 21 Marques studied in Macao and trained as a doctor in Europe in an era when educational opportunities were slender in the Portuguese colony. He later became a prominent member of Hong Kong's largest Portuguese gentlemen's club, Club Lusitano, and is today celebrated in Macao with a street named after him. Braga started his career as a humble printer at his grandfather, Delfino Noronha's, printing company in the 1880s. Four decades later, his entrance to the Legislative Council put him in the hot seat as a pride of Hong Kong's Anglophile Macanese community and an eyesore to the colony's pro-Portuguese community. Ultimately, both Marques's and Braga's standing in the Macanese circle and engagement with ‘local’ issues will help us to reflect on the diversity of migrant communities and the vibrancy of colonial port cities.
Marques, Camões lover and ‘public man’
Lourenço Pereira Marques was born in 1852 to an affluent family in San António, Macao. His parents were prominent figures within the Macanese oligarchy that dominated Macao politics and trade. His father, Comendador Lourenço Caetano Cortela Marques, was a politician and solicitor, while his mother, ‘Mariquita’ Pereira, belonged to one of the city's wealthiest families. At a young age, Marques came into contact with different cultures. His father was an enthusiast of Portuguese poet Luís de Camões and Marques grew up at the Camões Grotto (Camões Garden), where a bust of the poet was built in 1840. Due to his father's duty of dealing with Chinese affairs for the Senate, Chinese visitors frequented the Marques's home.Footnote 22 Lourenço Marques received his early education in Macao and Hong Kong, and later attended medical school in Lisbon. In 1877, he acquired his medical licence in Dublin and became a Fellow at the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of Lisbon.Footnote 23 Marques subsequently moved to Hong Kong and worked for the colonial government as Acting Assistant Superintendent of the Government Civil Hospital. Although raised a Catholic, Marques eventually became an atheist and Republican supporter, and had close connections to Freemason circles in Ireland and Hong Kong.Footnote 24
It was in Hong Kong that Marques emerged as a ‘public man’ who spoke to and wrote for a Lusophone audience. By this time, Hong Kong's Chinese elite population had begun showing a collective interest towards ‘local’ issues, including fights to abolish the mui tsai system (妹仔; literally, ‘little sister’), a Chinese practice of buying and selling young girls to servitude in families and racial distinction in the opening hours of the City Hall museum.Footnote 25 Having different activities from those of the Chinese elites, Marques did not become involved in public debates regarding local Hong Kong issues, opting to write, to a large extent, in the Portuguese language and creating a limited ‘dialogue’ with Macanese professionals.Footnote 26 He was a ‘public man’ in the sense that he worked, with fellow Macanese proponents of science and technology, to refine the writings of European intellectuals to a Macanese audience. Using knowledge he had acquired during his stay in Europe, Marques devoted himself in responding to and revising the concept of Darwinism, not as an attempt to engage in this wider European debate, nor ‘speak to’ existing proponents or critics of Darwinism, but as an urge to encourage progress through better acceptance of science in Macanese society. Marques was the first to write extensively about Darwinism in the Asian Lusophone sphere, and traced its history and development through the writings of Europeans like Sir Charles Lyell, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Friederich Müller, and Julius Victor Carus. During the 1880s, he published Defeza do Darwinismo: Refutaçao d'um artigo do Jornal ‘Catholic Register’ [Defence of Darwinism: Refutation of An Article of the Catholic Register] and A validade do Darwinismo [The Validity of Darwinism], attempting to strike a local ‘dialogue’ within the Macanese community in Hong Kong and Macao.
Marques's open support for Darwinism started as a response to a letter sent to Club Lusitano, Hong Kong's largest ‘Portuguese’ gentlemen's club in 1880. Written in Spanish by the rector of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the letter was a protest against the materialistic tendencies of the epoch, condemning Darwinism as a ridiculous satire. Marques repudiated the attacks through a booklet published by the club in commemoration of the tercentenary of the death of Camões.Footnote 27 This resulted in a round of debates between Hong Kong, Macao, and Manila. Two editorials emerged on the Catholic Register supporting the Spanish rector; the editor of the Catholic Register described Club Lusitano as ‘a proof of gross ignorance’ and claimed that Darwinism was but ‘insanity and the greatest contradiction’.Footnote 28 In Hong Kong, The China Mail printed a letter sent by ‘The Compiler of the Memoir of the Tricentenary of Camoens’, which criticized the Catholic Register for failing to ‘accept with humility’ the place assigned to mankind in the universe.Footnote 29 Notably, Marques was one of the compilers of the memoir and likely one of the authors behind the letter. The debate quickly extended to Macao, marked by at least three publications condemning the members of Club Lusitano and their support of Darwinism.
Contributing to the debate, Macao lawyer and journalist António Joaquim Bastos published a pamphlet to dismiss Club Lusitano and the ‘Hong Kong Portuguese’ as representatives of the Macanese community. A disciple of the Jesuit priests of the Seminary of St. Joseph and devoted Catholic himself, Bastos pointed out the Hong Kong Macanese elites’ defence of Darwinism was due to social differences between the Macanese communities of Hong Kong and Macau.Footnote 30 In March 1881, Canon António Vasconcellos delivered a sermon on the First Sunday of Lent. In his address, which was later published in Macao, Vasconcellos renounced Darwinism.Footnote 31 Macao-born Policarpo da Costa, one of the editors of Club Lusitano's Camões commemorative booklet, wrote a pamphlet to counter the sermon. Da Costa dedicated his work to all ‘lovers of progress’, criticized anti-scientific proponents, and highlighted transformations in religious belief and tolerance of scientific progress as a step towards establishing political order.Footnote 32 Following these debates, Lourenço Pereira Marques wrote Defeza do Darwinismo and A validade do Darwinismo as his response to the articles published on the Catholic Register.Footnote 33 He completed both works in October 1880, but they were only printed for the first time in 1882.
Marques used the opportunity to criticize the Catholic Register for using ‘outdated’ literature, which included writers and philosophers such as Alix, Wibrand, Snell, and Toule, whom he claimed to have never heard of. More significantly, Marques urged his Macanese readers to be more open-minded for the sake of the community's advancement and progress. He tried to convince Macanese men and women to embrace science and technology, pointing out that science could harmoniously coexist with Catholicism.Footnote 34 Adopting the works of European writers, Marques argued against any conflict between the theory of evolution and Church principles. He quoted, for instance, English biologist and Roman Catholic St. George Mivart's idea that religious teachings harmonized with modern science.Footnote 35 In addition, Marques brought into the discussion the writings of a Chinese philosopher and Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi (朱熹). He did not read Chinese, but quoted Zhu from Ernest Eitel's study of fengshui. He adopted Zhu Xi's idea that the world evolved from an invisible energy, a spiritual foundation of natural life, in stressing the harmony between religion and science.Footnote 36 Marques emphasized ‘Vemos portanto que a religião christã não é contra a sciencia’ (‘We see that religion is not contradicting to science’) and warned that the Macanese community would remain backward in their conservative world unless they changed their perceptions of science and opened their arms to accept science and technology as a crucial catalyst of social progress.Footnote 37
Marques's publications regarding Darwinism failed to stir further ‘dialogue’ within the Macanese community. His thoughts and intention of disseminating Darwinism, nevertheless, mirrored Bayly's idea of the ‘public man’. Through the Lusophone public sphere, he not only disseminated European intellectual trends across Hong Kong and Macao's Macanese communities, but also sought to encourage progress through science. Using Stefan Collini's description, Marques was a ‘public moralist’, being formally educated, financially secure, and devoted to commenting on political and social issues with ‘moral sensibilities’.Footnote 38 One scholarly account regarding Marques explained his critique of the general Macanese as a consequence of his long association with Britons and British culture.Footnote 39 As opposed to it, I argue that Marques actively used his interest in and knowledge of European intellectual trends to uncover problems within Macanese society. His choice to write in the Portuguese language and to address local issues reveals his concerns for the future of the Macanese in southern China. Marques did not distance himself from Macao or the Macanese community, but instead represented a small number of foreign-educated first-generation Macanese migrants who used the British colony as a space to develop their intellectual thoughts and encourage members of their community to pursue progress and change. His pursuit of a progressive Macanese society was further reflected in his concerns towards the absence of a public library in Macau.Footnote 40 During the twentieth century, Marques's private collection of 4,739 books on history, language, religion, science, philosophy, and politics from all around the world emerged at a library named ‘Dr. Lourenço Pereira Marques Biblioteca’ in the Club de Macau.Footnote 41
Lourenço Pereira Marques was not the first to raise Macao's issues in Hong Kong. Since British colonization in the early 1840s, an alternative Lusophone public sphere had subsequently emerged. Macanese individuals saw the British colony as a liberal space in which to discuss the Portuguese enclave's problems away from the Macao government's strict press censorship. Between the 1840s and 1880s, a total of 11 Portuguese-language newspapers were set up in the British colony, some of which were short-lived. One Macanese newspaper editor, Manuel Pegado, who transferred his newspaper to Hong Kong, highlighted the lack of press freedom in Macao. In 1846, Pegado wrote an open letter to criticize the Macao government for denying him freedom of press and pledged to revive the spirit of the ‘Macaístas’ and speak against the Macau government by exposing their ‘vices’. He urged Macao's Luso-Asians to make use of his newspaper columns in their cries for justice against the repressive Macao government.Footnote 42 Pegado's case and Marques's writings exemplify the emergence and burgeoning of an inter-port ‘dialogue’ between the Macanese through British Hong Kong. Using the Portuguese language, this ‘dialogue’ was restricted to the involvement of a singular community and contained within a Lusophone public sphere. Apart from the Lusophone public sphere, other public spheres catering to the needs of specific communities that also emerged in colonial Hong Kong. Filipino revolutionary José Rizal, for instance, took advantage of his time in the colony between 1891 and 1892 to write essays that would otherwise have been banned in the Philippines, including the Constitution of La Liga Filipina and criticism towards the Dominican friars in the Philippines. In 1892, The Hongkong Telegraph printed Rizal's attack against the cruelty of the Dominican order and the sufferings of lower-class natives under the name ‘Philippino’.Footnote 43 Similar to Marques's use of Hong Kong as a space to encourage progress within the Macanese community, José Rizal extended his anticolonial pursuits in the colony, addressing issues that concerned the Philippine revolutionaries’ fight against the Spanish regime.
Marques and Rizal met in Hong Kong and became acquaintances. They were frequent guests at the dinner table of Delfino Noronha, who was then running a prominent printing company and the official government printer. It was in Noronha's home that Marques discussed social and political issues with Noronha's grandson, José Pedro Braga; next-door neighbour, exiled Filipino revolutionary José Maria Basa; and ‘scandalous’ and outspoken founder of The Hongkong Telegraph Robert Fraser-Smith.Footnote 44 Marques was particularly close to José Rizal. In a note dated 1892, Marques called Rizal ‘a dear friend’ and offered him a ‘Portuguese dish of poultry in ginger and pepper broth’ that he had cooked.Footnote 45 He also took Rizal to his workplace at the Victoria Gaol, which inspired Rizal to write about the problems of the Spanish prison system in a piece entitled ‘Una visita a la Victoria Gaol’ (‘A visit to the Victoria Gaol’).Footnote 46 Although Marques interacted with other like-minded people outside the Macanese circle, his efforts to strike a ‘dialogue’ through his writings were concentrated on issues concerning the Macanese in Macao. He did not, through his publications, show interest towards non-Macanese affairs in Hong Kong. Neither did Marques openly support Rizal's struggle against the Spaniards. His works reflect his role as a Macanese ‘public man’, influenced by European intellectual trends but still closely linked to his Macanese roots, thus resulting in his efforts to facilitate a wider discussion between Macao and Hong Kong. Marques's experience shows us that Macanese thinkers and writers of his generation, albeit small in composition, kept to the Lusophone public sphere in addressing local issues with a global lens. They possessed wider internationalist visions but were committed to making narrower social changes that concerned the Macanese community.
Braga, Anglophile, and ‘Hongkong’ citizen
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hong Kong would evolve into a space for inter-ethnic discussions on emerging social issues. The rise of English as a vernacular language in Asian port cities, the rapid growth of port-based vernacular newspapers, and the monopoly of British media across the British empire led to a new level of global interconnectivity.Footnote 47 Colonial port cities fostered a new urban environment that provided people from different racial backgrounds with access to Western-style education and a burgeoning print culture.Footnote 48 This sculpted elites with a new intellectual culture, and resulted in the emergence of intellectual staging grounds for new national identities.Footnote 49 Overseas Chinese in Russia, Europe, and North America embraced internationalism in addressing China's political and social problems, and participating in trans-ethnic political movements.Footnote 50 In Hong Kong, local-born Chinese and Eurasians who were educated in the colony's schools and trained in the English language began to take part in the city's affairs. As a consequence, Macanese elites like José Pedro Braga deviated from a more Portuguese-oriented identity and cultivated a strong sense of belonging to colonial Hong Kong. With a vision to make Hong Kong a more equal place, Braga's public pursuits between the 1890s and 1920s, and his use of the English language in writing reflected a transformation in both Macanese identity and Hong Kong's public sphere during the modern period. While Marques focused on writing for a Lusophone audience and envisioned a progressive future for the Macanese in Macao, Braga showed wider concerns for lower-class local-born subjects in the British colony.
José Pedro de Noronha Braga was born in Hong Kong in 1871 to Macao-born Vicente Emílio Braga and Delfino Noronha's eldest daughter, Carolina Maria Noronha. Like many other first-generation migrants, Vicente Braga tried to establish himself in Hong Kong. He ran a failed soda-water partnership, worked as a clerk, and left the colony to become a pioneering Western-styled bookkeeper in Osaka in 1870.Footnote 51 He left his family and children in Hong Kong, achieving in Japan a status and salary equal to other European senior staff. As his son would reveal in his writing, the majority of Hong Kong's Macanese remained junior to European staff throughout the nineteenth century. This explained why his grandfather, Delfino Noronha, made sure young José Pedro Braga had a ‘British’ upbringing. He was sent to the Italian Convent School, a Catholic institution for educating European children, and the Roman Catholic St. Joseph's College, which offered English education to Macanese boys. Through Noronha's initiation, Braga acquired British naturalization. He attended St. Xavier's College in Calcutta, a prestigious English school reserved for English boys and some well-to-do Bengalis.Footnote 52 Braga subsequently transferred to Roberts College, affiliated to Calcutta University, where he came on top of the university entrance class.Footnote 53 Having done well in school, José Pedro Braga wanted to travel to England and become a barrister, but returned to Hong Kong in 1889 to help his grandfather to run his printing company, Noronha & Sons.
Braga's ‘British’ education coincided with a transitional period in Hong Kong history when the colonial government began to encourage the inclusion of local-born non-Britons as ‘British subjects’ in the 1880s. The new governor, John Pope Hennessy, was a Catholic Irishman who had a wife with a Malay grandparent. Hennessy championed racial equality and fought to provide equal opportunities to all Hong Kong residents, as he was never considered a true ‘British’ because of his background.Footnote 54 In 1880, the governor enacted the Naturalization Bill for the first time, offering Hong Kong-born subjects the opportunity to enjoy, within the colony, ‘all the rights, advantage and privileges of a British subject’.Footnote 55 He emphasized, at a student prize-distribution ceremony at St. Joseph's College, that the colonial government considered all Hong Kong-born ‘Portuguese’ youth as ‘British subjects’. Hennessy encouraged Macanese children to strengthen their English learning, as they were expected to take part in public affairs and other leading mercantile positions in the near future. Prominent businessman and philanthropist Emanuel Belilios seconded Hennessy's observations. He envisioned the new generation of local-born Macanese to work independently and manage their own staff of Chinese clerks without the help of European seniors. Hennessy's government subsidized English schools and distributed prizes for students who excelled in English.Footnote 56 By the late 1880s, 191 Macanese children attended the government-subsidized St. Joseph's College, while 211 others attended Portuguese schools offering ‘European education’ in the Portuguese language.Footnote 57 Macanese parents gradually realized the important role of English-language education in the future employment of their children, as was recorded in the 1888 Education Report. The report stated that ‘too many Portuguese parents’, who spoke only Portuguese, sent their six-year-old boys to English schools and insisted they receive vigorous training in the English language.Footnote 58 The colonial government's promotion of English-language education and the increasing acknowledgement of its importance amongst Macanese parents nevertheless marked the emergence of a new generation of Macanese youngsters who received formal English-language training instead of learning the ‘Portuguese’ language. While their mothers and fathers spoke Macao's creole Portuguese language of Patuá and had a close affinity to Macao, this generation of Macanese identified with the colony of Hong Kong and adapted to, to different extents, British culture and lifestyle. By the early twentieth century, Macao's Macanese observed the Anglicization of their Hong Kong counterparts as a growing ‘class’ difference.Footnote 59
Raised a naturalized British in Hong Kong and educated for some years in Calcutta, Braga was one of the first Macanese in Hong Kong to embrace internationalism in addressing the British colony's issues. In 1895, he published, in English, The Rights of Aliens in Hongkong, a 127-page pamphlet that praised British culture while calling for racial equality in the workplace. The pamphlet featured a photograph of then ex-Governor Hennessy, and Braga's response to a series of letters printed on The China Mail, The Hongkong Telegraph, Daily Press, and weeklies from Macau, O Extremo Oriente and Macaense, that discussed the employment of Macanese clerks in Hong Kong. These letters appeared after the Government Gazette published a report revealing that the Post Office failed to deliver more than 50 registered letters, mostly from the Straits Settlements, in the previous year.Footnote 60 As there was a significant population of Macanese workers in the Post Office, a series of letters were published in Hong Kong newspapers questioning the reliability of Macanese workers and the government's decision to hire them. One writer asked why the Post Office employed ‘rascally Portuguese’ instead of the ‘thousands of hungry but honest clerks at home [in the metropole], and good Englishmen everywhere’.Footnote 61 Another proposed that the colonial government should replace all workers with ‘Britishers’, considering that Hong Kong was ‘under the British flag’.Footnote 62 One writer suggested an ‘anti-Portuguese crusade’ to dispense of all Macanese labour, while another pointed out that the Macanese lacked intellect due to their Eurasian backgrounds.Footnote 63
In light of the ongoing debate, Braga decided to speak up, not only for the Macanese community, but also for the rights of all ‘aliens’ in the colony. By ‘aliens’, Braga was referring to Hong Kong-born non-Britons. Notably, his intention was not to criticize the metropole, but to encourage Hong Kong's residents to respect and practise what he believed was Britain's just commitment to colonial-born subjects. In The Rights of Aliens, this was shown in Braga's praise of the colony's previous British governors for their support to the employment of Macanese and Chinese civil servants. In turn, he denounced the writers who attacked Macanese workers as an obstruction to ‘the letter and spirit of British law and a proper sense of British justice’.Footnote 64 Apart from publishing the pamphlet, Braga also took to the local press to voice his opinion. In late August 1895, he wrote a letter to The Hongkong Telegraph to remind the public of Britain's commitment to colonial-born subjects through an 1862 dispatch from the Duke of Newcastle that claimed that all children of foreigners born in the British colony possessed the character, rights, and privileges of British subjects within and outside Hong Kong.Footnote 65 In addition to advocating racial equality to local-born ‘aliens’, Braga tried to affirm the importance of Hong Kong to domiciled subjects, and vice versa. According to the Macanese, domiciled subjects perceived the colony as a ‘home’. They spent their lives and their earnings in Hong Kong, and envisioned that ‘in every probability, future generations [would] do the same’. Braga pointed out that the British empire, in turn, owed its greatness and success to the liberal treatment of ‘alien’ workers.Footnote 66
Braga was one of the earliest ‘internationalists’ in Hong Kong to use universal concepts in fighting against social inequalities. The universality of equality and social justice, for him, existed beyond Hong Kong, making them respectable and powerful solutions to the inequalities that were unfolding in the colony. As will be discussed in the next section, Braga continued his pursuit of protecting the British empire while tackling global issues during the inter-war years. During the late nineteenth century, he focused on expanding his readership and stimulating inter-port debates. Thanks to the rise of English as a vernacular language across Asian port cities, The Rights of Aliens in Hong Kong resulted in a wider discussion within and outside of the British colony. In Hong Kong, one writer praised Braga as quoting ‘a defender of the Portuguese community of Hong Kong’.Footnote 67 Another pointed out that the Portuguese had a long history of friendship and alliance with Britain, and expressed that this alliance continued to exist through the Macanese community's loyalty to the Hong Kong colonial government.Footnote 68 The editor of The Hongkong Telegraph made a response to Braga's letter, supporting his view that Macao's Macanese residents, naturalized or not, deserved the same rights to employment as those from other communities. Following Braga's advocacy, the editor condemned the display of ‘colour prejudice’ in Hong Kong and asked Braga for suggestions to resolve the problem. To this, Braga proposed the establishment of technical education, a guild for the interests and welfare of workers, as well as the expatriation of the Macanese to other cities.Footnote 69
Braga's participation in the debate caught the attention of Macao's Portuguese-language newspapers, as well as the French-supported Siam Free Press. Macao's Extremo Oriente reprinted Braga's advice to The Hongkong Telegraph. The editor, disagreeing with the idea that the Macanese needed technical education, suggested that the community needed to learn from the Portuguese dentists, veterinarians, goldsmiths, tailors, bakers, and shoemakers in the Portuguese colony of Honolulu, and widen their professions. In addition, the editor criticized the Hong Kong government, accusing it of abusing the competitiveness of the employment market by reducing wages and for intensifying this competition by opening educational opportunities to the Chinese population.Footnote 70 Another Macao-based newspaper, Echo Macaense, responded positively to Braga's writings. The editor described Braga as a ‘hopeful youngster’ and commended his advice to strengthen the technical skills of the Macanese youth.Footnote 71 In Siam, the Siam Free Press also sided with Braga, critiquing the issue as a ‘denunciation of all aliens’, and argued that Hong Kong could not survive without the service and labour of its ‘aliens’.Footnote 72 Compared to Marques and his concerns for the future of the Macanese in Hong Kong and Macao, Braga's advocacy touched on a wider issue that transcended Hong Kong and Macao. His desire to facilitate cultural interaction between Asia's port cities was further reflected in his short-lived bi-monthly magazine, Odds and Ends.
Published by Noronha & Sons in 1896, Odds and Ends aimed to introduce southern China to other cities through photographs and short essays. The magazine was circulated in Shanghai and the Straits Settlement, but nothing is known of its readership.Footnote 73 Aside from featuring short essays showing different aspects of Hong Kong and southern China, Odds and Ends reflected Hong Kong's polyglot culture. Braga wrote the articles in English, sometimes supplemented by Chinese terms, and, by its fourth issue, featured content related to the Philippines and the Straits Chinese. The late José Rizal's final poem, Mi ultimo adios (My Last Farewell), was printed for the first time in Odds and Ends with the title Mi ultimo pensamiento (My Last Thoughts). Braga also acknowledged The Straits Chinese Magazine and its editors, Lim Boon Keng and Song Ong Siang, both prominent Straits Chinese leaders.Footnote 74 Continuing to voice out his support of the colonial government, Braga devoted five pages of the magazine's last issue to narrating the colonial career of Sir William Robinson, who was then the colony's governor. The essay featured Governor Robinson's career in the West Indies and highlighted his achievements in Hong Kong.Footnote 75 Due to the low number of readers, Odds and Ends only lasted five issues. It nevertheless exemplified the growing interconnectedness between Hong Kong and nearby port cities through a transnational Anglophone public sphere that was facilitated by a colonial-born, Anglicized Macanese. In the twentieth century, Braga and his family became more distanced from the Macanese community. According to Stuart Braga, Revival hymns were sung in José Pedro Braga's household and members of the family developed, to varying degrees, an anti-Catholic stance. Although José Pedro Braga was against this, the Braga family came to be known as one of the few Macanese families in Hong Kong to identify as Protestants. The Bragas were termed by the Macanese community as the ‘PBs’, short for the ‘Protestant Bragas’.Footnote 76
Inter-ethnic cooperation in the inter-war era
During the inter-war years, Braga continued to pursue his ‘internationalist’ vision, this time through political involvement and inter-ethnic collaboration. The inter-war years saw the world move towards international cooperation and Hong Kong was not divorced from these new changes.Footnote 77 In Asia, inter-port ‘dialogue’ emerged as transnational organizations mushroomed. In Hong Kong, more local-born and -educated Anglophile Chinese and Eurasian subjects became involved in social issues and politics, and the colonial government continued in their effort to promote education. In 1911, the University of Hongkong was established. Justifying the establishment, Governor Lugard argued that the colony's residents needed ‘Western education’ that would be taught in English and led by British staff of moral and academic distinction.Footnote 78 Affluent families in Hong Kong's Macanese community naturalized their children and sent them to England for education.Footnote 79 Being ‘British’ opened up unprecedented opportunities, not only career-wise, but also in terms of inter-ethnic collaboration amongst ‘internationalist’-minded subjects in Hong Kong. These people shared a common interest in global issues and had their minds set on bridging Hong Kong with the outside world. This was done by discussing global affairs in the colony, such as the 1921 Washington Peace Conference, and echoing the aims of a transnational organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR), through establishing Hong Kong's version: the League of Fellowship and Service.
Braga's further involvement in pursuing ‘internationalism’ came with the Hong Kong government's recognition of his social prominence. In 1919, he was appointed Justice of the Peace, along with Chinese compradors and philanthropists Kwok Siu-Lau (郭少流) and Sum Pak-Ming (岑伯銘).Footnote 80 Braga subsequently joined the League of Fellowship and Service after its establishment in October 1921, where he worked with British politician and member of the Executive Council Henry Pollock and other local Chinese and Eurasian leaders. The League was inspired by and modelled after the FoR, an organization formed in 1914 by English Quaker Henry Hodgkin and German Lutheran Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, to spread the call for world peace in the aftermath of the First World War.Footnote 81 Hodgkin gave public lectures around the world, resulting in the founding of fellowship branches in Europe, the United States of America, and Shanghai in the years that followed.Footnote 82 Adopting the FoR's advocacy, the League of Fellowship and Service was described as an all-inclusive club ‘of all races and creeds’ and classes and gender, to resolve local issues and engage Hong Kong with foreign organizations that shared a similar interest.Footnote 83 A month after its formation, Hong Kong's League of Fellowship had garnered 300 members, 200 of whom were Europeans and 100 were Chinese.Footnote 84 Acting as the colony's bridge to emerging global initiatives, the League sent a telegram expressing their support to the Washington Peace Conference and pledged to bring the universal message of peace to Hong Kong. Its members pointed out that it was up to the League, and the participation of the colony's men and women, to promote a better understanding between nationalities, encourage social service, and spread the cause of peace throughout ‘the East’.Footnote 85
Braga saw the League of Fellowship as an opportunity to continue advocating racial equality. In December 1921, he became a committee member of the League and sat at a general discussion regarding the League's objectives, which initially included the promotion of good fellowship and peace between all nations, the promotion of good fellowship within the colony, and the promotion of matters of service to the colony. Braga questioned the first point and expressed that the League did not possess the importance and recognition to influence other nations. Instead, he proposed to discuss Hong Kong's social issues and asked the League to campaign for the elimination of what he termed as ‘racial disabilities’ in Hong Kong.Footnote 86 Braga fought for the abolition of the Peak Reservation Ordinance, a legislation that segregated the Peak area and later led to the creation of areas in Cheung Chau and Taipo that were marked for the residential purposes of European residents.Footnote 87 A Eurasian member of the League, Lo Man-kam, supported Braga's suggestion to eliminate racial prejudice. Other members refused to carry on with the discussion and Henry Pollock, being a member of the colonial government, denied that racial distinctions existed in the colony. Pollock argued that the issue was more a question of ‘class than of race’. Braga then suggested that the League should focus on eliminating class distinction, explaining Hong Kong's ‘underlings, the bottom dogs [were] crying like voices in the wilderness … denied a roof over their heads because they [could not] pay $150 a month out of their pittance of a salary’.Footnote 88
The League finally decided on four objectives that reflected its members’ internationalism and their adoption of universal ideas in searching for ways to improve Hong Kong society. These included forming an Industrial Institute for boys and girls, establishing an International Club for people of all races, educating children through theatres, and forming a local branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1925, the organization disbanded with 408 members, half of whom were Chinese.Footnote 89 The League and its activities, albeit restricted in scale, positioned Hong Kong within a world of growing internationalist movements and inter-ethnic associations. Under this new atmosphere, Anglophile Macanese subjects like Braga found a broader public platform to cooperate with other like-minded people. Through the League, he took part in a new form of association that was not only interracial, but also internationalist and concerned with both global and local issues. He further brought his vision of eliminating racial prejudice into a more visible platform where he was able to start a dialogue with the British, Eurasian, and Chinese elites of the colony. The global transformations that took place during the inter-war years blurred ‘colour lines’ in Asia's port cities and allowed Braga, a Macanese, to establish himself as one of Hong Kong's public leaders.
Throughout the 1920s, Braga remained visible in the public eye as he entered civil service. In 1926, he became a member of the Sanitary Board during the absence of Dr Wilfred Vincent Miller Koch, and later replaced Dr J. C. Macgown.Footnote 90 That same year, Braga joined the Kowloon Residents’ Association (KRA), which was established in 1919 by Europeans residing on the Kowloon Peninsula for the welfare of Kowloon residents. Through his position at the KRA, he worked for the welfare of all residents of the Kowloon district and took on a ‘British Hong Kong’ identity that transcended his Macanese background. In 1929, he was appointed as unofficial member of the Legislative Council, together with English-educated barrister Tso Seen-Wan (曹善允).Footnote 91 This appointment not only affirmed Braga's social prominence in Hong Kong, but also marked a new page in the formation of the colony's civil society through the rising participation of local-born non-Britons in the social and political arenas. At a meeting to welcome the new unofficial members, Governor Clementi described Braga as, ‘in a very literal sense … a son of Hong Kong’.Footnote 92 In the Kowloon district, residents, regardless of race and class, saw Braga as their representative figure. He brought the KRA's requests into the Legislative Council, fighting for a children's playground and later proposing to close down brothels in Yaumati.Footnote 93 The South China Morning Post commended his effort, quoting: ‘Braga deserves the thanks for the community for his bold speech at the Legislative Council …. His reference to the social evil in Yaumati might have shocked some, but nevertheless he spoke the plain truth.’Footnote 94 The China Mail, on the other hand, printed a caricature sketched by a Macanese that depicted José Pedro Braga as an icon of Kowloon, perched on top of the Kowloon–Canton Railway, an important landmark that shaped Hong Kong's position as a gateway to China. The terminus, also known as the ‘Far East train terminus of the British Empire’, was a stopover for travellers from London to destinations in the Far East via the Trans-Siberian Express and was a symbol of the British colonization of Hong Kong.Footnote 95
Having a close affinity to Hong Kong and choosing to be more ‘British’ rather than ‘Macanese’ in the public eye, Braga became a prime example of a new generation of Anglicized Macanese in Hong Kong. The city's oldest ‘Portuguese’ club, Club Lusitano, acknowledged Braga's leadership position by appointing him as president in 1927, and a part of the Macanese community celebrated his appointment in the Legislative Council with a reception at the club—an event that his son, Jack Braga, observed ‘must have been one of the proudest in his life’.Footnote 96 The portion of the Macanese community that remained more ‘Portuguese’ in identity and culture, particularly Macao-born newcomers who arrived in Hong Kong after the 1880s, however, did not see eye to eye. While Braga was already criticized earlier on for his children's decisions to become Protestants, further noise erupted regarding his status as a ‘Portuguese’. A part of the Macanese community did not consider José Pedro Braga to be ‘Portuguese’, and this came to be discussed in the colony's Portuguese-language newspapers. In January 1929, one writer raised a question in O Petardo asking Macanese readers whom they presumed were leaders of the community.
A reader responded by dismissing the existing Macanese leaders in Hong Kong, including José Pedro Braga. This writer expressed, in Portuguese, ‘Não. A Comunidade Portuguesa de Hong Kong não tem leaders’ (‘No. The Portuguese community of Hong Kong has no leaders’). Referring to Braga as a naturalized British and not a Portuguese citizen, he or she stated that so-called Macanese ‘leaders’ like him had no right to represent the community or get involved in ‘Portuguese’ affairs because they had been ‘denationalized’. It was suggested that Anglicized Macanese leaders, for ‘good intentions’ and ‘inflamed patriotism’, renounce their British nationality and reclaim their Portuguese status at the Portuguese Consulate before claiming to be leaders.Footnote 97 Another writer condemned Macanese subjects who did not possess Portuguese nationality, praising in turn those who refused to renounce their nationality as examples of ‘sincere patriotic love’. The writer proposed that Macanese subjects of Portuguese nationality should be appointed to important positions in the colony so as to represent the community and speak for their needs.Footnote 98 While the colonial government's efforts to promote English-language education and the twentieth-century emergence of a transnational associational culture helped to build Braga's public roles and forge a new platform to realize his internationalist vision, these changes paved the way for the consolidation of a ‘British colonial’ civic identity that was distanced from Macao and the ‘Portuguese’ consciousness that previous-generation Macanese like Marques possessed. The colonial and global transformations during the era, thus, resulted not only in the rise of new national identities in Asian port cities, but also the formation of a new ‘Hong Kong’ civic identity that was neither anticolonial nor nationalistic.
Conclusion
Spanning two generations of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, the narratives of Marques and Braga offer us an alternative to understanding the evolution of a migrant community from wider perspectives. Existing literature has generally shown Macao's ‘Portuguese’ as a homogenous community, originating from the Portuguese colony of Macao, identifying with Portugal and Luso-Asian in culture and lifestyle. This study has suggested otherwise. Marques's thoughts were influenced by Darwinism, his having been born in Macao and moving to Hong Kong only after he became a doctor, but he remained loyal to his Macao roots. He wrote in the Portuguese language and disseminated his thoughts to an audience of Macanese living in southern China. Without intending to create a dialogue with European writers, Marques was a ‘public man’ who revised European ideas with local elements to urge the Macanese to look beyond religion and progress with science. Braga, a Hong Kong-born child of Macanese parents who received a British education and was naturalized at a young age, did not find the same connection with Macao. He admired the British empire, wrote in the English language, and had an internationalist vision to advocate racial equality in Hong Kong. His publication, The Rights of Aliens, reached a wider audience than Marques's works, stimulating discussion within and outside of Hong Kong. In the twentieth century, the growth of global connectivity and the emergence of a transnational and inter-ethnic associational culture offered Braga new platforms to pursue his vision of racial equality through collaboration with other Anglophile leaders in the colony. As Braga took on more prominent public roles, he continued to fight for the welfare of Hong Kong people. Distanced from Macao, Braga identified with colonial Hong Kong as his ‘home’ and a citizen of British Hong Kong as his identity.
Ultimately, this article has proposed rethinking cosmopolitan men beyond specific shared characteristics. More than a group of foreign-educated publics that collectively strove to create a better world by hinging global trends with local pluralism, Marques's and Braga's differing intellectual pursuits and personal goals demonstrated that, while modern Asian publics in the colonial setting imagined themselves as a part of a global community, their passions and pursuits were varied and could be influenced by personal experience, local developments, and transforming external factors. Marques and Braga both committed to social change through participating in Hong Kong's public spheres, yet the former was more devoted to issues regarding the future of the Macanese, whereas the latter showed interest in resolving imminent issues of equality and progress in the British colony. Nevertheless, Marques's and Braga's shared internationalist vision strained their relationship with the Macanese community and led to open discussions regarding their lack of loyalty to the Portuguese empire. This further suggests the complexity of cosmopolitanism, not only as an individual navigation between narrow nationalist and/or urban contexts and a wider global framework, but also as a breeding ground for contention and conflict between global, urban, and ethnic identities.
