On the night of 22 September 1874, Hong Kong was struck by ‘a typhoon of unprecedently destructive violence’.Footnote 1 As they waited for the full extent of the damage to be known, the British press speculated widely, and ‘with some anxiety for the full details’.Footnote 2 Reports from county to county raised alarm about the ‘Great Typhoon’ and stressed the ‘incalculable damage to the shipping and house property at that prosperous port’.Footnote 3 Aside from the physical and financial havoc, there was also conjecture about the typhoon's point of origin, its possible trajectory and, of course, the ‘fearful loss of life’ it might have caused.Footnote 4 Given the geographical extent of the British Empire, natural disasters were not novel events to the British newspapers – in fact, they might be considered an ‘everyday incident’.Footnote 5 It was by turning to these other disasters, drawing upon the collective experiences of ‘the innumerable varieties of danger which are to be found within the British dominions’, that the press were able to give an impression of the scale of the disaster that struck Hong Kong on that September evening.Footnote 6 The Globe, for example, recalled the ‘devastating cyclone’ that hit Calcutta in 1864.Footnote 7 On that occasion, a tidal wave, referred to as ‘a powerful agency’, had ‘lent its help to the tempest’, exacerbating the destruction. The correspondent reassured readers, however, that ‘fortunately there is no reason to fear any similar disaster from the tidal wave at Hong Kong’.Footnote 8 The Northern Echo's report was confident that the colony would prove resilient in the face of disaster – as they argued, ‘Hong Kong can afford a typhoon or two’ because ‘as the commercial gate of lower China, it occupies a position far too valuable to be neglected’. Beyond the financial and strategic importance of this colony to British interests, the Echo's correspondent also struck a note of hope for the future, suggesting that ‘science will probably be able to predict the advent of a typhoon as accurately as the appearance of a comet’ in due course. In other words, while such tempests could not be prevented, science could enable preparedness to ‘confine the inevitable damage within the smallest possible limits’.Footnote 9
This article examines depictions and discussions of typhoons affecting Hong Kong in British newspapers, periodicals and travel writings published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to ask how these seasonal but singular storms were imagined as part of the British experience of empire. The selection of newspaper reports about the typhoon of September 1874 briefly illustrates the different ways in which the concept of a ‘typhoon’ was deployed in British popular culture to represent and encase different ideas about the empire. In this article, I argue that cultural representations of typhoons were a tool of ‘othering’ and came to symbolize the tropical nature of Hong Kong: a strategic and economically important node within the empire. As this paper will show, there was a shift in the terminology used in the late nineteenth century when reporting on these phenomenal weather events. No longer interchangeable with ‘hurricane’ or ‘cyclone’, the term ‘typhoon’ became specifically tied to storms along the China coast and the Far East. This shift, I argue, reframed ‘typhoons’ from an object of local knowledge to a technical ‘modern’ term that developed under the purview of Western science. Paralleling this shift, British press reports of typhoons affecting Hong Kong became increasingly focused on descriptions of paternalistic care and imperial unity, which of course characterized the people, and this environment, as in need of protection and intervention respectively. While there was never consensus or a clear articulation of how this should or could be implemented, the evolving study of meteorology as a scientific body of knowledge was identified as the key to both understanding and, eventually, managing the unruly weather of the tropics.
The few extant studies of the cultural histories of typhoons can be divided into two categories: literary studies on the one hand, and investigations intent on recovering the experiences of historical storms and the legacy of their destruction on the other.Footnote 10 This article falls between these two approaches by highlighting the role of the British press in transforming typhoons from a mundane event into a terrifying spectacle, just as Hong Kong was characterized both as part of the empire and as part of the tropical world. By the late nineteenth century, Hong Kong was famous for being a beautiful tropical port that was the ‘genuine offspring of British energies’.Footnote 11 It was also a strategically important port city to the empire.Footnote 12 It is for this reason that studying how the British press reported typhoons in relation to Hong Kong is significant: typhoons were a central element in British understandings of Hong Kong. One correspondent for the Western Daily Press complained in 1927 that since arriving in Hong Kong he had ‘heard so much about them’ and that he was ‘rather full of it’. Not only had he grown weary of them, but he also moaned that ‘tales of their terrors’ were ‘so drummed into’ him that he was ‘really anxious to get [his] baptism over and to know the worst’.Footnote 13 ‘Typhoons’ became a trope of this colony, functioning as a vehicle for the expression of ideas about the experience of empire and colonial life in Britain's most easterly dominion.
Situating Hong Kong
Hong Kong sits astride a climatological boundary between the tropical and subtropical worlds. There were always periodic concerns about its ‘tropical nature’, namely perceptions of dormant diseases that lurked in the ground itself and the bodies of the local Chinese population.Footnote 14 These concerns rendered the colony a tropical paradox, for its environment and geographical position enabled both its beauty and prosperity and its susceptibility to disease and chaos. This dichotomy is well known in the study of ‘tropicality’ as explored by David Arnold, Felix Driver, Lucia Martins, Nancy Leys Stepan and many others: as Arnold expressed it, the tropics were ‘invented quite as much as they were encountered’.Footnote 15 This imagined geography is not to say that the tropics, defined as the region between the Tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, did not exist. Rather, nature within this region was imbued with cultural connotations that conveyed concerns and ideas about the environment and its relationship with humans, both indigenous and foreign to the land. By the nineteenth century, referring to the ‘tropics’ had become ‘a Western way of defining something environmentally and culturally distinct from Europe, while also perceiving a high degree of common identity between the constituent regions of the tropical world’.Footnote 16 The concept served to distinguish a European identity, while generalizing ‘the tropics’ as a natural ‘other’ through glossing over and eliding contradictions and regional differences.
Visions of the tropics were often ‘represented positively (as in fantasies of the tropical sublime)’ as well as ‘negatively (as a pathological space of degeneration)’.Footnote 17 Certainly, British accounts exhibited this duality in the character of typhoons. The occurrence of one was both spectacular and phenomenal in the way they formed and destroyed. How, commentators wondered, could such violent forces be so ‘often heralded by wonderful sunsets in which all the colours of the rainbow vie with each other’?Footnote 18 The correspondent for the Western Daily Press in 1927 described at length the appearance of the sky prior to the typhoon hitting the colony:
sun set in a flow of fire, streaks of gold and crimson shone in the clouds, high cirrus clouds glowed with a strange pink aura, the pink of cherry blossom – while the sky between the cloud is of all the most delicate shades of blue, from cobalt, ultramarine, and sapphire, shading off to wonderful opalescent greens, towards the east, huge masses of cumulus cloud are banked up, first gleaming gold in the last rays of the sun, lighting up the earth in a most un-unnatural colour, and then turning a hideous mixture of sage-green and coffee-colour as the light leaves them.Footnote 19
The onset of the storm is an image of sublime seduction before it quickly shifts into something malevolent, stamping out the rays of light with a putrid other-worldly mixture. Descriptions of the beauty that proceeded a typhoon were produced very commonly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they highlighted what was being constructed as the deceptive yet alluring nature of the tropics. It seems fair to say that although studies of tropicality have sidelined the representation of singular weather events, typhoons were elemental to Hong Kong's identity as a tropical space. This characterization, I argue, allowed expressions of unity and paternalistic care, on both an imperial and a colonial level, to seep into the reporting of typhoons and their aftermath. In order to explore this, this article will first consider how the concept of ‘typhoons’ came to be associated with this specific region of the world, before moving on to consider how these narratives generated unifying narratives of cohesion for the colony.
Translating ‘typhoon’
‘Typhoon’ is just one of the words commonly used to refer to weather systems that originate over tropical or subtropical waters characterized by sustained circular winds. Broadly known as ‘revolving storms’ in the nineteenth century, meteorologists now use the generic term ‘tropical cyclones’ to classify such storms with winds exceeding seventy-four miles per hour (or 120 kilometres per hour).Footnote 20 With lesser wind speeds, they are referred to as tropical storms (winds between thirty-nine and seventy-four miles per hour) or tropical depressions (winds of less than thirty-nine miles per hour). Regionally speaking, ‘typhoons’ refer to those that originate in the north-west Pacific Ocean, ‘tropical cyclones’ or ‘cyclones’ come from the Indian and South Pacific Oceans regardless of wind strength, and ‘hurricanes’ inhabit the North Atlantic Ocean and the central and eastern North Pacific.Footnote 21
In the nineteenth century, these three terms were used by British institutions for revolving storms in the same regions, and knowledge about them was bounded both by the storm's geography and by the interests of empire. In the 1875 edition of an instructional pamphlet distributed by the British Admiralty, revolving storms were confined thus: ‘Hurricanes in the West Indies, Cyclones in the Indian Ocean, and Typhoons in the China Sea’.Footnote 22 These regions were significant imperial, shipping and commercial spheres for the British Empire. The Admiralty acknowledged that these storms had ‘much engaged the attention of meteorologists and philosophers’ in recent years, and thus knowledge about such storms was of ‘immediate importance’ to the ‘practical seaman’.Footnote 23 The circulation of this knowledge had largely been the work of European gentlemen, who focused their concern on the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. These individuals ‘indeed so forced the subject on the attention of the public’ that the British Admiralty believed it necessary to publish such pamphlets.Footnote 24 In fact, it was only in the 1840s that ‘cyclone’ came into the English lexicon after Henry Piddington, a retired British ship's captain living in Calcutta known for his intense interest in documenting the storms of the Indian Ocean, proposed the term. He took inspiration from the Greek word kukloma, referring to the coil of a snake.Footnote 25 Piddington's contribution is typical of the development of meteorological knowledge in the nineteenth century, where (often) gentlemen drew on their individual experiences and, motivated by intellectual or financial interests, gathered first-hand observations into treatises and theories that could then inform institutionalized knowledge.Footnote 26 While their individual works occasionally drew inspiration from one another, it is worth pointing out that there were no efforts to bring the study of such storms into a centralized project across different regions. Furthermore, although the British Admiralty redistributed knowledge about these storms, their efforts were based predominantly on case studies in the Indian Ocean. This state of affairs is in line with David Livingstone's observation when he argued that drawing attention to the geographies of science inevitably highlights the ‘uneven distribution of scientific information’.Footnote 27 Consequently, the study of the revolving storms in the nineteenth century largely focused on ‘cyclones’, and their study in the Indian Ocean never aligned with the growing merchant-driven efforts to develop warning systems in response to similar natural events in the China Seas.Footnote 28 Thus the distribution of knowledge on tropical storms was geographically skewed, and the designation of the same type of storm is reflected in the interchangeable use of the three words ‘typhoon’, ‘cyclone’ and ‘hurricane’.
These three words were used freely in the British press until around the 1880s. After this point, the term ‘typhoon’ became quintessentially Chinese or ‘Far Eastern’.Footnote 29 Importantly, its usage was accompanied by far less frequent discussions and disclaimers in British newspapers of what might constitute a ‘typhoon’, and fewer introductory explanations of why readers should take an interest in them. The fact that the word ‘typhoon’ no longer needed introduction or justification suggests that it had transitioned from an ‘exotic’ word into common parlance in Britain. Furthermore, its meaning had become technical, to be used in a scientific context. This is encapsulated in the sinologist Frederick Hirth's comment in 1880 that while ‘typhoon’ might be an established ‘technical term’, it now ‘may be considered the common property of about all European languages’.Footnote 30 Even more tellingly, when writing for a popular children's periodical, Susan Grand, a ‘New Woman’ writer, pointed out that the word ‘typhoon’ was actually a ‘misnomer when applied by foreigners to those circular storms equivalent to the hurricane or tornado of the West Indies’, asserting a qualitative difference between the three. Having lived through the aforementioned 1874 typhoon in Hong Kong, perhaps Grand felt that her experiences gave her an understanding of the regional differences of tropical cyclones. She went even further when she explained to her audience that while the term actually came from the Chinese ‘tae’ and ‘fung’, the Chinese population did not use it correctly. Instead, they applied it to ‘indicate all storms of wind indiscriminately’.Footnote 31 In both cases, Grand and Hirth were clear that, whatever the origins of the term, the word ‘typhoon’ now meant what Europeans decided it did. ‘Typhoon’, as a word with Chinese origin, had gathered a cultural ‘afterlife’, as in Ari Larissa Heinrich's study of medical imagery. The word moved between East and West accruing specific meanings and the use of the term exhibits a power relation of knowledge ownership.Footnote 32
So what lay behind this association between the word ‘typhoon’ and specific areas of China and the Far East in the 1880s? The answer is, I suggest, reflected in two contexts. First, by this time, the British and other foreign entities had gained a more stable foothold in China from which to pursue their commercial interests and establish their own networks. Along with the cession of Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, a formalized treaty-port system was set up in Canton, Shanghai, Ningpo, Fuzhou and Amoy as the first five cities designated for free trade and permissible long-term foreign presence within the Qing Empire.Footnote 33 By 1917, there were ninety-two treaty ports. These were of varying sizes but, considered as one system, they give a picture of the extent and distribution of foreign power in China.Footnote 34 The Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) was emblematic of this. Established in 1854 and originally known as the Imperial Maritime Customs service, it functioned as a pseudo-British institution. Officially, it was an arm of the Chinese state, but the CMCS was always headed by a Briton, with the exception of one American, L.K. Little, and staffed with a large contingent of expatriates. This institution was described by historian Robert Bickers as ‘the most highly visible’ yet ‘the most ambiguous’ entity because the CMCS not only oversaw duties, but also implemented a multitude of projects to ‘advance knowledge of Chinese society, culture, government and trade’.Footnote 35 The CMCS was crucial in facilitating the collection of meteorological data all along the Chinese coast with daily reports generated at fifty-two ports and lighthouses between 1869 and the 1930s. As Marlon Zhu has argued, this agency was a significant institution in the informal development of the network of meteorological surveillance in and across the China Seas.Footnote 36 It was in the commercial interests of all involved to push for the development of sophisticated typhoon surveillance and warning systems along the China coast.
Second, there had also been a significant scholarly debate over the etymology of the word. The most commonly accepted origin of ‘typhoon’ is Chinese, with tai meaning big, great or strong, and fung meaning wind.Footnote 37 Typhoons, in Hirth's opinion, referred to ‘the cyclones of the China Sea and adjacent parts’, and he believed its history was ‘buried in the first reports of Western travelers on their adventures in Chinese waters’.Footnote 38 Portuguese explorer Fernão Mendes Pinto is often accredited as the first European, in 1560, to attribute the term tufaõ to the Chinese.Footnote 39 Variations of the term have also been traced to Arabic, Malay, Persian, Turkish, Aramaic, Hindi and Greek. Some linguists and writers claimed that the root of the word is to be found in one of these languages, while others used the existence of the term in other languages as evidence of contact and cultural exchange with Chinese sailors.Footnote 40 Whatever their opinions, by 1880 it seemed that many had ‘abandon[ed] the idea of a Chinese source altogether’, preferring an Arabic or Greek root. Hirth, however, argued against this, claiming he had come across a ‘native’ Chinese description written in 1694 of a ‘storm raging on the coast of Formosa’ that convinced him ‘typhoon’ cannot be of any other origin but Eastern.Footnote 41 In fact, he was ‘inclined to believe’ that it was not of Chinese origin, but of a local dialect used in Formosa, present-day Taiwan, and then adopted by Chinese writers because ‘no adequate name seemed to exist in their written language’.Footnote 42 In 1896, Gustaaf Schlegel, a Dutch sinologist, responded to Hirth's etymology of ‘Taifun’ in T'oung Pao, a leading journal on imperial China. Schlegel dismantled Hirth's claim that ‘typhoon’ meant ‘the wind of Formosa’ by consulting English, Dutch and German dictionaries of Chinese, and deployed his knowledge of colloquial Amoy and Cantonese to demonstrate the various local origins of the word in question.Footnote 43 While Hirth and Schlegel did not agree on the minutiae of the term's etymology, what is evident is that the storms blowing over the Far East had become entangled with cultural understandings of littoral China, the geographical spaces at the forefront of these storms, and the various languages spoken therein. Both scholars identified localized origins of the term, and acknowledged that, in the English-speaking world, these storms were referred to by their presumed pan-Chinese name: ‘typhoon’.
There were other ‘local’ words and phrases for typhoons. In the Philippine archipelago, they were, and still are, known as baguio.Footnote 44 However, this term is largely missing in British press discussions and travel accounts detailing and tracing the exact same typhoons that affected both Hong Kong and the Philippines. This omission is interesting given the emphasis meteorologists placed on the Philippines as ‘the origin’ of these storms.Footnote 45 William Doberck, the first director of the Hong Kong Observatory, published a paper in 1886 on the ‘Laws of the eastern seas’, in which he tracked the trajectory of the recorded typhoons from 1884 to 1885. Like many other weather manuals of the nineteenth century, Doberck sought to place order on and define the pattern of these natural occurrences. In pursuit of this, he observed that ‘nearly all the typhoons appear to have their origin east or south-east of the Philippine archipelago’, but those ‘formed in the China Sea … seldom develop much energy’.Footnote 46 The observatory in Manila, established in 1865, was an important centre for the collection and distribution meteorology data in the China Seas.Footnote 47 Despite the significance of the Philippine archipelago in the study of typhoons, the localized word and cultural meaning of these storms were not incorporated into British discussions, unlike the significance of typhoons to the pan-Chinese populations. There is a paradox in the recognition of the ‘otherness’ of typhoons that suffuses the study of the term's etymology, a study that sidelined other ‘local’ sites which contributed to scholarly understanding of the term and phenomena, while privileging a different ‘other’. Typhoons had a Chinese heritage and were emblematic of China.
Narrating unifying experiences
Although the word itself came to be associated with the Chinese, the experience of a typhoon was often narrated in the British press through tropical tropes. Written in the first person, many of these accounts in news articles or travel journals would vividly detail the authors’ endurance of the progression of a storm in a way that became almost standardized. To begin, the narrator would recall a few indicators of an incoming tempest: often first noting the picturesque views, the sublime colours of the sky, a perceptible shift in the wind, or scenes of utter calm and peace in the natural environment. Moments before the typhoon hit, narrators would detail the turbulence, noise, and snippets of fury they spied from their precarious places of shelter. The experience of enduring one was a marker of resilience, a characteristic required in the retention of an empire across the seas. In the Northern Echo's report on the 1874 typhoon, the reporter showed studied nonchalance in his description of experiencing such a destructive force, stoically stating that the ‘Englishman who rules in every Continent has to contend with the difficulties of every clime’.Footnote 48 The typhoon in Hong Kong, though devastating, he explained, was akin to enduring ‘a flood in India, a drought in Australia or a war in Africa’, and given Hong Kong's significance to the empire, it ‘will not suffer permanently’.Footnote 49 Similarly, when the ‘fiercest typhoon’ struck the colony in 1937, the resilience and fundamental unity of the colonial community were emphasized by the Illustrated London News. The reporter wanted to ‘drive home’ the point that ‘within a couple of hours of the abating of the gale, all normal services were being conducted as though nothing had happened’. He attributed this to the ‘general congeniality which pervaded this mighty centre of commerce’, evidenced by the fact that even local rickshaw operators ‘desisted from touting for fares’ because the colony was ‘as one in sentiment’.Footnote 50
In fact, the resilience of Hong Kong in the event of a typhoon became a more common narrative element in British accounts after the 1874 event. The ‘casualties to shipping’ were listed by the name of the vessel and its origin (predominantly European), as well as the extent of damage.Footnote 51 While this served the underwriters and the shipping industries, for whom typhoons were an omnipresent risk, it also built a camaraderie between all mariners and merchants united by the indiscriminate effects of the typhoon. After all, ‘Chinese typhoons … ravage places visited by the ships of all nationalities’, proclaimed Father Marc Dechevrens, head of the Zi-Ka-Wei Observatory near Shanghai.Footnote 52 The 1874 typhoon was significant in convincing the Colonial Office that establishing a Royal Observatory in Hong Kong was necessary. The establishment of the observatory in 1883, almost a decade later, was justified by the need for accurate timekeeping in the harbour.Footnote 53 But, as Marlon Zhu argues, the establishment of the observatory and development of meteorology in the colony must also be understood in terms of the role of the Hong Kong mercantile community before the ‘interloping of the British Empire’.Footnote 54 The demands and pressure from the mercantile community to establish a meteorological centre in the colony were frequently aired in the various English-language publications of Hong Kong and the Chinese treaty ports.Footnote 55
However, their actions and dissonance were of little interest to the British press, who chose instead to highlight the solidarity of all who were stationed in this colony. For example, in the aftermath of the typhoon on 19 September 1906, which struck with no warning, the observatory in Hong Kong was besieged with local complaints and Doberck left as the head of the institution the following year after a tumultuous tenure.Footnote 56 Although the British press reported that ‘public opinion’ in Hong Kong was ‘incensed at the Observatory for failing to report’ the incoming typhoon, ‘it is not believed’ that the observatory was actually ‘blameworthy on the present occasion’.Footnote 57 Throughout the following weeks, there were daily updates (and at times several articles within one edition), including news of the assistance offered by ‘the Council, the Chinese charitable institution, and the European firms and residents’ who were all doing ‘what is in their power to relieve distress’ in Hong Kong. Sir Matthew Nathan, the governor of Hong Kong, also accepted the ‘proffered cooperation of the American Squadron in the work of rescue’.Footnote 58 The charity of the international and local Chinese communities within the colony was also matched by the overseas Chinese population in San Francisco, who reportedly sent a remittance of $10,000.Footnote 59 And beyond that, the international community, often with vested commercial interests in Hong Kong, showered the colony with sympathy. For example, the Japanese minister for foreign affairs, Viscount Hayashi, sent a telegram to the governor ‘expressing his sympathy with the sufferers’.Footnote 60 In the aftermath of a typhoon in Hong Kong, the British press focused on stories that emphasized colonial and international good fellowship and mutual support.
In such reports the press also emphasized the importance of the strong relationship between the colony and Britain. On two occasions, after typhoons struck Hong Kong in 1906 and 1908, King Edward sent messages of condolence that were published in The Times. In these telegrams, he expressed his ‘deep regret’ having learnt of the ‘great calamity which has befallen the colony of Hong-kong’.Footnote 61 Lord Elgin conveyed His Majesty's sympathy for the ‘whole community’ in Hong Kong, as well as his grief at the ‘immense loss of life among the Chinese population’.Footnote 62 The king's sympathy was useful for the colonial government, reporting that they would ‘placard the streets with English and Chinese versions’ of His Majesty's telegram.Footnote 63 Governor Nathan later thanked the king for ‘his most gracious message’, to which ‘his people here responded with feelings of the deepest loyalty to his loving care of them in this time of distress’.Footnote 64 Whether or not this was how the majority of the inhabitants of Hong Kong felt, it is clear that the press was reinforcing the ‘oneness’ of an imperial community as demonstrated by the responses to a natural disaster. This was not necessarily always a top-down sentiment either. Expatriates who had lived in Hong Kong also shared their memories of typhoons in the aftermath of a destructive one. In 1906 the Sketch, a weekly journal, published a gentleman's recollection of typhoons ‘when I was on the island in the early ’eighties’.Footnote 65 This Briton's experiences of a typhoon twenty years prior were rendered into a shared experience (although imagined) of the empire, one that characterized dealing with crises as the never-ending business of maintaining an empire, in which everyone, from royalty to the everyday reader of the British press, was engaged and involved. In this way, a unified sense of empire as shared achievement was created.
Another important contribution to this sense was the narratives of heroic action in the face of a typhoon that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Acts of heroism articulated in reports from the 1840s to the 1860s showcased the bravery and nerve of exceptional mariners or crews who would consult books such as ‘the mysterious “Hornbook of Storms”’, by Henry Piddington, to guide them through the tempest.Footnote 66 Bravery and courage in the face of a revolving storm were expressed as a joint effort that connected those seminal works which had first deciphered the ‘laws of storms’ with the nerve of the crew using them while on board an endangered vessel. But from 1900 there were also frequent reports about the courage of individual British men who risked their lives to save their fellow crew members or stranded and hapless Chinese individuals. The dramatic rescue of the HMS Sandpiper by the crew of the Otter was commemorated by an illustration in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic.Footnote 67 In particular, Commander Wilkin was widely commended for his ‘pluck and skill’ in saving the crew of the Sandpiper.Footnote 68 In August 1923, there were reports a ‘wonderful life-saving deed’ undertaken by a ‘British bluejacket by the name of Twiggers’ who was ‘rousingly cheered’ by the ‘hundreds ashore’ after he bravely swam out ‘through the raging sea for 500ft. and saved Lieutenant Dickson’.Footnote 69 In the 1937 typhoon, British police and revenue officers were praised for their ‘magnificent rescue work’ saving a ‘number of Chinese children who were stranded at various danger points’.Footnote 70 These sort of men were further honoured with nominations and awards for bravery from institutions like the Royal Humane Society. One seaman's family even received a visit from royalty as a result.Footnote 71
The Bishop of Victoria, Joseph Hoare, was a prominent figure who died in the 1906 typhoon. ‘Profound grief was felt throughout the colony’ and reiterated in the British papers. What is notable, however, was the way in which the story of his death was constructed in the absence of evidence as to what had actually occurred.Footnote 72 Early on 18 September 1906, the bishop had been out on a boat with four of his students before the typhoon struck unexpectedly. It was believed that the bishop's death arose from the fact that he had ‘kept to the boat till the last’ in order not to abandon the students, despite the fact that he himself ‘was a very strong swimmer’.Footnote 73 Bishop Hoare's death could not have been explained in any more honourable a manner, sacrificing his life for the final comfort of the Chinese students under his guardianship. In this way, Bishop Hoare's death was not construed as a product of senseless destruction but memorialized as one of sacrifice in protecting colonial subjects. Like the other Britons who were presented as risking their lives without a second thought, these men fulfilled a vision of late Victorian hypermasculinity justified by the imperatives of empire.Footnote 74
Aside from constructing a hero in the event of a typhoon, British stories about the apparent inability of local populations to prepare for or withstand a typhoon clearly cast the Chinese as in need of benevolent, paternal imperial guidance. The choice to live on boats and in mat sheds was seen to only confound the damage of a typhoon, which easily made ‘matchwood’ and ‘smoke’ of their dwellings.Footnote 75 The local rituals of gongs and crackers to ‘avert the threatening tempest’ were reduced to ‘novel and amusing sights’ that demonstrated the superstitious peculiarities of the ‘floating population’ in Hong Kong.Footnote 76 However, this had not always been the case. Between the 1840s and the 1860s, it was common to view the Chinese boat dwellers in Hong Kong as ‘weather-wise’.Footnote 77 In W.D. Bernard's published memoirs of his service on the Nemesis, he recalls the severe typhoon of 1841. His description is full of praise for the Chinese: although they were ‘ignorant of the use of the barometer’, they ‘acquire from experience a tolerably accurate knowledge of the indications which determine the approach of these dreaded typhoons’.Footnote 78 Similarly a Times report of the 1841 typhoon remarked that at the first sign of a severe gale, the local inhabitants ‘were speedily convinced that they had to witness and suffer one of those dreadful visitations of providence and conflict of the elements, called tyfoons’.Footnote 79 The evacuation of the boats of the local Tanka and Chinese was all the indication that Captain J. Elliot Bingham needed to convinced him that a typhoon was coming.Footnote 80 A correspondent with the initials H.C. reported to the Colonial Magazine in 1850 that their Chinese pilot abruptly left their ship, Antelope, before they were due to sail from Hong Kong to Shanghai. ‘Before quitting the ship’, the pilot said, ‘you no catchee typhoon inside one two piece day’. The meaning of this was not immediately clear, but it would turn out that he was trying to tell them ‘that we should not be safe for two days’, even though ‘no sign of unfavourable weather was perceptible’ to the Europeans. As the day passed, the remaining passengers on board observed ‘numbers of fishing boats making for the shore’ in anticipation of adverse conditions.Footnote 81
Weather wisdom, as argued by Katherine Anderson, was considered ‘akin to the tools of modern science’ in Britain even in the 1870s.Footnote 82 The innate, but also cultivated, ability to read the weather was ‘perceived as a form of automatic operation’, often embodied within sailors and shepherds in British culture.Footnote 83 As meteorology developed into a distinct field of its own, weather wisdom was framed as being complemented, but not necessarily enhanced, by scientific tools such as the barometer and weather maps, because measurements could only give a universal ‘sense’ of the weather.Footnote 84 However, the weather wisdom of the boat people around Hong Kong drops out of typhoon narratives being circulated in Britain towards the late nineteenth century. Their apparently superstitious rituals and frenzied panic were still reported as a spectacle of the ‘other’ and as ‘primitive’. But their ability to interpret the onset of a typhoon was stripped away around the same time that ‘typhoon’ as a term was subsumed under European knowledge and when meteorology in the ‘Far East’ came within the imperial and colonial domain in Hong Kong with the establishment of the observatory and the expansion of the meteorological network along the China coast.
Accompanying the stripping away of local weather wisdom were an increasing number of reports relying on the anemometer, measuring wind velocity, rather than the barometer as the marker of the ‘size’ of typhoons. It allowed for comparisons to be drawn based on perceived objective data. The typhoon of 1923 was proclaimed the ‘worst typhoon’, experienced since 1906 and ‘the wind had a velocity of 130 miles per hour, the highest on record’.Footnote 85 This was then trumped in 1937, when the observatory's instruments recorded the ‘fiercest ever experienced’ when their instruments ‘ceased registering at 125 miles an hour’, but private observations recorded winds of 160 miles an hour.Footnote 86 From the early twentieth century, the hyperbole about the intensity of the physical experience of typhoons was now backed by measurements that translated the whippings of wind into events that could be benchmarked. This comparative mechanism, reliant on increasingly sophisticated meteorological instruments, served to enable the experience of a singular typhoon to become transcendent by drawing in typhoons of the past. The British press elided local weather wisdom for increasingly ‘measured’ and heroic reports of typhoons, shaping the discourse on Hong Kong as an ordered and congenial part of the empire, in spite of the visitations of typhoons.
Conclusion
Typhoons were a constant feature in British press reports of Hong Kong in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The majority of these reports provided information for merchants, underwriters and mariners, keeping them abreast of factors that affected their increasing volume of trade in and around the coast of China, where Hong Kong was the only British colony. However, as I have argued in this article, narratives of typhoons affecting Hong Kong that circulated in British newspapers and periodicals also served other functions. First, the way that typhoons were described firmly positioned Hong Kong as part of Britain's empire in the tropics. By the turn of the century, experiencing a typhoon was a rite of passage for British sojourners and travellers to the colony. And although typhoons affected other treaty ports and places of commercial pursuits all along the China coast, the rhetoric used in portraying them expressed the duality of the tropics that came to define the vast region in the nineteenth century. Typhoons were capable of producing intense, sublime beauty that was also matched by intense violence and destruction.
Second, around the turn of the century, there was a shift in reporting ‘typhoon’ events which reflected changes in British interests along the Chinese coast. Up until around the 1880s, the word ‘typhoon’ was used interchangeably with ‘cyclone’ and ‘hurricane’ in these British reports on Hong Kong, did not need to be explained, and was firmly associated with the ‘Far East’. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire – along with other foreign powers – had secured a more permanent footing on Chinese soil, which enabled them to establish networks to facilitate the development of their commercial and other interests. Crucial to this was the development of a meteorological network that could share data and observations in the surveillance and prediction of these storms. From the 1880s onwards, the ‘typhoon’ transitioned from an ‘exotic’ local term to a technical term used both by British institutions and widely in the national press. The word might be of Chinese origin (or derived from the parlance of southern Chinese communities), but its usage now signalled both a claim over the word and an expertise in the management of these storms.
Aside from a shift in the terminology, there was also a shift how the British narrated the experience of a Hong Kong typhoon. It became an occasion to report on an ideal colonial and international community within the colony of Hong Kong, one that prioritized mutual aid and support over geopolitics. Furthermore, the disaster of a typhoon cultivated sentiments of the imperial community and tied Hong Kong into a narrative of imperial care. The creation of a British male hero was key in conveying these ideals, which ultimately served to characterize the local Chinese population as in need of imperial protection. In this process, the local population were stripped of their claim to weather wisdom. Their innate ability to read their skies and seas, which was reported between the 1840s and the 1860s, was transformed into a spectacle of superstition, disorder and folklore.
By drawing these tendrils together, it is possible to see how typhoons were created in Britain as a coherent lens through which to view part of empire. Scholars have tended to investigate the impact of extreme storms upon the immediate communities that suffer the most acute affects. This article, however, has suggested that it is also equally significant to follow the reverberating afterlives of storms in both lay and technical discourse. Storms – particularly tropical ones – are regional events which shape global perceptions.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the referees for their insights and encouraging comments. I would also like to acknowledge the support I received as a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities China–UK (MHCUK) fellow at the CSHHH Glasgow, University of Strathclyde. Lastly, but not least, I would like to thank Fiona Williamson and all the team at BJHS for putting this special section together.
