Introduction
Reactions to crisis events, for instance, reactions to disease epidemics, particularly when coupled with military insecurity, can often be argued not just to overwhelm temporarily the colonial entity itself, but to project further outwards, vitalizing extended imperial concerns and shaping metropolitan policy from its so-called periphery. Indeed, Hong Kong Island in the early 1840s was as peripheral and as untested as the British Empire could conceive, both in terms of its perceived economic utility and geopolitical location. Yet, two years after its initial colonizing, the malaria epidemic of 1843, the ‘Hongkong Fever’, both emphatically reshaped the early entrepôt city and, as a determined outcome, strengthened the city's communal resolve to make the half-hearted endeavour succeed. For some however it also offered opportunities to renegotiate positions of power intra-colonially, and as shall be seen in the example of early Hong Kong, self-interest under the veil of disease exerted as much a pressure as did malaria itself.
Ethnically speaking, Hong Kong Island—the first parcel of a wider territory later conceded to the British—unlike most other colonizing narratives was initially, to all intents and purposes, an empty space devoid of a significant local population with which to contest, impose or react against. Certainly there were hamlets along the northern stretch of island coast against which the first colonial settlement, the small city of Victoria, nudged, though most were placed towards its eastern fringe. Far more significant were two indigenous fishing ports, Chek Chue, later renamed Stanley, on the southeast and Shek Pai Wan, later renamed Aberdeen, on the southwest, which combined numbered populations of about 4,000 Chinese.Footnote 3 However, apart from rudimentary policing and land rights negotiations, the relative distances of these two marine centres from the settlement prevented any effective assimilation into the preliminary strategies of colonization.
What at first did emerge were haphazard, loose and speedily conceived district strategies for dealing with the dramatic influx of Chinese migrant labourers, merchants and vendors, and the smaller addition of European and Parsee commercial investors into the tiny colony. These were to be managed by a small colonial civilian administration, in part supplied by seconded British military personnel and almost wholly enforced by the same large military presence. It is therefore unsurprising that the military themselves both consciously through their initial surveys, road construction and military stations and inadvertently, through their imported collective trauma of sickness, imposed a dramatic reconfiguration upon the city's urban morphology, and through this, a social and racial redeployment. In addition the uncertainties as to both the island's future (an unstable treaty between Britain and China had just been ratified) and wider regional British security (an outcome of the recently ended First Opium War) created conditions in which any crisis could be effectively exploited by these same interests. That said, the precipitous terrain of the relatively treeless island itself—mountainous bald fingers of granite serried by water courses or ‘nullahs’—imposed one of the most restrictive and impelling narratives upon the development of the colony as, to some extent, it still does to this day.
For the first two years of Hong Kong Island's appropriation while Britain was still at war with China, British military expenditure had been heavily burdened by the renting of expensive transport ships, such that it delayed the construction of substantial accommodation on the ground.Footnote 4 This had been a hallmark of the China Expedition during the First Opium War of 1839–1842, where staging areas and encampments across several hundreds of miles of China coast had to be constantly reassessed. Construction therefore had to be rapid and cost-effective. The consequence was the disastrous mortality rate for which these short-term measures were blamed. Malaria had been generally identified as the cause, though the prevalent pre-bacteriological paradigm within both Western and Chinese medicine considered it to be an airborne miasma or gas, the link to the female Anopheles mosquito as its vector taking a further 54 years to identify. Yet opinions as to the source of its generation and, therefore, of its eradication, were varied, only to coalesce across the critical year of 1843.
The West Point outbreak
On 3 May 1843, one month before the island would be conferred the title of a crown colony, Plenipotentiary and soon-to-be-Governor Sir Henry Pottinger rode to the most westerly stretch of the city of Victoria, now straggling along more than three miles of rugged northerly shoreline. He spent the evening pacing the slopes of an area known as West Point. Upon this undulating terrain of rocky scrub an extensive military barracks now ranged in three tiers upon the hillside above and to the south of the island's primary artery, the coastal Queen's Road, beside which the solitary road bent around and terminated.Footnote 5 These barracks had first been constructed, under the orders of Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in China, Lieutenant-General Sir Hugh Gough, probably in late 1841 by Captain George F. Mylius, and had cost just over $1,800—less than one-fifth of the cost of the obviously more substantial barracks constructed by Mylius at the south-eastern station at Chek Chue.Footnote 6 West Point had subsequently been expanded under Gough's immediate replacement, Major-General Alexander Fraser, Lord Saltoun.Footnote 7 Pottinger was concerned that Saltoun was now developing an interest in commandeering the entire site of the Ordnance District, a strip of land at the base of Cantonment Hill—a zone further east at the heart of the city of Victoria and immediately to the east of Government Hill. Saltoun wanted it as a demarcated military base, thereby jeopardizing the contiguity of Pottinger's vision of a linear city. The governor's hope that evening was that he could offer a suitable adjacent area of ground in order to convince the major-general to continue to consolidate his base at West Point. He wrote to Saltoun the following day offering a sweetener—at the back of his letter he attached a crude, unmeasured sketch of the marked-off area, while adding: ‘The whole of this ground will require a considerable outlay in clearing and levelling it, but when that is done, I look on it that there will not be finer or more healthy locations in the Island.’Footnote 8
With these words Pottinger was consciously dismissing Gough's concerns of the previous year, in 1842, in which the commander-in-chief had written to the plenipotentiary expressing that ‘I am persuaded that the north side of the island of Hong Kong will never be healthy during the hot and wet season (that is from about the middle of June to the middle of September) for Europeans’.Footnote 9 Troops stationed along the northern shore had been incapacitated through bouts of fever. Gough clearly believed that the source of the ague was location-specific, while Pottinger, himself an honorary major-general with 27 years’ continuous service in places such as Bombay and Afghanistan, held that it was endemic of tropical climates in general when complemented by a lack of sensible precautions and irresponsible behaviour.Footnote 10 At Gough's insistence a court of inquiry was convened that winter. The court, in its findings on 9 December 1842, while dismissing Pottinger's assertions, had declared that climate together with crowded accommodation were the principal causes of sickness in concert with generally unfavourable locations. Though in this instance West Point had been singled out, it concluded that it was a general geographical orientation or broad locality of the northern shore rather than specific locations or structures that could be held accountable.Footnote 11 The wound that this division of opinion inflicted between the military and civilian wings of the fledgling government would soon be reopened. Nevertheless, as the city grew, taking on a more definite form, peripheral locations such as West Point were increasingly being seen by those sections of the military that believed in the merits of centralized and defensive garrisons as an early blunder.
Saltoun was not the only interested party shifting his aspirations due east to the centre of the colony. Vice Admiral Sir William Parker also much preferred having his navy stores relocated in their entirety from Navy Bay, the small cove below West Point, to a more secure area within the Ordnance District adjacent to the military, and where currently his ‘Middle Stores’ were positioned.Footnote 12 It suited both Saltoun and Parker to consort with each other in order to consolidate their hold on that central location, and events would soon transpire to play into their hands.
In January 1843, the total number of rank and file troops recorded across the island of Hong Kong was 1,201 European and 550 ‘native’ (that is native Indian, Ceylonese and Malay) troops. West Point that year was occupied by the left wing of the 55th Regiment of Foot. This was the largest contingent on the island, an entirely European body of 500 men.Footnote 13 Sickness among the troops in the regiment had begun in the early part of May, much as it had done the previous year at West Point with an increase in patients suffering from fever. But it was not until the end of May that cases of ‘severe Remittent and continued Fever’ markedly increased.Footnote 14 From 20 May until 15 July, when Major-General Saltoun instigated a medical investigation, 408 patients were admitted, of which 294 were cases of fever. This was from an average strength of troops at the barracks of about only 250 men. During this period 39 men died, 25 from fever. Out of a total of nine officers, all but two became sick and two subsequently died.Footnote 15
The barracks were arranged in three clusters corresponding to three levels, and appear to have been opportunistically built upon the terraces of abandoned paddy or cultivated land, though it is likely that the military rudimentarily cut and filled in situ augmenting what was already inherent.Footnote 16 All had enclosing verandas. The upper two clusters were raised from the ground, with steps leading up to a deck. The uppermost, the ‘South Soldier's Barrack’ with, what seemed to be, a rear latrine, was the earliest building group on the site.Footnote 17 The middle cluster, the ‘East and West Officers’ Quarters’, had verandas on three sides, the higher southern face buried into the hillside. The lowest cluster, the ‘East and West Soldier's Lower Barracks’, a set of three had beside them on the only surviving contemporary plan of the site—the Edwards-de Havilland Survey (or ‘Gordon's Map’) of 1843—the dotted outline of a fourth, quite probably recently removed—a possible locus of sickness.Footnote 18
Equally vague are references as to the materials that comprised the various structures. In July 1843, a Chinese contractor known to the British as Amoon won the tender to provide sundry repairs to the buildings, though this sum also included work for the 41st Madras Native Infantry Ordnance Barracks and Hospital. From this it at first seems difficult to untangle and determine of what material the West Point barracks consisted. However, it was probable that the Madras Native Infantry were accommodated in mat barracks, as was the norm with the native troops stationed in Hong Kong. Also, by far the largest material costs were for carpenters and the day-labour for bricklayers, as well as the provision of panes of glass. The materials at West Point were thought fit for re-use when it was finally demolished and sold by part at auction in 1844.Footnote 19 Therefore the barracks themselves were certainly not matsheds (they had panes of glass) but most likely of timber and brick, that is, timber framing on brick bases—a similar approach to early tong lau shop house construction. The out-buildings, however, were matsheds including a mat covering for a marine sentry.Footnote 20 Under the circumstances it must have seemed somewhat more surprising that West Point was so severely affected. What emerged out of this was a more sophisticated view of why and how buildings could be linked to miasma—involving building materials certainly, but also their orientation, disposition to effective ventilation, shading and other strategies.
The first alarm within the colonial community was raised on 5 July when the Hongkong Eastern Globe published news of the outbreak at West Point. Again, the spectre of a location-specific source of miasma was assumed, and it was suggested that the only remedy was abandonment:
We understand that sickness to a very alarming extent prevails among the European Soldiers stationed at West Point. . .We think there is something obnoxious to the European constitution in this part of the Island, and as it is difficult to trace the immediate cause. . .we trust the authorities will see the necessity of abandoning the place entirely, and thus be the means of saving the lives of many unfortunate men who cost the Government upwards of a hundred pounds each for their passage to this country.Footnote 21
One wonders if the same level of concern would have arisen had not West Point that year been exclusively European, that is, if the victims had been the relatively cheaper native troops. The Canton Press later concurred, choosing to be more precise in their geographical prognosis in that it was ‘moreover singular that the centre of the town of Victoria on Hongkong should be comparatively free of sickness whilst the Western and Eastern extremities are described as very unhealthy’.Footnote 22 However, this year such a vague prognosis, as had been suggested by the court of inquiry that previous December, would not carry the same weight. Over the next three months with attacks of malaria spreading almost randomly across the small city, albeit focused along the western and then eastern extremities, a paradigmatic shift occurred in people's minds as to the cause, and it was no longer simply location-fixated.
Saltoun, stung by the publicity, and probably most sharply by the equation of life against economic loss, quickly assembled a committee of physicians to pinpoint the source of the outbreak.Footnote 23 The committee president Superintending Surgeon Thomson's personal observations would later be utilized in 1844 by the first colonial treasurer Robert Montgomery Martin as part of his obsessive crusade to prove to Whitehall that Hong Kong in its entirety was unfit for human habitation.
The medical committee assembled on-site on 15 July and made a thorough investigation of both the buildings and the surrounding area, yet it was unsure of its conclusion, suggesting it to have the characteristics of malaria perhaps arising from the ‘rank grass and exuberant vegetation’ from the base of two ravines either side of the barracks. Footnote 24 But this time round, such a usual, pat diagnosis could not satisfy. There simply was not enough damp and rank matter in the vicinity to convince the committee that this was the cause of such an extensive and severe outbreak. The only other possibilities seemed to be a combination of dwelling conditions, heat and night duties: the ‘faulty construction of the Barracks’, its position locked away from cooling south-westerly breezes; the need for men to march such long distances every day under the sun to reach the camp; and that each soldier served on regimental guard every third night. Yet, even these seemed unconvincing, and they surmised ‘that some other cause is in operation, which cannot be detected’.Footnote 25
With such a frighteningly vague conclusion, it was hardly surprising that Saltoun's immediate response was to vacate West Point, bury the dead nearby, and decant the living into two moored vessels—the Judith Allan and the Sappho.Footnote 26 The need now for hospital ships had become dire, and not just for the military. HMS Minden, the Royal Navy's retro-fitted floating hospital recently arrived, had become so overtaxed with the sick that it found it more expedient to tip the dead into the sea rather than expend valuable manpower burying their sailors on land—a procedure that received a sharp rebuke from the governor.Footnote 27
By 26 July the barracks had been completely vacated, with all of the furniture packed into one building to enable greater ease of guarding against looting.Footnote 28 A week later, and somewhat unexpectedly, the families of the 55th Regiment arrived from Calcutta. Many then heard of their husbands and fathers sick or dying, and themselves now bereft of accommodation.Footnote 29 Out of compassion, Pottinger felt compelled to sanction the hiring of houses and the building of temporary accommodation, and thereby initiated what would become a lingering trait in the following few years, the billeting of soldiers in private residences across the city, while the various permanent barracks programmes got underway. Also with new troops soon expected from England, Pottinger now realised the urgency of constructing barracks across the island, such as the ones planned to replace or augment existing sites, although he could not bring himself to suggest ‘Cantonment Hill’ at Victoria's core.Footnote 30 The struggle for the heart of the city was intensifying.
By August the fever had become widespread, though most of the cases clustered at both the western and eastern ends of Victoria.Footnote 31 Its broad canvas of attack had now earned itself the name ‘Hongkong Fever’. From May until its eventual decline in November, the fever would claim the lives of 24 per cent of the military personnel and a further 10 per cent of the European civilian inhabitants.Footnote 32 We have only a limited account of its effects upon the Chinese population though, according to the deputy superintendent of trade, A. R. Johnston, they appeared to have suffered as much under the new epidemic as their European counterparts.Footnote 33 While the colonists had attempted to protect themselves with vaccinations since the first occupation, the Chinese inhabitants had ‘no remedies of their own except counter-irritation, produced by pinching and rubbing with the fingers and with copper cash’.Footnote 34 Those who were able fled the island, with some Europeans regressing to their earlier life on board vessels, but many returning to their old retreats in Macau. By 12 August, the Macau-based Canton Press reported: ‘We regret to learn that much sickness prevails at Hongkong; invalids arrive here daily for cure and the Hongkong fever is of a very malignant description, and brought on probably not so much by the unhealthiness of the climate there as by too much exposure to the sun, which cannot always be avoided.’Footnote 35 This may have been a veiled criticism of Pottinger's April instructions to investigate and halt certain private construction work, solar exposure implying a lack of built and planted shade and, in turn, an unfavourable comparison with Macau.
The valley experiment
Along the opposite extremity of the shoreline city, three miles to the east of West Point, malaria wreaked havoc upon another vision of the future and cut down more lives. Jardine Matheson & Co., the largest and most influential of the Canton trading houses, having invested immediately and heavily into Hong Kong had, prior to the fever, been looked upon as a test case by the more timid merchants still yet to leave Macau, or those who had recently joined the island's mercantile fold. Over the past two years Jardine Matheson had poured most of their capital into their enclave at East Point. Their major purchase comprised a distinctive spur of rock to the immediate west of the original Causeway Bay that jutted north-eastwards into the harbour, with two sizeable hillocks to the rear.Footnote 36 First they erected a set of godowns upon the spur, then a three-storey office building behind, against which they built their hilltop residence upon the seaward hill. This two-story bungalow, dubbed East Point One, combined a Roman-arched rusticated base with a lighter Grecian upper floor veranda of Ionic columns, a similar style that would be employed by Superintending Royal Engineer Major Edward Aldrich for the Officers’ Quarters (Murray House) two years later.Footnote 37 On the more remote hill, the Black Mount, a sizeable bungalow was built, and within the dip were situated the stables.Footnote 38 Yet, despite having a wall early constructed around the small enclave and a deployment of armed sepoy guards, old opium-war storage habits and nagging doubts as to the safety of land could not be shaken—most of the bullion and all of the opium were stored off-shore within anchored vessels. However, if not for security, of all the places that would prove a sanctuary of health, East Point would stand out most peculiarly as it was perched upon the very edge of one of the most insalubrious locations identified during the 1843 outbreak.
Alexander Matheson, the firm's senior partner, had felt obliged to relinquish some of his early purchases near Central, those below Cantonment Hill, for military use, and East Point was a considerable distance from this early clustering.Footnote 39 Though it is unclear how much influence Matheson himself brought to bear upon the issue, by early 1843 there were signs that Pottinger had begun taking the naval surveyor Commander Belcher's initial thoughts on the Wong Nai Chung Valley—soon to be misleadingly renamed by the government as ‘Happy Valley’—the area adjacent to East Point, much more seriously.Footnote 40 The Wong Nai Chung Valley now lay as an abandoned network of paddy fields and streams within the largest area of naturally level ground to be found along the north side of the island. Belcher's 1841 report had spelt out the advantages in choosing the valley as the capital of Victoria—it may well indeed have induced Matheson to purchase this piece of land in the first place. Now perhaps Matheson would be forgiven for finally thinking that the ‘mountain’ would move to his ‘Mohammed’ after all. Another incentive for Pottinger to investigate this option may have been a realization that the marine lots sold in 1841 took such a significant percentage of the valuable shoreline away from Government control, and that future reclamation in front of these influential owners might first involve a sticky legal battle, as it was unclear whether they had a right to enjoy unhindered access to the shore.Footnote 41 The valley provided land enough for resettlement of the core administration, residences of various classes, growth in commercial activity and future expansion. Pottinger therefore instructed his cousin, Land Officer Alexander T. Gordon, to look into this. Certainly Gordon, the moonlighting architect, had an additional vested interest in considering the area, as it was adjacent to the land owned by his professional client, Alexander Matheson.Footnote 42
Submitting his report on 6 July, Gordon's almost Venetian or Dutch scheme, redolent of historically mercantile civic overtones, was clearly well thought out, though, unfortunately, no drawn plan appears to exist. In it he proposed a praya wall—much like at Macau—lined with warehouses. The marshland would be drained and channelled into a canal system. European houses and shops to the north and seawards, Chinese to the rear, all encircled by a ring road above which the wealthier residents would build their villas. The scheme would either be funded privately or by government for the primary infrastructure with lots subsequently leased.Footnote 43 London's response would arrive the following January; however, malaria would make its decision known somewhat earlier.
At about this time, beginning in July, malaria struck along the east side of the island.Footnote 44 The worst concentration of cases was, unfortunately, in the very area Gordon was proposing for the new city. William Tarrant, the later anti-government editor of the Friend of China, who himself was responsible for supervising the construction of roads in that district, recalled that ‘indeed the intention of the earlier settlers appears to have been to make their chief quarters in that neighbourhood’, but of the row of small houses initially constructed there ‘only a few of which were ever occupied; their occupants dying of fever contracted within them’.Footnote 45 Mansions were also constructed following the 1841 land sale. Mr Mercer, Alexander Matheson's new agent, built his home opposite the later burial ground but ‘fever caught in it killed him; and down it came’.Footnote 46 By 1861, the published date of Tarrant's scathing early history of the colony, the only dwelling that remained standing was the bungalow of Mr Stewart, an employee of Matheson, located at the head of the Valley: ‘Dr. Young's bungalow, just below, being deserted immediately and carried away piecemeal’.Footnote 47 The valley experiment was a sorry affair. Groups of abandoned, unfinished houses littered the eastern side including, at the summit, a deserted sanatorium belonging to Jardine Matheson & Co.
Victims of the fever filled up the local Protestant and Catholic burial grounds, then in Ha Wan (Wan Chai) south of the Queen's Road, to brimming point such that both would be dug up and relocated to much larger sites on the western edges of the Wong Nai Chung Valley itself, now an area which held as much terror for merchants who lived through 1843 as did West Point for the military.Footnote 48 This new necropolis, as was the tradition, would demarcate the receded limit of the post-fever city, at least for a short time, and provide an emotional cordon sanitaire for those living behind it.
A link between miasmas and dwellings
The outbreak of this third season of fever in 1843 marked an important shift in hypothesis as to its cause and remedy. Though vague notions of climate, overcrowding and general locality were presumed, there had been no mention within the 1842 Court of Inquiry of the relative suitability of accommodation. Now however, for the first time, the medical profession had, almost with one voice, concluded that the cause was also owing to the unsuitability of certain modes of construction. As the supportive newspaper of the government, the Friend of China, reluctantly admitted in September 1843 that:
the removal of the Government to Macao, and the panic it produced if we may judge by the quick departure from our Island of almost all who could leave; compels us to advert to this painful subject and to say that the best medical Authorities uniformly ascribe the present sickness, not to any climatic or local influence of a deleterious character, but wholly to the absence of habitable houses and the suitable accommodations which are absolutely required for the healthy existence of Europeans in this climate and especially during this, the rainy season.Footnote 49
The newspaper was taking a sideways swipe at the very unpopular government notification dated 10 April that it had, as the government gazette, first printed. If this was not clear enough, it later spelt it out: ‘But for the (we presume unavoidable) delay in the Land arrangements and the prohibition of building, we sincerely believe the fatal fever now raging, would not have been engendered’.Footnote 50 This was a daring attack on its proprietor, and one that dropped accountability for the fever directly into the lap of Pottinger's administration.
The original notification alluded to was published in the Friend of China on 13 April, two months before the medical committee's fateful visit to West Point. Its purpose was to prevent further construction prior to a reformulation of land policy that could legally commence following the formal exchanges of the ratified Treaty of Nanking with China scheduled later that year—that is, once Hong Kong was considered to be a ‘crown colony’.Footnote 51 A notice for the verification of possession and clarification of the terms of ownership was not unexpected, despite later cries of foul play by landowners in January 1844 at the time of the second great land sale. There was a pragmatic preparedness among existing purchasers that the quit rent ownership model they had been promised in mid-1841 under the first plenipotentiary Captain Charles Elliot looked increasingly unlikely to be approved. What was a surprise to most of them were the following instructions concerning the forcible halting of construction, contradicting previous pressure put upon them by the land officer's department to ensure that each owner spent a minimum percentage of the plot purchase price on construction work. In other words, what seemed contradictory was that the halting of construction as now ordered would risk annulling the very stipulations of ownership that the government had originally imposed.
The government notification ordered an almost complete cessation in construction. It was this cessation—‘the absence of habitable houses’—coincident with the worst and most generalized attack of malaria since colonization that co-joined to provide the community with a potent new thesis: that the fever was inextricably linked to the combined effects of the form, construction quality, material use, and the siting of built accommodation in Hong Kong. Doubtless there was some truth in this observation, particularly relating to ‘absence’. The abandoned pits of building sites that pockmarked the rudimentary east-west highway of the Queen's Road since enforcement of the notification must have proved perfect receptacles of stagnant water for the Anopheles mosquito to breed in and transit across. A number of recent historians of medicine, such as Packard, have asserted that malaria epidemics and their patterns of transmission have arisen from dramatic shifts within an environment. Changes which disrupt the original flow and distribution of water, together with the introduction of a new, large human population, particularly one comprising potential malaria carriers or ‘immunologically naïve’ individuals, and the local presence of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, are the three essential ingredients generally necessary for an epidemic.Footnote 52 The 1843 outbreak amply provided these components. In addition, the recent war with China and the use of Hong Kong as a garrison settlement most probably introduced parasites into the geographical system.Footnote 53
Following the closure of West Point and the enormous panic that deaths across the city were beginning to produce, Pottinger was now finally persuaded that a plausible link existed between unsanitary locations and miasma. On 16 August 1843 he appointed two surgeons, P. Young and acting Colonial Surgeon C. A. Winchester, together with Clerk of the Police Court, C. B. Hillier, W. Scott and Land Officer Gordon, to form a Committee of Public Health and Cleanliness with authority to investigate, formulate and implement any rules they thought necessary to impose upon the colony with respect to improved cleanliness and therefore health.Footnote 54 No rules were implemented, but their findings became enshrined in the cumbersome and encyclopaedic ‘Preservation of Good Order and Cleanliness Ordinance’ no. 5 of 20 March 1844.Footnote 55 The Committee did, however, recommend and undertake four projects at a cost of a mere $150. These four items, all preoccupied with the draining of standing water, were the clearing and enlarging of drains at the west end of the city; the provision of a new drain along the Queen's Road; the raising of the road near the Lower Bazaar, which flooded during rain storms; and the provision of a new water course along the Upper Bazaar, the Upper and Lower Bazaars being the principal Chinese commercial and residential districts at the time.Footnote 56 From this emerged a concerted effort to provide cohesive drainage and sewerage across the growing road network, and would become a key concern during Governor John Davis’ administration beginning in May 1844. To the end Pottinger would maintain his belief in dismissing site selection based upon medical topographic approaches as mere ‘theories’.Footnote 57 Davis maintained the opposite view with regard to location-specific advantages, but the success of the sanitation and construction projects in Hong Kong from 1844 onwards would, in a way, not contradict either viewpoint. Location problems could be mitigated and therefore discounted as inherent, irredeemable features.
Two years after the major fever outbreak, in his 1845 Blue Book report as colonial surgeon, Dr Francis Dill remarked upon the relative healthiness of the past year: ‘which is to be accounted for by the improved state of the Colony, improvements in drainage, in roads, and in dwellings more adapted to the Country’.Footnote 58 He is more explicit about his beliefs as to the causes of the fever and its prevention in a paper read that same year before the China Medico-Chirurgical Society:
In my opinion the chief exciting causes are, exposure to the rays of the sun, sleeping under the direct rays of the moon, and exposure to the night dews; the atmosphere is much more charged with miasmatic vapour at night than during the day, or rather the poison is more concentrated along the surface of the earth. Badly constructed dwellings placed either in immediate contact with the damp earth, or which is still worse, elevated a few feet, leaving a space without any ventilation, which becomes the receptacle of foul and confined air, and farther the dwellings being occupied before they are perfectly dry, must appear one of the most prominent sources of fever.Footnote 59
Dill, admittedly, was now writing in a time of respite and felt that the changes brought about by a re-vamped building programme had demonstrably reduced the incidence of fever.
The missionary and sinologist, Reverend James Legge, concurred with Dill, feeling that it had been a combination of ground conditions and poor dwelling provision that seemed to be linked to the pattern of fatalities. In his reminiscences of his time in Hong Kong he recounted that ‘there was no subsequent year of sickness and mortality so great as that of 1843’, the year of his first arrival:
The mortality was mainly owing to the want of accommodation for the multitudes who kept pressing into the new colony, and to the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up. I remember visiting officers who were living in small huts reared on the hill behind the general's house. It was no wonder that one after another they were seized with fever, and either died, or were invalided home. Then the drains were for the time all open, and an atmosphere of disease, which only the strongest constitutions and prudent living were able to resist, might be said to envelope the inhabitants day and night.Footnote 60
Legge believed that, apart from the effects of Pottinger's confusing notification to halt construction, the inhabitants had inadvertently increased their exposure to the disease by the poor building stock already in existence. If the British government had intimated more confidently a determination to retain Hong Kong in 1841 then ‘the small and rude beginnings would not have been what they were in the middle of 1843, if they had not dated from before the treaty of Nanking’.Footnote 61
The celebrated botanist Robert Fortune, whose first days in China also threw him into the midst of Hong Kong's epidemic, believed that the peculiar fierceness of the solar rays (which he believed to be particular to the region), would be reduced by an intensive planting programme, whereby trees and large vegetation would offer life-saving shade, ‘decompose the carbonic acid, and render it fit for the respiration of man’.Footnote 62 He would lobby Davis’ government during his intermittent visits over the three years he remained to establish a planting regime for the city and ultimately afforest the island, and would persist on subsequent trips in the 1850s under more sympathetic ears.
Slightly closer in time to the recording of these events, Captain Arthur Cunynghame, aide-de-camp to Major-General Lord Saltoun, immediately on his return to London in 1844, published his memoirs of his time in China. Entitled An Aide-De-Camp's Recollections of Services in China, Cunynghame's account of his short stay in the territory records some of the worst months of the fever besieging Hong Kong in 1843. For Cunynghame, the steep terrain leeward of prevailing winds posed an essential problem:
The town itself is long and straggling, from the nature of the ground upon which it is built—a strip of land at the base of the hills; and from the circumstance of their rising so immediately behind it, screening it during the summer from the prevailing winds, the south-west, they cause it to be very hot, not allowing a breath of air to circulate freely through the streets.Footnote 63
Hindrance to the movement of air suggested itself as a critical factor to a number of observers. The military certainly began to share this theory. One contract went out in late August 1843 for ‘cutting down a tongue or wedge of Land to improve the ventilation of the lower rooms of the new Officers Quarters at Chek-Chu’.Footnote 64
When air appeared to circulate freely and other aspects of the land such as drainage and vegetation were considered favourable, other factors had to be found to account for the insalubrious nature of the locale. The military suffered sporadically and extensively across a number of their settlements, West Point being of course just the most notable place at the start of the 1843 outbreak. However, these settlements were scattered across a wide variety of terrain and coastal orientations. For instance, Cunynghame alluded to a similar incident occurring at the small barracks constructed in Sai Wan, located along the north-east, and described by him as ‘by far the prettiest part of the island’. He therefore concluded that, as with other barrack locations, the only possible common denominator in the sickness among stationed troops was poor construction and cramped conditions: ‘I am inclined to think that it was there owing, as well as elsewhere, more to the want of good and sufficient accommodation than any other cause’.Footnote 65 A newer building to contain about 100 men was being constructed as he wrote, and doubtless this would be robust and generous, and therefore healthy. By 1844, across Hong Kong, from what had previously been considered the more healthy location of Chek Chue in the south to Sai Wan in the north, a revised programme of substantial, spacious barrack construction was underway.
Nevertheless, specific location choice was maintained as fundamental to health preservation. Cunynghame, in particular, lamented the situation around the Wong Nai Chung Valley: ‘Many private dwellings have been commenced. . .most have yet proved very unhealthy and in consequence have been little inhabited’.Footnote 66 Using it as a general test case in his theory of poor site selection he cited what he considered were the ‘two causes’ of disease. The first he attributed to lack of air movement caused by a secluded position and the restriction of sea breezes. Such movement he considered partially attributable to paddy cultivation. The second source was ‘from the neighbouring hills being encumbered with shrubs and tangled woods, miasma from the paddy-fields and decayed vegetation being extremely prejudicial to health’.Footnote 67 The details would subsequently be argued out between medical practitioners. Was it owing to ‘exhalations from the deserted rice grounds’ in Hong Kong as Dr John Wilson, Medical Inspector of Naval Hospitals and Fleets, would suggest in his published Medical Notes on China?Footnote 68 Or was it ‘that the principal causes are the natural marshy swamps, the decaying brushwood, as well as the cultivated rice fields’, as counter-proposed by Dr Dill?Footnote 69
What precautions could be taken to improve the health of residents of the city? For the medical officers of Her Majesty's Navy a proposed naval hospital in a ‘moderately elevated position’ seemed to elicit the approval of the civil medical service in enhancing the chances of survival.Footnote 70 Subsequently, for an increasing number of experts from the new chattering class in Hong Kong, height was evidently right. The higher the elevation above sea level, the safer it seemed. As one article in the Chinese Repository reported in August 1843, ‘we learn that the hospital for seamen is now ready to receive patients. This institution is situated near the preceding, [that is, the Medical Missionary Society Hospital] in an elevated and healthy position’.Footnote 71 The consequences of this would lead to the birth of the ‘Mid-levels’ area above the Central District.
Height of course was not enough. West Point itself had been elevated, but in an unhealthy location. There seemed little point therefore in rebuilding upon the site. The barracks were soon demolished, their parts auctioned off to the highest bidder. Eight lots, one for each of the barracks, outbuildings and guardhouse, were sold, and their parts entirely removed by early March 1844.Footnote 72 By the time the first surveyor-cartographer of Hong Kong Island, the young Royal Engineer Lieutenant Thomas Bernard Collinson, had set his theodolite upon this stretch of land later that year, it was as if West Point had never existed: The naval stores and the circular battery to the north along the shoreline near Navy Bay would remain, but a significant new highway, the Pok Fu Lam Road, would cut its way through the old barracks running neatly along Collinson's elegant contour lines to descend down into ‘Aberdeen’—the third artery, after the Wong Nai Chung Gap and Tai Tam Gap to connect the island from north to south.Footnote 73
However, before its demise, West Point held a secret. As the boards were lifted from the platforms in preparation for the barracks’ removal it was found that ‘the floors were totally rotten, and beneath them a quantity of water was lodged’.Footnote 74 This account was recalled in 1846, the healthiest year on record. West Point's lingering importance was that it would serve as the ideal anti-model in almost all respects of how not to build in Hong Kong. It was the cause célèbre of Governor Davis and his colonial surgeon, Dr Dill. As Davis opined to William Gladstone, then colonial secretary, the troops had once been ‘lodged not in Barracks, but in ground floor hovels, the boards of which were in close contact with the wet earth below’. He implied by the reverse that now, following Major Aldrich's designs, they had been elevated upon solid, well-built masonry. ‘I had not been a month on shore’, he continued, ‘before I gave my assent to Major-General D'Aguilar erecting the new Barracks where they are now completed’.Footnote 75 While the West Point barracks ‘were not only surrounded, but actually built upon a swamp’, with Aldrich's help Davis had learnt from this and constructed a ‘catch water drain’ running along the base of the hills above and across the central and western extent of the city ‘which is so admirably adapted to prevent the enormous quantity of Water (which is constantly escaping from the Hill) spreading over the entire surface of the ground immediately above the Town’.Footnote 76
Gone too, for the military, were the casual positioning and orienting of buildings, particularly when their backs were to the southern slopes of hills. If only they had consulted the merchants perhaps. The ‘old China hands’ professed some early knowledge in this art of orientation, a rudimentary feng shui presumably gleaned from their Chinese compradors. Alexander Matheson had, as far back as January 1842, advised a client intent on building in Hong Kong that:
As an old resident in China, I strongly recommend your having the entrance to the South West, and if possible no entrance to the North or N. East—as in winter it would be a thorough obstacle to keeping your house warm. I conclude you will like to have a surrounding verandah.Footnote 77
Perhaps the men of commerce indeed held the answer? In the space of a few months, the Friend of China, formerly a loyal supporter of government policy, had switched its allegiance to the merchant classes. It had some justification. The government had repeatedly skipped to Macau along with most of the wealthier residents, some of whom were reluctant to return. Yet amidst this exodus, at the two wealthiest companies’ bases, Jardine Matheson & Co.'s at the rocky promontory enclave of East Point, and Dent & Co.'s magnificent offices in Central, the worst period of Hong Kong's early history also saw the near completion of their grand projects of construction. As they took shape, these buildings must have been seen as beacons of hope. For the Friend of China the juxtaposition of trauma and triumph took shape in a single entry on 14 February 1844. The accursed 55th Regiment had now mercifully received orders for immediate embarkation for England and lesser merchants remained cautiously penned in Macau, yet ‘The princely establishment built by Messrs. Jardine Matheson & Co. also those by Messrs. Dent & Co. and other firms, are nearly completed. We anticipate at an early date, the removal from Macao to this Colony of every British House in China.’Footnote 78 It was as if a nightmare had been quickly shrugged off.
Meanwhile, right up to the end of his term of office in May 1844, Pottinger had stubbornly maintained his long-held beliefs in the face of a groundswell of opposition. ‘He does not concur’, wrote his private secretary to new Major-General George Charles D'Aguilar's assistant military secretary that March, ‘in the theories that have been laid down either as to the peculiar advantages of one situation over another—judging from past experience—or as to the peculiar insalubrity of this Island over any other part of the Coast of China’.Footnote 79 He would soon be replaced by a governor who did.
Mammon versus military—a battle for the centre of the city
The first governor's stubbornness might be forgiven in the light of a recent conflict. A battle of two visions for the future of the city took place across 1843. Malaria would not just form a backdrop to this struggle, but would directly intervene in the decision-making. The combatants were Sir Henry Pottinger and Major-General Lord Saltoun, and the prize—a thin strip of coastal land below Cantonment Hill, which would ultimately form an area that would for evermore be known as Admiralty. On the one side was a civic concern for a unified shoreline where a mercantile community might lavish their considerable expenditure upon fine palaces and godowns, make good use of the waterfront access, and visually start to tie the city together; on the other, a much more self-interested concern for the well-being and control of troops within a new self-contained, fortified military cantonment, where all the necessities of provision and good governance would be at Saltoun's disposal while he sat upon the hill above as overlord.
This strip had been known for quite some time now as the ‘Ordnance District’ and had historically comprised part of the earliest military settlement that had, at the beginning of 1841, straddled the Albany Nullah and covered part of the foot of Government Hill. Lieutenant John Ouchterlony of the Madras Engineers had constructed temporary matsheds here for the arrival in September of 1841 of the 98th Regiment, the Staffordshire, stretching along the harbour front, north of the Queen's Road, with some sheds built higher up around land later to be occupied by the military commander's new headquarters.Footnote 80 It then became a depot for provisions for the China Expedition of 1842, and, on instructions from the Governor-General of India, the Commissariat was established here together with Ordnance stores. Yet at the same time a mixture of godowns, two market bazaars, the Canton and Morgan's Bazaars, and residential buildings dotted the area, and there was no determination on the part of Pottinger to root them out.Footnote 81 On the contrary, he saw it as eminently suitable that this shorefront area to the north of the Queen's Road (that section of road eventually renamed the ‘Queensway’) be protected from further military encroachment. For by now, this meagre strip had become one of the most valuable possessions left available for leasing by the Crown and would, to his mind, comprise an eminent centrepiece for the January 1844 land sale.
Pottinger had always been sympathetic towards the dire need for barracks—he possibly saw them as relatively moveable items if government needs changed in the re-acquisition of land.Footnote 82 However, he had drawn the line at the intense fortification plans adopted by Aldrich under Saltoun. In late July 1843, as the stakes mounted, a letter by Pottinger's secretary Richard Woosnam to those private landowners now affected was leaked to the local press:
A plan has been proposed by Major Aldrich of the Royal Engineers for laying out and fortifying the centre part of this city. . .H.E. the Governor further directs me to acquaint you that he has not himself, after full consideration, seen cause to recommend Major Aldrich's plan to the authorities at home.Footnote 83
The decision to consolidate military forces in the central portion of the city, as has been seen, was already contemplated before the outbreak of malaria at West Point. Now, with the ratified treaty and with the prize of permanence assured, a tug-o’-war between the civil government of Pottinger and the armed services for possession of prime land was all but inevitable. However as Pottinger, the ever-mobile plenipotentiary, was frequently absent from the island performing his diplomatic and trading duties, the Hong Kong-based Major-General Lord Saltoun as general commanding officer was certainly better-placed to steal the initiative.Footnote 84
In mid June, one month before the medical committee gathered at West Point, Saltoun directed Aldrich to ‘examine this place [Hong Kong] with a view to the best defensive positions being selected’.Footnote 85 This was quite possibly the first significant instruction issued to Aldrich after having arrived in Hong Kong on 10 June. Saltoun also passed on proposals for a comprehensive cantonment plan that had been formulated by Ouchterlony while he had been executive engineer.Footnote 86 This plan was known to Pottinger, as he had previously protested about its encroachment west across the Albany Nullah onto Government Hill, and north across the Queen's Road onto the valuable shorefront, causing him to reiterate in early May:
I consider it will be a most excellent arrangement to assign to this Cantonment all the land lying between the Ravine that runs along the Eastern side of ‘Government Hill’ and the Ravine that divides ‘Hospital Hill’ from the location belonging to Messrs. Holliday Wise & Co., merely reserving a frontage towards the ‘Queen's Road’, of the depth of the ranges of shops known by the names of the ‘Canton and Morgan's Bazaars’.Footnote 87
He would allow ‘four great roads’, two to penetrate the Canton and Morgan's bazaars and two other locations along the Queen's Road provided the cantonment remained discreetly set back and screened by commerce along the principal artery of the city.Footnote 88
By 28 June Aldrich had produced a 16-page report, a memoranda on barrack and hospital accommodation and the internal defence of the colony.Footnote 89 He blithely ignored all Pottinger's concerns, even going one step further by suggesting that the entire area should be ‘confined entirely to the Military Department’.Footnote 90 What seems surprising in this document is that, with cases of the ‘Hongkong Fever’ multiplying around him as he wrote, as well as intimating that he had served some time in the malarial West Indies, Aldrich appeared almost exclusively focused upon the compressive virtues of defensible space and surveillance rather than the expansive ones of ventilation and contagion prevention.Footnote 91 Also surprising, considering the impact of disease as the major cause of mortality for troops in China, Saltoun neither instructed nor did Aldrich overtly contemplate a strategy for dealing with this at the same time. This may have been due to the fact that Lord Aberdeen's January 1843 despatch from the Foreign Office had made it abundantly clear to take into account ventilation and barrack positioning, and need hardly have required re-mentioning.Footnote 92 In turn, it seems, by his subsequent designs of the Officers’ Quarters (later named Murray House) and Headquarter House (later named Flagstaff House) ventilation, shade and elevation were indeed inimitable components of Aldrich's thinking. Regardless, the epidemic in the following months would consolidate Aldrich's proposal and undoubtedly add leverage in Whitehall. For, in Aldrich's mind, it was not just the strategic defence of a town that was required but also the very creation of a self-supporting military community within it.
In addition to defence, a significant reinforcement of troops were on their way to the new crown colony and barracks would be needed for the detachment of Royal Sappers and Miners and the seven hundred soldiers supplementing the 98th Regiment, fresh from England.Footnote 93 Aldrich therefore integrated the defence and accommodation programmes to strengthen his hand. He requested the acquisition of existing adjacent buildings, both military and civilian, which were ripe for appropriation. His first thoughts were on immediate, temporary accommodation, requesting the use of the Commissariat godowns and the quarters for native and Chinese commissariat officers as a temporary barracks for the troops, and the relocation of ample stores to other sites to free up building stock and land as well as the securing of private warehouses.Footnote 94 He would soon gain permission to design a whole barracks system from scratch based upon Ouchterlony's plan layout.
Saltoun promptly forwarded the memoranda to the governor on the 29 June, and somewhat disingenuously excused himself by admitting: ‘This plan you will observe from the very absurd way in which locations have been given, interferes considerably with what has been considered private property’. Yet Saltoun offered Pottinger a fait accompli, asking him:
to decide whether this or any other plan of fortifications drawn out by the officer duly authorized to do so and approved of by me as commanding the forces, shall be caused into execution forthwith, or whether it is your pleasure we shall wait for the approval of the Master-General and Parliament.Footnote 95
Having had his conditions for site-selection bluntly ignored, Pottinger must certainly have felt the bind he was in. Writing back to Saltoun on 4 July all the governor could do now was again to repeat his determined belief that the West Point area was the ideal position for a cantonment ‘which I had sketched in my own mind for this side of the Island long before I heard that Major Aldrich had been ordered to China’.Footnote 96 He argued that it was more logical for ‘Fortifications to the West of the City (beyond the Naval Arsenal, Depôts, &c.) to command the Western or Principal entrance to the Bay of Hong Kong’.Footnote 97 The 50-feet wide Queen's Road, Pottinger offered, would be extended, kept in good repair, and thereby able to afford rapid deployment of both troops and gun carriages to any point along the northern coast, ‘and in such an extreme case, the public as well as private buildings would be, of course, appropriated for temporary Barracks, or Hospitals, or any other purpose to which they could be usefully applied’.Footnote 98 But it was July and the micro-political world around him had shifted with the climate of sickness.
The governor sent his dispatch to London on 17 July in the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel George Malcolm. Attached to this compendium of documents was the correspondence between Pottinger, Saltoun and Aldrich, together with Gordon's 6 July eastern resettlement scheme. Pottinger utilized the Gordon Report to compare it favourably against Aldrich's proposal, arguing repeatedly on economic grounds:
Situated as I am it is my duty to say, that I think that carrying out those plans will interfere very much with the increase and prosperity of Hong Kong (Victoria) as an Emporium of Trade, which was, I believed, the sole, or, at least, the Chief, object in securing its cession.Footnote 99
Pottinger, as we now know, was unlucky. The untimely epidemic at West Point accompanied by a wholescale evacuation of the area 17 days after Pottinger's reply to Saltoun, and just four days after his transmission of the entire situation to Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley in Whitehall—including Aldrich's memoranda, his remonstrance and all—certainly scotched any idea of a cantonment in the vicinity of West Point and Navy Bay. Months passed in the waiting for a decision to reach them from Whitehall. Nevertheless, whether or not the epidemic directly impinged upon London's decision, the removal of Pottinger's alternative left Aldrich's proposal in the securing of the area desired relatively unchallenged. The city would be bisected.
As it chanced, Lord Stanley did indeed fall behind his man. He wrote on 15 November: ‘Her Majesty's Government agree with Sir Henry Pottinger that the prospects of Hong Kong as a mart and as a colony are not to be sacrificed to other purposes’.Footnote 100 It was, however, a pyrrhic victory. Where else now were the military to go? The Ordnance District and the area behind would become a cantonment in all but name and soon become known as the ‘Murray Barracks’—integrated within the larger ‘Victoria Barracks’ complex—and Admiralty. Bit by bit, building elements would be added into Pottinger's ‘no-go’ zone, and private property edged out.
Post-traumatic space
The first step in this post-traumatic ballet came almost at once. Riding on the coat tails of the recently constructed Royal Artillery Hospital designed and erected by Ouchterlony nearby, the new military commander Major-General George Charles D'Aguilar instructed the construction of a military hospital. By this health pretext he would gain possession of the valuable north side of the road, along the shore. ‘The site now proposed for the Military Hospital is not within the ground which was allotted for Cantonments’ piped Pottinger's private secretary helplessly:
it is almost superfluous to add that by far the most valuable part of the Crown Lands in this Colony are those which are washed by the Harbour and which are consequently peculiarly adapted for mercantile purposes.Footnote 101
He was powerless to prevent it. Once the land around Cantonment Hill was threatened with removal from civilian use an inevitable and dramatic sequence of events unfolded:
First, it became clear that the ‘Central District’, the commercial district to the immediate west, had to be consolidated, requiring expansion up the steep mountainside—the urban grain of the city realigning itself north-south as well as east-west. The Chinese Upper Bazaar, the twin streets of shop houses that climbed up southwards from Central, in Pottinger's and subsequently Davis's eyes, quickly emerged as a blunder, a blockage in need of speedy rectification.
Second, this need for the Europeans to climb was reinforced by a belief that higher-altitude dwellings would protect inhabitants from the fever. The first governor, despite his location-based scepticism as to malaria, had no doubt upon this matter. In a letter to Saltoun in October 1843 Pottinger assured him that ‘the experience of even the past season is strongly in favour of the superior eligibility of the tops of hills’.Footnote 102 One of the peculiar statistics to emerge from the grim head-count during the 1843 epidemic was the surprising healthiness of prisoners housed in Magistrate William Caine's elevated prison complex, situated a little way above and to the east of Upper Bazaar. Writing in October 1843, the Chinese Repository commented that there were housed at any one time an average of 60 inmates, and yet of those only nine had died throughout the entire three years of occupation. ‘Of those nine, some were debauched opium smokers—who died for want of that which caused their death. Two or three only died of fever’.Footnote 103 From 1844, the area around Caine's house, prison and magistracy took on a speculative kudos for the private investor as one of the most desirably healthy parts of the city. Arising from this, and the 1844–1845 reorganization and expansion of streets under Davis, emerged the birth of the lower portion of an area later to be known as ‘Mid-levels’.Footnote 104 Pottinger would use the January land sale of 1844, later reinforced by Davis, to push the resident Chinese out of Upper Bazaar and into an expanded area called Tai Ping Shan to the lower west, adjacent to and just above the shoreline district of Lower Bazaar.Footnote 105 The distancing and marshalling of the Chinese into an effective ghetto would compound both the reality and prejudices of the British administration towards these local migrants as dregs of society to be kept at arms length, the new region swiftly gaining a reputation for illicit activities and organized crime.Footnote 106 This, as Evans points out, is ‘the first “resumption” of land for public purposes in the history of Hong Kong’ initiating what would become an increasingly habitual instinct by the colonial government of compulsory purchase as a mechanism of urban control and alteration including, ironically, that of plague-ridden Tai Ping Shan itself under the resumption ordinance of 1894.Footnote 107 The removal allowed ‘corrective’ re-configuring of the street system, which among other changes would include the new Wellington Street; and, in conjunction with this re-formed circulatory infrastructure, provide sales plots of greater topographical spread than had hitherto been offered under auction.
Third, the Murray Barracks and Admiralty would imminently cut off Central from the wealthy residential-cum-commercial quayside of Spring Gardens, located in present-day Wan Chai, where the homes of the elite had been hastily captured in watercolour by George Chinnery and, later, more leisurely lithographed by the architect Murdoch Bruce. Its survival as a suburb necessitated a reasonable connection to the commercial and civic centre, and as neither Central nor the Wong Ngai Chung Valley, its plans now abandoned, afforded such hope Spring Gardens itself would eventually, reluctantly, be released to local Chinese, while Europeans would climb for the steeper reaches of Mid-levels.
Thus, like a plant that has had its shoots abruptly cut off, it appears that the malarial outbreak of 1843 had the compound effect both west and particularly east of pruning the city of Victoria back to its initial root, thereby influencing the tendril lines of subsequent growth for young Hong Kong. There would, of course, be small upheavals over the course of the next few years, mostly of an economic and political nature, which would threaten the colony's development—including a climate of increasing disenfranchisement with Sir John Davis’ administration—but nothing quite like the trauma of 1843. This had been both the nadir and the reforging of the city. The internalization and segregation of interests and the ‘Hongkonian’ way of life—a peculiar 1841 phrase denoting the varied interior worlds of an insular proto community—was gone, and in its place was an increasing belief in the need for municipal governance.Footnote 108 This call emerged as an outcome of perceived worsening inequalities between the city's major interest groups. Malaria had thrown the hastily pre-conceived though messily more equitable arrangements of spatial control temporarily into the air. Once the pieces landed in 1844 redeployment was swift and clear. A unified, integrated vision of a city was sacrificed for that of overt stratification and separation. The uncertainties of future military security placed immediate advantage of martial space over commercial space, and likewise, European space over Chinese space, with centrality and height playing significantly more important roles in the emergence of social status.
Both the perception and remedial measures taken in addressing health concerns, particularly those thought to be linked to miasma were, in fact, integrated into to a wider set of socio-political issues. From 1841 to 1844, due to political uncertainty and related individual concerns as to personal and emotional long-term investment upon the island—a mantle of doubt and fear seemed to extend itself upon the very terrain of the land itself. This un-demarcated geography of fear retracted after the outbreak of the 1843 ‘Hongkong Fever’, becoming an almost precise set of rules about where to build and how to build. Nevertheless, arguments continued, and through the subsequent years from 1844 to 1846, as a visually cohesive city emerged, thoughts shifted—especially for the European community—towards commerce, leisure, and social bonding.
The arrival of Robert Montgomery Martin as colonial treasurer in 1844 would plunge Hong Kong into another crisis by his attacks upon the island as a terrain of irredeemable unhealthiness. Martin re-opened a British national wound: the issue of the agreed returning of the northern island of Chusan (Zhoushan) to China under the Treaty of Nanking. He would place the larger, more temperate island in a favourable juxtapose with smaller Hong Kong, giving it an almost mythical, salvific quality in comparison.Footnote 109 Yet his protestations and lengthy diatribes against Britain's continued occupation of Hong Kong, when placed against simultaneous improvements in the well-being of inhabitants upon the island, eventually laid to rest the spectre that was the inherent, irredeemable unsuitability of the terrain. Miasma, that is malaria, remained a threat. But through the painful process of countering Martin it was to be seen, perhaps somewhat prematurely, as a containable one. Once relations between the governor and the Colonial Office had been mended over this incident, the subsequent questions of Hong Kong's future were directed to the higher order of purpose rather than merely of existence. This would include the development of interdependencies not just between the five treaty ports and Hong Kong but also between Hong Kong and Canton. Hong Kong emerged, with the abolition of Canton's Cohong system, as a ‘bonded warehouse’ or back storeroom to the Chinese city's new front office trading environment providing the economic lifeline for the subsequent, delicate decade of the young colony.Footnote 110
The variegated terrain of Hong Kong Island had seemed to present hidden dangers and benefits with regard to health, and therefore it had to be understood and tamed. This taming would occur, by among other means, through surveying, whereby T. B. Collinson's masterwork, his four-part Ordnance Map of 1845, would overlay the added dimension of mapped altitude and produce the first published set of plans within the British Empire to exhibit the use of the contour line.Footnote 111 Also how to build was now just as important as where to build and, as a consequence, a healthy property intermingled with the badge of status. The colonizers now possessed the confidence to ameliorate, control and eventually remove the threats posed by this natural terrain, and in so doing, were preparing the ground, so to speak, of emerging modern architectural and town planning approaches within the second half of the nineteenth century, approaches that perceived land as a passive resource for mass social provision.
A shifting thesis for the causes of malaria would still continue, albeit within tighter and tighter orbits of reasoning. One such example being an almost micro-remedial approach by the War Office in tackling a further contained outbreak in the Murray Barracks in 1848. Here, the statistical analysis of infected patients against bed and fenestration positions within the plans and sections of each building would provide a reasoned approach as to the possible external source and direction of the miasma and reassure the military that they could mitigate it in a relatively cost-effective manner, through adjacent ground surface treatment or window coverings.Footnote 112 This in itself was undoubtedly as a result of an accepted wisdom of maintaining one's health in sturdy and elevated buildings, buildings that in their failure to protect in this instance could only have been due to some compromise at their most vulnerable interfaces, their openings and contact points with the ground, or when placed in immediate adjacency to a miasmatic environment.Footnote 113
Hong Kong's crisis coincided with zealous developments in sanitary reform in Great Britain and fuelled the debate. Thanks in part to Martin, the 1843 fever and the subsequent measures to rebuild and expand the city, particularly upwards, generated much discussion and interest within Whitehall. One result of this was that the Colonial Land and Emigration Office engaged the new ‘Royal Commission on the Health of Towns’ to ensure that health protection was being carefully considered.Footnote 114 An outcome was the design of a comprehensive high-level water catchment system for use in both fire prevention and street sluicing. It also argued, in reaction to Governor Davis’ proposal, that any dividing of the city into districts be based upon ‘an accurate survey of the whole natural area for drainage with a plan shewing the relative heights of the ground’ rather than on ideological or political grounds.Footnote 115
Hong Kong also emerged as a site of heated discussion across the British Empire's broadsheets, a byword for failure through the effects of a diseased climate coupled with a local government berated for its moral decrepitude in failing to stem petty crime and corruption, while accused by merchants of hindering the island's integration with China trade. However, after 1845, provisions of rudimentary civic hygiene and the relative abatement of disease refocused the early colonists onto the latter concern, and the colony's problems were once more hauled through Whitehall and subsequently Westminster, culminating in a scathing set of minutes taken before the House of Commons Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China in 1847. Constructing a healthy city provided the foundations for attracting and encouraging the free flow of commerce and people. As a frustrated Alexander Matheson exclaimed before the committee: ‘It is necessary to make a place before you can derive a revenue from it’.Footnote 116 The effects of the inquiry and the replacement of the second governor—Davis’ position had become untenable—may have helped the city of Victoria finally to have reached some form of critical mass by the late 1840s, becoming more seriously accepted as an important trading port and, moreover, now visually looking the part to elicit such a confidence. This pull resulted, between the years 1848 to 1853, in Hong Kong seeing the first significant boom in its population, increasing across this period by over 80 per cent, principally due to an influx of Chinese—their numbers swelling from 20,228 to over 38,000, with European numbers climbing more modestly from 642 to 776.Footnote 117 Coincident was the start of the California Gold Rush, giving birth to Hong Kong's enduring attribute as a major transit point for the free movement of Chinese labour.Footnote 118
The perceived link between modest changes of altitude and surviving the ‘Hongkong Fever’ must certainly have fed into the newer statistical methods employed by the home government in the later epidemics of cholera that swept along Western Europe in 1848–1849 and 1853–1854, whereby organizations such as the Registrar-General's Office in London began to correlate disease with topographical elevations, finding ‘that the mortality of the cholera epidemic is highest on the land at the low mouths of rivers, and generally on the low ground of towns’.Footnote 119 These in turn, the linking of land, elevation and proximity to stagnant water, would feed into the sanitary approaches of Europeans in Shanghai beginning in the 1850s, and the subsequent British control of Tientsin (Tianjin) in the 1860s, in their compulsive drive to eliminate marshes and block up trenches, such as the Chinese city's perimeter moat.Footnote 120
In Hong Kong itself the politicization of health catalysed by the government's initial reactions to malaria would evolve along predictably racial lines. Most noticeably, the forcible relocation of Chinese residents from Upper Bazaar to Tai Ping Shan would fossilize into a clear bifurcation of the city between Chinese and Europeans. The regulatory instruments that followed would reinforce this imposed geographical divide, one such example being Governor John Bowring's radical brothel licensing ordinance no. 12 of 1857, an ordinance which anticipated the home government's first Contagious Diseases Act by seven years. As Levine and Howell both note, the ordinance imposed the registration of prostitutes and brothels, the product of which was to both formalize and legitimize racial segregation across an east-west divide: with purely Chinese-serving brothels along the west end of the town, and those serving European clients reserved along the east.Footnote 121 What the authorities neglected was equally discriminatory, for example, the discrepant long-term lack of piped fresh water to the western section of the town. This, coupled with unsanitary conditions would culminate in the wholesale government-ordered destruction of Tai Ping Shan itself in 1894 following a most virulent and deadly outbreak of the bubonic plague. A clear historical thread can therefore be traced between a ‘solution’ to malaria in 1844 and the ‘solution’ to the plague exactly 50 years later.
Colonial Hong Kong may have been a mistake of history, an unloved consequence of a trade war between two civilizations that shared little respect or understanding for each other. But once it was settled upon, a real and necessary problem had to be solved: how to make an island rock, initially important due only to its proximity to a harbour, habitable? Malaria may not have been the only baneful, emergent property of ill-contrived occupation and a relentless, heedless exploitation of a limited terrain, but it was a significantly important one that, through the purgatory of an epidemic, essentially reconfigured both policy and space out of which the post-traumatized city was to inexorably emerge.
