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The Hong Kong Fever of 1843: Collective Trauma and the Reconfiguring of Colonial Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2012

CHRISTOPHER COWELL
CHRISTOPHER COWELL*
Affiliation:
Columbia University* Email: cac2207@columbia.edu
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Abstract

This paper adds to a relatively new line of research investigating inadvertent transformations of urban colonial space generated by collective trauma. To the now classic iterative, and racial dynamics of Neild's ‘accommodation’ in the development of Madras,1 and of Yeoh's ‘contesting’ of the built environment in Singapore2—specifically in the tugging and pulling between local and colonial influences within the spatial discourse of colonial port cities—needs to be added that of single or multiple-event collective trauma. Such trauma, perceived as brought upon by unexpected external causes, might consolidate, perhaps accelerate, or even sever a previous sequence of spatial negotiation, particularly if that sequence was politically vulnerable or immature. The paper is a focused account of such an occurrence: the small-scale yet intensely traumatic events of Hong Kong Island while still in its colonial infancy in 1843, the year of the ‘Hongkong Fever’. It argues that a new conception of malaria—considered then a miasma—now linked both to location and construction, led to the first reactive, yet decisive, reconfiguring of a previously improvised urban colonization process, consequently salvaging Hong Kong's position within a wider imperial context.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 329 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Neild, Susan M., ‘Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, 13:2 (1979), pp. 217–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Kuala Lumpur; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

3 From a census taken 15 May 1841, Chinese Repository, 10 (Canton: Printed for the Proprietors, 1841), p. 289. However there are questions as to its accuracy in that the figure may be somewhat reduced: Lethbridge, H. J., ‘A Chinese Association in Hong Kong: The Tung Wah’, Contributions to Asian Studies, 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1971), p. 144Google Scholar.

4 For example, at the end of 1841 the freight expenses alone of ‘Three Ships in conveyance of Troops direct to Hong Kong’ cost the Treasury an exorbitant £20,772. See: National Archives, Kew [hereafter NA]; Colonial Office [hereafter CO] 129/1: 267, Estimate of expenses—1842 China Expedition, Treasury Chambers, 16 June 1842.

5 For the only known final layout plan of West Point see: CO 129/2: 455ff, Maps and Plans—flat [hereafter MPG] 1/156, Edwards-de Havilland Survey (or Gordon's Map) (1843).

6 CO 129/5: 143, ‘Detailed Account Disbursements of the Land Department from June 1841 to January 1844—Military and Naval’.

7 CO 129/10: 638a, Pottinger to D'Aguilar, 2 February 1844. We have a snapshot of the earlier arrangement from Pottinger's Map of 1842, Maps and Plans—rolled [hereafter MR] 029, extracted from NA; Foreign Office [hereafter FO] 925/ 2427, which shows a scattering of less orderly barracks entitled ‘Volunteer Barracks’.

8 NA; Admiralty [hereafter ADM] 1/5530, Pottinger to Saltoun, 4 May 1843 (copy).

9 CO 129/1: 118a, Gough to Pottinger, 7 October 1842.

10 For information as to Pottinger's previous experience see Endacott, G. B., A Biographical Sketch-Book of Early Hong Kong (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1962), p. 14Google Scholar.

11 ‘On the question of locality, the Court is of [the] opinion, that in the North, or Town side of the Island, although the Europeans at West Point suffered most, still so much sickness prevailed amongst the Native Troops in the other barracks as to make it impossible to attach much importance to locality only—On the South side the station of Chuek Choo appears to have been decidedly more healthy.’ CO 129/1: 166, Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry, 9 December 1842.

12 ADM 1/5530, Parker to Saltoun, 15 July 1843.

13 ‘List of H.B.M.'s Military Forces in China’, Chinese Repository, January 1843, as recorded in the Canton Register, 28 February 1843.

14 CO 129/7: 182a, Proceedings of the Medical Committee, 15 July 1843.

15 Ibid., 182a.

16 We know of the extensive areas of abandoned terraces of former cultivated land in the vicinity via a medico-topographical report: ADM 1/5530, Wilson, Reid and King to Parker, 12 July 1843. See also MPG 1/156, Edwards-de Havilland Survey (1843). These terraces now correspond with the areas contained between Third Street and Pok Fu Lam Road, Pok Fu Lam Road and Bonham Road, and at the uppermost level between Bonham Road and the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong, with what appears to be the upper latrines within the oldest part of the University complex. The University, it seems, was therefore unwittingly built upon the site of the outbreak of the 1843 fever.

17 MR 029, Pottinger's Map (1842).

18 Names of all the barracks are provided in the notice of public auction of ‘the whole of the Materials of the Barracks and other Military buildings at West Point’ (Commissariat, 6 February 1844), Friend of China, 10 February 1844.

19 CO 129//10: 637a, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Captain D'Aguilar, Assistant Military Secretary (A.S.M.) to D'Aguilar, 2 February 1844. Pottinger suggested ‘that a Committee should be appointed to report on the [West Point] Barracks and to decide whether the materials should be sold or kept for future Military Buildings’.

20 CO 129/5: 473, Land Department receipt, 5 August 1843.

21 Hongkong Eastern Globe, 5 July 1843, as reprinted in the Canton Press, 15 July 1843.

22 Canton Press, 15 July 1843.

23 CO 129/7: 182–184, Proceedings.

24 Ibid., 183.

25 Ibid., 183a.

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27 CO 129/10: 475, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Parker, 15 July 1843.

28 CO 129/10: 485a, Pottinger to Saltoun, 26 July 1843.

29 CO 129/10: 490, Pottinger to Saltoun, 3 August 1843.

30 CO 129/10: 492a-493, Pottinger to Saltoun, 7 August 1843.

31 Canton Press, 26 August 1843.

32 1843 Principal Events, Historical and Statistical Abstract of the Colony of Hong Kong 1841–1930, 3rd Edition (Hong Kong: Noronha & Co., 1932), p. 3Google Scholar. The abstract cites for this: Eitel, E. J., Europe in China: The History of Hong Kong from the beginning to the year 1882 (Hong Kong: Kelly and Walsh/London: Luzac & Co., 1895), p. 191Google Scholar. Though this is an oft-cited set of statistics by a number of historians, locating the origin of this important data beyond Eitel has proved to be peculiarly elusive.

33 Johnston, A. R., ‘Note on the Island of Hong-Kong’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 14 (1844), p. 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While there is no overt sense of superiority in Johnston's text one must be cautious as to the extent of knowledge conveyed on Chinese medical matters by the author.

34 Ibid.

35 Canton Press, 12 August 1843.

36 Both hillocks have since been flattened. The seaward hill is now the area encompassing the Lee Gardens, the landward, then known as the ‘Black Mount’, is now Caroline Hill. All were collectively known as ‘East Point’. ‘Leighton's Hill’ to the left, and skirting the passage to the Wong Nai Chung Gap, was owned by Jardine Matheson's Bombay dealer Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, CO 129/10: 524, Pottinger to Saltoun, 26 October 1843.

37 Lawrence, Anthony, The Taipan Traders (Hong Kong: Formasia, 1985), pp. 68–69Google Scholar.

38 It is with reference to this bungalow that Land Officer Gordon in his report of 6 July 1843 provides justification for reclassifying future lots for sale, as this was the only residential lot he could think of remote enough from the sea ‘that should be placed in the class of “Suburban”’, CO 129/2: 150–150a, Gordon to Malcolm, 6 July 1843.

39 Evans, Dafydd Emrys, ‘Jardine, Matheson & Company's First Site in Hong Kong’, JHKBRAS, 8 (Hong Kong, 1968), pp. 149–153Google Scholar.

40 Commander Belcher's memorandum on Hong Kong Island, 1841, reprinted in: Canton Register, 4 January 1842.

41 For instance, see: CO 129/10: 692a-693, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Gordon, 15 March 1844, regarding the granting of permission of ‘a proposed Sea Wall which certain owners of Marine Lots wish to build. . .on the clear understanding that the contemplated management shall neither be considered to alienate in any degree or shape, the rights of Government, nor to prevent any other future measures’. However legal uncertainty remained as to whose rights revoked the other, especially with regard to the terms of the 1841 sale, providing a serious impediment in the speed of the city's future growth for the next several years.

42 As confirmed in Matheson's correspondence to the land officer as overseer in the construction of his East Point office building. See: Cambridge University Library, Jardine Matheson Archives [hereafter JMA]; C6/3, A. Matheson to Gordon (Macau, 10 March 1843).

43 CO 129/2: 138, 141–143, Gordon to Malcolm, 6 July 1843.

44 Canton Press, 26 August 1843.

45 Tarrant, Hongkong, pp. 45–46.

46 Ibid., p. 45.

47 Ibid., p. 46.

48 Ko, Cemeteries in Hong Kong, p. 242; CO 129/7: 310a-311, Davis to Stanley, 26 December 1844.

49 Friend of China, 7 September 1843 as recorded in the Canton Press, 9 September 1843.

50 Ibid.

51 Friend of China, 13 April 1843 as recorded in the Canton Press, 15 April 1843.

52 Packard, Randall M., The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

53 As the colonial medical historian Mark Harrison asserts, ‘War favours the spread of malaria in several ways. The movement of large numbers of troops and civilians introduces parasites and vectors into areas formerly free of them; the destruction of dams and levies cause low-lying areas to be flooded, providing ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes’. Harrison, Mark, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 157Google Scholar.

54 Eitel, Europe in China, p. 192; Tarrant, Hongkong, p. 58. Tarrant, however, states that the appointments occurred on 17 August.

55 Ibid.

56 CO 129/5: 461–461a, ‘Accounts of the Colony of Hong Kong for the Quarter ending the 30th of September, 1843’, Pottinger to Stanley, 14 June 1844. Excerpt of accounts of the Land Department, 31 August 1843.

57 CO 129/10: 705a-706, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Captain D'Aguilar, A.S.M., 18 March 1844.

58 CO 133/2: 137–38, Dill, Dr F., ‘Report of the Colonial Surgeon's Department for the Year 1845’, Blue Book of the Colony of Hong Kong 1845 (Hong Kong, 1845)Google Scholar.

59 Tarrant, Hongkong, p. 65.

60 Legge, James, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong—From a lecture by the Rev. James Legge, D.D., L.L.D., on reminiscences of a long residence in the East, delivered in the City Hall, November 5, 1872’, The China Review, 3 (1874), p. 165Google Scholar.

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64 CO 129/5: 465, Land Department receipt, 4 August 1843. Note: British phonetic spellings of local Chinese place names understandably varied between authors at this time. This area is now spelt in English as ‘Chek Chue’ (or ‘Stanley’).

65 Cunynghame, Recollections, p. 77.

66 Ibid., p. 76.

67 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

68 CO 129/17: 95, Dill to Davis, 14 August 1846. Dill is quoting from: M.D., John Wilson, Medical Notes on China (London: John Churchill, 1846), p. 149Google Scholar.

69 Ibid.

70 CO 129/ 5: 231a, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Captain D'Aguilar, A.S.M., 18 March 1844. This view was chiefly expressed by the first colonial surgeon Dr Alex Anderson.

71 ‘Art. III. Religious and charitable institutions in Hong Kong: churches, chapels, schools, colleges, hospitals, &c.’, Chinese Repository, 12:8 (Canton: Printed for the Proprietors, August 1843), p. 442.

72 Notice of public auction of ‘the whole of the Materials of the Barracks and other Military buildings at West Point’ (Commissariat, 6 February 1844), Friend of China, 10 February 1844.

73 NA; War Office [hereafter WO] 7/118, Hong Kong Survey—by Lieut. Collinson, R.E., 1845 (Southampton: Ordnance Map Office, 1846)Google Scholar.

74 CO 129/17: 96, Dill to Davis, 14 August 1846 (as recollected).

75 CO 129/17: 92a, Davis to Gladstone, 19 August 1846.

76 CO 129/17: 96, 98a, Dill to Davis, 14 August 1846.

77 JMA; C6/2, A. Matheson to Captain Ramsey, Hong Kong (Macau, 20 January 1842).

78 Friend of China (Overland Summary), 14 February 1844.

79 CO 129/ 5: 231a-232, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Captain D'Aguilar, A.S.M., 18 March 1844.

80 Lieutenant Colonel Oxley, D. H., Victoria Barracks 1842–1979 (Hong Kong: British Forces Hong Kong, 1979), p. 13Google Scholar.

81 Canton Press, 29 July 1843.

82 CO 129/10: 514, Pottinger to Saltoun, 9 September 1843: ‘I conclude the materials of the present mat Barracks will be of more or less use in the erection of the permanent Barrack, and recommend they should be applied to that purpose’.

83 Woosnam, Canton Press, 29 July 1843. Original letter dated 22 July 1843.

84 Welsh, Frank, A History of Hong Kong, 2nd Edition (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 145Google Scholar.

85 CO 129/2: 102, Saltoun to Pottinger, 29 June 1843.

86 CO 129/2: 71a, Pottinger to Saltoun, 2 May 1843.

87 Ibid., 69a–70.

88 Ibid., 71.

89 CO 129/2: 120–127a, Memoranda, Aldrich to Saltoun, 28 June 1843.

90 Ibid., 124a-125.

91 Ibid., 124a.

92 CO 129/3: 34a-35, Aberdeen to Pottinger, 4 January 1843.

93 CO 129/2: 120a, Memoranda.

94 Ibid., 121–121a, 123–123a.

95 CO 129/2: 102a–103, Saltoun to Pottinger, 29 June 1843.

96 CO 129/2: 131a, Pottinger to Saltoun, 4 July 1843.

97 Ibid., 132a.

98 Ibid., 133–133a.

99 CO 129/2: 98, Pottinger to Stanley, 17 July 1843.

100 CO 129/4: 216a, Colonial Land and Emigration Office to Stephen, 9 December 1843. Citing a reply from Stanley to Pottinger, 15 November 1843.

101 CO 129/ 5: 230a, Woosnam (Pottinger) to Captain D'Aguilar, A.S.M., 18 March 1844.

102 CO 129/10: 525a-526, Pottinger to Saltoun, 26 October 1843.

103 ‘Art. IV. Record of criminals, European and Chinese, lodged in jails at Hongkong, from 9th of August, 1841, to the 18th of September 1843’, Chinese Repository, 12:10 (Canton: Printed for the Proprietors, October 1843), pp. 534–535.

104 ‘Mid-levels’ is now more precisely thought of as the area above (south) of Caine Road—though it should be considered historically as an organic extension of this original settlement below, now known locally in recent years as the ‘SoHo’ district (idiomatically borrowed from Manhattan parlance in literally meaning ‘South of Hollywood Road’).

105 The relatively low-lying area of Tai Ping Shan was named after the mountain towering above, in English known as ‘Victoria Peak’, and should not be confused with the latter high-altitude area only to be colonized several decades later as part of the exclusively European ‘Peak’.

106 Munn, Christopher, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (Richmond, Surry: Curzon Press, 2001), pp. 2, 44, 68–69, 73–78Google Scholar.

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109 For instance, Martin's Report on the Island of Hong Kong, 24 July 1844, CO 129/7: 49–93.

110 See the colonial government's notice on land use on the Thirteen Factories site at Canton, Friend of China, 23 December 1843.

111 Diamond, A. I., ‘Major-General T. B. Collinson, Royal Engineers’ (File Note), Hong Kong History Workshop (Hong Kong: Department of History, The University of Hong Kong, December 1984)Google Scholar. As Diamond explains: ‘His map was published by the Ordnance Map Office, Southampton in 1846, prior to any contoured map of the United Kingdom, the first not being printed until December, 1847’.

112 See: WO 44/594.

113 Rather curiously, the notion of the elevated, isolated building, raised on pilotis to avoid contact with low-lying gas, would linger beyond miasma theory in the form of Le Corbusier's re-justified proposals for his Ville Radieuse project in 1935. The lifting of discreet, white, horizontally-banded, rectilinear slabs from the ground – the very signature of the new International Style – was now given added urgency by the politically adaptable Swiss architect as a means of elevating and shielding occupants from a ground plane of toxins, the product of a feared aerial gas bombardment of European cities at the outbreak of an anticipated war. See: Cohen, Jean-Louis, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011), pp. 144–47Google Scholar.

114 CO 129/18: 260–271, Colonial Land and Emigration Office to Stephen, 4 February 1846.

115 Ibid., 269a-270.

116 Report from the Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index (London: House of Commons, 12 July 1847), A. Matheson, 6 May 1847, p. 204.

117 Yip, Ka-cheDisease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), p. 14Google Scholar.

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121 Levine, Philippa, ‘Modernity, Medicine and Colonialism: The Contagious Diseases Ordinances in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements’, Positions, 6:3 (Winter 1998), p. 676CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howell, Philip, ‘Prostitution and racialised sexuality: the regulation of prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (2000), p. 329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in particular, Howell, Philip, ‘Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong’, Urban History, 31:2 (2004), pp. 229–248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.