Ep. 101 | The History of Hong Kong (Part 1)

Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lib Sin ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one. Across thousands of shows to reach your target audience and their favorite podcasts with Lib Sin ads. Go to LibSyn ads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N. Ads.com today. [ding] Hey everyone, last of Montgomery again. Episode 101 of the China History Podcast. It's been a while since they had Sydney, Rittenberg episode on September 25. Too much going on right now. That's getting between me and getting these episodes out. I thought I'd start a little overview of the history of Hong Kong. I've planned for a long time to do these histories of Hong Kong, Taiwan, a cow, and the straight Chinese. So today, I'm going to stop talking about it and just do it. I don't know how many episodes it will take. But this time, we're going to explore the history of Hong Kong. All the books I found that cover Hong Kong history begin in the 1840s with the OPM War. That's not a Eurocentric way of looking at it. I don't know what is. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hong Kong began way before the Treaty of Nanjing. I remember during the nine years I lived there that among the hundred or so archaeological sites, I remember there were some-- with history, there went back something like 6,000 years. Long before there was any Great Britain or England for that matter. The area has been inhabited for 30,000 years. And Hong Kong's history as part of China dates back to at least the Qing dynasty, and certainly to the Song. Now, part of this story has already been told in CHP Episode 6. But 31 minutes, 19 seconds hardly does the OPM War justice. So in this series, we're going to take a second long look at the OPM War and get into more details. I have Julia Lovell's book Handie, and that will be a primo resource for when the time comes. Any local in Hong Kong will tell you one of the main reasons for the dazzling success of this place is, of course, the Feng Shui. When the earliest ancient geomancers got a load of this place thousands of years ago, they must have thought they struck the mother load. That's what Lie Boi you thought when he traveled the length of China and set eyes on this place. Lie Boi, as he's known in Mandarin, lived his life during the last decades of the Northern Song. Lie Boi, maybe he predicted this all along. So enthusiastic was he about what he saw in this unique, one of a kind place with its amazing valleys, coves, inlets, harbors, hills, and mountains. Who knew way back when, how valuable this place would be. And who could have predicted what a pivotal role Hong Kong would play in the history of 19th and 20th century China, time and again. So I thought, let's put that good old Eurocentric version aside and start at the beginning. I hit this quick in and out trip to Hong Kong last week and there was just enough downtime for me to head over to East Gymside Joy to go check out the Hong Kong Museum of History. It's like not even two bucks to get in. So check it out next time you're there. Bring a fur coat and a muffler. I thought, let's sit back and go to the start of the beginning of the beginning. That all began 400 million years ago. Yeah, that's how far we're going back today. A record for the China History Podcast. That's when the geological evolution began. That formed this amazing land. This time was known as the Devonian Period, one of the six periods that make up the Paleozoic era. This is far back because I think one could go as far as the history of our planet goes. You can still see rock formations from this era today when you visit Clover Cove up in Tai Po, as well as around Bluff Head and around the Northern Tollo Channel in the new territories. The rock formation known as the Devil's Fist in Wang Chuk-Kok Choi is an example. Yeah, I'm saying all these places in my bad Cantonese. If I say "Wang Chuk-Kyau-Chui", no one's going to know what I'm talking about. So throughout the entirety of this series, as long as it ends up going, I'm going to stick to the Cantonese pronunciation. And all I could say in advance to all my canto speakers is, "Doyum-Chui". Well, we know how the Paleozoic period ends. Started off good, but the Cambrian explosion, plethora of life forms coming to being, and then it ended with the Permian Triassic Extinction event that sort of killed off just about, but not quite all life on the planet, on land anyway. Probably the C2. Whatever happened must have been pretty bad because it took 30 million years for life on Earth to bounce back from that. When this happened, the area where Hong Kong is located was covered by a vast shallow sea. Around 140, 160 million years ago, we had the Jurassic period that saw the lands in Hong Kong shaken by the most violent, volcanic eruptions and blew all this ash and lava above the ground. And it was these geological forces created during that Jurassic period that gave Hong Kong some of its most kick-ass landscapes. These rock formations that were formed during this period make up about half of Hong Kong. You know what, was a few months ago I recall some company or the Hong Kong government was doing some surveying or something and they chanced upon the remnants of this extinct super volcano from like 140 million years ago. It's said it blew like 300 cubic miles or something like that worth of ash and rock into the skies, totally blanketing Hong Kong. Hope that doesn't happen again. But not everything was blown out in volcanoes and fishers in the Earth's crust. A lot of the molten rock cooled below the surface and by amazing geological forces ended up being forced up above the surface and this is mostly granite and other coarse rocks. And about 30% of the land in Hong Kong was formed this way. And then more recently, but still a good 100 million years ago, Hong Kong was a desert not suitable for sustaining life on land. That's why the dinosaurs of the region stayed up in Guangdong Province and left their fossils there for paleontologists to dig up. But Hong Kong, no dinosaurs. The Cretaceous period of 50 to 80 million years ago saw Hong Kong covered by a wide shallow lake. Then came the famous meteorite or comet or whatever it was that caused the end Cretaceous extinction event. Once again, life is destroyed on the planet. As we know it, including all the dinosaurs. This is the extinction event that did them in. But one thing that came out of this event were the formation of these massive salt formations. And we'll see once humankind makes their entree and societies begin to organize, it's this salt created during this period that brings an economy to Hong Kong for the first time. Salt was the oil business of its day. Following the Cretaceous period, we had the Cenozoic era. Lots of tectonic plate shifting during this time and Arctica broke off and ended up at the bottom of the planet. It was the erosion and geological forces that happened during this time 60 million years ago that shaped much of what we see today in Hong Kong. The peak included. Fast forward to 2 million years ago and we're in the ice age. The last ice age was about 18,000 years ago, freezing cold. Because of all the ice, the sea level in Hong Kong was about 130 meters shallower than it is today. And because the sea level was this low, the coastline of Hong Kong ran about 120 kilometers south of where it is today. These glaciers carved out valleys and continued to sculpt the landscapes of Hong Kong. And then the ice age ends, the waters melt, sea level rose, the valleys filled up with water and wala that incredible and intricate coastline and topography was created that makes up Hong Kong Island, Kaolun, the new territories and roughly 260 islands. Big and small. Go on Google Earth if you've never done it before and check it out from a few thousand meters up. Pretty amazing. After this last ice age, humans, if you believe an evolution, had already evolved into homo sapiens. And many of these hominid fossil remains been found in and around Hong Kong. And of course, all over southern China. This would be the late upper Paleolithic period. Anywhere from 10 to 50,000 years ago. So folks are living in and around Hong Kong, at least as early as this period. Well, this isn't a podcast about paleontology. But let's just say scattered all over parts of Hong Kong with the same stone hand axes, drills, spearheads, arrowheads, choppers that you find wherever humans gathered in any civilization, in Asia, Africa, in Europe. you know, dozens of thousands of years ago. There's plenty of pottery that's been uncovered too. Thankfully we have that. If not for pottery, the first ever artificial material that humankind ever produced, we wouldn't know half as much as we do about these, budding civilizations that began to form. Pottery making in South China and Hong Kong first began about 8,000 years ago. The earliest archaeologists began digging in Hong Kong during the 1920s, found proof of life in and around Lanto Island, especially around Checklop Caught where the airport is located. There were also plenty of relics found on Lama Island where we recently had that tragic accident where 39 people lost their lives. Pottery and other stone tools were also uncovered in Tuen Moon and you're in Long in the Western New Territories. There were textile fragments also dug out of the ground near Checklop Caught that are well over 3,000 years old and rock carvings that are still visible. It can be seen in Big Wave Bay, Hong Kong Island and Guangchuk Hong. This is all Bronze Age China. In Toto, there are about 170 archaeological sites spread out around Hong Kong. Who were these earliest humans? Who inhabited parts of Hong Kong and the adjacent area of southern China? These prehistoric people were probably the Yue, Y-U-E. The Yue were spread out across the three most southern provinces of China, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan. These people, not constrained by borders that wouldn't exist for many thousands of years, were also spread out in neighboring Vietnam. In Mandarin, we call Vietnam, Yunnan, same Yue character. In Vietnamese, this character is pronounced Viet. These Yue people, the important thing to know was they weren't Han people. They had their own distinct culture, ways of dressing, rituals, and language. Collectively, they are known as the Ba Yue. Ba means 100, so the 100 Yue. The best known are the Nan Yue of Guangdong, which Hong Kong is a geographical appendage. You also had the Ming Yue of Fujian, as well as the Yue State located up in present-day Cha Jiang. The descendants of these prehistoric and ancient Yue people are today spread out across southern China and northern Vietnam. There, they developed their distinct culture, but again, they were not Han people. And the Han Chinese, when they locked horns with their Yue down in the south, they found them to be fierce, uncivilized, and not to be messed with. But nobody told that to Qin Shih Huang, the mighty Qin Emperor from whose name we get the word China. He sent his armies down south and his drive to Unify the Land. And this is exactly what he did. He unified the south and incorporated this southernmost territory into his China. He consolidated his reach by setting up a military base or a commandery, as Sima Qian said, who he is, he said of Qin Shih Huang's armies, quote, "In the south, they seized the land of the hundred tribes of the Yue and made of it, Guilin and Xiang provinces, and the lords of the hundred Yue bowed their heads, hung halters from their necks and pleaded for their lives with the lowest officials of the Qin." We all know as big and bad as Qin Shih Huang was, he didn't have the necessary staying power. And when he went, so he went to Qin, we've covered this all before in previous podcasts. So he was successful in bringing the south and all these Yue tribes into the Han Chinese fold. But when he died, well, you know what happens? Happen in China, happens everywhere when the center breaks down. Those at the fringe try to reassert themselves. Such a person was Zhao Tau, commandant of Nanhai, the Jun or commandery that controlled southern China, including Hong Kong. He rebelled against the fading Qin and set himself up as emperor of the new Nan Yue Kingdom. They hung in there for almost a century, 203 to 111 BC. Zhao Tau was successful in unifying all the various Yue peoples of the region. And it was during his rule that Chinese culture permeated into the south and made itself at home. And this blended with the best that the Yue had to offer and the unique southern Chinese culture more and more began to take shape. Zhao Tau's progeny, all surname Zhao, paid tribute to the Han Dynasty emperors and became vessels of the Chinese emperor. Things went well for a while, but then one day Han Wu-Di decided to send a hundred thousand troops south to put an end to this kingdom down there. During this Nan Yue Kingdom period, the Zhao's began the work of assimilating the Yue people and their culture into the Han Chinese world. And after Han Wu-Di put an end to them, the Nan Yue people and their world was swallowed up by China. Never to be heard from again. No written records survived to tell their side of the story. One thing's for sure, the Yue people may not have survived as a race, but strands of their DNA most definitely attached itself to the whole double helix that makes up the culture of Guangdong province. Hong Kong during the Qin and Han Dynasty's was because of its geographic location, a fisherman's paradise. And thanks to the geological goings-end during the Cretaceous period of 50 to 80 million years ago, salt was plentiful too and business was booming. And guess what, salted fish business wasn't too bad either. It maybe didn't seem like all that much, but from these most humblest of beginnings. I guess we could say the Hong Kong economy, more than 350 billion strong today was often running. We know that Hong Kong was populated during the Han Dynasty because one day back in 1955, when the Hong Kong government was leveling the side of a mountain in Chong Xiaowan to build the Lei Chang-Uk housing estate, they stumbled upon a tomb that was dated back to the time of the Eastern Han. So this alone proves that Hong Kong history surely didn't begin with the opium war. So we can conclude that it was at least during the Han Dynasty that settlements first began to appear in Hong Kong. The next great period for Hong Kong came around the fifth and sixth centuries during the time of upheaval known as the Southern and Northern Dynasties. And later the Jin Dynasty of the Georgians, these were the times, if you recall, from past China history podcast episodes, when massive waves of Chinese from north of the Yellow River fled to the south. And for those that kept on going until you couldn't go any further south, they ended up in Hong Kong. These became known as the five great clans. And folks, they're still around today. You have the Hao, Dang, Pang, Liu, and Man clans. And Mandarin, that would be Ho, Dang, Pang, Liao, and Wen. These are the original Hong Kong people. And recorded history starts with them. They are today known as the Punti, P-U-N-T-I, or Buntai in Cantonese. Or Buntai in bad Cantonese. Mandarin, of course, this is Bunti. It means native or of this land. Many of these Buntai people today still hold title to their lands. So other than the earliest unorganized settlers who plied their trade in fishing, diving for pearls, and from the salt biz, these Buntai were the first Hong Kong people. In American history, I guess we say if you came over on the Mayflower in 1620, you're the first of the first. Well, the Buntai are Hong Kong's version of this. Although this all began during the southern and northern dynasties, it was really during the southern Song, and especially during the Gure and Dynasty, that these five great clans became firmly established. But they weren't the last. They got there first and established themselves. And after they were all set up and held proper title to their lands and had organized themselves, along come the Haka people from north of the Yellow River, as well as the Tanka from Guangdong, and the Hakao, who originally came from Fujian and spoke a Hakaan or Fujian dialect. These Tanka and Hakao were the legendary boat people of Hong Kong. They lived the entirety of their lives and their boats. They called themselves the Soy-Seyong-Yet, or in Mandarin, the Shui-Syang-Ren, the people who lived on the water. The Tanka people were sort of considered in a class of their own, not Han. No one got along with them. And in fact, these Tanka, Haka, and Hakao used to sort of really stick to their own kind, more fiercely than maybe other cultures. Today, there are over 50 million of these people spread out across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. This is a group who has left a major mark on Chinese history. And I plan to explore their world and their contributions to Chinese history and another podcast. The Haka people, however, they were land lovers. And so they farmed. The boom day were there first, and they got first dibs and all the best lands. So the Haka either ended up in the hills where land was not terribly suited for agriculture, or they just rented lands from the boom day. That was the pecking order, as far as the earliest days of Hong Kong when villages were thriving in the new territories. If things began to transition to China's golden ages during the Tang and Song Dynasty, during the Tang, Hong Kong was a thriving center trade in the region. There was still the lucrative salt trade. as well as fishing and pearl diving. There was stuff going on all over the new territories and on Lantau Island. If you head over to Joss House Bay, which is located in the easternmost portion of Hong Kong, not too far from Clairwater Bay, you can still see today the earliest references carved in stone dated to 1274 AD, the time of the Southern Song. There's 108 characters carved into the solid rock that tells about some mundane visit by some visiting government official and a couple other happenings at the time. And it's this rock inscription that remains the oldest historical relic existing today in Hong Kong. When the Germans booted the Song Dynasty out of Kaifeng, you recall, they ended up reconstituting themselves down in the south in Hangzhou, or the N'an more accurately. And when they met their end in the mid to late 1270s, Hong Kong made it into the history books. If you recall from CHP episode 29, 1276, the Mongols were sweeping in from the north and the Song Emperor's advisors tell them that we better vacate. So they end up setting up a temporary court in Fujian. Then the Mongols chased them out of Fujo and this 10 year old boy emperor and his minder, Lu Shou Fu, they bored a vessel and they head south along the coast to Guangdong Province. Lu Shou Fu and this little Song Dynasty emperor end up in none other than Lantau Island in Silvermine Bay or Moihua or Maywaw in Mandarin. Afterwards, this government in exile moved to Kaolin city for a spell. This boy emperor, the Duansong emperor, he gets sick and dies in 1278 and his brother, Chaoping. He claims the honor of being the final emperor of the Song Dynasty that was created in 960 AD by his great ancestor, Zhao Quang Yin. He dies age eight on March 191279 just north of Hong Kong somewhere in the Pearl River estuary. Again, the details are all in CHP 29. Yuan Dynasty, plenty going on in Hong Kong. People started pouring in. Can't get any further south in Hong Kong and people were scattering in the wake of the Mongol invasion. I'm sure you are all following Dan Carlin's fantastic series, The Wrath of the Cons. It's here in the late 13th and the 14th century. The clans really spread out in the new territories. And it's here during the Yuan Dynasty that Hong Kong first became permanently settled. People lived on their boats and along the coast, but now Hong Kong had farming and agriculture going on at the same time. Now this may have been subsistence farming, but it was still another step forward in the territories development. Hong Kong still had a way to go. When the Yuan Dynasty exited stage left and the Ming Dynasty began in 1368, this is when things began to gel to a certain extent. We all remember from the early Ming that this is an age of discovery on the high seas and Europeans began showing up in the 16th century. Jorge Alvarez officially became the first Westerner to land in Hong Kong, doing so in Tuan Moon in 1512 and 1513 where he was part of a Portuguese military settlement based there. It was scouting around for trade opportunities and this yet to be explored region. Macau is still a little more than four decades away. They didn't stay in Hong Kong for too long and were ultimately chased out by the Ming Dynasty troops. By the Ming Dynasty, you already had about 15, 16,000 people residing in Hong Kong, which hardly made it the bear in island with hardly a house upon it as Henry John Temple, Third Viscount, Palmerston famously said, almost 300 years later. And we're going to lay down our tools here and call it a day starting with the next episode. We'll look at Hong Kong history in the early Qing Dynasty. Today's episode was just about setting everything up. The main point I wanted to make was that popular history tends to say Hong Kong's history began with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. And we could all see, although the Star Fairy hadn't started service yet, there was still plenty going on. And plenty of people from Guangdong or who had come down from the north and settled in Guangdong, many making their way to the southernmost point to this future international financial powerhouse. We still have a long road to hope before we reach that stage. This is Lázelo Montgomery once again, and as usual, signing off from my little "twin" the town of Claremont, California. We'll see you next time. I won't say when, but it won't be too long, I hope. Take care, everyone.