The History of Hong Kong (Part 5)

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Los La Montgomery again, part five today of our little Hong Kong history overview. We got as far as the 1860s last time. I ended with the governorship of Sir Hercules Robinson. I didn't intend to do it this way, but I'm finding it convenient to use Hong Kong's governors as the milestones to introduce the history of this period. The man following Robinson was the sixth governor of Hong Kong. Sir Richard Graves McDonnell, known in these times for McDonnell road up in the mid-levels of Hong Kong, he served from March 1866 to April 1872. Under McDonnell, the peak is going to become the peak with a capital T and a capital P. This will become the premier address location in Hong Kong. And at the time, this hollowed ground was only open to those of the Caucasian persuasion. If you know what I mean. McDonnell became governor at a rocky time. There was a bit of a financial crisis that had just started thanks to a bank called Overend Gurney and Company, which back in the day was one of those two big defailed types, which failed. It failed in mid-1866. It almost took the great Hong Jardine and Matheson down with them, but they escaped by the skin of their teeth. Jardine's rival, the firm Denton Company, they weren't so lucky. They got wiped out and closed their doors in Hong Kong in 1867. They were the bitter rivals of Jardines. Denton Company, along with Jardines and the American firm Russell and Company, were the big three whose history went all the way back to the battle days of the Canton system. Anyways, the Overend Gurney bank failure hit Hong Kong hard. It caused a run on the banks and many businesses closed. Thanks to the crisis, though, many Chinese firms filled the vacuum left by these failed Western Hongs. Hongs, by the way, is the Cantonese word for company. And Mandarin, this is pronounced Hang. By 1880, we'll see the top 18 largest taxpayers in Hong Kong were Jardines and 17 other Chinese firms. HSBC, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, good old Hong Kong Bank, they survived this banking crisis and this little upstarted bank profited and benefited immensely in the aftermath of the Overend Gurney failure. During McDonald's run as governor, Hong Kong Bank became the banker to the Hong Kong government. McDonald was also known for his tough crackdown on crime and for empowering the police to be merciless and tough, flogging and hanging were the main tools of the trade. Because the prisons were all overcrowded and there was no room to take more criminals, the authorities would tattoo the convicted man's face and then they'd stick him on a boat and send him away to someplace far away. His tattoo branded him and if he ever tried to sneak back in a Hong Kong, he would be easily given away and if caught, faced flogging or death. It was said that in Shanghai and Canton as well, the Chinese authorities there would send all their riffraff and ex-cons on a boat to Hong Kong just to get rid of them and of course to hassle the British and give them a headache. This is an old geopolitical trick used from time to time throughout recorded history. I vaguely remember the Cuban refugees who poured in during Jimmy Carter's term in 1980. There was a lot of talk about Castro emptying out his prisons and letting a lot of these guys go to the US so that they could become the new problem of the American authorities. Another thing that McDonald did that didn't go down well at the time was his ham-fisted attempt to regulate gambling through a kind of licensing system. It was bitterly resented and the pushback from the Chinese was very forceful. Colonial police were all on the take from these gambling dens and clubs and they too didn't support these attempts at regulation either. McDonald had to drop this idea in the end after too much sustained resistance. In the end, the forces lined up against McDonald and his attempts to control gambling in Hong Kong all argued in one when they claimed that the regulations had increased corruption, bankruptcy, robbery, suicide and the selling of children into slavery. Those were the negatives of his administration. On the other hand, Governor Richard Graves McDonald was a reforming governor. He had over 20 years serving as governor and one place or another in the empire and he came to Hong Kong to perform his swan song before he retired with distinction from the foreign service. So he knew how to manage an administration and within a very short period of arriving he began cleaning things up. He took measures to fight back against piracy. You know, when he became governor, the problem was rampant. When he left, it was on the decline. Drastic times needed drastic measures and this is what McDonald did. The Suez Canal had just opened up when he took office. This was a big deal in its day and having the Suez Canal saved one the hassle of having to sail all the way around the south of Africa. The bank failures that happened around the time McDonald began his governorship caused a recession to hit Hong Kong among other places. McDonald had to ride this one out. Payments to the military were halted temporarily. All public works ceased and was absolutely essential and the government took a loan from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation of $80,000 to help them ride out this storm. This the bank did at eight percent interest. McDonald took the unpopular step to raise taxes in the colony. He did this through a number of ways. A flat rate stamp tax being one of them. A whole number of taxes were levied and the Chinese, making up 98 percent of the population, were the ones who paid the taxes and provided most of the government revenue. By the time McDonald left in April of 1872, the colony of Hong Kong was looking better than it had ever done so before. Like President Obama, he arrived down the scene just as a financial crisis was unfolding. He weathered this economic downturn and even during these depressed times, pushed through all kinds of reforms and ordinances that weren't at all noteworthy in their individual accomplishments. But collectively, McDonald put Hong Kong on firm and stable footing. His successors are Arthur Kennedy. You know what I'm going to say? Of course, of Kennedy Road and Kennedy Town. He arrived with Hong Kong looking a whole lot nicer than when McDonald found it. If not for the gambling, regulation, debacle, McDonald's reign would have been more than good. So good were things in the colony that Governor Arthur Kennedy didn't have to do too much. His period in Hong Kong, 1872 to 1877 witnessed the worst typhoon ever to hit Hong Kong since the colony's founding. This one, a direct hit struck Hong Kong the late evening of September 22nd, 1874. This one howled throughout the whole night and into the morning in the six hours that this one savaged Hong Kong. 2,000 people are more lost their lives. A number eight signal can be rather destructive. In my nine years in Hong Kong, I never witnessed a number 10, but I heard they're pretty terrible. This one at 1874 and later in 1906, 1937 and 1962 would witness the full destructive force of a number 10 signal typhoon and would wreak havoc on Hong Kong and just kill many residents. The Sir Arthur Kennedy didn't do anything spectacular during his period in government house. Despite carrying on McDonald's rather harsh, anti-crime measures mostly against the Chinese, he made attempts to reach out to the Chinese community. He was the first governor to host events at government house where local Chinese were invited. Up till now, the segregation had been quite strict. The Hong Kong dollar was officially launched during the time of Sir Arthur Kennedy. He wasn't the greatest governor, but he was certainly popular when he left. They built a statue in his honor after hearing about his death shortly after leaving Hong Kong in March 1877. The statue disappeared during the Japanese occupation of the island. It was never recovered. By Arthur Kennedy's time, Hong Kong as a British colony had been in existence for three decades. In the last episode we saw that this whole Hong Kong experiment was very rough going in the beginning. It took a while for everyone to see the light. Hong Kong wasn't by any means a mature place yet. Forces were in motion socially and politically that were slowly transforming the place into the international shipping trading and financial center that it ultimately became. By the time of Kennedy, pressures began to mount so that the powers in Hong Kong and in London were forced to contemplate that for every hundred people in the colony, 98 were Chinese. And there was simply no way in the world. The local Chinese populace could be administered to or policed without drawing them into the system. The idea of some benevolent dictatorship in Hong Kong just simply wasn't going to work. They needed to bring the local Chinese on board to make this whole Hong Kong thing work. The typing rebellion had led to a huge influx of Chinese into Hong Kong. These new arrivals were of a different sort than those who had come before them. These were the so-called respectable Chinese. That is to say they were people of substance, with money, education, and social status from wherever they came from in China. They had too much to lose. And so in order not to be included amongst the 20 or so million people killed in the typing conflict, they fled to Hong Kong. Many with their wealth, their families, and they are they settled and prospered. Many were as rich, educated, and cultured as the European residents of Hong Kong. They were different from the Chinese who the British had grown used to, who were, you know, involved in commerce and China trade and who had come to Hong Kong alone to try their luck. Now, whole families of Chinese were showing up. They joined up with existing mighty and influential Chinese, most of them part of that brotherhood of compredors who worked with the big western trading companies. This was where that unshakable Hong Kong Chinese business and merchant class began. These Chinese made immediate contributions to Hong Kong society and to commerce as well. They were joined by another group of Chinese who began to emerge during this time. These were the second generation of Chinese, many trained by the western missionaries. They were different from the first generation. This second generation were more westernized, fluent in English, mixed much easier with the British and other Europeans. What I call the Lord Palmerston generation, that first generation, the time of this generation began to fade from the scene with the death of that giant in British history in 1865. The bottom line was that the British around Macdonald and Kennedy's time had to start paying more attention to the specific and unique needs of the Chinese populace. They had to respect and attend to Chinese sensibilities, no matter how different, strange, or even revolting they might beat some western people. One of the outcomes of this kind of thinking was the Donghua Hospital founded in 1870. Now many Hong Kong and Hong Kong expat residents will have heard of them. Sometimes on Saturdays, this is the charity featured in the morning and you'll see hundreds and hundreds of young Hong Kong teens standing around the MTR and on the streets holding some bag in which money is deposited and whoever gives us money will get this little sticker to put on their shirt or whatever indicating you gave already. That's how I first heard of Donghua Hospital. The Donghua Hospital was created by these Chinese I mentioned, the second generation since the founding of the colony. Rich, successful, educated, and cultured, completely different from those who had first come to Hong Kong. In establishing the Donghua Hospital, this was one of the earliest examples of Chinese taking control of matters that exclusively concerned their community. The British stepped aside and let it all happen. There was no way they were going to be able to lord it over 98% of the population and serve their needs by themselves. Things were just growing way too fast. It was a different playing field now. Serious money was now sloshing through the colony, most of it legal. No matter how much the British felt, Chinese medicine was hokey or that Chinese believed in some things that the British regarded as pure superstition. They had to push those prejudices aside and respect Chinese traditions. So in the 1870s, it's 30 years since the Treaty of Nanjing and Hong Kong is no longer looked upon as this abysmal failure or bad idea. The population is a little over 120,000. The first generation built the foundation and did as much as they could to push things in the right direction. Now it's the second generation who have arrived. These guys are a whole lot smarter and sophisticated than Ma and Pa who came to Hong Kong in the 1840s or 50s, probably from some tune, some village up in Guangdong or Fujian. They speak English perfectly and many have grown up amongst the British. Since birth, they know how to stand up to them and how to use the system to get their way. So they broke ground in 1870 and Donghua Hospital served as a nice example of the British stepping out of the way, acknowledging that the Chinese as far as sickness, death, and wellness were concerned, hit their own way of doing things. So this was the first real hospital set up in Hong Kong where local residents could go get treated and the cherry on top as far as the British were concerned was that the board of directors or trustees of this institution were all the most powerful, respected, and influential Chinese businessmen in the colony. So in a way that Donghua Hospital became the unofficial voice of the Chinese community in Hong Kong. Anyway, it's still around today, bigger and better than ever before, and serving the people of Hong Kong in ways small and big for over 140 years. Well, Sir Arthur Kennedy was succeeded by Sir John Pope Hennessy, Hennessy Road. As you could tell, a lot of the major streets of Hong Kong were all named after these early governors. He was a Catholic, which immediately put him behind the eight balls, as far as the Protestant Hong Kong establishment was concerned. He was a stand-off as guy. Didn't get along with anyone, wasn't very well-liked. He had the reputation of always siding with the Chinese against the Hong Kong British establishment. He served from 1877 to 1883. In the US, this would be the time of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur in the US. The Chinese Exclusion Acts, which we looked at in CHP episode 44, would start in 1882. As I said, Hennessy famously always sited with the Chinese. For this, he was despised and hated by many from the Hong Kong establishment. He was the governor who said, "From now on, it was okay for any Chinese to buy property and build buildings in central." You see, up till then, the central district was off limits to Chinese, as far as, you know, who could own property there. Back then, Chinese couldn't even operate a respectable business in central. They had to go east or west of central. Those were the Chinese areas of Hong Kong. Hennessy had said, "They're being no legal impediment in the way, and it being a matter of principle importance that no obstruction should be put in the way of the natural course of trade that permits be freely granted for native structures along any part of Queen's Road, and business streets immediately joining upper Wyndham Street, Hollywood Road, and Aberdeen Street." So, as soon as all this money poured into central, it launched a great real estate boom that I would say continues to this very day. But there were plenty of people who were of the mind that, there goes the neighborhood. The level of sanitation and hygiene that the Westerners were used to, and what passed for okay in the Chinese areas, well, it was quite a gap. So, the fair was the Chinese start mixing with us. You know, it's going to have a negative impact on the whole matter of public health and sanitation. Hennessy appointed one Osbert Chadwick out to compile a report on the sanitary conditions in Hong Kong. When the report came out in 1882, it had a huge impact on how public sanitation should be carried out. It resulted in the creation of a department to handle all this stuff, and this department later on became what we know in Hong Kong is the urban council, or today the urban services department. Well, this isn't the sexiest thing in the world to talk about sewage and sanitation, but it needed to be done. After so many people started living on top of one another, literally. Anyways, Chadwick's rather shocking reports of sanitary conditions in Hong Kong got the ball rolling in what ultimately followed, gave the colony and all the inhabitants something that was needed. A cholera epidemic in 1882. three didn't hurt as far as you know incentives to prioritize this whole thing. Even with all the wonderful things that came out of the Chadwick report, the matter of overcrowding in the Chinese quarters remained the insurmountable obstacle. It was said in some quarters locals lived a thousand to an acre. Chadwick had said, "If you want to do this right, you need at least 300 cubic feet of space per person." That comes to about 12 square feet for a family of four, and at least one window. Now let me tell you, sounds rough, doesn't it? Even this 12 square feet, this was considered too generous by many of the Chinese slum lords of the day. Let me just mention another one of the many pillars of early Hong Kong society during Hennessy's time. The Bol-Lianggok or Baoliangju was set up in English. This was called the Society for the Protection of Women in Children. The original cause for which this esteemed body was created was to combat the sale of the so-called Muijai in Hong Kong. These Muijai, or Maids, which means little sister, who were they? These were the Chinese version of the poor peasant girl who was sold by her parents into a kind of slavery where they were taken into a rich household and lived a life of servitude with that particular family. Another route taken, not willingly, I'm sure, was one of prostitution and performing roles in the skin trade of China and Hong Kong. In the traditional Chinese society, especially with the poorer classes, the idea of selling one's daughter wasn't such a bad thing. Sons were preferred, and if there were too many mouths to feed in the family, the females of the lot were always the ones who drew the short straw and ended up getting sold. Again, this wasn't looked at as necessarily bad since it could be argued that life is a Muijai was preferable to one of growing up in the grinding poverty of the countryside. 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It was a cruel system and nothing more than a kind of slavery from, I guess, any angle you look at it. So Governor Hennessey saw to the creation of the Bolion Gu- in November of 1878. This organization began doing all its good work in 1882 to fight against the abduction and trafficking of women and children. Today in our modern times, the group is involved in social services, adoption, education, recreation and also cultural services. During these early years of British colonial rule, the Bolion Gu- just like Donghua hospital did, they also served as a kind of unofficial mediator between the British authorities and the local populace and all kinds of culturally sensitive matters. Governor Pope Hennessey also led the way to appoint the first Chinese members of Legico, the Legislative Council. He also saw two other programs, some of which the people of Hong Kong would become the prime beneficiaries. This included the grant in aid system, which helped fund many and academic career for so many Hong Kong students. Speaking of grant, US 18th president and civil war hero, at least for the northern side, Ulysses Simpson Grant visited Hong Kong in 1879. It was just a stop during an extended Asian tour and nothing of great consequence occurred. Let me mention an early giants of Hong Kong history, Sir Kai-ho Kai, in Mandarin, his name was Chi Chi. He's known as Kai-ho. His quick resume, like I said, he was one of this generation born into a track in life that allowed him to mix comfortably in both the British and Chinese societies. He grew up in a church-going family and his father and brother were prominent in the church. Kai-ho studied in the UK. He went to medical school there, got his MD. Afterwards, he went and got a law degree in 1881 and left Britain in 1882, returning to Hong Kong just when someone like him was needed on the scene. He came to Hong Kong with all that awareness of British education and tradition. Kai-ho was the perfect vessel that contained the right concoction of British and Chinese sensibilities. He was able to do a lot of good in establishing hospitals and bringing acceptance of some Western medical practices to the local community. In 1887, the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was opened with his support and leadership, and this later on became Hong Kong University. I'm going to mention this in a little bit because of one of their more famous students there. Kai-ho and his son-in-law, Mr. Al Duk, with later on in the 1920s, involved themselves in a land reclamation project. Well, that went bust, but their project, named after themselves, Kai-ho and Al Duk was called the Kai-Duk Bund. And you guessed it, this was the very land where later on Kai-Duk Airport would be built. Kai-ho from the 1880s and '90s and all the way up until his death in 1914 was one of the most respected and admired men in Hong Kong, certainly amongst the Chinese community there. It was appointed to let go in 1890. It was only 31 at the time. For the most part, Hennessy's neglect of the government administration created a lot of headaches. A lot was planned, but little got done. Hennessy left Hong Kong in 1883 and was succeeded by one of the more forgettable governors, Sir George Ferguson Bowen. Yes, lovely Bowen Road in the mid-levels. He used to love to walk there back in the day. The Royal Observatory and the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter are credited to Bowen. Now Bowen served only four years as governor of Hong Kong. From March 1883 to October 1887. And he wasn't always there. The Sino-French War broke out in 1884 as did the siege of Khartoum in Sudan, where Charles Chinese Gordon met his demise. There were wars breaking out here and there as well, in Burma, between Serbia and Bulgaria. It wasn't a peaceful time in the world, but France's involvement in China and the Far East brought a new kind of additional importance to Hong Kong. The British feared that with France outgalevanting around China and the South China Sea, measures had to be taken to protect Hong Kong. As a governor, Bowen was described as one of the bad ones, but blessed with a good staff. The Chadwick Report was studied and under Bowen. That's when things began to happen. Hong Kong by the 1880s, with the safe backing of Great Britain to ensure peace and serenity in the colony, was handling about 21% of China's exports and 37% of the import trade. And not quite half of these imports, China took in from Hong Kong, consisted of that black mud also known as opium. Still legal. Too much money to be made. No one wanted to give it up still. Not the addicts, they're enablers, and the merchants who bought and sold this stuff. In July 1887, a chap from Legico, a successful trader named Paul Chater, suggested a land reclamation project in central, covering 57 new acres. 3,400 yards long and 250 feet wide. Work began in 1890 and was completed in 1904, and this meant that Queen's Road was no longer Harborfront property. The former promenade along the Waterfront in Central and Western now became Devo Road. This road was named after Sir George William Devo, Bowen's successor, who served as Hong Kong's 10th governor from 1880 to 1886. Two main things we remember from Devo's period were the construction of the peak tram, which opened for business May 28, 1888. This of course led to a boom in building on the peak. He's also known for the establishment of Hong Kong electric holdings, one of them. the venerable old companies of Hong Kong, now part of Mr. Li Ka Xing's business empire, we discuss Li Ka Xing in episode CHP 13. 1880s and 90s was a period when great and costly public works were carried out. A half a century after the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, it was looking like this barren rock with hardly a house upon it, was in store for great things. Wealth was accumulating a fast clip. More and more Chinese were streaming into the colony. No one was waiting to see what was going to happen. The government began playing for keeps and they began to transform the territory. The illustrious Hong Kong triads had by now become a daily fact of life. There were as many as 15,000 members walk in the streets infiltrating the government, the top levels of industry and commerce they were everywhere. The Bowen Devo governorships were not considered remarkable in any shape or form. The 19th century will come to a close with the governorship of Sir William Robinson, a second governor named Robinson, just denied him the honor of having any places named after him. Governor Hercules Robinson took all the glory and he's the Robinson we mostly remember today. This latter Governor Robinson served from 1891 to 1898. A guy by the name of Sun Yat Sen was studying medicine in Hong Kong at this time. Sun had been a student in Hong Kong since 1883 when he was 17 years old. He received his degree in medicine from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, which I mentioned previously, became Hong Kong University. It was here in Hong Kong during these formative years that Sun Yat Sen in the 1880s and early 90s began his career as a revolutionary. We'll talk more about that later. This other governor Robinson he had the misfortune of being in charge when the great bubonic plague of 1894 struck. This whole thing is known as the third plague pandemic. It started in Yunnan in 1850 and spread quickly due to havoc created by Muslim rebellions there. By March 1894, it had spread to Canton and from Canton to Hong Kong. More than 100,000 people died with at least 2,500 in Hong Kong. Ground zero was the densely populated Typing Shan Street area just above Shang Wan. From Hong Kong, it got passed to India. You see mankind in the 1890s, they couldn't get around like we do today, but they still were able to move from point A to point B quicker than ever before. People on the go, that's a godsend to any pandemic. This governor Robinson was one of those types who, unlike a few of his predecessors, didn't care too much for the Chinese and viewed them with disdain. As far as drastic measures taken to prevent the spread of the plague in Hong Kong, a great majority of local Chinese residents tried to get around these efforts of the Hong Kong government. Robinson said of this exercise in frustration, quote, "educated to unsanitary habits and accustomed from infancy to herd together. They were unable to grasp the necessity of segregation. They were quite content to die like sheep, spreading disease around them as long as they were left undisturbed. These feelings, no doubt the result of blind prejudice and superstition, naturally prompted concealment which eventually necessitated the organization of search parties and house-to-house visitation. Heroing tales are told how, upon a search party, entering a house in which there were cases of sickness. Every possible means of evasion and concealment was hurriedly devised. Never was Chinese ingenuity put to sow, sow, or test, or exercised in such a pitiful cause." Governor Robinson had to work with the Donghua Hospital people to control this with plague upon the colony. This 1894 plague was quite a shot to the system. Like with other cultures around the world, Chinese culture has its own rights and rituals regarding death and all the things you're supposed to do if and when it happens. Well, one of the bedrocks of the Chinese death experience involved being buried in the land of your ancestors. And by this time, most people dying had at one time or another come from China. So with so many local people dropping dead one after the other, it created a logistical and social nightmare of epic proportions in the colony. At a time when movement was restricted, over 100,000 local Hong Kong people rose up and headed north to Quangzhou. Yeah, they figured if they were going to die from this plague, then it had best be amongst their ancestors. Going on concurrently with this great plague was the Sino-Japanese war. 1895 will bring us the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which is going to launch over a century of enmity between these two great nations, an enmity that still simmers today in fact. One of the last things of considerable consequence that happened during Robinson's time besides the opening of the peak tram in 1888 was the negotiation of the lease on the new territories. It was left up to Robinson's successor to actually go in and take it over. As the financier Paul Chater, you know, of Chater Garden and Chater Road, that guy, he his contribution to the discussion about whether or not to go after the new territories went like this. He felt that even though Japan had just given them a licking in the Sino-Japanese war and humiliated them with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Chater said, quote, "that empire," meaning China, "is too intrinsically strong, too full of resources, too patient, and persevering ever to remain for any length of time in her present condition." So it was therefore Chater had recommended that regarding the new territories strike now while China was weak. We all know, you know, Hong Kong Island was seated in perpetuity in 1841, then came Kaolun south of Boundary Street in 1860, but the place was getting way too crowded for its own good. You may say that today the population runs in a million so how overpopulated could it be. But back in the 1890s, they couldn't build these huge housing estates like they can now. There was no mass transport and, you know, as we know, from the plague of 1894 sanitation couldn't support this large of a population. And the plague itself made the government think they needed more room to spread out and now with the specter of Japan looming on the horizon and China's appearance and ability to stand up to them or anyone probably, the British felt strongly that they needed some sort of buffer between them and China. Not only were they nervous about Japan, but Russia and France too. Those two were also having their own little Chinese adventures, the French and the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885, and the Russians and all their grand designs along the Manchurian border. Now the British side attempted to negotiate the dividing line between the northern extent of the new territories in China to a small chain of mountains just north of the city of Shenzhen. They felt the Shenzhen River itself didn't provide enough of a line of separation between Hong Kong and China. But in the end, this is where they drew the line right at the Shenzhen River. The lease was signed on June 9, 1898 and this second convention of Beijing, as the document is called, leased the area between Boundary Street and the Shenzhen River to Britain for a period of 99 years. The lease would expire on June 30, 1997. Back in 1898, this seemed like a long, long way away. Just as the year 2111, 2112 seemed so distant to us in our time. In the summer of 1898, Governor Sir William Robinson left Hong Kong after a rather action-packed turbulent period. He didn't stick around for the leasing of the new territories. The next governor to fill Robinson's shoes was Sir Henry Arthur Blake, who Hong Kong residents will know for Blake's pair, formerly of Central, and now safely relocated and standly. This governor Blake was quite the amateur botanist, and the flower native to Hong Kong, the Bohenia Blakiana, was named after him. This Bohenia flower is now the official flower of Hong Kong and appears on the Hong Kong flag and on the currency. He became the first governor to take over the new, fortified, and bigger Hong Kong. The new territories added 365 new square miles of land, which increased the total area of the colony by 12 times. The date of the takeover was set for April 16, 1899. Now, one of the other fascinating things about the takeover of the new territories was that the District of Calune City, within this small enclave, quote, "the Chinese officers now station there shall continue to exercise jurisdiction, except so far as maybe inconsistent with the military requirements for the defense of Hong Kong. So basically that little Vatican city, that little San Marino, it remained Chinese territory. This is the area where you had later on the fabled walled city of Kaolun. It would serve as China's unofficial clubhouse in the territory, where many in operation or negotiation was carried out. The whole takeover of the new territories didn't go altogether smoothly. There were a lot of hiccups when all these guailos started showing up in these traditionally Chinese agricultural backwaters on the other side of the mountains, north of Kaolun. Guailo, by the way, for those who don't know, this is what the locals always call foreigners, the men anyway. A girl was a guai mui, and a woman was a guai poh. Guai meant devil. Guai is how you pronounce it in Mandarin and loh meant, you know, fellow or guy. Loh or in Mandarin law, in Mandarin is not the most, you know, affectionate or polite form of the word man. Mui means sister, as I said, and poh was woman. Guailo, guai mui, guai poh, the names have all stuck around all the way into modern times. I still hear it all the time, and even in my presence, the word is still used freely. I personally don't care and then bother me, but some people, well, they look at this term like it's the N word. So it all depends on how you feel about it or look at it, but the word guailo, that's definitely a sliver of Hong Kong culture. So like I said, it didn't go smooth, but it all eventually got worked out. We're gonna close out this episode now just by mentioning about where China is at the turn of the century, 1900. The Boxer Rebellion raged between the fall of 1899 and September 1901. The Guangshu Emperor's 100 Days of Reform, the Wu Shu Bien fa, well, actually 104 days, but 100 sounds better. China is well into its century of humiliation, and we all know the whole Qing dynasty is gonna come crashing down in 1911, 1912. So next episode, we'll see how Hong Kong becomes one of the bases of subversion, where Sun Yat Sen and all his followers plot the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of a republic. The colony had been warned in no uncertain terms. From the head office in London, not to allow Hong Kong to become a base from which anti-Ching conspirators could gather to plot the end of the dynasty. The Hong Kong government walked a fine line following the orders from London, but at the same time not doing anything to halt the activities of the known leaders of the movement. The worst, I guess you could say, they did, was in March of 1896 when Sun Yat Sen was on his way back to Hong Kong after a fundraiser in Hawaii. Governor William Robinson declared him "persona-known grata" in Hong Kong for a period of five years, and he ended up in London and later got himself kidnapped, and from there went on to become the face of the revolution. So we'll pick up next time with the governorship of the man whose name graces the most famous street in all of Kaolun, good old Nathan Road. We'll look at Sir Matthew Nathan, and then we'll see how far we'd go before the buzzer sounds. There I go again, the royal wee. I'm recording this in the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I'm traveling all around the country on this magical mystery tour with all my peoples from the head office. Stay well, everyone, wherever you are in the world. This is Lázlón Montgomery, signing off from the Marriott and Boca Ratón, Florida, and hoping against hope that you'll join me next week for another exciting episode of the China History Podcast. Call 1-800-Granger. Click Granger.com or just out by Granger for the ones who get it done.