“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have, the facts of life.” A tv theme song about a girl’s school, but it applies also to colonial era Hong Kong. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Most of the people in Hong Kong were Chinese, but there were Indians and Europeans, merchants and missionaries, selling strange to natives religion to save their souls and opium to addle them until the reckoning. Into this a stamp with a portrait of Queen Victoria, to remind the colonials of home and their higher duty.
Todays stamp is issue A1, a 10 cent stamp issued by the crown colony of Hong Kong in 1890. This was the first Hong Kong stamp issue in 1862 and many versions and denominations existed until the same basic stamp was redrawn with King Edward VII in 1903. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $2.25 used. A blue-green mint version of this 10 cent stamp is worth $2,000.
Hong Kong Island passed to Great Britain as a result of the Opium Wars after the island was used as a staging point for the British Indian Army. Great Britain had been running a huge trade deficit with China and hit upon trading mainly Indian grown opium that was legal in the British Empire for the silver needed to buy Chinese tea and other goods. The Chinese authorities understandably did not want their people addicted to opium and were enjoying the trade surplus so a series of wars were fought that were won by the British Empire. Eventually additional land on the mainland was taken to make the island more defensible.
The island at first just had a small number of Chinese fisherman but the trading post colony quickly attracted a large number of Chinese and Indians. The British set up schools for the Chinese that were founded under the guise of Christian missionary work. Sir Fredrick Lugard, the colonial governor had the idea to expand the medical school into a proper University to rival a school the Prussians had founded in Shanghai. He enlisted the help of Parsi Indian businessman Sir Hormusje Naorojee Mody. Parsis were Zoroastrian Persians who had emigrated to India from Persia prior to the British during the Mughal time. He put up personally half the money on condition that others donated matching funds. The University was a big success with Sun Yat Sen being an early graduate and even today is one of the top universities in Asia. You may recall Lugard from his earlier work on behalf of the British East Africa Company as The Philatelist wrote about here. https://the-philatelist.com/2018/09/07/imperial-british-east-africa-company-1890-another-company-fails-to-administer-a-colony/. No mention of Lugard attempting his blood brother schtick with the Chinese in Hong Kong, for good reason.
Late 19th century southern China was beset with an outbreak of the bubonic plague. This terrified the British in Hong Kong. They viewed Chinese personal habits and sanitation as disgusting and now quite dangerous. Chinese threw their refuse into the street that was taken by the flooding rains into the water supply. To avoid this hazard British and other Europeans kept moving ever higher up the hill on Hong Kong Island in the hopes of better water. When their settlement reached the crest of the hill, the colonial government passed a Peak District Reservation Ordinance that forbid Chinese from living near the top of the hill. This is not something that could be done today but succeeded for at least the Europeans. 24,000 Hong Kong residents got the plague. It was 90% fatal, but very few were Europeans.
Lugard is most famous rightly for the University of Hong Kong but came close to changing Hong Kong forever. He offered return of certain territories to China in return for making the 99 year lease of the new territories permanent. Remember it was the pending end of the 99 year lease that lead to Great Britain turning over Hong Kong in it’s entirety to China in 1997. Lugard’s offer was not well received in China.
Well my drink is empty and so I will open the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.