Some Talk with a Taipan and a General: proves in what Manner a Sea-Picnic may be a Success

I should like to rise and go

Where the golden apples grow,

Where beneath another sky

Parrot-islands anchored lie.

HONG-KONG was so much alive, so built, so lighted, and so bloatedly rich to all outward appearance that I wanted to know how these things came about. You can’t lavish granite by the cubic ton for nothing, nor rivet your cliffs with Portland cement, nor build a five-mile bund, nor establish a club like a small palace. I sought a Taipan, which means the head of an English trading firm. He was the biggest Taipan on the island, and quite the nicest. He owned ships and wharves and houses and mines and a hundred other things. To him said I:—

‘O Taipan, I am a poor person from Calcutta, and the liveliness of your place astounds me. How is it that every one smells of money; whence come your municipal improvements; and why are the White Men so restless?’

Said the Taipan: ‘It is because the island is going ahead mightily. Because everything pays. Observe this share-list.’

He took me down a list of thirty or less companies — steam-launch companies, mining, rope-weaving, dock, trading, agency and general companies — and with five exceptions all the shares were at premium — some a hundred, some five hundred, and others only fifty.

‘It is not a boom,’ said the Taipan. ‘It is genuine. Nearly every man you meet in these parts is a broker, and he floats companies.’

I looked out of the window and beheld how companies were floated. Three men with their hats on the back of their heads converse for ten minutes. To these enters a fourth with a pocketbook. Then all four dive into the Hong-Kong Hotel for material wherewith to float themselves and — there is your company!

‘From these things,’ said the Taipan, ‘comes the wealth of Hong-Kong. Every notion here pays, from the dairy-farm upwards. We have passed through our bad times and come to the fat years.’

He told me tales of the old times — pityingly because he knew I could not understand. All I could tell was that the place dressed by America — from the hair-cutters’ saloons to the liquor-bars. The faces of men were turned to the Golden Gate even while they floated most of the Singapur companies. There is not sufficient push in Singapur alone, so Hong-Kong helps. Circulars of new companies lay on the bank counters. I moved amid a maze of interests that I could not comprehend, and spoke to men whose minds were at Hankow, Foochoo, Amoy, or even further — beyond the Yangtze gorges where the Englishman trades.

After a while I escaped from the company-floaters because I knew I could not understand them, and ran up a hill. Hong-Kong is all hill except when the fog shuts out everything except the sea. Tree-ferns sprouted on the ground and azaleas mixed with the ferns, and there were bamboos over all. Consequently it was only natural that I should find a tramway that stood on its head and waved its feet in the mist. They called it the Victoria Gap Tramway and hauled it up with a rope. It ran up a hill into space at an angle of 65°, and to those who have seen the Rigi, Mount Washington, a switchback railway, and the like would not have been impressive. But neither you nor I have ever been hauled from Annandale to the Chaura Maidan in a bee-line with a five-hundred-foot drop on the off-side, and we are at liberty to marvel. It is not proper to run up inclined ways at the tail of a string, more especially when you cannot see two yards in front of you and all earth below is a swirling cauldron of mist. Nor, unless you are warned of the opticalness of the delusion, is it nice to see from your seat, houses and trees at magic-lantern angles. Such things, before tiffin, are worse than the long roll of the China seas.

They turned me out twelve hundred feet above the city on the military road to Dalhousie, as it will be when India has a surplus. Then they brought me a glorified dandy which, not knowing any better, they called a chair. Except that it is too long to run corners easily, a chair is vastly superior to a dandy. It is more like a Bombay-side tonjon — the kind we use at Mahableshwar. You sit in a wicker chair, slung low on ten feet of elastic wooden shafting, and there are light blinds against the rain.

‘We are now,’ said the Professor, as he wrung out his hat gemmed with the dews of the driving mist, ‘we are now on a pleasure trip. This is the road to Chakrata in the rains.’

‘Nay,’ said I; ‘it is from Solon to Kasauli that we are going. Look at the black rocks.’

‘Bosh!’ said the Professor. ‘This is a civilised country. Look at the road, look at the railings-look at the gutters.’

And as I hope never to go to Solon again, the road was cemented, the railings were of iron mortised into granite blocks, and the gutters were paved. ’Twas no wider than a hill-path, but if it had been the Viceroy’s pet promenade it could not have been better kept. There was no view. That was why the Professor had taken his camera. We passed coolies widening the road, and houses shut up and deserted, solid squat little houses made of stone, with pretty names after our hill-station custom — Townend, Craggylands, and the like — and at these things my heart burned within me. Hong-Kong has no right to mix itself up with Mussoorie in this fashion. We came to the meeting-place of the winds, eighteen hundred feet above all the world, and saw forty miles of clouds. That was the Peak — the great view — place of the island. A laundry on a washing day would have been more interesting.

‘Let us go down, Professor,’ said I, ‘and we’ll get our money back. This isn’t a view.’

We descended by the marvellous tramway, each pretending to be as little upset as the other, and started in pursuit of a Chinese burying-ground.

‘Go to the Happy Valley,’ said an expert. ‘The Happy Valley, where the racecourse and the cemeteries are.’

‘It’s Mussoorie,’ said the Professor. ‘I knew it all along.’

It was Mussoorie, though we had to go through a half-mile of Portsmouth Hard first. Soldiers grinned at us from the verandahs of their most solid three-storied barracks; all the blue jackets of all the China squadron were congregated in the Royal Navy Seamen’s Club, and they beamed upon us. The blue jacket is a beautiful creature, and very healthy, but . . . I gave my heart to Thomas Atkins long ago, and him I love.

By the way, how is it that a Highland regiment — the Argyll and Sutherlandshire for instance — get such good recruits? Do the kilt and sporran bring in brawny youngsters of five-foot nine, and thirty-nine inch round the chest? The Navy draws well-built men also. How is it that Our infantry regiments fare so badly?

We came to Happy Valley by way of a monument to certain dead Englishmen. Such things cease to move emotion after a little while. They are but the seed of the great harvest whereof our children’s children shall assuredly reap the fruits. The men were killed in a fight, or by disease. We hold Hong-Kong, and by Our strength and wisdom it is a great city, built upon a rock, and furnished with a dear little seven-furlong racecourse set in the hills, and fringed as to one side with the homes of the dead — Mahometan, Christian, and Parsee. A wall of bamboos shuts off the course and the grand-stand from the cemeteries. It may be good enough for Hong-Kong, but would you care to watch your pony running with a grim reminder of ‘gone to the drawer’ not fifty feet behind you? Very beautiful are the cemeteries, and very carefully tended. The rocky hillside rises so near to them that the more recent dead can almost command a view of the racing as they lie. Even this far from the strife of the Churches they bury the different sects of Christians apart. One creed paints its wall white, and the other blue. The latter, as close to the race-stand as may be, writes in straggling letters, ‘Hodie mihi cras tibi.’ No, I should not care to race in Hong-Kong. The scornful assemblage behind the grand-stand would be enough to ruin any luck.

Chinamen do not approve of showing their cemeteries. We hunted ours from ledge to ledge of the hillsides, through crops and woods and crops again, till we came to a village of black and white pigs and riven red rocks beyond which the dead lay. It was a third-rate place, but was pretty. I have studied that oilskin mystery, the Chinaman, for at least five days, and why he should elect to be buried in good scenery, and by what means he knows good scenery when he sees it, I cannot fathom. But he gets it when the sight is taken from him, and his friends fire crackers above him in token of the triumph.

That night I dined with the Taipan in a palace. They say the merchant prince of Calcutta is dead — killed by exchange. Hong-Kong ought to be able to supply one or two samples. The funny thing in the midst of all this wealth — wealth such as one reads about in novels — is to hear the curious deference that is paid to Calcutta. Console yourselves with that, gentlemen of the Ditch, for by my faith, it is the one thing that you can boast of. At this dinner I learned that Hong-Kong was impregnable and that China was rapidly importing twelve- and forty-ton guns for the defence of her coasts. The one statement I doubted, but the other was truth. Those who have occasion to speak of China in these parts do so deferentially, as who should say: ‘Germany intends such and such,’ or ‘These are the views of Russia.’ The very men who talk thus are doing their best to force upon the great Empire all the stimulants of the West — railways, tram lines, and so forth. What will happen when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to Lhassa, starts another line of imperial Yellow Flag immigrant steamers, and really works and controls her own gun-factories and arsenals? The energetic Englishmen who ship the forty-tonners are helping to this end, but all they say is: ‘We’re well paid for what ............