The fundamental problem with writing local history for any period in the last 200 years is the over-abundance of materials. A Magistrate's Court in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong, for example, aims to reveal details of Hong Kong's social history in the 1880s, and what it mostly relies on are reports on court proceedings published in the English-language China Mail. But from this source alone there are masses of such items. How, then, to select and highlight, because if one thing is certain it's that no modern reader, and few historians, want to know the details of every larceny, abduction or smuggling incident 130 years ago in the UK's fast-expanding colony on the South China coast.
Gillian Bickley is the biographer of Frederick Stewart (1836 to 1889), the Scotsman who eventually came to head the Hong Kong civil service, and so what she has done here is focus on the cases Stewart heard in his capacity as magistrate in the eight months from July 26, 1881, to March 29, 1882. Presumably Bickley had these reports in her files for her biography of Stewart and thought that it would be a good idea to make fuller use of them than she had previously had space to do. The material seemed perhaps rather repetitive for an entire book, so she has fleshed it out with contributions from modern Hong Kong figures on such things as the law then and now, newspaper reporting in Hong Kong in general, and so on.
The book has an interesting contribution from Timothy Hamlett on English journalism in Hong Kong at the time. He points out that magistrates'cases provide a rich source of material for social historians, one that in Hong Kong's case is still largely waiting to be mined. He also looks at the practicalities of court reporting in the period -- the expatriate journalist preparing his reports in longhand in the morning, his text being set up in print by local non-English-speakers in the early afternoon, and the finished newspaper probably being delivered to its readers' offices before they went home from work. The paper's circulation was around 700, so its readership (by the standard optimistic computation) some 3,000. Hamlett states that these readers would have comprised "the local British, other Europeans, Portuguese from Macau, Parsees, Indians and the most prosperous and Westernised of the Chinese."
A range of crimes
As for the cases themselves, they occupy some two-thirds of the book. Around 120 are considered, from a total of over 700, separated into categories such as the military, prostitutes, children and students, and seamen on leave. They deal with incidents ranging from the abduction and sale of young girls for prostitution (something that still happens elsewhere in Asia) to the snatching on the street of women's ear-rings.
Stewart's stint as a magistrate (the lowest justice in the British judicial system) took place during the time when the governor of Hong Kong was John Pope Hennessy, a man widely resented by the British expatriates on account of his reformist views. It was under him that the branding and public flogging of convicts was abolished, though flogging was quickly reintroduced, albeit in the relative privacy of prisons, and continued to be used until the 1990s. Against this background, Stewart can be seen as a liberal idealist, quietly putting into practice humane principles that Pope Hennessy had such trouble with on the wider stage.
Curiosities include the existence at the time of licensed brothels, and the regulation but not prohibition of opium. Users of the latter who came before the courts were charged with possession "without a permit from the opium farmer." "Farmer" didn't mean producer -- opium was the government's monopoly, and it "farmed" out its right to sell it for a fee.
Today Hong Kong's magistrates are, in the words of Garry Tallentire, a modern magistrate there who contributes a chapter, qualified solicitors or barristers, male and female, "of local, British, Indian, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian origins." In Stewart's day, by contrast, they were mostly "male, British and unqualified in the law."
Strictly by the book
Tallentire makes two other points of great interest -- that in the 1880s there was no specific law under which people suspected of bribery could be charged, and that custodial sentences in those days were generally shorter than they are today. This latter point gives pause for thought -- as Jan Morris commented in her book Hong Kong (1988), Britain's colony 17 years ago was a strict place. Clearly it remains so.
Behind this book lies a controversy between those who think that, in Jan Morris's words, "On the whole, with many lapses and exceptions, British government in Hong Kong [was] good government," and those who believe that "the early modern state had to resort to violent and exemplary punishment ... to demonstrate [its] monopoly of authority" (Samson Chan, in an unpublished UK doctoral thesis quoted here). This is not to mention the belief that Britain's laws in Hong Kong were designed primarily to control and repress its Chinese population (a law that Chinese, and only Chinese, had to carry a lamp or a police pass after dark is the center of much discussion here). In this stand-off, Bickley, a Hong Kong poet and academic of long standing, is on the whole on the pro-British side. Her lengthy introduction, however, is a masterly and impartial survey of her subject-matter.
The most readable book on this topic is probably still Austin Coates' ironic Myself a Mandarin (1968), on his experiences as a Hong Kong magistrate in the 1950s. Read together, that book and this new one offer a historical overview of an evolving system -- how British concepts of justice reluctantly adapted themselves to the alien realities of life in an imperial outpost in southern China.
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