Hong Kong by Jan Morris

British Empire having only just been plunged into the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, but the plot was discovered and Cheong Ah Lum, though acquitted of murder for lack of evidence (by a judge and jury all of whom had swallowed some of his arsenic) was deported to China. With a shudder British society returned to normal, the Governor, Sir John Bowring, himself composing a hymn of thanksgiving to be sung in the Cathedral. For years afterwards visitors were shown Cheong Ah Lum’s bakery as a Chamber of Horrors, and a chunk of the poisoned bread, well-preserved by its arsenic, was kept in a cabinet in the Chief Justice’s office until the 1930s.
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    Pick up any local newspaper, and you will see that Hong Kong crime today, though generally less spectacular, can be just as surprising. The tang of it is always in the air, like the sting of profit; often the two merge, confirming I suppose the belief of idealistic Marxists that capitalism is a misdemeanour in itself.
    Though by international standards the rate of serious crime is remarkably low, the streets are generally safe and vandalism is rare, there is all the general chicanery one expects of a great city, especially a port-city so volatile as this: protection rackets, pornography, prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, violence of one sort or another. Every few months the Tactical Unit of the Hong Kong police force mounts an intensive anti-crime sweep, setting up road blocks, stopping and questioning thousands of citizens, raiding night-clubs, dance-halls and mah-jong schools, but though a few dozen arrests are always made the great body of organized crime is scarcely affected.
    The drug trade in particular is always on the boil. Until the 1930s the Hong Kong Government still leased out an opium farm, or agency, and the smoking of opium was legal here until 1940 – extraordinarysurvivals of old imperial mores. The subsequent banning of all narcotics has led to an inexpungable black market in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. In 1995 73 people were prosecuted for murder and manslaughter, 1,102 for rape and indecent assault, but 5,669 were charged with drug offences, whether with trafficking or with simple possession. At the other end of the crime market, ever and again the predictable cases of crooked dealing emerge from the affairs of big business.
    Much of the crime is organized by the Triads, secret societies which began as subversive political organizations in Manchu China, but developed into huge ramifications of skulduggery. Triads have been at work in Hong Kong almost since the start of the colony, and as 1997 impends are apparently intensifying their activities while the going is good. There are said to be at least fifty separate gangs in the city now, with at least 100,000 members, binding themselves together with secret oaths and rituals, and engaged like the Mafia in many kinds of criminal enterprise. They are supposed to number in their ranks many a well-educated and professionally respectable citizen, but they can be primitively brutal: a businessman stabbed to death by Triad hit-men in 1987 had been sent in warning, a few days earlier, the severed head of a dog.
    The largest Triads are far too prominent to be entirely clandestine, and play a more or less open part in Chinese community affairs, rather like the IRA in some parts of Northern Ireland. They are said to have infiltrated many schools, and young men join them as a demonstration of their manhood, or are trapped into complicity by their own dependence on drugs. The largest society of all, the Sun Yee On or 14K Triad, which moved to the colony from China after the Communist Revolution, is believed to have at least 25,000 members. Some Hong Kong Triads have become internationally powerful too, especially in the heroin business, with branches in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the United States, and agents in every overseas Chinese community: one of the most active along the drug routes is said to be the