Hong Kong primarily as a place of sexual licence, where a business trip is easily lubricated by adventures on the town, and painted girls in topless bars are always ready to ease the tension after dark.
Indeed it is a louche and lascivious city. Sexual gossip abounds. A judge is observed in a red-light district, a well-known Chinese lady is seen in Macao with an influential administrator. Illicit relationships true or imaginary are staples of conversation, and several thousand people, including Heaven-knows-who, are said to be on a secret police list of homosexuals. It was always so. From the beginning Hong Kong seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements, partly because of the climate perhaps, partly because European males have always been attracted by nubile Chinese females, partly because the early settlers were often men of vigorous appetite and flexible morals, and partly because the air of Hong Kong somehow seems to suggest that in sex, as in most other things, anything goes.
Even in High Victorian times, it appears, English gentlemen might acceptably flirt with Chinese women, as they certainly might not with Africans or Indians. The London
Graphic
reported with amusement, in 1872, the response of an Englishman disembarking in Hong Kongwhen a pretty Chinese girl asked if she could wash his clothes for him: ‘Yes! and me too, if you like, my duck of diamonds!’ Many nineteenth-century Europeans took Chinese mistresses. From their liaisons sprang a Eurasian community which still survives, though nowadays its members tend to think of themselves simply as Chinese, and which has produced some distinguished citizens – notably Sir Robert Ho Tung, said to be Hong Kong’s first millionaire.
Very early in the colony’s history we read of brothels flourishing in the area off Hollywood Road, west of Central, staffed sometimes by Chinese, but often by Europeans and Americans. ‘Clouds and rain’ was the Chinese slang for sexual intercourse, but the English equivalent was ‘honey’. The Beehive Inn, a well-known bordello of the mid nineteenth century, hung out a sign saying:
Within this hive, we’re all alive,
And pleasant is our honey;
If you are dry, step in and try,
We sells for ready money.
And when in 1851 an Australian ‘actress’ opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace she advertised it thus in the Press: ‘At Mrs Randall’s – a small quantity of good HONEY in small jars.’ Church-going colonists, leading merchants, senior Government officials, were not ashamed to visit these houses, and visitors were often shown them. Kipling, when he visited Hong Kong in 1888, spent a night inspecting the stews, and wrote about it freely in
From Sea To Sea
. He declared it ‘Life with a Capital Hell’, being especially perturbed by his discovery of Englishwomen among the whores. 7 Even in the 1930s the best-known of the contemporary madams, the Russian-born Ethel Morrison, was a familiar figure of Hong Kong society, and when she died there was a memorial service for her at the Anglican Cathedral.
The grander brothels presently moved to the Happy Valley area, the rougher ones further west, so that the area called Kennedy Town entered the naval vocabulary for a generation or two (though Her Majesty’s ships were also served by a peripatetic corps called The Midnight Fairies, who used to climb their hulls at dead of night). Later the red lights shifted again, and for a time made the name of Wanchai,a hitherto seedy district surrounding Lockhart Road, a soldiers’ and sailors’ synonym for roister:
Way down in Wanchai there is a place of fame
There stands a street, and Lockhart is its name.
Slant-eyed Chinese maidens all around I see,
Calling out ‘Artillery man, abide with me’. 8
During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, when Hong Kong became a centre for Rest and Recreation (‘R and R’) for the United States forces, Wanchai was like a wildly liberated Las Vegas. All along
Indeed it is a louche and lascivious city. Sexual gossip abounds. A judge is observed in a red-light district, a well-known Chinese lady is seen in Macao with an influential administrator. Illicit relationships true or imaginary are staples of conversation, and several thousand people, including Heaven-knows-who, are said to be on a secret police list of homosexuals. It was always so. From the beginning Hong Kong seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements, partly because of the climate perhaps, partly because European males have always been attracted by nubile Chinese females, partly because the early settlers were often men of vigorous appetite and flexible morals, and partly because the air of Hong Kong somehow seems to suggest that in sex, as in most other things, anything goes.
Even in High Victorian times, it appears, English gentlemen might acceptably flirt with Chinese women, as they certainly might not with Africans or Indians. The London
Graphic
reported with amusement, in 1872, the response of an Englishman disembarking in Hong Kongwhen a pretty Chinese girl asked if she could wash his clothes for him: ‘Yes! and me too, if you like, my duck of diamonds!’ Many nineteenth-century Europeans took Chinese mistresses. From their liaisons sprang a Eurasian community which still survives, though nowadays its members tend to think of themselves simply as Chinese, and which has produced some distinguished citizens – notably Sir Robert Ho Tung, said to be Hong Kong’s first millionaire.
Very early in the colony’s history we read of brothels flourishing in the area off Hollywood Road, west of Central, staffed sometimes by Chinese, but often by Europeans and Americans. ‘Clouds and rain’ was the Chinese slang for sexual intercourse, but the English equivalent was ‘honey’. The Beehive Inn, a well-known bordello of the mid nineteenth century, hung out a sign saying:
Within this hive, we’re all alive,
And pleasant is our honey;
If you are dry, step in and try,
We sells for ready money.
And when in 1851 an Australian ‘actress’ opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace she advertised it thus in the Press: ‘At Mrs Randall’s – a small quantity of good HONEY in small jars.’ Church-going colonists, leading merchants, senior Government officials, were not ashamed to visit these houses, and visitors were often shown them. Kipling, when he visited Hong Kong in 1888, spent a night inspecting the stews, and wrote about it freely in
From Sea To Sea
. He declared it ‘Life with a Capital Hell’, being especially perturbed by his discovery of Englishwomen among the whores. 7 Even in the 1930s the best-known of the contemporary madams, the Russian-born Ethel Morrison, was a familiar figure of Hong Kong society, and when she died there was a memorial service for her at the Anglican Cathedral.
The grander brothels presently moved to the Happy Valley area, the rougher ones further west, so that the area called Kennedy Town entered the naval vocabulary for a generation or two (though Her Majesty’s ships were also served by a peripatetic corps called The Midnight Fairies, who used to climb their hulls at dead of night). Later the red lights shifted again, and for a time made the name of Wanchai,a hitherto seedy district surrounding Lockhart Road, a soldiers’ and sailors’ synonym for roister:
Way down in Wanchai there is a place of fame
There stands a street, and Lockhart is its name.
Slant-eyed Chinese maidens all around I see,
Calling out ‘Artillery man, abide with me’. 8
During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, when Hong Kong became a centre for Rest and Recreation (‘R and R’) for the United States forces, Wanchai was like a wildly liberated Las Vegas. All along
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