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Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong Kong*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2014

ROBERT PECKHAM
ROBERT PECKHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Email: rpeckham@hku.hk
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Abstract

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 1177 - 1209
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This article has benefited from conversations with many colleagues, and I should like to thank, in particular, John Carroll, Angela Ki Che Leung, Christopher Munn, and David Pomfret. My thanks, also, to Thomas Warren at the HSBC Asia-Pacific Archives, and to the anonymous reviewer.

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25 John Pope Hennessy, ‘The Governor's Report on the Blue Book’ (29 April 1881), AR (1879–1880), paragraph 128.

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41 A number of currencies were in use in Hong Kong during the nineteenth century, including Spanish and Mexican silver dollars. In 1862/3 the government made the silver dollar legal tender, issuing its own coinage; see Spalding, William F., Eastern Exchange Currency and Finance, 3rd edition (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1920 [1917]), pp. 316–335Google Scholar.

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43 Ibid, paragraph 128.

44 However, there is some ambiguity in the estimates of trees planted, with discrepancies in the statistics reported in different official documents. Ford, ‘Report from the Superintendent of the Botanical and Afforestation Department’ (22 March 1882), GG, Vol. 28, No. 13 (25 March 1882), pp. 324–327 (p. 326); Ford ‘Report from the Superintendent of the Botanical and Afforestation Department’ (4 April 1883), GG, Vol. 29, No. 17 (14 April 1883), pp. 344–349 (p. 349).

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50 Ibid, p. 1; see, also, ‘Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of the Colony of Hong Kong’, AR (1939), p. 21. However, the possibilities that large-scale forestry in Hong Kong might supply the timber market for house-building and ship-building were discussed; see, in this context, the correspondence between the surveyor general and J. D. Humphreys in GG, Vol. 23, No. 50 (17 November 1877), p. 510. Ford had argued for the cultivation of camphor trees; see CO 129/163 (14 May 1905), pp. 490–493; CO 129/303, pp. 319–321.

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124 ‘Report of the Commissioners appointed by His Excellency Sir G. William Des Voeux to Enquire into the Cause of the Fever Prevailing in the Western District’ (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1888), p. viii.

125 Ibid.

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127 Ford, ‘Report of the Superintendent of the Botanical and Afforestation Department’ (22 February 1890), p. 370.

128 Ford, ‘Report of the Superintendent of the Botanical and Afforestation Department’ (25 June 1891), p. 579.

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