Hong Kong Museum of History must flesh out the city’s story

The interim exhibit at the museum gives much space to the culture of ‘indigenous people’, although after 1841 Hong Kong was populated largely by immigrants
It also lacks a sense of how Hong Kong came to be a major commercial and maritime centre

Philip Bowring

Published: 7:00am, 28 Feb 2021

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With the Chinese Communist Party celebrating its centenary this year, General Secretary Xi Jinping has urged study of its history, of Marxism and socialism with Chinese characteristics. The president’s focus on history reminded this writer to visit the Hong Kong Museum of History which has recently reopened.

Its earlier incarnation was often described as the best museum in Hong Kong, combining vivid visual displays with a thorough account of history, which was generally regarded as fair and balanced. What would museum designers in the era of President Xi make of this history?

Aligning it with any new expectations would not have been easy, given that though Hong Kong contributed significantly to other revolutionary history, it played scant role in that of the Communist Party. Furthermore, at almost all times in the past 180 years, since the British took possession of Hong Kong island in January 1841 – one year before this was formalised in the Treaty of Nanjing – its population has increased 1,000-fold, thanks to influxes of patriots seeking better, safer freer lives.

It would be unfair to compare the current exhibition with its predecessor. It is an interim display a fraction of the size. However, if history and identity are, as they should be, closely linked, this new exhibition suggests an effort, conscious or not, to downplay the big themes of history in favour of the harmless and meaningless.

Long queues are seen outside the Hong Kong Museum of History in Tsim Sha Tsui on the last day of The Hong Kong Story permanent exhibition on October 18, 2020. While the permanent exhibition is being revamped, an exhibition “Recreating a Classic: The Best Features of The Hong Kong Story” is being held. Photo: Winson Wong

There is little objectively wrong with the displays, nor obvious historical biases. It is what is not there that is striking, as though the organiser were too scared of the subject so retreated into folklorique assemblages of costumes and temple artefacts and collections of mundane objects. Far from “recreating a classic” with “the best features of the Hong Kong story”, it is a shadow of its predecessor.

A large part of a small exhibition is taken up with reconstructions of shops selling grain and groceries, a barber shop, herbal tea shop and the like. The postal service is honoured with a Victorian pillar box and rows of individual postboxes, household objects especially from the 1930s and 1950s – gramophone, sewing machine, camera – figure prominently along with old tourist brochures, and the sort of old bric-a-brac found on Hollywood Road. Old coins and notes abound, but with little context.

History here only starts in the Neolithic period, ignoring the geological history which created the rock formations, which are such a tourist attraction, or the situation of Hong Kong 10,000 years ago when sea level were 20 metres lower than today. Skimming over the displacement of old culture with Han migration and domination over the Yueh seafarers, then Hong Kong’s marginal role in successive imperial dynasties, we get to modern times.

Much space is given to descriptions and costumes of the Hoklo, Punti, Hakka and other “indigenous” peoples despite the fact that after 1841, Hong Kong, now with a new identity, was primarily populated with assorted, if mostly Cantonese, immigrants. This focus on “indigenous” seems in line with privileges still given to their villages and the Heung Yee Kuk at the expense of the vast majority.

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The remarkable growth of Hong Kong in its first half-century of foreign rule occurred before the acquisition of the New Territories and its modest indigenous population.

The exhibition naturally gives space to the opium trade and to the British governors. But it is lacking a sense of how it came to be a major commercial and maritime centre, a product not just of empire and proximity to China, but a much larger regional role driven by its free port status.

Hong Kong history: from colony to powerhouse

There is scant place for the many foreign businessmen, the Indians, Parsees, Americans, Armenians, Jews, Japanese and overseas Chinese who created the trade and funded investments in ships, docks and infrastructure, in the process creating the modest prosperity which attracted immigrants.

The city’s role in Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement is accorded plenty of space, but not those of Philippine revolutionaries Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh.

The brutality of the Japanese occupation is emphasised, but the post-war period avoids awkward specifics of mainland history behind waves of mass immigration and official policies towards it.

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The influx of flight capital and manufacturing expertise from the mainland is credited with enabling industrialisation, but not the other ingredient – Hong Kong’s preferential access to Western markets, which helped make it a key global player in textiles and garments.

The subsequent dramatic growth of international financial and professional services, only possible because of law and language links to London and New York, likewise gets scant attention despite their significance to the economy, including today as a financial intermediary between China and the outside world.

Domestically, there is plenty about post-war progress in education and housing, but little sense of Hong Kong Cantonese as a lively, identifiable culture, nor of the importance, at least in the recent past, of links with Chinese in Southeast Asia, and currently with the huge communities in Western countries.

The museum does have some good points. A special display at the entrance of old photographs of Hong Kong island streets is one. A showing of clips from old newsreels recording events such as the 1967 riots, the Festival of Hong Kong in 1969 and the handover bring events to life in a way static displays and documents cannot.

But, all in all, it is a thin and dumbed-down version of Hong Kong’s historical identity, and the importance of its uniqueness to its prosperity from 1841 to today.

Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator