Then & Now | The Hongkongers who emigrated to Trinidad and their descendants who returned
The mixed-race descendants of men who had left the territory to seek their fortune in the Caribbean and married locally looked to post-war Hong Kong as a bolt hole - and found themselves more ‘foreign’ than they had expected
Trinidad is probably the least known of Hong Kong’s overseas connections. And it’s a connection that goes far beyond those West Indies clichés of calypso bands and rum cocktails.
In the 1940s and ’50s, as Britain sought to combine smaller colonial territories into larger nation states that might survive in the cold-war world, various political federations of adjacent colonial territories were attempted.
Northern and Southern Rhodesia were bundled together with Nyasaland in 1953 to form the Central African Federation, eventually disbanded in 1963. A similar union was mooted (but not realised) for East Africa, with a proposed amalgamation of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar.
In Southeast Asia, the Federated and Unfederated Malay States and the erstwhile Straits Settlements of Malacca and Penang were combined to form the Federation of Malaya in 1948. Enlarged with the addition of Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo (now Sabah) to make the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, this union contracted when Singapore was expelled in 1965.
A similar project was tried in the Caribbean, with a comparable outcome. Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the Leeward and Windward islands were amalgamated to form the West Indian Federation – also known as the West Indies.
Port of Spain, the cosmopolitan capital of Trinidad and Tobago, with its large Indian, Chinese, Afro-Caribbean, European and Creole populations, was designated the federal capital from 1958 to 1962. Following full independence for Trinidad and Tobago in 1962 – and the restrictions on permanent migration to the United Kingdom for colonial passport holders introduced that year – many people of Chinese descent from Trinidad, most of whom had Cantonese or Hakka roots, chose to move to Hong Kong.
