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“Thrilling cities” (Publication, 1963)

Year

1963

Text

Fleming, Ian. Thrilling cities. (London : J. Cape, 1963). [Reisebericht 1959-1960. Artikel der Reiseberichte für die The Sunday Times. Enthält Hong Kong und Macao]. (Fle43)

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Fleming, Ian  (London 1908-1964 Canterbury) : Schriftsteller

Subjects

History : China - Hong Kong / Literature : Occident : Great Britain : Prose / Travel and Legation Accounts

Chronology Entries (2)

# Year Text Linked Data
1 1959-1960.2 Fleming, Ian. Thrilling cities [ID D33902]. (2)
MACAO
Gold, hand in hand with opium, plays an extraordinary secret role through the Far East, and Hong Kong and Macao, the tiny Portuguese possession only forty miles away, are the hub of the whole underground traffic.
In England, except between bullion brokers, nobody ever talks about gold as a medium of exchange or as an important item among personal possessions. But from India eastwards gold is a constant topic of conversation, and the daily newspapers are never without their list of gold prices in bullion, English sovereigns, French Napoléons and louis d’or, and rarely a day goes by without there being a gold case in the Press. Someone has been caught smuggling gold. So-and-so has been murdered for his gold hoard. Someone else has been counterfeiting gold. The reason for this passionate awareness of the metal is the total mistrust all Orientals have for paper money and the profound belief that, without one’s bar or beaten leaf of gold concealed somewhere on one’s person or kept in a secret place at home, one is a poor man.
The gold king of the Orient is the enigmatic Doctor Lobo of the Villa Verde in Macao. Irresistibly attracted, I gravitated towards him, the internal Geiger-counter of a writer of thrillers ticking furiously.
Richard Hughes and I took the S.S. Takshing, one of the three famous ferries that do the Macao run every day. These ferries are not the broken-down, smoke-billowing rattletraps engineered by whisky-sodden Scotsmen we see on the films, but commodious three-decker steamers run with workmanlike precision. The three-hour trip through the islands and across Deep Bay, brown with the waters of the Pearl River that more or less marks the boundary between the leased territories and Communist China, was beautiful and uneventful. The commu-nist gunboats have given up molesting Western shipping and the wallowing sampans chugging with their single diesels home-wards with the day's catch, the red flag streaming from the insect- wing sails, were the only sign that we were crossing communist waters. At the northern extremity of Deep Bay lies Macao, a peninsula about one-tenth the size of the Isle of Wight that is the oldest European settlement in China. It was founded in 1557 and is chiefly famous for the first lighthouse built on the whole coast of China. It also boasts the graves of Robert Morrison, the Protestant missionary who compiled the first Chinese- English dictionary in 1820, of George Chinnery, the great Irish painter of the Oriental scene, and of the uncle of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord John Spencer Churchill. It is also noted for the gigantic ruins of St Paul's Cathedral built in 1602 and burned down in 1835; and finally-save the mark!-for the largest 'house of ill-fame' in the world.
So far as its premier citizen, Dr Lobo, is concerned, the most interesting features of Macao are that there is no income tax and no exchange control whatever, and that there is complete freedom of import and export of foreign currencies, and all forms of bullion. To take only the case of gold bullion, it is, therefore, perfectly easy for anyone to arrive by ferry or seaplane or come across from Communist China, only fifty yards away across the river, buy any quantity of gold, from a ton down to a gold coin, and leave Macao quite openly with his booty. It is then up to the purchaser, and of no concern whatsoever to Dr Lobo or the chief of the Macao police, to smuggle his gold back into China, into neighbouring Hong Kong or, if he has a seaplane, fly off with it into the wide world. These considera¬tions make Macao one of the most interesting market-places in the world, and one with many secrets.
As we came into the roadstead, we were greeted by a scene of great splendour. The sun was setting and in its pathway lay a spectacular fleet of many hundreds of junks and sampans at anchor. This caused much excited chattering amongst our fellow-passengers and it was only on the next morning, when this fleet and other fleets from the outer islands were spread all over the sea, now under the rising sun, all heading for the mouth of the Pearl River, that we learnt the answer. The Sea Fishing Co-operative of Communist China had ordered all fishermen to a great meeting at which new fishing laws were to be promulgated - matters such as that the smaller junks should fish home waters within a certain radius, while the larger junks and sampans would be confined to the more distant fishing grounds. It all sounded very orderly and sensible, and very un-Chinese.
The Portuguese Navy, represented by a small Kiplingesque gunboat with one gun behind a square shield (surely a gatling!), stood guard over the interior harbour, but no courtesies were exchanged with the Takshing, nor could there have been, for the signal halyard had been run from the short mast to the muzzle of the main armament and was now hung with the crew’s variegated washing, from which it was discernible that Persil appeared to have been but sparingly used for the Navy's big wash.
The waterfront was an astonishing mixture of rotting godowns announcing in sun-faded letters that they were, for instance, FABRICIA DE AGUAS GASOSAS Or the KWONG HUNG TAI FIRE¬CRACKER MANUFACTURING COMPANY, interspersed with the ruined façades of once grandiose private houses ornamented with the most exquisite, though dilapidated, baroque plaster and stone¬work. The whole town is like this, a jumble of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century highly ornamented European styles, gimcrack modern ferro-concrete, and spruce, hideous villas. Half the streets are cobbled alleys and half wide, empty modern highways at whose pretentious crossings an occasional rickshaw waits for the otiose traffic lights to change to green. In short, the place is as picturesque as, and deader than, a beautiful graveyard.
We repaired to the Macao Inn on the junction of the water-front and the Travesso do Padre Narciso. There we met 'Our Man in Macao' and drank warm gins and tonics under a banyan tree while I enlightened myself about the four Mr Bigs - who, with the Portuguese Government in the background, control pretty well everything that goes on in this enigmatic territory. In America these four men would be called the Syndicate, but here they are just friendly business partners who co-operate to keep trade running along the right channels. They were at that time, in order of importance, the aforesaid Dr P. J. Lobo, who looks after gold; Mr Foo Tak Yam, who concerns himself with gambling and associate activities, which may be broadly des¬cribed as 'entertainment', and who owns the Central Hotel, of which more later; Mr C. Y. Leung, a silent partner; and Mr Ho Yin, the chief intermediary for trade with Communist China.
The fortunes of these four gentlemen rose during and after the war - during the war through trade with the Japanese who then occupied the mainland, and, after the war, during the golden days when the harbour of Macao was thronged with ships from Europe smuggling arms to Communist China. Those latter days had turned Macao into a boom town when a single street running half the length of the town, the 'Street of Happiness', had been one great and continuous street of pleasure and when the nine- storey-high Central Hotel, the largest house of gambling and self-indulgence in the world, had been constructed by Mr Foo to siphon off the cream of the pleasure-seekers. Those golden days had now passed. Communist China was manufacturing her own weapons, the Street of Happiness had emptied through lack of roistering sailors, and now pleasure, devoted only to the relaxation of Hong Kong tourists, was confined to the Central Hotel.
Having got all this straight in our minds, it was obvious to Dick and me that only one question remained: where to have dinner before repairing to the Central Hotel? We were advised to choose between the Fat Siu Lau, the 'Loving Buddha', in the Street of Happiness, noted for its Chinese pigeon, or the Long Kee, famous for its fish. We chose the Loving Buddha, dined excellently and repaired to the Central Hotel, whose function and design I recommend most warmly to the attention of those concerned with English morals.
The Central Hotel is not precisely a hotel. It is a nine-storey skyscraper, by far the largest building in Macao, and it is devoted solely to the human so-called vices. It has one more original feature. The higher up the building you go, the more beautiful and expensive are the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling tables, and the better the music. Thus, on the ground floor, the honest coolie can choose a girl of his own class and gamble for pennies by lowering his bet on a fishing-rod contraption through a hole in the floor on to the gaming tables below. Those with longer pockets can progress upwards through various heavens until they reach the earthly paradise on the sixth floor. Above this are the bedrooms. In the pursuit of information which would be in accordance with the readership of the Sunday Times, it was a matter of course that, very soon after our arrival at the Central Hotel, Dick Hughes and I should take the lift to the sixth floor.
The sixth floor was spacious and well-lit with the sort of pseudo-modern decor you would find in a once-expensive French café that is on the way downhill. Across the entrance hall was the gambling hell to which we were drawn by the rattle of dice and the cries of the attractive, as it turned out, feminine croupiers. Here we found fan-tan being played, and a rather complicated dice game known as hi-lo. Having read about fan- tan in my Doctor Fu-Manchu days, when I had assumed that this must be the most sinful game on the face of the earth, I made straight for the fan-tan table, changed a hundred Hong Kong dollars (about £6 5s. od.) into counters and sat firmly down at the sparsely occupied table next to the 'dealer', an almond-eyed witch in a green cheong sam. On the other side of the table, beside the rack of chips, stood a similarly dressed girl with an air of authority. It was she who ran the game, while the girl on my right went through the necessary motions.
I must say that the adventure books of one's youth do give one false impressions. Fan-tan is simply a rather pretty, childlike way of inevitably losing your money. To begin with, the odds are 10 per cent in favour of the house compared with about 1-35 at roulette, and anybody who gambles at those odds is either off his head or a Chinaman.
The game proceeds as follows: in the centre of the table is a square of painted wood divided into four compartments, marked 1, 2, 3 and 4, and you place your bet on one of these numbers. The croupier has in front of her a large pile of two or three hundred small white plastic buttons, a species of inverted brass goblet, and a thin wooden wand about two feet long. When the bids have been placed, she muddles the inverted goblet around in the pile of buttons, pushes it out in front of her, well away from the original mass of buttons, and lifts it away. Shen then takes her wand and delicately separates the buttons, four by four, from the pile heaped in the middle of the table. The winner is he who has guessed that at the end of her separating of these buttons, four by four, she will leave either one, two, three or four buttons behind. If you have bet on the correct remainder you are paid two to one, less 10 per cent. The girl then rakes in the central pile of buttons to join the mass in front of her, muddles them all together and squashes her goblet once again down in amongst them.
It is a pretty, restful game containing only one point of interest. A third, or not later than half-way, through the separating of the pile of buttons, the experienced fan-tan player, or certainly the organizing croupier, will hold up one, two, three or four fingers to predict the winning figure although perhaps fifty buttons have still to be separated and these are still piled up in an apparently unfathomable muddle, some on top of others and most of them overlapping. While I duly and happily lost my hundred dollars, enjoying the gentle ritual, the authori¬tative girl opposite was never wrong in divining the winning number from the piled-up jumble. It was quite uncanny, and the girl smiled appreciatively at my polite applause.
After Dick and I had had enough of this dainty piracy, we repaired to the neighbouring hell to try our fortunes at the more adult game of hi-lo. This is a game played at a long table with a green baize board marked out in varous sections rather in the fashion of American craps. Behind this sits the usual beautiful croupière (if that is the feminine for croupier) with, in front of her, a shining aluminium contraption which looks like a cross between a pressure-cooker and an atomic war-head but is, in fact, a locked container containing three dice. When, after a good deal of mumbo-jumbo, she shakes the apparatus and removes the lid, the game is completed and up to a maximum of three sixes, or eighteen, and a minimum of three ones, will be displayed by the dice. So far as the even chances are concerned, you can either bet on the numbers three to eight inclusive, which is 'lo', or ten to fifteen, which is 'hi', the number nine in the middle being zero. On these you get even money odds. You can also bet on single numbers from three to eighteen and various combinations, such as three of a kind, or a sequence. If you have bet on 'hi' or 'lo' and three of a kind turned up, you have lost. These nuances are complicated and I could not work out the odds in favour of the house. It seemed easier to stick to 'hi' or 'lo', which I did until a further hundred dollars of the Sunday Times's money had gone down the drain.
An interesting feature of the hi-lo gambling hell is that half-way up the wall behind the players there is a crow's-nest in which a small Macaon sits. When the croupière is about to raise the fateful lid, she presses an electric bell which rings in the room and also in the various nether gambling hells down the building. In these, gamblers of lesser degree have been staking on similar tables. When the lid is lifted, the man in the crow's-nest relays the winning number down to these tables and also to electric indicators in the dance halls where gamblers can place their bets with the hostesses. Thus the dice I was watching on the sixth floor were vital for the many games being played through-out the Central Hotel.
Having educated ourselves in these matters, Dick Hughes and I repaired to our sixth-floor dance hall to see how Mr Foo was handling the second human vice. The place had a central, well- lit dance floor and a well-disciplined eight-piece 'combo' playing good but conventional jazz. In the shadows round the walls sat some twenty or thirty 'hostesses'. Dick and I arranged ourselves at a comfortable banquette in the sparsely frequented room and ordered gins and tonics and two hostesses. Mine was called Garbo, 'same like film star', she explained. She wore a pale-green embroidered cheong sam and a 'Mamie Eisenhower' bang rather low on the forehead. She had the usual immaculate ivory skin and the conventional 'almond' eyes which were bright with intelligence and a desire to please. Rather startlingly, she appeared to have black lipstick but, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, this turned crimson. Dick's girl was a trifle older, perhaps thirty-five, wore a beige cheong sam, and was more forward and vivacious than Garbo. They asked for lemonades and, for a while, we made the usual rattling, gay, and highly artificial night-club conversation. When, in my case, the springs threatened to run dry, I fell back on that hoary gambit of reading my partner's hand.
Through experience in this science, dating back to my teens, I have acquired a crude expertise in palmistry and, with my first pronouncement that Garbo had three children, I hit a lucky jackpot. The two girls chattered excitedly and, realizing with awe that her hand was being held by a great soothsayer from the West, perspiration rose in Garbo's palm and she was hard put to it to keep this dew at bay with a paper napkin. In the reverent hush that ensued, looking alternately into the dewy palm and the reverent almond eyes, I solemnly warned her that her heart was not ruled by her head, that she had artistic leanings which had not yet come to fruition, that she would have a serious illness when she was about fifty, and finally, provocatively, that she was inclined to be under-sexed. This last pronouncement was greeted with much hilarious protestation which drew two more girls to our table and involved me in a further hour of miscellaneous prognostication and consumption of gins and tonics.
We then danced for a further hour, during which Garbo told me that I looked like Stewart Granger and danced like Fred Astaire. She also said that I was the perfect type of English gentleman and very 'humourlous' which, thinking she had said 'humourless', came as a dash of the good old Western cold water to which the Englishman is accustomed. But the small cloud was soon dispersed by further happy-talk and, by the end of the evening, I felt that I was the greatest factor in Anglo-Oriental relations since Lieutenant Pinkerton.
The evening, the reader will be relieved to learn, ended decorously in a minor snowstorm of twenty-dollar notes and protestations of undying love, and Dick and I left the magnificent Central Hotel on a wave of virtue and euphoria, showering blessings on Mr Foo and his much maligned nine-storey palace of ill-fame.
This was my first experience of Oriental Woman, and this, and my subsequent investigations, confirmed the one great advantage she possesses for Western Man. Oriental ladies have an almost inexhaustible desire to please. They also have the capacity to make the man not only suspect, but actually believe, that he is in every respect a far more splendid fellow than in his wildest dreams he had imagined. Not only that, but the women of the East appear, and in fact actually are, grateful for one’s modest favours, with the result that every meeting with them leaves one in good humour and with a better opinion of oneself. However ill-founded this feeling may be, how very different from the knocking we all get in the West where women - and this applies particularly to America - take such a ferocious delight in cutting the man down to size! 'All you want is slaves',
I hear the friends expostulate. 'Well, er ... ' one mumbles, 'not absolutely. It's not exactly slavishness. It's just well, er, the desire to please,’
But I must not allow impious comment to get mixed up with sacred fact.
The next morning I was awakened by a European clang of cathedral bells and a thin, distant tucket of military bugles, and we girded ourselves for luncheon with Dr Lobo. Ever since Life magazine cast a shining light on Macao in 1949, the Doctor has been very wary of writers and journalists, but the magical name of a friend in Hong Kong had opened even this door for us, and in due course we were picked up by a powerful-looking ‘secretary’ in a battered brown Austin. We had spent the morning observing a communist co-operative hard at work across the river, admired the awe-inspiring façade of St Paul's Cathedral upon which the Japanese Christian stonemasons had sprinkled plenty of dragons and flying skeletons amongst the angels, and taken note of the hospital founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1906.
Neither the Austin nor the battered Chevrolet in which we later left to catch our ferry, nor the Villa Verde, which belonged to some tropical Wimbledon, suggested that Dr Lobo was worth the five or ten million pounds which with he is credited. At first sight, the Doctor, in his trim blue suit, stiff white collar and rimless glasses, looked like the bank manager or dentist (in fact he started life as an oculist) one would have found in the more benign Wimbledon. Dr Lobo is a small, thin Malayan Chinese with a pursed mouth and blank eyes. He is in his early seventies. He greeted us carefully in a sparsely furnished suburban living-room with a Roman Catholic shrine over the doorway, a large, nineteenth-century oleograph depicting heaven and hell, and a coloured reproduction of a famous picture I could not place - a woman with bowed head swathed in butter- muslin, who was either Faith, Hope or Charity. A powerfully-built butler, who looked more like a judo black-belt than a butler, offered us Johnny Walker and we launched into careful conversation about the pros and cons of alcohol and cigarettes, neither of which, Dr Lobo said, appealed to him.
A spark of animation came into Dr Lobo's eyes when I said I heard that he was an amateur composer of note. The Doctor said he had been a violinist and had given concerts in Hong Kong. But he was certainly, he vouchsafed, no Menuhin or Heifetz. Nowadays, when he had time, he did indeed try his hand at composing. I asked if we might hear something. Readily Dr Lobo handed us a gramophone record entitled 'Gems of the Orient', privately recorded by His Master’s Voice. Meanwhile he busied himself with a large gramophone. The titles of Dr Lobo's compositions were 'Souls in Sorrow', 'Passing Thoughts', 'Waves of the South Seas', 'Lilies of the Mountains' and 'Lasting Memories'.
The Doctor put ‘Waves of the South Seas' on the gramophone and turned various knobs, which resulted only in a devastating roar of static from a concealed loudspeaker. More knobs were turned and still the static hooted and screamed. Dr Lobo shouted through the racket that there was something wrong. The secretary was sent off to fetch the house engineer. Dick and I sipped our whisky and avoided each other's eye. The engineer arrived and repeated Dr Lobo's previous motions. Identical hullabaloo. The engineer conjured with the back of the machine while we looked on politely. Dr Lobo adopted the familiar expression of the rich man whose toy is kaput.
In due course the thin, wavering strains of a tune containing vague echoes of 'Tales of the Vienna Woods', 'In a Monastery Garden' and 'Rose Marie' fixed expressions of rapt attention on all our faces. I shifted my posture to the bowed stance with eyes covered which I adopt for concert and opera. There was nothing to do but think of other things until both sides of the longest player I have ever heard had been completed. Dick and I made appreciative grunts as if we had come back to earth, speechless, from some musical paradise. I muttered something about 'remarkable virtuosity' and 'many-sided talent'. And then, blessedly, luncheon was served.
Dr Lobo's dining-room was lined from floor to ceiling with cabinets of cut glass that winked painfully from all sides as if one was sitting in the middle of a giant chandelier. The tepid macaroni and vegetable soup promised an unmemorable meal, so I politely got on to the topic of gold. Yes, indeed, it was an interesting business. Did I know the Bank of England and Messrs Samuel Montague? Such nice, correct people to deal with. No, he hadn’t actually got an office in Europe.
A manfacturer of baby powder represented him in those parts. The Doctor himself had never been farther abroad than Hong Kong.
I pressed on about gold. As I understood it, I said, Macao had been excluded by Portugal from the Bretton Woods monetary agreement which tied most of the other countries in the world to a gold price of $35 an ounce. Since, for instance, the Chinese price is around $50 an ounce, there was obviously a handsome profit to be made somewhere. Was I correct in thinking that Dr Lobo bought gold from, say, the Bank of England, at $35 an ounce and then sold it at a premium to anyone who cared to buy; how it then left Macao for the outside world being none of his business? Yes, agreed Dr Lobo, that was more or less the position. Nowadays the business was difficult. Before, when the premium over the official gold price had been higher, it had been more interesting. Smuggling? Yes, no doubt such a thing did take place. Dr Lobo smiled indulgently. The people in these parts liked to have a small piece of gold. If they bought gold in Macao, I insisted gently, how did they get it out? Dr Lobo A man s face went blank. These were matters of which he knew little. He had heard that they sewed single coins into their clothes and hammered thin plates of gold which they could carry in their belts. There had also been a case where some cows had been found to contain gold. The bamboo that is so much a part of sampans, for instance, is conveniently hollow. Was I interested in cut glass? All this glass had been a hobby of his late wife A man s. It was Stuart glass, the best.
How, I persisted, was the Indian market in gold nowadays? A man I hear it is not so good A man, said Dr Lobo. Nowadays the Indians were poor. They had no foreign exchange with which to buy gold and nobody wanted the rupee. Previously, he understood, large fortunes had been made from selling gold to India, but nowadays, the eyes twinkled frostily, it was perhaps more profitable to buy newspapers. Yes? This neat reference to the change of ownership of the Sunday Times showed that Dr Lobo had his wits about him.
I allowed myself also to become personal. Dr. Lobo was reputed to be a very rich man. Was he not frightened of being kidnapped? I had heard that much of this had been going on in Singapore and also in Hong Kong. Had there not been a recent case ... ? This was clearly a subject which had had Dr Lobo's close attention. He became more animated. 'I have precautions', he said. 'I take care. We have excellent police in Macao'. The business in Hong Kong had been foolish. The family had received an ear and had gone to the police. This was an error. They should have paid the ransom money. As it was, the head of the family had never been seen again. Very foolish! Had this, I asked, been anything to do with the Tongs or Triads, criminal brotherhoods that operate in every Oriental town? That was possible, thought Dr Lobo. He had heard that these people were very powerful, particularly in the opium traffic. Opium was a very sad business. Dr Lobo became eloquent.
'It is a terrible thing, Mr Fleming. These people give all their money for opium. Soon they lose their interest in food and then in women. They become sexless, neuter, and waste away. It would be much better if they drank beer, even too much beer, as I believe is sometimes the case in your country. But what do you think of my coffee? This is my own coffee from my estate in Timor'.
The conversation petered away into polite inanity and it was nearly time for Dick and me to take the ferry. But first, said Dr Lobo, we must see his radio station. We went out into the garden and there indeed was a concrete building the size of a squash court, which is Radio Villa Verde, dispensing, amongst other things, entertainment to the inhabitants of Macao. We went in and saw the operator on the other side of the big glass window putting a record on. The Chinese girl at the control desk jumped up and bowed, her earphones still on her ears. The radio station seemed to me a wonderful adjunct to a man dealing in the bullion markets of the world. Good communications are the sinews of successful business. I said so.
Dr Lobo looked pained. 'This station is only for entertainment, Mr Fleming.' I said, yes, of course, and we stepped out and turned our backs on the innocent building to have our photo-graphs taken with Dr Lobo by the secretary, and a copy of 'Gems of the Orient', inscribed with best compliments, presented to us.
My last sight of the enigmatic Dr Lobo, as we rattled away in the ancient Chevrolet, was of a small, trim figure cutting short the last wave of his hand as he turned and, flanked by the powerful secretary and powerful butler, disappeared back into the villa. What had I learned of Dr Lobo, the gold king whose name is whispered with awe throughout the East? Absolutely nothing at all. What do I think of Dr Lobo? I think that while there may be unexplained corners in his history, as there are in the histories of many a successful millionaire, he is what he appears to be: a careful, astute operator who has chosen an exotic line of business which may have caused a good deal of pain and grief in its retail outlets to the regret, no doubt, of the wholesaler. The respectability of all ageing millionaires is now his, together with the laurels of good citizenship - a doctorate of sciences unspecified and, two weeks after I left him, his appointment as Chairman of the Municipal Council of Macao, a post equivalent to mayor.
Commenting on his last appointment, the China Morning Post spoke of him as:
Probably the best known local man who retired from public service about three years ago as head of the Economics and Statistics Department of Macao. It was thought then that Dr Lobo would at last be able to enjoy a well merited rest. On the contrary he has been recalled to public duty... Dr Lobo's long experience in administra¬tive matters and his natural knack for getting things done, should see him through with flying colours.
Good show!
Dr Lobo's fellow-member of the Syndicate, Mr Foo, has not fared so well. Since I left his establishment of a thousand pleasures, the Tongs have been after him. As the local press reports:
A group of terrorists, calling itself the Fa Mok Lang Group, after writing blackmailing letters to Mr Foo, placed three bombs in the lavatories of the mezzanine restaurants of the Central Hotel, having previously thrown leaflets from the roof of the hotel urging gamblers and pleasure seekers not to go into the hotel any more 'because the hotel was menaced by bomb explosions'.
There are always interfering busybodies around when someone tries to give the common people a bit of fun.

On our way back to Hong Kong, and in the ferry, recalling Dr Lobo's mention of the Tongs, now known as Triads, and musing over their possible connection with the smuggling of gold and opium which are more or less interconnected, I asked Dick Hughes, who knows the answer to everything in the Far East, what the Triads really amounted to, and this is the gist of what he told me.
There are scores of Triads, or secret Chinese blood societies, in Hong Kong, mostly concentrated in the Kowloon district, and their members, ranging from pimps and shoe-shine boys to businessmen and teachers, run into tens of thousands. Originally the aims of the Triads were laudable and patriotic. Members were rigorously tested, sworn to unselfish brotherhood and dedicated to moral and religious principles. But the process of degeneration has been profound. Politics, then squeeze and conspiracy, and finally crime, rackets, extortion, blackmail and smuggling have debased the high ideals of the early Tongs, just as the semi-religious Society of Harmonious Fists (/ Ho Chuan) of A.D. 1700 became the horrendous Boxers of 1900.
The Triads are not banned in Macao, and Dick hazarded the suggestion that Dr Lobo and other members of the Syndicate were probably forced to pay them protection money. (No doubt Mr Foo failed to pay up and was punished with bombs in the lavatories of his Central Hotel.) But they are illegal in Hong Kong, where they flourish underground with secret signs and passwords and iron rules of punishment and vengeance. The old membership identifications, a cash coin or a cotton badge, have gone, but nowadays one member can distinguish another by the manner, perhaps, in which he lights a cigarette or sets the teacups before a visitor.
The largest and most powerful of the Hong Kong Triads today is the formidable '14 K', so called because the ancient Canton address was Number 14 in Po-wah Road, with the 'K' added later for 'karat' of gold in memory of a bloody pitched battle over 'protection' against a rival Triad whose members likened their strength to local but softer gold. '14 K' dates from the seventeenth century, but was rejuvenated and developed by General Kot Sui Wong as a secret agency of the Kuomintang. He was deported from Hong Kong to Formosa in 1950, but returned incognito to the colony and, before he died in 1953, re-activated all eighteen groups of the redoubtable '14 K' which now has an estimated membership of eighty thousand divided into mellifluously named sub-branches.
For instance, Dick Hughes explained, the 'Sincere' sub¬branch of '14 K' is a strong-arm gang who protect squatter areas in Kowloon. The 'Filials' have about fifteen thousand members who specialize in the drug and prostitution traffic. These two gangs were chiefly responsible for the rioting, blood¬shed, looting and arson in the recent Kowloon riots.
The initiation ceremony into '14 K' lasts all night and involves the novices in an elaborate ritual handed down through the centuries. The 'Ten Precious Articles', which figure in the initiation, include a red lamp (to distinguish true from false), a red pole (for punishment), a white paper fan (to strike down traitors) and a peach-wood sword (representing a magical blade which has the power to decapitate enemies when merely flourished in the air). Joss-sticks are lighted on an altar before which the aspirants swear thirty-six death-binding oaths and drink from a bowl containing sugar, wine, cinnabar, blood from a beheaded rooster and a drop of blood from the middle finger of the novice’s left hand. After election, the new members hurl their joss-sticks to the floor with the demand that their own lives be similarly extinguished if they break their oaths. There is a picturesque variety of death-penalty methods, ranging from the meticulous 'ten thousand knife cuts' to the imponderable ‘exposure to thunderclaps’. The rivalry, terrorism and intrigues of the different Triads are the explanation for nearly all the mysterious stories of officially motiveless murder and assault in the Hong Kong press. Recently there was unusual co¬operation between the Hong Kong police and the communist authorities following a Triad murder in the colony. An elderly Triad leader was stabbed in the back after a friendly game of mahjong. The killer, from a rival Triad, timed the murder so that he could catch the midnight ferry to Macao. The Hong Kong police vainly pursued the ferry in a motor launch and then alerted the Macao police, but the man managed to cross over into Communist China for sanctuary. Within a week, the communists, having seen the man’s photograph in the Hong Kong press, located him and returned him to Macao, where the murderer committed suicide.
Like the Mafia, Dick explained, the Triad member never squeals and thus, for the running of smuggling channels, the Triads provide an almost limitless army of reliable couriers for the dispersal, through Hong Kong to the rest of the Orient, of the gold bullion quite legally purchased from Dr Lobo. Only a couple of years ago, one of Jardine Matheson's most respectable cargo and passenger ships had been arrested in Calcutta where the police found £200,000 worth of solid gold neatly inset and over-painted by a passenger in the woodwork of a cabin. The gold was on its way into India. Although arrests were made, the highly indignant firm of Jardines (or rather their insurance company) was fined ,¿100,000 by the Indian Government for inadequate protective devices and for acting as a carrier, at however many removes, of smuggled gold. As a result, Jardines have had to organize their own security service to supplement the incredibly active and ingenious Hong Kong Customs and Police Department.
I asked Dick how Dr Lobo, in the face of the Triads, managed to bring his gold bullion into Macao without its being hi¬jacked in transit, and Dick explained about Len Cosgrove and his ancient Catalina amphibian. I was later to meet Len Cosgrove (in Jack Conder's bar, of course) and I was greatly taken with him. He is a Scot, another Hemingway character, generally known as 'Cos', a small, tough, cheerful individual who can stand your hair on end with his stories of authentic derring-do. He was in the R.A.F. during the war and drifted into civil aviation and then into this perilous job of ferrying fortunes in gold bullion from Singapore to Dr Lobo's vaults in Macao, expecting to be cracked on the head by a crew member or shot down by communist planes on each trip. And with these lone jobs, as he explained to me, things could go wrong. An Australian friend of his, also flying a Catalina, had been paid by a Chinese syndicate to fly a huge cargo of opium from Singapore to Macao for onward smuggling into Communist China. At the point of no return from Singapore he had flown into the edge of a monsoon and had had to keep going. With his fuel almost exhausted, he came over the islands to find Macao harbour completely obscured by low cloud. He came down through it and found himself almost on top of one of the neighbouring communist islands with a bad swell running. At this moment one of his engines failed and he decided to ditch, got the angle wrong and buried his nose in the sea. The plane slowly broke up and, as the communist gunboat appeared, he was horrified to see the canisters of raw opium bobbing about in the waves. He and his navigator spent two years in a communist jail, came out, and died of their experiences. Cos was very matter-of-fact about the hazards of his profession, but also understandably tight-lipped - not necessarily because of the secrets he knows, but because, when the last five years of his contract have run out, he wants to write his memoirs. I shall look forward to them.
The next few days in Hong Kong were more respectable than the Macao interlude - golf at the Royal Hong Kong Club a few miles from the communist frontier, where the rattle of Bren-guns at the ranges and the occasional passage of a tank are apt to disturb one's swing, and where the huge cartwheel hats of the Haka women, plucking weeds out of the greens with their finger-nails, form a useful back wall for the topped approach; a morning in Cat Street, the Portobello Road of Hong Kong, where I found no difficulty in rejecting the assorted chinoiserie of ten centuries; dinner one night in an enchanting Sea Palace amidst the myriad sampans that pave the fishing port of Aberdeen; and a final fling on the Hong Kong racecourse from the luxurious fastness of the Jardine box. This must be one of the most splendidly equipped racecourses in the world, with overall closed- circuit television coverage giving instantaneous photographs of the entire race, the latest totalizator (at least £30,000 is bet on each race) and modern moving staircases to each floor. There, with the help of Jardine’s know-how and a place accumulator, I recovered my and the Sunday Times's losses in the gambling hells of Macao.
And then it was time to go, on an evening of brilliant stars, to make the next leap, in Comet G/APDO, over Formosa and Okinawa, to Tokyo.
I have seldom left a town with more regret...
2 1959-1960 (1) Fleming, Ian. Thrilling cities [ID D33902]. (1)
"The Editorial Board of the Sunday Times repeatedly urged me to do something exciting and write about it and, at the end of October 1959, they came up with the idea that I should make a round trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in beautiful, beautiful prose."
HONG KONG
… This was my first morning in Hong Kong and this small paradise was the house of friends, Mr. and Mrs Hugh Barton. Hugh Barton is perhaps the most powerful surviving English taipan (big shot) in the Orient, and he lives in discreet accord-ance with his status as Chairman of Messrs Jardine Matheson, the great Far Eastern trading corporation founded by two energetic Scotsmen one hundred and forty years ago. They say in Hong Kong that power resides in the Jockey Club, Jardine Mathesons, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and Her
Majesty's Government - in that order. Hugh Barton, being a steward of the Jockey Club, Chairman of Jardine's, Deputy Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and a member of the Governor's Legislative Council, has it every way, and when I complained of a mildly stiff neck after my flight it was natural that so powerful a taipan's household should conjure up a comely masseuse before breakfast. That is the right way, but alas how rare, for powerful taipans to operate. When, the night before, I had complimented Mrs Barton for having fixed a supremely theatrical new moon for my arrival, I was not being all that fanciful.
Apart from being the last stronghold of feudal luxury in the world, Hong Kong is the most vivid and exciting city I have ever seen, and I recommend it without reserve to anyone who possesses the fare. It seems to have everything - modern comfort in a theatrically Oriental setting; an equable climate except during the monsoons; beautiful country for walking or riding; all sports, including the finest golf course - the Royal Hong Kong - in the East, the most expensively equipped racecourse, and wonderful skin-diving; exciting flora and fauna, including the celebrated butterflies of Hong Kong; and a cost of living that compares favourably with any other tourist city. Minor attrac¬tions include really good Western and Chinese restaurants, exotic night life, cigarettes at 1s. 3d. for twenty, and heavy Shantung silk suits, shirts, etc., expertly tailored in forty-eight hours.
With these and innumerable other advantages it is, therefore, not surprising that the population of this minute territory is over three million, or one million more than the whole of New Zealand. The fact that six hundred and fifty million communist Chinese are a few miles away across the frontier seems only to add zest to the excitement at all levels of life in the colony and, from the Governor down, if there is an underlying tension, there is certainly no dismay. Obviously China could take Hong Kong by a snap of its giant fingers, but China has shown no signs of wishing to do so, and when the remaining forty years of our lease of the mainland territory expire, I see no reason why a reduced population should not retreat to the islands and the original territory which we hold in perpetuity.
Whatever the future holds, there is no sign that a sinister, doom-fraught count-down is in progress. It is true that the colony every now and then gets the shivers, but when an American bank pulled up stumps during the Quemoy troubles in 1958, there was nothing but mockery. The government pressed on inside the leased territory with the building of the largest hospital in the Orient and with the erection of an average of two schools a month to meet the influx of refugees from China. The private Chinese and European builders also pressed on, and continue to press on today, with the construction of twenty-storey apartment houses for the lower and middle classes. Altogether it is a gay and splendid colony humming with vitality and progress, and pure joy to the senses and spirits.
Apart from my host, my guide, philosopher and friend in Hong Kong, and later in Japan, was 'Our Man in the Orient', Richard Hughes, Far Eastern correspondent of the Sunday Times. He is a giant Australian with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world exemplified by his founding of the Baritsu branch of the Baker Street Irregulars - Baritsu is Japanese for the national code of self-defence which includes judo, and is the only Japanese word known to have been used by Sherlock Holmes.
On my first evening he and I went out on the town.
The streets of Hong Kong are the most enchanting night streets I have trod. Here the advertising agencies are ignorant of the drab fact, known all too well in London and New York, that patterns of black and red and yellow have the most compelling impact on the human eye. Avoiding harsh primary colours, the streets of Hong Kong are evidence that neon lighting need not be hideous, and the crowded Chinese ideograms in pale violet and pink and green with a plentiful use of white are entrancing not only for their colours but also because one does not know what drab messages and exhortations they spell out. The smell of the streets is sea-clean with an occasional exciting dash of sandalwood from a joss-stick factory, frying onions, and the scent of sweet perspiration that underlies Chinese cooking. The girls, thanks to the cheong sams they wear, have a deft and coltish prettiness which sends Western women into paroxysms of envy. The high, rather stiff collar of the cheong sam gives authority and poise to the head and shoulders, and the flirtatious slits from the hem of the dress upwards, as high as the beauty of the leg will allow, demonstrate that the sex appeal of the inside of a woman’s knee has apparently never occurred to Dior or Balmain. No doubt there are fat or dumpy Chinese women in Hong Kong, but I never saw one. Even the men, in their spotless white shirts and dark trousers, seem to have better, fitter figures than we in the West, and the children are a constant enchantment.
We started off our evening at the solidest bar in Hong Kong - the sort of place that Hemingway liked to write about, lined with ships’ badges and other trophies, with, over the bar, a stuffed alligator with an iguana riding on its back. The bar belongs to Jack Conder, a former Shanghai municipal policeman and reputed to have been the best pistol shot there in the old days. His huge fists seem to hold the memory of many a recalcitrant chin. He will not allow women in the bar downstairs on the grounds that real men should be allowed to drink alone. When the Japanese came in 1941, Conder stayed on in Shanghai, was captured and escaped. He took the long walk all the way down China to Chungking, sleeping during daylight hours in grave¬yards, where the ghosts effectively protected him. He is the authentic Hemingway type and he sells solid drinks at reasonable prices. His bar is the meeting place of 'Alcoholics Synonymous' - a group of lesser Hemingway characters, most of them local press correspondents. The initiation ceremony requires the consumption of sixteen San Migs, which is the pro name for the local San Miguel beer - to my taste a very unencouraging brew.
After fortification with Western poisons (I gather that no self- respecting Chinese would think of drinking before dinner, but that the fashion for whisky is invading the Orient almost as fast as it has invaded France) we proceeded to one of the finest Chinese locales, the Peking Restaurant. Dick Hughes, a hard-bitten Orientalogue, was determined that I should become Easternized as soon as possible and he missed no opportunity to achieve the conversion. The Peking Restaurant was bright and clean. We consumed seriatim:
Shark's fin soup with crab, shrimp balls in oil, bamboo shoots with seaweed, chicken and walnuts, with, as a main dish, roast Peking duckling, washed down with mulled wine. Lotus seeds in syrup added a final gracious touch.
Dick insisted that then, and on all future occasions when we were together, I should eat with chopsticks, and I pecked around with these graceful but ridiculous instruments with clumsy enthusiasm. To my surprise the meal, most elegantly presented and served, was in every respect delicious. All the tastes were new and elusive, but I was particularly struck with another aspect of Oriental cuisine - each dish had a quality of gaiety about it, assisted by discreet ornamentation, so that the basically unattractive process of shovelling food into one's mouth achieved, whether one liked it or not, a kind of elegance. And the background to this, and to all my subsequent meals in the East, always had this quality of gaiety - people chattering happily and smiling with pleasure and encouragement. From now on, all the meals I ate in authentic, as opposed to tourist, Chinese or Japanese restaurants were infinitely removed from what, for a lifetime, had been a dull, rather unattractive routine in the sombre eating-mills of the West, where the customer, his neighbours and the waiters seem subtly to resent each other, the fact that they should all be there together, and very often the things they are eating.
Dick Hughes spiced our banquet with the underground and underworld gossip of the colony – the inability of the government to deal drastically with Hong Kong's only real problem, the water shortage. Why didn't they hand it over to private enterprise? The gas and electricity services were splendidly run by the Kadoorie brothers, whose record had been equally honourable in Shanghai. There was a grave shortage of hotels. Why didn't Jardines do something about it? Japanese mistresses were preferable to Chinese girls. If, for one reason or another, you fell out with your Japanese girl, she sould be dignified, philosophical. But the Chinese girl would throw endless hysterical scenes, and probably turn up at your office and complain to your employer. Servants? They were plentiful and wonderful, but too many of the English and American wives had no idea how to treat good servants. They would clap their hands and shout 'Boy!' to cover their lack of self-confidence. This sort of behaviour was out of fashion and brought the Westerner into disrepute. (How often one has heard the same thing said of English wives in other 'coloured' countries!)
The latest public scandal was the massage parlours and the blue cinemas (with colour and sound!) that flourished, particularly across the harbour in Kowloon. The Hong Kong Standard had been trying to clean them up. The details they had published had anyway been good for circulation. He read out from the Standard: 'Erotic dailies circulate freely here. Blue films shown openly. Hong Kong police round up massage girls.' The Standard had given the names and addresses: 'Miss Ten Thousand Fun and Safety at 23 Stanley Street, 2nd floor. Business starting at 9 a.m.... Miss Soft and Warm Village ... Miss Outer Space, and Miss Lotus of Love at 17 Café Apartments, Room 113, ground floor. (Opposite the French Hospital. Room heated)... Miss Chaste and Refined, Flat A, Percival Mansion, 6th floor (lift service). ' And more wonderful names: 'Miss Smooth and Fragrant... Miss Emerald Parsley ... Miss Peach Stream Pool (satisfaction guaranteed), ' and so forth.
The trouble, explained Dick, was partly the traditional desire of Oriental womanhood to please, combined with unem¬ployment and the rising cost of living. Increase in the number of light industries, particularly the textile mills, the bane of Lancashire and America, might help. Would I like to visit the latest textile mill? I said I wouldn't.
It was a natural step from this conversation to proceed from the Peking Restaurant to the world of Suzie Wong.
Richard Mason, with his splendid book The World of Suzie Wong, has done for a modest waterfront hotel what Hemingway did for his very different Harry's Bar in Venice. The book, though, like A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin, read universally by the literate in Hong Kong, is small-mindedly frowned upon, largely I gather because miscegenation with beautiful Chinese girls is understandably an unpopular topic with the great union of British womanhood. But the Suzie Wong myth is in Hong Kong to stay, and Richard Mason would be amused to find how it has gathered depth and detail.
It seems to be fact, for instance, and perhaps the only known fact, that when he was in Hong Kong Richard Mason did live in a waterfront establishment called the Luk Kwok Hotel, transformed in his book into the Nam Kok House of Pleasure, where the painter, Robert Lomax, befriended and, after comic, tender, romantic and finally tragic interludes, married the charming prostitute Suzie Wong.
As a result of the book, the Luk Kwok Hotel, so conveniently placed near the Fleet landing stage and the British Sailors' Home, has boomed. Solitary girls may still not sit unaccom- pained in the spacious bar with its great and many-splendoured juke-box. You must still bring them in from outside, as did Lomax, to prevent the hotel becoming, legally, a disorderly house. But the whole place has been redecorated in deep battle¬ship grey (to remind the sailors of home?) and one of Messrs Collins's posters advertising Richard Mason's book has a place of honour on the main wall. Other signs of prosperity are a huge and hideous near-Braque on another wall, a smart Anglepoise light over the cash register, and a large bowl of Siamese fighting fish. (It is also a sign of fame, of which the proprietor is very proud, that the totally respectable Prime Minister of Laos and his Foreign Minister stayed at the Luk Kwok on a visit to Hong Kong.)
If you inquire after Suzie herself, you are answered with a melancholy shake of the head and the sad, dramatic news that Suzie’s marriage failed and she is now back 'on the pipe'. When you ask where you could find her, it is explained that she will see no other man and waits for Lomax one day to return. She is not in too bad a way, as Lomax sends her regular remittances from London. But there are many other beautiful girls here just as beautiful as Suzie. Would you care to meet one, a very particular friend of Suzie's?
I don't know how much the sailors believe this story, but I suspect they are all quite happy to put up with 'Suzie's friend', and I for one greatly enjoyed exploring the myth that will for ever inhabit the Luk Kwok Hotel with its neon slogans: 'GIRLS, BUT NO OBLIGATION TO BUY DRINKS! CLEAN SURROUND¬INGS ! ENJOY TO THE MAXIMUM AT THE LEAST EXPENSE!'
Dick Hughes misunderstood one author's delighted interest in the brilliance of another author's myth, and protested that there were far better establishments awaiting my patronage. But by now it was late and the after-effects of jet travel - a dull head¬ache and a bronchial breathlessness - had caught up with me, and we ended our evening with a walk along the thronged quays in search of a taxi and home.
On the way I commented on the fact that there is not a single seagull in the whole vast expanse of Hong Kong harbour. Dick waved towards the dense flood of junks and sampans on which families of up to half a dozen spend the whole of their lives, mostly tied up in harbour. There hadn't used to be any seagulls in Shanghai either, he said. Since the communists took over they have come back. The communists have put it about that they had come back because they no longer have to fight with the humans for the harbour refuse. It was probably the same thing in Hong Kong. It would taken an awful lot of seagulls to compete for a living with three million Chinese.
On this downbeat note I closed my first enchanted day…

Cited by (2)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 Universitäts-Bibliothek Basel Publication / UBB
2 2007- Worldcat/OCLC Web / WC