Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, souvenirs, personal projects.
-| September 2022 |-
EXCERPT
“The German presence in occupied Hong Kong wasn’t entirely negligible. Germans observed during the actual course of the fighting included an officer and a civilian wearing a swastika emblem on his lapel. Both apparently made some attempt to intercede with the Japanese forces on behalf of their fellow Europeans. Shortly after the takeover, on December 30 1941, a number of German officers with nazi armbands are said to have watched the allied POWs being herded into captivity. One Indian eye-witness reported, ‘I have noticed many German advisers and I understand that the Germans are in charge of artillery operations’. At one point in the early months of the Occupation a German gestapo man in Hong Kong was said to have commented ‘that the Japanese would never have got where they were if it had not been for the Germans’. The Defag Co., a subsidiary of the industrial giant I.G. Farben, was observed to have entered along with the Japanese. [I.G. Farben, the parent company of Bayer, manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust.] Civilian visitors in the following year included Dr Erich Kordt, the German chargé d’affaires in Nanking.”
At the beginning of the second week of the war [January 1942], the controller of land transport issued a notice in the Gazette Extraordinary stopping all private motoring and limiting the sale of gasoline to certain designated pumps where officers of the Transport Service checked on all persons desiring to buy it. Nearly all the privatley owned cars and trucks in the Colony had been requisitioned much earlier in the conflict; but this order stopped what remained of private traffic. The buses had been requisitioned, and the streetcar service, which for days had run only dawn to dusk, was now indefinitely suspended.
Shop fronts throughout the business district were boarded over; such business as was done being, wutg a few exceptions, carried on through little peepholes or half-sized doors in the baording. Everywhere glass store fronts and window panes were criss-crosed with pasted slips of paper to prevent them from shattering with the constant reverberations of shellfire and the continual thudding of exploding bombs or shells.
The streets were sprayed with a rubble of plaster and bricks and were in some places piled so high with debris as to be impassable. Many houses and buildings, particularly those of the older type of construction, were pulverized. The unremitting shelling made whole blocks uninhabitable even in areas where the actual damage was relatively lighter. As the hostilities progressed, more and more of the mid-level and Peak dwellings were literally blown off the side of the hill – among them the residence of the American consul-general, whose home was totally wrecked.
In 1938, legislation to abolish the mui-tsai system was signed into law, and Phyllis Harrop was appointed assistant secretary for Chinese affairs. When Phyllis answered the ad in 1937, she thought that she was being hired as a secretary. She had gone to Shanghai from England in 1929 to see the world. There she worked as a secretary until an ill-fated marriage to a German baron in 1934. Leaving him, she worked in Japanese-dominated Manchuria and had some contact with the world of the secret service. Now, in Hong Kong, she was given an assignment to protect young girls.
One raid that Phyllis had conducted in person had discovered seventeen transferred girls who were about to be shipped abroad. Phyllis set about preparing herself for her real job, becoming as soon as possible proficient in Cantonese and the relevant laws of Hong Kong. She built up a staff of Chinese women not afraid to work hard, and two police inspectors and a sergeant were seconded to her. As well as that team there were about one hundred Chinese detectives. It was not easy. The police department, instructed to refer to her all cases concerning women and childrn or family affairs, objected to having to deal with a woman. She found that notice of a forthcoming raid on a “sly brothel” (i.e. illegal) was leaking out so that any evidence of law-brekaking had disappeared by the time the police arrived.
Subsequently she made a practice of going on raids and was seen as quite a character, as well as a friend, among the Chinese. Phyllis took her work seriously but she did not take herself seriously, laughingly describing her job as “protecting wayward girls”. Phyllis gives her formal title in “Hong Kong Incident” (1942) as “nui wa man dai yan”. It meant, literally and inaccurately, the lady secretary for Chinese affairs’. But it meant colloquially “big lady”
☰ heaven
☱ lake
☲ fire
☳ thunder
☴ wind
☵ water
☶ mountain
☷ earth
MENU
‘Rebecca’ (1940) •
c.1960 •
‘Rich and Strange’ (1931) •
c.1954 Cliff House •
c.1929 Steamer •
c.1968 Children’s Menu •
San Francisco magazine food writer Jack Shelton, “I would no sooner serve a great portion of this delicacy than I would fresh caviar.”
| In 1990, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors honored baker and owner of Stella Pastry in North Beach, Franco Santucci, as the best baker in the world.
| His prized creation is the Sacripantina, born long ago and in Genoa, where a feast was given by a king in which a dessert was to be the centerpiece. | Conceived by the queen, it stunned the assembled when they tasted this confection of “cream, air and magic”, conjured w/ Almond Powder, Butter Cake, Cream Frosting, Meringue, Simple Syrup, and Zabaglione.
| Here is a similar
recipe to a treasured North Beach treat.
Tata Innovation Center on Roosevelt Island, designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architecture.
Sitting on the East River in New York is a cigarette-shaped island, two miles long and under a quarter-mile wide. Known then as Mason’s Island, it was a yellowed blade of neglected farms. Today, the island has a new name, where a five-acre plot is home to Cornell Tech Campus, sitting among restored woods and wetlands.
± New Zealand
Ringed by extinct volcanoes, Auckland looks east over Hauraki Gulf to the horizon. + Billboard on the way to the airport.
Located in the North Island of New Zealand, home to the largest Polynesian population in the world, and where the Symonds St Cemetery gives context to when this port-of-call was a ‘fledging colonial country’.
± Brazil
National Museum of Brazil vanishing. +Luzia’ is twelve thousand years old. She is the oldest person in South America, and now has lost 20% of her skull.
A fire on September 2 2018 gutted the National Museum of Brazil, turning a million art objects into ash and smoke. Gone are collections on paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, and indigenous Brazilian ethnology. Disappeared is a wing devoted to ancient Egypt, including a throne room.
Mostly intact is the second largest space rock on Earth. The Bendegó meteorite was discovered in 1784 by a boy in Monte Santo, Bahia. ... Watch a 38-min. documentary from 2019 of the retrieval phase; in Brazilian-Portuguese.
± Western Australia
Aerial view of the coast to Western Australia. + 2016 Super Moon over Perth. + Geode from Mammoth Cave, a 1,600-ft wide by 98-ft deep limestone cavern.
Yagan Square honors the fourteen Noongar language peoples of Western Australia. + Repurposed building in William St downtown, detail of original façade with a modern topping. + Plaque for J. Crothers Perth, constructing Western Australia since 1896.
Spanda, a carbon fiber sculpture by Christian de Vietri, can be seen at Elisabeth Quay on the Swan River.
± Reno
Vintage hot rod cruises N. Virginia St. + St Francis Hotel (1925) used to be where visitors roomed while seeking a divorce.
The city of Reno in Nevada came into being around 1852 by western-bound settlers chose a spot along the Truckee River, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Then, when nearby Virginia City struck silver, someone built a toll bridge across the Truckee River. This new route allowed for an easier to and from the California Trail, and the spot became known as Lake’s Crossing. The First Transcontinental Railroad would make Reno a depot, and the Lincoln Highway system connected the city via automobile with the rest of the United States.
Reno is now a city of casinos. Watch six minutes of 1953 in color, featuring neon signs, one-armed bandits, and Harold’s Club and the Ship Bar, when the Nevada state speed limit was 25mph.
± Four Corners
Spanning the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii ‘valley of the rocks’ is home to Navajo people. Monument Valley is also non-federal territory and a park, where sandstone formations ‘rise into the air’. The entrance by way of Utah, on U.S. Highway 163.
± Great Barrier Reef
Pages from ‘The Great Barrier Reef of Australia’ (1893) by William Saville-Kent.
Found in the Coral Sea off Queensland on the north-east coast of Australia, part of indigenous spirituality, a built structure, the largest one in the world made by living organisms, this World Heritage site comprises some 900 islands and 2,900+ individual reefs.
± Osaka
The Sun descends over an 18th-c. roadway to give way to 21st-c. Osaka night, a jumbo colony of joined cities, the ‘kitchen of Japan’, where nineteen million people call home. The ‘megalopolis of water’ has an underground city of arcades, cafés, and people movers to get around.
± Paris
The last mass of the day was in session when a fire alarm went off. It was Monday during Holy Week 2019; and mass resumed when nothing was found. Thirty minutes later a second fire alarm went off: the attic was on fire. Soon the roof of the world’s most famous cathedral, built between 1163-1345, was burning. The spire then snapped and collapsed into the inferno. Response arrived, just ‘fifteen to thirty minutes’ away from the complete destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral.
An onsite journalist witnessed Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain to the Paris Fire Brigade, running into the burning church and saving the Crown of Thorns. Bought by Louis IX in 1239, and believed to be the one worn by Jesus Christ.
+ (excerpt) ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ (1831) by Victor Hugo. ❝He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him—he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.❞
An 1859 model, made for architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, of the spire sitting on the wooden-beamed roof, known to habitués as the ‘forest’.
± Prague
The construction of Charles Bridge in 14th-c. Prague took up 45 years. Built of stone, this span over the Vitava River became, until 1841, the only ‘solid-land’ trade route between eastern and western Europe.
± PNG
Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, looks southeast over the Gulf of Papua to the Coral Sea.
Motuans were the original people. To trade with others in the Gulf of Papua, expeditions of up to 600-men would embark on sea voyages.
+ (excerpt) In his autobiography ‘My Wicked, Wicked Ways’ (1959), actor Errol Flynn describes sailing to Port Moresby in 1930: ❝We piloted our ship into the rather fine harbor of Port Moresby. We arrived during the rainy season and the whole area was brilliant green. The region seemed beautiful to me and I poked around searching its resources. About thirty miles from the port the Laloki River flowed through an emerald countryside. I fell in love with it. My partners made their way back to Australia, but I decided to settle there. ... Around me, from Laloki to Port Moresby, was a territory plentiful with nutmeg, rattan cane, the okari nut, bananas, mangrove, coconuts, and sandalwood. There was fish in the river, and the natives brought food to my door. For a pence or two I could have the fruit of the region.❞
The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking regimen – the bitter made palatable with sugar and milk or lemon – calmed a nation’s nerves.
That morning
I heard water
being poured into
a teapot. The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound. But all at once, I knew you loved me. An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.
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A steadfastness in dutiful habiting in all matters related to tea is a core requirement of Britishness, and in 2013 the standard came up for a review: “... the official specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially ‘under review’”. Something the British Standards Institution performs as part of a “systematic periodic review”. The standards are “devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them”, and copies were obtainable free of charge.
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When his desk phone rang, one day in November 2015, the Middleton policeman picked it up and spoke with a man who requested police to come by. Officer Andy Richardson took down the address, drove over with a colleague, ended up staying for tea. He tweeted: “Just dealt with a 95-year-old couple, called and said they were lonely. What else could we do? We’ve got to look after people as well. It’s not just fighting crime, it’s protecting people in whatever situation they find themselves.” Fred Thompson, the elderly man from Manchester, England, who made the call: “You feel somebody cares and oh that does matter ... simple things they talk about, nothing very special but they showed that they cared by being there and talking to you.”
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She: (looking at water) It’s hot! ...
He: Can I be of any assistance?
She: Oh no. Men are so helpless in the kitchen. (she picks up kettle, proceeds to pour into teapot.)
He: Oh no. Always bring pot to the kettle, never bring the kettle to the pot.
She: Well listen I’ve been making tea for longer than I can remember–
He: Don’t let’s get into difficulties about this. But you must listen to an Englishman about tea. When making tea, always bring the pot to the kettle and never the kettle to the pot.
She: Oh, your knowledge is surprising.
He: Don’t see why you should say surprising. The best cooks have always been men. I myself have pronounced views on the preparations and servings of food.
❝The popularity of tea in England ... was due to a Portuguese infante, Queen Catherine, whose predilection for that beverage rendered it fashionable. In an ode to her, Waller sings: The best of queens and best of herbs we owe / To that bold nation who the way did show / To the fair region where the sun doth rise, / Whose rich productions we so justly prize.❞
Historic Macao by C. A. Montalto de Jesus 1984. Oxford University Press.
She: Have you?
He: Oh yes.
She: You know something nice that would go with tea?
He: Eh yes, yes. The ingredients are quite simple. Do you have a little flour?
She: Oh would you?
He: Flour, butter, milk and salt.
She: Oh you seem so at home in the kitchen.
He: Ah it would be difficult to describe the intense satisfaction that I’ve always derived from cooking.
•
+
Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of eleven different “golden” rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese, i.e., Sri Lankan tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice. If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.” This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. It’s not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste. And do not put the milk in the cup first – family feuds have lasted generations over this – because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed – how often those attributes seem to go together – teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary. •
+
Morrissey: I absolutely never get sick of drinking tea. It’s a psychological thing really, it’s just very composing and makes me relax. It’s just so much ... Oh yes, yes, I’m very avid, I have to have at least four pots a day.
For those of us who don’t know how to make a pot of tea, what do you do?
M: [mumbles]
Well I would do that without even thinking about it.
M: Right and also you have to use real milk you can’t use the UHT fake stuff, you have to use proper milk. ... Well you really have to put the milk in first which many people don’t.
Put the milk in with the water, before you boil the water?
M: No, you’re confused already no, you put the milk in before you pour the water in or the tea, whichever.
Okay, so what about the actual brewing of the tea?
M: The brewing of the tea, it’s very important that you heat the pot before you put the water in, if you use a pot. I know most people who just throw a teabag into a cup but in England of course you have to make a pot of tea and you have to heat the pot first with hot water and then put the teabags in – I can’t believe I’m saying this – and then put the hot water in and then just throw it all over yourself, rush to Out Patients and write a really good song.
•
1883
Waglan Island, on the eastern entrance into Hongkong harbor, plays host to a meteorological station, a saluting battery, and a lighthouse. These are navigational aids for guidance through a channel into a well-lit harbor “singularly free from submerged dangers.”
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1920
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Opening on New Year’s Day 1920, greeting guests from the Central District on a newly built road over the mountain, the “old lady on the Riviera of the East” could offer comfort already on “a well-made road, leading to the main steps, in front of which is a miniature Italian garden, artistically laid out and provided with a fountain.”
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From the main steps guests reach a spacious balcony which runs the entire length of the facade. There is a 3,500 sq-ft hall with its own verandah. Each bedroom measures twenty-foot square, and comes with its own white-glaze tiled bathroom featuring hot and cold water.
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Located on the Island side facing the sea, this “hotel without its like in the East” provided living quarters in the back for staff, and was originally conceived as a self-contained “pleasure resort.” During the war it was used by the Occupation, partly as a hospital, partly as a recuperation center.
c.1912 +
+
The first distributor of the Model T by Henry Ford in Hongkong was Alex Ross & Co., with headquarters in Prince’s Building, Central District.
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Maintenance happened in the garage on Salisbury Rd in Kowloon, next to Star Ferry and the Kowloon Canton Railway terminus. Vehicles on offer were capable of 25 miles to the gallon and could be ordered in any colour as long as it was “blue or grey.”
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The typhoon of August 20 1927 damaged the garage, which had at the time twenty motor cars and six motor cycles.
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1920s
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In the beginning, there were very few movie houses wired for sound. The Majestic (1928) on Nathan Rd was one of the first, and their New Year’s offering for 1930 was technicolor Hollywood musical Paris, now a lost film. The Peninsula Hotel hosted casual tea dances by day and formal balls by night.
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Monthly magazine published by the Peninsula Hotel’s parent company, Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd.
(1886- )
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The Dairy Farm, Ice & Cold Storage Co., Ltd. was founded by Dr Patrick Manson with a herd of eighty cows. By the mid 20th century, there were 1,600 tuberculosis-free dairy cattle, chicken farms, and piggeries offered for retail using modern butchery methods. In addition to dairy and provision stores, Dairy Farm operated twelve soda fountains and restaurants. Cold storage facilities could handle imported refrigerated meats, game and poultry, quick frozen foods, canned, bottled and packaged goods, and dairy products of every variety.
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(1927- )
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In 1921, the people running the Hong Kong Hotel were approached by the government to build a hotel on the tip of Kowloon. On opening day in 1927, it was promptly requisitioned as temporary accommodation for British troops. The following year it was handed back to the owners, and a new opening date of December 11 1928 was announced, bringing local sheiks and flappers to its ballroom dance floor. During the Occupation, the hotel became headquarters for Lieut. Gen. Rensuke Isogai, who renamed it the Toa Hotel. After the war, the owners took it back, only to have it be requisitioned a second time for allied civil servants and ex-POWs. The Peninsula reopened again in 1946, resuming a tradition of supplying “hot” rhythm for the bright young people.
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Matchbox cover issued to officers during the Occupation, who had a right to use the facilities at the Peninsula Hotel, headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces.
(1850- )
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More ancient than Harrods, Lane Crawford Department Store was founded by one Thomas Ash Lane, formerly a butler in the East India Co. factory at Canton, who went to Hongkong in the early 1840s and, together with Ninian (Norman) Crawford, went into business carrying goods. They opened their doors in 1846.
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(1868-1952)
Hong Kong Hotel, Queen’s Rd at Pedder St, is the first world-class hospitality house in Hongkong, where management has provided a special launch to meet ship passengers and ferry them to the hotel’s pier. A six-storey north wing facing the waterfront opened in 1893, but was consumed in a fire in 1926.
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(1892-1951)
Beginning around 1892, entrepreneural brothers Sam and Marcus Samuel began to ship kerosene in bulk to China, where they found a ready market. Then partnering with Royal Dutch Petroleum for a joint venture, they became Asiatic Petroleum Co. Today it is whatever Shell Oil’s latest brandname is called.
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The end of Pedder St runs into the Asiatic Petroleum Co. building, where a clock tower once stood. On the right (not shown) is Jardine’s headquarters. On the left (also not shown) is the Hong Kong Hotel, making the two-block long Pedder St the “financial district of Hongkong, China.”
Golden Triangle
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A twenty-mile wide gulf in South China is home to Canton, Macao and Hongkong. The river flowing into it is short, being a coastal convergence where three other rivers meet. Banks were once lined with banana and sugar-cane groves, with orange trees and rice paddies.
European sailors came and before long had given a name to where the delta begins and the river ends: Bocca Tigris, mouth of the tiger, to denote the dangers going upriver.
Halfway to Canton was an island, and where a warehouse with a wharf was situated. Business was conducted in Canton, where a stretch by the Pearl River was turned into an on-site compound for European and American companies, in the business of making trade here, in the golden triangle of China.
South China Sea +
More than two hundred species of fish call the Pearl River Delta home. Bream, herring and dace. Anguilla Marmorata and ratmouth barbell. The mandarin, the bighead and four varieties of carp – silver, grass, golden, common.
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SACRED SPACE Konohanasakuya-hime, the shinto spirit of Fujisan, is a volcano goddess, and presiding deity for the prevention of fires.
Fujisan
Taking on its iconic form some five thousand years ago, becoming the locus for ascetic buddhism of the shinto school (because blessed by superb symmetry?), Mt Fuji stands alone in the center of Japan, and has inspired artists for many centuries. Recognized as a “sacred space”, in 2013 Mt Fuji became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Each item, unto the crest of a wave, in cosmological Japan is imbued with its own kami “spirit”. The kami of Mt Fuji is a princess, her name is Konohana-sokuahime.
Mt Fuji, in shinto cosmology, is occupied by a kami “spirit”. The Japanese have imbued the world, unto a blade of grass, each with its own kami. Princess Konohanasakuya-hime is the kami of Fujisan, present wherever cherry blossoms are found on Mt Fuji: Fujisan-konohana-sokuahime “Fuji causing the blossom to brightly bloom”. The fujiko branch of shinto adds to the mountain a soul, endowing it with existence. Meanwhile, buddhists regard the volcano as a gateway to another world. The summit is ringed with eight peaks, and a hike to visit all of them can take about half a day.
While her husband Astraeus “dawn wind” teases primeval goddess Nyx “night” to leave the Sky, winged dawn goddess Eos “aurora” arrives in her twin-horse chariot to announce the advent of the Sun over Mt Fuji.
Hiking to the summit to greet the morning Sun is a common occurrence, and for as long as anyone can remember, there is and always has been, a choice of only four trails leading to the top. There is a term, as in “My goraiko was obscured by clouds and rain blotted out the horizon”. For lucky ones, though, the alpine sight of morning peeking over the horizon, the departure of night, can trigger a palpable shift, “something we all know happens regular, see but not see ...”
–
goraiko, shinto speak.
A macabre fourteen square mile pine forest at the base of Mt Fuji, where it is dark on the ground and light at the top.
There is an immense pine forest, a lethal leafy labyrinth, ringing the north-west base of Mt Fuji. Aokiga-hara-jukai “the sea of trees” is alarmingly dark during daytime, and likened to a walk on the sea bottom. The forest floor still and silent, the treetops swaying and musical – leaves playing with wind and sunlight. Thought to be haunted, the forest is a suicide destination spot.
The village of Yoshida resides on the slopes of Mt Fuji, and plays host to an annual two-day fire festival, in honor of Kamuy-huci, the kami of fire.
The shinto embodiment of fire, hearth goddess Kamuy-huci, visits Mt Fuji once a year, wearing buddhist beads for a powwow with the kami of Fujisan. They meet at a trail stop on the way to the summit, in the village of Yoshida, rife with rustic rumors of interesting insights into a psychoanalysis of fire. Yoshida hosts an annual autumn fire festival, which is over and done with in one night and following day, involving practises to conclude the climbing season, and there is festival footage.
Mt Fuji has starred in numerous scifi scenarios, featuring hybrids as well as mutated Japanese beings born after the Second World War.
As a stand-in for the future-perfect landmark, Mt Fuji has has been featured in numerous scifi movies and TV shows. The mountain top has served as a staging ground for countless mutants born after the Second World War, beginning with Godzilla the fire-breathing giant lizard. Ready to fight and best them are supermen and superwomen in battle-suits, or else heroic beings from other planets, time travelers, as well as a legion of cyborgs and robots. The first to show up was Golden Bat aka Phantaman, who was sent forward in time to the year 1930 by Atlantis science. A few were born with fire powers: siblings Shiro and Leyu Yoshida; buddhist Izumi Yasunari. Tetsuo Shima (Akira) came to light in 1988, harboring the seeds of destructive psychic powers, while Iron Man (aka Tetsuo) was an 1989 cyborg with a tragic sex life.
The top image shows Mt Fuji in 2019, aboard the International Space Station.
Fujisan is a relatively young and active volcano, sixty-two miles south-west of Tokyo. It sits on a slab of rock at the “triple junction” position, radiating tectonically down towards the Filipino Plate, west towards the Eurasian Plate, and east to meet with the North American Plate – the Okhotsk. There have been twenty-one recorded eruptions, the last was an 8.4 on October 26, 1707, destroying seventy-two houses and three buddhist temples; powerful enough to blow a scoop out at the tip, forming a new crater on the eastern flank. A meteorological reading, from February 4, 2013, is typical of current times:
The volcano remains calm. However, an increased number of small quakes near and under Mt Fuji are visible on our latest data plot of nearby earthquakes (within 30 km radius). While all of these are very small and the number is certainly not alarming, the volcano remains interesting to watch. ...
“The German presence in occupied Hong Kong wasn’t entirely negligible. Germans observed during the actual course of the fighting included an officer and a civilian wearing a swastika emblem on his lapel. Both apparently made some attempt to intercede with the Japanese forces on behalf of their fellow Europeans. Shortly after the takeover, on December 30 1941, a number of German officers with nazi armbands are said to have watched the allied POWs being herded into captivity. One Indian eye-witness reported, ‘I have noticed many German advisers and I understand that the Germans are in charge of artillery operations’. At one point in the early months of the Occupation a German gestapo man in Hong Kong was said to have commented ‘that the Japanese would never have got where they were if it had not been for the Germans’. The Defag Co., a subsidiary of the industrial giant I.G. Farben, was observed to have entered along with the Japanese. [I.G. Farben, the parent company of Bayer, manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust.] Civilian visitors in the following year included Dr Erich Kordt, the German chargé d’affaires in Nanking.”
At the beginning of the second week of the war [January 1942], the controller of land transport issued a notice in the Gazette Extraordinary stopping all private motoring and limiting the sale of gasoline to certain designated pumps where officers of the Transport Service checked on all persons desiring to buy it. Nearly all the privatley owned cars and trucks in the Colony had been requisitioned much earlier in the conflict; but this order stopped what remained of private traffic. The buses had been requisitioned, and the streetcar service, which for days had run only dawn to dusk, was now indefinitely suspended.
Shop fronts throughout the business district were boarded over; such business as was done being, wutg a few exceptions, carried on through little peepholes or half-sized doors in the baording. Everywhere glass store fronts and window panes were criss-crosed with pasted slips of paper to prevent them from shattering with the constant reverberations of shellfire and the continual thudding of exploding bombs or shells.
The streets were sprayed with a rubble of plaster and bricks and were in some places piled so high with debris as to be impassable. Many houses and buildings, particularly those of the older type of construction, were pulverized. The unremitting shelling made whole blocks uninhabitable even in areas where the actual damage was relatively lighter. As the hostilities progressed, more and more of the mid-level and Peak dwellings were literally blown off the side of the hill – among them the residence of the American consul-general, whose home was totally wrecked.
In 1938, legislation to abolish the mui-tsai system was signed into law, and Phyllis Harrop was appointed assistant secretary for Chinese affairs. When Phyllis answered the ad in 1937, she thought that she was being hired as a secretary. She had gone to Shanghai from England in 1929 to see the world. There she worked as a secretary until an ill-fated marriage to a German baron in 1934. Leaving him, she worked in Japanese-dominated Manchuria and had some contact with the world of the secret service. Now, in Hong Kong, she was given an assignment to protect young girls.
One raid that Phyllis had conducted in person had discovered seventeen transferred girls who were about to be shipped abroad. Phyllis set about preparing herself for her real job, becoming as soon as possible proficient in Cantonese and the relevant laws of Hong Kong. She built up a staff of Chinese women not afraid to work hard, and two police inspectors and a sergeant were seconded to her. As well as that team there were about one hundred Chinese detectives. It was not easy. The police department, instructed to refer to her all cases concerning women and childrn or family affairs, objected to having to deal with a woman. She found that notice of a forthcoming raid on a “sly brothel” (i.e. illegal) was leaking out so that any evidence of law-brekaking had disappeared by the time the police arrived.
Subsequently she made a practice of going on raids and was seen as quite a character, as well as a friend, among the Chinese. Phyllis took her work seriously but she did not take herself seriously, laughingly describing her job as “protecting wayward girls”. Phyllis gives her formal title in “Hong Kong Incident” (1942) as “nui wa man dai yan”. It meant, literally and inaccurately, the lady secretary for Chinese affairs’. But it meant colloquially “big lady”
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Hongkong was founded as a British colony in China, “neither a settlement nor an acquisition of natural resources,” but to trade in the Far East. Government was to serve the interests of merchants, and the first to make use of the opportunity was Jardine Matheson & Co. Followed soon enough by Dent & Co., Lindsay & Co., Dodwell & Co., and John D. Hutchison. There was also a cargo-&-passenger shipping company, Butterfield & Swire, which had an office in Shanghai, opened in 1866. Now they came to Hongkong, began to diversify, went into the sugar refining trade. Then the partnership with Richard Shackleton Butterfield was severed, and the firm’s remaining two partners, brothers John Samuel and William Hudson, rebranded the company as Swire’s. After the Second World War, they opened up an aircraft repair shop at Kai Tek Airport, as a springboard into the emerging commercial airline field.
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Lion Rock has watched over the rehabilitation of Hongkong’s original aerodome to become an international airport, now is keeping a safe distance as the Pacific Air Maintenance and Supply Co., is conducting a test.
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1899 photograph of the sugar refinery works located dockside, between Hongkong Island and Lamma Island, and facing the South China Sea.
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(1828- )
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Figurehead recovered from a wreckage at sea belonging to Jardine Matheson & Co.
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In 1828, Scotsmen and “country merchants” William Jardine and James Matheson became partners, buying Malwa opium in Bombay from a Parsee merchant named Framjee Cowasjee to sell in Canton. Organized and efficient, they soon controlled approximately one-third of foreign trade with China, most of it in opium.
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The men who worked Jardines Matheson were expected to be disciplined sailors, yet like all Europeans would have been familiar with a bar room drink of alcohol, tobacco juice, sugar and arsenic called a “canton gunpowder.”
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Here is James Matheson’s verdict for one of his ship masters: “The Gazette was unnecessarily delayed at Hongkong in consequence of Captain Crocker’s repugnance to receiving opium on the Sabbath. We have every respect for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited for the drug trade.”
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This is William Jardine’s recruitment letter to a European missionary who can speak Chinese: “We have no hesitation in stating to you that our principal reliance is on opium. Though it is our earnest wish that you should not in any way hinder the grand object you have in view [distributing the Bible translated into Chinese], by appearing interested in what by many is considered an immoral traffic; yet such traffic is so absolutely necessary to give any vessel a reasonable chance of defraying her expenses that we trust you will have no objection to interpret on every occasion when your services may be requested.”
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By 1868, William Jardine was very wealthy, and had built himself a landscaped home.
❝The popularity of tea in England ... was due to a Portuguese infante, Queen Catherine, whose predilection for that beverage rendered it fashionable. In an ode to her, Waller sings: The best of queens and best of herbs we owe / To that bold nation who the way did show / To the fair region where the sun doth rise, / Whose rich productions we so justly prize.❞
Historic Macao by C. A. Montalto de Jesus 1984. Oxford University Press.
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