You may go to Hong Kong for me : British views of a Chinese colony

Abstract

This thesis is about the place of Hong Kong within British imaginations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The colony was at once idyllic – a model of British virtues and energies – and objectionable – a breeding ground for disease and a shelter for immorality and colonial mediocrity. By examining the circulations of these perceptions from a broad range of visual and rhetorical texts such as newspapers and periodicals, travel writing, novels, exhibition pamphlets, musicals, photographs, postcards, and illustrations, I argue that Hong Kong was a persistent feature of British popular culture. While the colony’s presence may not have been as visible in Britain as other larger dominions were, the study of Hong Kong in British popular culture is a study of cultural margins. It has long been accepted that the British Empire was made to matter at home, and this thesis expands on this idea by considering the place of smaller colonies in the construction of popular imperial culture. How was this Crown Colony imagined as its own place? How was it imagined as part of the British Empire? And how was Hong Kong made to matter to a largely disconnected public? By showing that Hong Kong was far from absent from British imaginations, it becomes clear that the landscape and geography of the island were crucial to how the colony was perceived and communicated to audiences back in Britain. Over the course of a century, these depictions of Hong Kong cemented the idea that this colony was an island in the tropics and a paradise of potential.