Making an urban wilderness: water and the Technological Imaginary in Hong Kong, 1860-1918

Abstract

Histories of Hong Kong tend to emphasize the colony’s spectacular urban development: from “barren rock” to high-rise metropolis. What is generally ignored in this narrative of untrammelled growth is the extent to which the city’s expansion was intertwined with an equivalent engineering of ‘nature.’ This paper provides a historical perspective on the social processes involved in the co-production of ‘nature’ and the urban environment in Hong Kong, focusing on the construction of the Tai Tam reservoirs from the 1880s to 1918. The paper begins by considering the role of water and its circulation within the colonial imaginary, engaging with recent environmental histories and cultural geographies of empire that have underscored the ways in which the colonial state exerted, consolidated and extended its power through control of the environment. As the city of Victoria expanded, access to – and control of – water were viewed by a colonial elite as crucial to safeguarding the territory’s independence and political sustainability. The lack of fresh water hampered urban development and economic prospects. The paper shows how such anxieties were entangled with other concerns about the perceived degradation of the natural environment by the Chinese. The indiscriminate exploitation of the land by the ‘native’ population was understood to have deleterious health consequences on colonial society, inducing drought and disease. State-sponsored projects – including the building of the reservoirs and a program of concerted afforestation – endeavored to restore the “barren rock” to productivity. The paper argues that a colonial discourse of healthy circulation (fresh water), was inseparable from a counter-discourse of insalubrious circulation: the dispersal of infection from the proliferating urban ‘reservoirs’ of disease in the poor Chinese districts of the expanding city.