'Intolerable nuisance' : seeing, hearing and harm in Hong Kong, 1860-1910

Abstract

In Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nuisance served an important zoning function. Nuisance is a legally actionable annoyance that causes harm or interferes with an individual’s use of their property or the public’s use of common space. Allegations of nuisance, visual and auditory, were wielded by government officials, representatives of the Catholic Church, European residents, and eventually Chinese residents in order to have certain areas purged of people, businesses, and practices considered undesirable. Rhetoric that framed prostitutes and other marginalized women as well as the spaces associated with them as harmful visual nuisance proved useful to government officials and Catholic clergy in a few limited cases. However, the notion of visual nuisance was itself limited and did not have nearly the impact that auditory nuisance did on the regulation of space in the colony. In the later nineteenth century, a discourse emerged among European residents of Hong Kong that cast Europeans as intrinsically quiet and noise averse and Chinese as intrinsically noisy and noise loving. This enabled the passage of legislation (Ordinance 10 of 1872) that created a zone of protected “European” space within which certain noises construed as Chinese were banned. Sound and space were thus racialized and embedded in colonial law as such. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, the sounds of modern work supplanted “Chinese” street noise as Hong Kong’s foremost noise nuisance. The sounds of boiler making, blacksmithing, and engineering work were often louder and more pervasive than the “premodern” noise nuisance of the nineteenth century. It was also plainly the product of Britain’s colonial presence and thus resisted racialization. The government responded to the noisy trade issue by creating a zone, much larger than that created by Ordinance 10 of 1872, within which noisy trades were forbidden to operate without a license issued by the governor. By using an existing mechanism in the Crown Lease to enforce this measure, officials avoided passing new legislation and gave themselves the flexibility to deal with businesses on an individual basis according to their own priorities. However, that flexibility also opened opportunities for Chinese residents and business owners to use the system to their own advantage.