The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Colonialism, Power, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank
selected the winning entry. 4 The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, founded in
1864, was in effect a merger of the banking interests of established agency
houses. Its boardroom was an arena in which taipans from major merchant
houses with a fair share in the China trade got together; ten different firms
were represented in 1882, including all the big names, such as Jardines
Matheson, Peninsular and Oriental, Gilman, Siemssen, David Sassoon and
Sons, and Russell and Company. 5
Class Consciousness
Among the social characteristics of the taipans that had a significant impact
on the headquarters building was class consciousness. Very few Europeans
in nineteenth-century Hong Kong came from a truly upper-class or aristocratic
background. The majority were from the middle or lower middle
classes, but they all enjoyed a social status and a standard of living far beyond
anything they could command at home. 6 For most of the early traders
and civil officers, their time in the East was merely a period of transition and
their ventures in Hong Kong were only a means of moving up the social ladder
back home. With the help of a hierarchy created by the colonial government
and an unlimited supply of Chinese subjects, they detached
themselves from their humble origins and acted out the kind of class position
they aspired to obtain in Britain. 7
One of the outward signs of class consciousness was an emphasis on
rank and position. Those who had gained high social status in the expatriate
community wished to emphasize that they had no connections with
those beneath them. The taipans despised the clerks and shopkeepers who,
in turn, despised the seaman and soldiers. The merchants divided themselves
into “seniors” and “juniors” and, except in business matters, maintained
a wide distance between each other. 8
This concern was expressed through the vertical spatial division in
the 1886 headquarters. Bedrooms on the first floor were allocated for junior
European staff, 9 while those on the second floor were reserved for European
staff with a higher ranking. All top-floor rooms enjoyed unobstructed
views, as this floor was above the roof line of the adjacent buildings; not only
were they “spacious, lofty and well lit,” 10 but some even had views across the
harbor. Views from first-floor bedrooms, by contrast, were obstructed by the
city hall to the east, by the Chartered Bank to the west, and by the dome
over the banking hall to the south. No bedrooms on this floor had a praya
view—only the drawing room and the dining room, 11 which were used by
both the senior and junior European staff.
The hierarchical vertical separation was taken to extreme in the residences
of the managers who lived in separate houses in the Peak district of