The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Shirley Wong
the city. 12 The accommodation for Chinese servants was down in the basement,
separated from the European staff’s living quarters. 13
Division within the European staff according to rank and position
was also expressed in the horizontal layout of the plan. There was a close correlation
between depth and seniority: the further one proceeded from the
main entrance at Queen’s Road, the nearer one approached the core of power.
The chief manager’s office was right at the end of the east side of the corridor,
opposite the boardroom. Next door was the office of the submanager,
the second man from the top of the power structure. Adjacent to the submanager’s
office was the correspondents’ room, where the “semi-seniors”
such as the assistant chief accountant and subaccountant worked. This room
was linked by a passage to the east side of the general office in the banking
hall where the European junior clerks were, but it was also separated from
that general office by the strong room. The gap between the junior staff and
the senior staff could not be transgressed, and there was probably no better
way to maintain this gap than by the physical interposition of the strong
room, which was built with walls 2.5 feet thick and equipped with fire- and
burglar-proof doors. 14
Class identity was also reinforced by the interior furnishings. The
marble fireplaces in the bedrooms reminded the European staff of their
newly acquired status and the grandeur that came with it. The electric bells
fitted in all rooms signified the luxurious lifestyle built on the services provided
by an abundant supply of local servants. Finally, there was also a grand
staircase linking the residential quarters and the ground floor, and the very
act of ascending it fostered an elevated self-image.
Another outward sign of class consciousness was the display of
wealth. An extraordinary degree of conspicuous consumption was found
among the expatriate community in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, manifested
particularly in their housing. Victoria, the European commercial sector
of Hong Kong, was called “the city of palaces” in the 1880s because of
its extensive hongs and elegant residences, and Governor William Des Voeux
(1887–1891) pointed out that the city “savoured more of fashion and expenditure”
than any other colony he had seen. 15
The Hongkong Bank headquarters was built in keeping with the
general extravagant style of the city as a whole. The very high specification
of the materials used included granite facing for the whole building and
solid granite columns throughout carved into the Doric, Corinthian, and
Composite orders. Teak also appeared extensively in architraves and paneling.
16 Although granite and teak were widely used in prominent public
buildings in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, here the intricacy of their
decoration and their sheer quantity clearly indicated that cost was not to be