The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Colonialism, Power, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank
even have direct access to the corridor that divided the west side from the
east side where the offices of European staff were all located.
Segregation of the compradore is also evidenced in the written and
visual documents kept or produced by the Bank. No names of Chinese employees,
not even the head compradore, appeared in the staff lists. 41 Chinese
staff in Hong Kong were not included in staff photos; it was not until 1928
that the compradore department was photographed—but separately from
the European staff. The first photograph featuring both European and Chinese
staff together was taken in 1935. 42
THE WIDER CONTEXT
While the power structure within the colony is the focus of the above analysis,
it is by no means the only force shaping the built form of the 1886 headquarters.
The power relationship between the core and the periphery
provides a key for understanding other contributing factors. As already
noted, the headquarters site stood at the eastern edge of the European commercial
sector, an area produced by the continuous land reclamation along
the praya in the nineteenth century. Reclamation in Hong Kong has to be
understood in the light of the colonial government’s land policy, which was
driven by the need to offset Britain’s military expenses and to surrender
strategic sites to the military authorities. Most waterfront properties in this
sector were three-story buildings with arched verandahs, a strong rhythm in
facade composition, and an essentially “European” feel evoked by a classical
architectural language. These premises, which fronted the praya in a
straight line with a highly uniform appearance, formed a powerful context
for the headquarters building and provided an architectural vocabulary for
its praya facade.
The 1886 headquarters can be read on a global as well as urban
scale. Since the dominance-dependence relationship within the colony was
sustained by the power of the empire at large, the meaning embedded in the
1886 headquarters cannot be fully decoded without examining the building
in a world context. The headquarters building was not just a symbol of
the client’s financial strength; it was also a manifestation of the Bank’s connection
with the British government, and with the empire as a whole. That
connection made possible a continual increase in profits from 1864, when
the Bank was formed, to 1886, when the headquarters was completed—despite
the political and economic chaos in China and in the region as a whole.
Most of the Bank’s revenue came from loans to China. The Foreign
Office continually supported the Bank’s forwarding of these loans, as the financial
dependence of an indigenous government on a European banker