Birth of a Newspaper
Readers who think they live in interesting times should try imagining what Hong Kong and China were like a century ago. Asia's freest port was still very much in the ascendancy as the world's gateway to the Middle Kingdom; fortunes were being won and lost by the shipload, luring treasure-hunters of every stripe to its shores.
The 'barren rock' government, barely 60 years old, was having to grapple with the social effects of all this runaway commercial success, and although some of the major business groups, or 'hongs', were already well established, the city's establishment was still in the making. Society hummed with opinion on how best to develop a vibrant multinational community.
Much of this opinion was not very constructive. Indeed, critics of the government made their counterparts today seem polite. Newspapers were scathing of governors' policies, and often of their character, too. Editors were routinely jailed for libel. And when they weren't having problems with the law, they were being set upon - sometimes physically - by members of interest groups claiming to have been smeared.
China, meanwhile, was nearing the end of the Qing dynasty's rule and newspapers up and down the coast were speculating about the rise of republicanism. Change was not just in the air, it was hitting the street faster than many could comprehend. The censors of the day were powerless to regulate the international communities in China's so-called treaty ports, western enclaves where Chinese jurisdiction didn't apply, and English newspapers proliferated. There was no television or radio, and the wireless telegraph had only just been invented in Europe. Newspapers had to compete with the rumour mill, and those that could not beat it joined it.
Into this environment stepped the South China Morning Post, on November 6, 1903. Hong Kong had already seen the demise of The Friend of China (established 1842). No friend to the leadership of Hong Kong, it had once famously described the first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, as a 'man who appears either to have been utterly devoid of the sense of the moral obligations imposed on him ... or deliberately living in seclusion among a few adoring parasites whose limited intellects were devoted to pandering to the great man's vanity'.