Then & Now | Why colonial Hong Kong didn’t appeal to literary big hitters

Well-known literary figures seldom stay long in Hong Kong. And given the city’s overween­ing philistinism, why would they?

Those who did remain in the colony for any length of time were, as British novelist W. Somerset Maugham candidly described himself in another context, usually in the first rank of the second rate.

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A passing visit only provides so much material, and much of that – once published – militates against any lengthy return sojourn. Maugham himself found this out the hard way after his Far Eastern short stories were released; lonely planters, administrators and various eccentrics had opened up to him, only to find their personal lives and secret stories repurposed in his fiction, earning him threats of legal action and the cold shoulder on subsequent visits.

Statue Square in Hong Kong’s Central district contains a Victorian effigy of a frock-coated Sir Thomas Jackson, chief manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation for most of the period between 1876 and 1902. Nineteenth-century Far Eastern finance aside, Jackson and his ilk inadvertently played an important role in shaping 20th-century literary history as – by negative example – they impelled British author P.G. Wodehouse on his literary career.

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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse – known throughout his life as Plum, and profession­ally as P.G. Wodehouse – was the son of Ernest Wodehouse, a late-19th-century Hong Kong magistrate. The author’s eldest brother, Philip Peveril, was reportedly the first European child born on The Peak, in 1877; his name came from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Peveril of The Peak (1823).

He joined the local police force and eventually became, in the tart words of one of Plum’s many biographers, a “stereotypical colonial blimp”; he retired to England, where he died in 1951.