Review | Exhibition about history of Hong Kong as a hub of global trade is rich in detail, but too broad in scope
- Hong Kong Maritime Museum exhibition’s 250 objects range from the exquisite to the intriguing, and offers some fascinating nuggets of information
- However, in trying to cram in 6,000 years of history it skimps on context and oversimplifies, and is driven by the narrative that global trade is benign
A new exhibition at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum uses objects to join the dots between different cultures, shedding light on affinities forged not by military dominance but by the circulation of ideas through commerce.
An ancient bronze drum excavated in Guangdong province that may be 1,800 years old, for example, so resembles drums of a similar age, material and design found in Yunnan, in the interior of southwest China, and in parts of Southeast Asia that it links southern China to a so-called “Bronze Drum Culture” shared by communities which traded with each other for millennia.
Of the 250 items included in “Maritime Crossroads: Millennia of Global Trade in Hong Kong”, some are exquisite examples of export wares to the West, others intriguing items that demand close inspection, such as a fragment of a wooden ship dating from China’s Ming dynasty unearthed in Sai Kung, in Hong Kong’ s New Territories.
There are also 19th century carronades, a type of cannon, and much smaller flotsam salvaged from shipwrecks that help bring to life the epic journeys of seamen plying long-distance sea routes and place Hong Kong in the cross-currents of the “Monsoon trade routes” that used to be determined by seasonal trade winds.
There is a fundamental problem with the exhibition, however, and that has to do with its scope. The curators have attempted to condense 6,000 years of history (“from the Neolithic to the Internet era”, according to their description) into one exhibition. And it is not just local history but a grand narrative that attempts to cover the history of trade between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and America.
Such an approach allows for a rich display of artefacts, including a collection of lovely ship models from the Spanish Armada to ancient Arab vessels. But it runs the risk of gross oversimplification, of sanitising contentious histories, and sometimes failing to provide broader historical context.
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For example, a section on the Dutch East India Company (VOC) begins with the fascinating, albeit random fact that Europe-Japan trade started when Chinese smugglers introduced Portuguese merchants to a local leader in Japan. The rest of the description is entirely about traders’ access to Asian ports, with no mention at all of the origins of the VOC or the major role that it played in Dutch colonisation.
There is an abundance of historical detail – for example, about the role Hong Kong played in the coolie trade in contracted Chinese labourers, and about early sailing routes between Hong Kong and the West that includes the fact that of 470 Japanese buried at the Happy Valley cemetery in Hong Kong in the 19th century, many worked for Japanese shipping companies.
However, there is no room for any of these stories – important ones that add nuance to our understanding of grand historical narratives – to breathe, given the narrative running through the exhibition that global trade is a positive force and has always been the lifeblood of Hong Kong. One almost expects to see the logo of Invest Hong Kong, the government agency that facilitates inward investment, among the headlines trumpeting the city’s success. (The headline “Standing on the World Stage: Successful Hong Kong” does appear on one of the text panels.)
Equally disappointing is the way it incorporates the merman myth of Lo Ting; the curators have borrowed a fibreglass sculpture by Jimmy Leung of the fictional half-man, half-fish creature commissioned by curator Oscar Ho Hing-kay for an exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1998, not long after sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to China. Ho had asked local artists to dream up all kinds of stories about Lo Ting – a creature, little more than a side note in an ancient document, that he decided to embellish and turn into a symbol of local identity.
While that exhibition was forthright about using Lo Ting as a metaphor for a city trapped between two major powers and competing ideologies, here it is treated merely as a historical object with no attempt to alert visitors to the divide between fact and fiction.
Still, there is a lot for visitors to immerse themselves in and from which to make historical connections themselves. A particular highlight is a mid-19th century export oil painting attributed to a studio in Canton (present-day Guangzhou). It features Qing dynasty army officers rounding up pirates and their families in a small harbour full of pirate ships (as marked by their black flags), somewhere in southern China.
The museum bought it at a New York auction last month, with its new director, Joost Schokkenbroek, putting in the winning bid.
It is a scene as full of drama as that in a Bruegel painting, and will be compared with similar paintings in the Hong Kong Museum of Art’s extensive collection of export art. We look forward to the outcome of such valuable research, and hope the museum will share it with the public in more tightly focused and rigorous exhibitions in the future.
“Maritime Crossroads: Millennia of Global Trade in Hong Kong”, Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Central Pier No. 8, Central, Mon-Fri, 9:30am-5:30pm, Sat, Sun and public holidays, 10am-7pm. Until Aug 12.
