Then & Now | How romanising Chinese became politically correct
Hong Cong, Hongkong, Hong Kong ... the spelling distinctions maybe a staple of dinner-party conversation between long-term residents and newcomers but is there more to it than meets the eye?
Any language that requires both transliteration and translation offers standardisation challenges, and China provides numerous examples. Variations in transliteration from Chinese, and a variety of spellings of Hong Kong and the surrounding region, have occurred since the earliest 16th-century European contact. One such example is a commonly reproduced aquatint of the Pok Fu Lam coast: “The Waterfall at Hong Cong”, from the time of the Amherst diplomatic mission to China of 1816.
Hong Kong/Hongkong spelling distinctions are a staple of dinner-party conversation between long-term residents and newcomers.
Typically, old stagers explain away these contradictions in neatly plausible binary terms: Hongkong, written as one word, was deployed for commercial entities, such as Hongkong Electric and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Hong Kong as two words signified an official entity, such as the Hong Kong Government, Hong Kong Police and the Hong Kong Post Office. But until the late 1950s, various interchangeable official and commercial usages remained commonplace.
To aid standardisation, A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories was published in 1960 regularising place names across the colony. Even small villages were noted, with a census-derived population count, sub-ethnic majority where appropriate (such as Cantonese, Hakka, or a mixed population), and the predominant surname found in the village.
Locations recorded in this government gazetteer bear British place names that have long since become obsolete as Chinese names have been called back into everyday usage. Only a detailed comparison with contemporary maps would now indicate the locations of Mount Fowler, The Mendips and other remote peaks in the New Territories.
