Travellers' ChecksWhen Hong Kong resembled ‘Italian seaport’ and tourists were ‘globe-trotters’

Egerton Knox Laird sailed into Hong Kong just before midnight on June 12, 1873. “When we arrived opposite Victoria Peak the numerous lights of the shipping, and those of the town, which extend far up the side of the mountains, shone out brightly,” he declared, “and added to the fairy-like character of the scene.” Hong Kong in broad daylight was apparently no less beguiling, and worthy of once commonly made Mediterranean comparisons, with many buildings that “undoubtedly remind one of those of Genoa, or one of the Italian seaports”.

Aged 25, Laird was the youngest son of the English shipbuilder John Laird, and was travelling as a tourist – or “globe-trotter” as he titled himself in The Rambles of a Globe Trotter in Australasia, Japan, China, Java, India and Cashmere. Accord­ing to author Amy Miller in her new book, The Globetrotter: Victorian Excursions in India, China and Japan, Laird was the first to use the term. It soon became a popular expression, and globe­trotting became all the rage – a long-haul, up­market extension of the by then over­subscribed and increasingly middle-class European Grand Tour. As soon after as 1877, one of Laird’s contemporaries, Charles Lucas (photography from whose albums appears throughout the book, and who features – cup in hand – on its cover), wrote from Hong Kong that “we have met several pleasant Globe Trotters, but it is a very common occupation now”.

Rather interestingly, although not mentioned in Miller’s book, Laird’s family firm had built Britain’s first ocean-going iron warship, the Nemesis, which was used with devastating effect during the first opium war. Later known as Cammell Laird, then Metro-Cammell, the company supplied the carriages for Hong Kong’s MTR in the 1970s, and for the newly electrified KCR the following decade. You could be reading this while sitting in one.

Royal Caribbean’s Spectrum of the Seas is on course for Hong Kong