HSBC: The Shanghai Connection - by Kit Villiers

As promised a couple of weeks back, here is a little background on how 'Shanghai' got into the title of what is now Britain's biggest bank.

You'll recall that the full name of HSBC is the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. The Hong Kong bit is clear enough: Hong Kong was a British colony from 1841 to 1997, and its main bank, almost a central bank, was (and still is) the Hong Kong Bank, or simply 'The Bank' for those that live there. As Jeremy Paxman pointed out in his 'Empire' series, the Bank's history has not always been totally untainted, the colony's early days being mixed up with the Opium Wars and other dark deals in which the Bank was doubtless inevitably intertwined....

But Shanghai? China was never anybody's colony: but for a large part of the 19th century it got pushed around by the European powers and might as well have been. In particular the Europeans forced concessions on China, the most obvious being the occupation of large parts of two of its main trading cities of Canton (near Hong Kong) and Shanghai, China's largest city. Even today one can see remnants of the old 'French concession', while the waterfront still has the old warehouses and offices of what were chiefly British interests.

In Hong Kong the Bank has rehoused itself in a modern skyscraper, but in Shanghai the buildings on the waterfront, the 'Bund', are in a kind of time warp; when I visited a couple of years back, I was told that the old (joint, with Hong Kong) HSBC head office was an exact replica of the building in Hong Kong. I did eventually find it, but I think it must be several generations older than its counterpart as I didn't recognise it at first at all. It looked pretty forlorn, and in fact the whole of the Bund is now overshadowed by the ultra modern developments in Pudong, on the other side of the river. Perhaps the Chinese want to show how much better they do things than the old European traders did in olden (i.e. pre-Communist) times.

I could well imagine that pre-1949 the Shanghai branch must have been as important as the Hong Kong one, but of course business nose-dived when the Mao regime took power and capitalism was discredited. But the powers that be in the Bank (mostly Scots, I believe) have always hankered after old glories, and hoped that Shanghai would recover its old profitable ways. They decided to try to stick it out, and keep Shanghai open until better times came round again. A skeleton staff was kept on, including one or two expat British officers.

Although quiet, things weren't too bad until the Cultural Revolution. Most foreigners fled China when that began, but the Bank was forced to keep at least one expat there or face being closed down completely. During the height of the Cultural Revolution this man was a friend of mine, one Tim Cotton. I asked him what life was like in those dark days. "Pretty grim", he said. "Mostly it was plain boring. There was no business, your Chinese friends were always in danger of being denounced and food was scarce. It was a strange feeling, being in one of the world's great cities, but being almost the only non-Chinese, and being surrounded (if you went out) by millions of glassy-eyed screaming locals wearing Chairman Mao suits and just staring at you as if you'd come from Mars". Luckily after a bit he discovered that Standard Chartered Bank were in the same position, and he spent the evenings with his opposite number: deadly rivals in Hong Kong, but thrown together by adversity in China. Whether they could get hold of the excellent Tsing Tao beer in those days or just had to content themselves with playing chess I'm not sure.

And how about today? Shanghai is of course thriving, and no doubt HSBC with it. But HSBC is just one of many international banks there, and it's only in Hong Kong and in the UK where it's the biggest kid on the block.

China Here we come: Part 3 by Kit Villiers

Oops! There was a clatter of sandy gravel, and John Barrett came sliding past me and on down the hillside. Luckily the run was nearing the end; the bus was parked about 500m away on a dirt road at the bottom of the hill, and when we got John down to road level there was a little shack which, after some misunderstandings involving our regretfully rejecting Mr Wang's fine selection of fireworks and bananas until next time, provided our wounded runner with a soothing cup of tea. Soon the bus turned up, and we bathed the wounds with bottled water, a spot of Savlon, etc. and the incident was soon forgotten, especially once John had sunk his teeth into his first Carlsberg.....

 

That was on the Sunday, our last day in China.

 

The first run had taken place the Saturday afternoon of our arrival and Bob (HSBC) and Roger ( a Kiwi) had set it. Although the terrain round about was mostly flat (and boring) rice paddies, they had decided to set the run directly from the hotel.  As they didn't need our bus, the Sunday run team (Chunder Chan, our only Chinese member) and I, were able to use it to look for a suitable site somewhat further afield for the second run.

 

To some extent I was just a passenger to begin with, as Chunder and the driver settled down to natter in Cantonese as we drove off down the dusty road. Just as I was beginning to think they were talking about the state of the HK stock market or something (China had no stock market then) and forgotten all about the run, I noticed we had reached a rather promising area of partly wooded low hills. It proved to be perfect. Sandy paths led up through attractive country to a series of ponds. The ponds had steep sides, so you had no choice but to run through them. It was about 25c so we thought the harriers would appreciate a little cool down after panting up the hills.  

 

Generally our runs were circular: i.e. ideally they ended up where they started. Otherwise you need transport to get runners back to their bags, etc. In a strange land this can be problematic, especially for those such as me who have little sense of direction, and Chunder if anything had even less. Our other problem was lack of time - we had both to find a runnable trail, but also to mark it for the runners to follow the next day. We went a little beyond the ponds, and saw a road at the bottom of the hill. Despite our being in the most crowded province of the world's biggest (in population) country, we had seen no-one to ask. But we seemed to have come vaguely in a circle, and we thought, well, there aren't many roads in the area - it must surely be the one where we'd left the bus. We decided to go back and mark the trail, dropping blobs of flour as we went.

 

At least we were right in one respect - the bus was on that road; but unfortunately after our brilliant water feature, there was no real path, and the hillside sloped ever more steeply downwards. The trouble is, of course, that one can't exactly pick up flour once you've marked the route. We did eventually emerge, slightly scratched it has to be said, on to the road, and just kept our fingers crossed that the pack would enjoy the scramble too - after all, it wasn't a race, more of an excuse to have a quiet convivial drink. As related earlier, we almost got away with it......

 

You would be forgiven for thinking that the whole weekend could have been almost anywhere: we'd had minimal contact with the locals apart from the very friendly hotel staff. This changed somewhat right at the end of our break: we were to return to Hong Kong by train, and said goodbye to our driver at the station which was heaving with people, mostly staring at us, although whether it was because we were foreigners or because we were heading for freedom, we never found out.

China here we come - Part 2

By OISE Oxford tutor Kit Villiers

We passed up the passengers' breakfast of cold rice, and filed down on to the old wooden dock. After wandering through various cavernous dimly lit warehouses (15 watt bulbs seemed to be the maximum)  which looked as if they'd seen no trade for decades, certainly not since the Communists took over in 1949, we finally saw a few official looking people who wanted to see our passports. I say 'see' rather than 'read' as some of these gentlemen, who all wore the ill-fitting military uniforms so many officials sported in those days, included several for whom reading Latin script was a bit of a challenge. This became apparent even to our half-awake group when some of the oldest (officials, I mean - not our fellows) were spotted scrutinising our documents upside-down. As the minutes passed, our hearts sank: our passports were by now in a large pile, being passed from one official to another in a somewhat aimless fashion not perhaps surprising amongst people who probably would see no other passengers that day, and would get their salary however many or few long nosed foreigners they admitted to the Middle Kingdom.

Eventually we emerged again into the lovely bright sunlight (this was many years before the pollution which ravages much of China today), and were amazed to find that the bus we'd hoped we'd arranged was there and waiting, and that it looked like it had been built in relatively recent times.

We were the Hong Kong Hash House Harriers, then as now an all male drinking club with a running problem. Normally we jogged non-competitively around the trails of Hong Kong of a Monday evening, but once a year or so we went on a foreign jaunt somewhere in S.E Asia. Now, following the death of Mao and the opening up after the Cultural Revolution, it was China's turn. Our plan was to base ourselves on a hotel outside the city and try to find some nice countryside to run in. One of our number had organised all this beforehand - at least the voyage, the bus and hopefully the hotel.  I imagine, even using his Cantonese speaking secretary, he would have needed extreme patience to achieve this, bearing in mind the primitive communications of those days.

Our driver seemed to know where to go, and we trundled off through the back-streets of Canton. I was amazed how dirty it was, and how shabby the people were in their Chairman Mao suits. It did remind me a little of Seoul in the winter 10 years before - ramshackle brick buildings covered in soot, with people staring at our bus, as though they had nothing to do except stand about all day. I looked in vain for anything that might have been a shop or restaurant , or even had a bit of colour.  Eventually MacDougall (another Aussie) spotted something and yelled for the driver to stop. He dashed out and came back laden with fireworks, telling us that there were only two things you could buy in China - fireworks and bananas.

I later found out why the fireworks: outside the city,  China was totally dark; our hotel proved to be a pretty basic affair out in the ricefields, and once it got dark you really couldn't see a thing until MacDougall (who'd remembered to bring matches) set off a rocket or two. Of the hotel itself I recall only the so-called disco. There was a band of sorts, and a sign in Chinese from which even I could see that foreign folk had to pay three times more to go in than locals. We looked in after the fireworks, hoping that we might be able to dance with girls from surrounding villages, but there wasn't a soul. The band played to nobody the whole evening, and looked like it performed this ritual every evening. One was left to ponder the economics of communism....

Next time - we actually get to run in the Chinese countryside. 

China here we come! By Kit Villiers

The ancient passenger liner turned slowly out into the busy waters of North Kowloon, and most of the passengers, clutching their Carlsbergs (the preferred tipple of our club), made their way on to the deck to take a last look at Hong Kong, at least for a couple of days. We were on our way to the ancient city of Canton (now Guangzhou) up the Pearl River. We sailed at 11pm and were due to arrive at dawn the next morning.

We'd already had our first brush with Chinese bureaucracy. While we were alongside we were in Hong Kong territorial waters, and had been paying for our tipple in HK dollars and at (very cheap) HK prices. As soon as we cast off, the girl suddenly charged us about five times as much: "It's a China ship" she explained, "China price now." She also seemed to have some difficulty with what currency to use. We had at that stage never seen renminbi nor did we have any of the Foreign Exchange Certificates which foreign visitors could use in China in those distant days.  US dollars would have done apparently, at a pinch, but not having many greenbacks amongst us either, we finally persuaded her to continue to accept HK money -  or, we said, the little ship's bar would do no more business.

This affair being settled, although not wholly satisfactorily, I leant on the ship's rail in company with Ted Brown, an official with the HK government and 'an old China Hand', watching the junks and sampans still criss-crossing the harbour late at night. We had to be up early and my thoughts were turning towards sleep, but Ted said he thought we'd soon get a spectacular view of the Portuguese colony of Macau. He was right: suddenly to port there was a glow, and soon the lights of the myriad casinos which graced the shoreline came into view. Macau, Ted told me, was already full of gamblers from Hong Kong, who always rushed there after work (it was a Friday night) by fast ferry and gambled non-stop for 48 hours before returning tireder, poorer but not wiser at the end of the weekend.

I don't think any of our group (we were as I recall the only passengers) had ever been to the Mainland. During the Cultural Revolution visits were all but impossible. If you wanted to see China from Hong Kong in those days, you had to go to Robin's Nest in the New Territories, climb a small hill and then if you were lucky you might see a peasant in a distant rice-field; it's amazing to think that those rice-fields have now become Shenzen, a city of (probably at least) 10,000,000 today, crowded with Chinese whose life differs only from Hong Kongers in that they drive on the wrong side of the road...

It's difficult to describe our entrance to Canton the next morning. We had been warned that although Canton was the most advanced city in China, it was light years behind Hong Kong. Well, about 100 years anyway;  then as now, I would put Hong Kong about 10 years ahead of England - they had a new spankingly efficient underground, trucks that beeped when they reversed, fast lifts, free local phones, etc. - but by my calculation that meant there was still about 90 years between South China and the UK.

Looking back I don't know now whether it was the silence (after the bustle of the metropolis we'd left the night before) or the colours which made the greater impression on us all.  We got up to a beautiful October day and the ship was gliding quietly towards what appeared (speaking of impressions) to be an Impressionist painting. Canton harbour seemingly hadn't changed since the 19th century; the early morning sun was shining on what seemed like banks of faded yellowing go-downs (warehouses), with a few orange ones thrown in. Neither ashore nor at sea did there appear to be any movement at all. We were heading for an ancient pier that would I'm sure would have been recognisable to many a 19th century trader plying his trade in tea, gold and drugs. But the tea clippers had long disappeared and instead as we watched we were awed at the sight of a real old fashioned junk creeping down the river under full sail. (Even in those days commercial junks in Hong Kong had for decades been motorised, and the only ones to be seen under sail  were a few made for the tourist trade).

A few sleepy looking shorehands (perhaps the first Communists I'd ever seen, apart from the girl in the bar) were standing by to make fast our mooring ropes, and we'd arrived....

To read more of the thrills and spills of this first weekend in China, watch this space for the next instalment.

By Kit Villiers