Hong Kong

Before 1841 the villages of what is now Hong Kong belonged to Xin’an county in Guangdong and reckoned in the silver tael of roughly 37.8 grams alongside strings of copper cash; what survives from those centuries is clan genealogies, land deeds and carved stelae on which temples and ancestral halls named their subscribers, the oldest dated stone being a rock at Fat Tong Mun cut in 1274. After the town of Victoria was laid out on the north shore, the harbour traded in Spanish and Mexican silver dollars while the government kept its books in pounds sterling, and that double system lasted decades, so almost every early figure depends on knowing which unit is meant. The colonial paper is unusually complete: annual Blue Books, the Hongkong Government Gazette, Colonial Office correspondence and printed public works estimates all survive and are largely digitised, so a nineteenth-century building can often be priced to the pound. The territory offers two very different seams for creative expenditure — subscription lists chiselled into temple stone, and a small surveying department whose head designed the early public buildings himself.

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Surveyor General Charles St George Cleverly and the Building of Government House, Victoria 1851–1855

Charles St George Cleverly, the colony’s second Surveyor General, designed and superintended the first Government House on Government Hill in the town of Victoria; work began in October 1851 and the house was completed on 1 October 1855. E. J. Eitel, writing in 1895 from the colonial records, gives the total as £15,318 spread over several years, a figure that bundles Cleverly’s design and supervision with the masonry, joinery and fitting-out of the house and its two gate lodges. Hong Kong kept its government books in sterling while the coin actually circulating in the harbour was the Spanish and Mexican silver dollar, so the gold figure converts a sterling accounting total at the British mint standard rather than a weighed payment. The sum rests on a single nineteenth-century authority and has not been checked against the colony’s Blue Books.

~112,127.8g

Eitel, E. J. Europe in China: The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882. (Luzac and Co.; Kelly and Walsh, 1895), ch. XVII, pp. 327–328; Antiquities and Monuments Office, Hong Kong, declared monument record for Government House.