Introduction
My friend was sitting at his desk, busy, no doubt, in framing the best-worded sentence ever penned in the East, when a howl from the street rang through the lofty verandah, and rebounded, as it were, from the high ceilings of the room. ‘That’s one of those ubiquitous hawkers,’ said my friend angrily, springing to his feet and rushing to the verandah to have a look at the back of the disturber. I joined my friend quietly and was just in time to see a pair of broad shoulders raising themselves, and a pig-tailed head bending backwards; and than [sic] came a second edition of the howl we had heard before. I myself, being of an asthmatic nature, rather envied the sturdy fellow who could carry so much on his shoulders and walk a brisk pace, and yet have breath enough left to utter such stentorian sounds.Footnote 1
So begins ‘Chinese street-cries in Hongkong’, an article written by the Reverend Johannes Nacken of the Rhenish Missionary Society and published by the China Review in 1873. He went on to enumerate the cries ‘used for selling articles of food, fruit, and various articles for daily use…the cries of those who buy refuse, and those who offer their services for repairing; of coolies, and…those in connection with idolatry’.Footnote 2 For him, these street cries represented ‘one of the many outward signs by which we learn the life of the Chinese around us, their moral and domestic habits’.Footnote 3
By the time Nacken wrote the piece, he was literate in written Chinese and understood Cantonese, and he transliterated and translated many of the street cries and included the corresponding characters in footnotes. However, the episode documented in the opening paragraph took place several years prior to its publication and at a point when the author could not himself decipher the cries. The article, then, written by a more experienced Nacken, transformed these meaningless ‘howls’ and ‘stentorian sounds’ into recognizable words and phrases, revealing an order to Chinese daily life inaccessible to his earlier self, his friend and most other European residents in nineteenth-century Hong Kong.
Nacken’s experience illustrates the relative nature of sound perception. Noise is not defined by any objective quality, such as volume or pitch, but by the listener’s attitude towards it. As historians of sound like Hillel Schwartz, Alain Corbin and Mark M. Smith note, noise is any sound that is unpleasant or undesirable to the hearer, and Aimée Boutin adds that sounds are ‘perceived as noise when they do not have use-value and seem gratuitous’.Footnote 4 Thus, despite the fact that his reaction to the ‘howls’ was more sanguine than his friend’s, the Nacken of the opening paragraph perceived the street cries as noise. By 1873, however, the same sounds revealed an underlying order to a slightly older, more knowledgeable Nacken. He described the early morning cries of congee sellers, followed by those of fruit and vegetable vendors, operators of portable noodle stands set up at lunch and dinnertime, and dessert hawkers. These cries marked the rhythms of daily life in the Chinese quarters and, as the loquats, mangoes, pineapples and guavas of summer gave way to the persimmons, olives and chestnuts of autumn, they also marked the changing seasons.Footnote 5 His increased understanding of the local language turned what had been meaningless and distracting into the components of an intelligible soundscape.
Nacken may have furnished his readers with one of the most detailed and informative descriptions of street cries in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, but it was not his work, nor that of anyone who shared his ethnographic interest in the connection between street cries and Chinese daily life, that shaped the way noise was regulated there. Instead, it was the colony’s European professional class that did so. As Nacken pointed out, to many of Hong Kong’s foreign residents, street cries were a nuisance, a virtually inescapable source of disruption. For them, street noise penetrated the ears, rendering the sense of hearing a vulnerability rather than a tool for the acquisition of useful knowledge, and their complaints regularly appeared in the local newspapers. The government heeded these complaints, and the year before Nacken’s article was published, crying out wares was banned from the central business district and areas of European residence by Ordinance 10 of 1872, ‘An Ordinance to prevent certain Nuisances’.
‘Nuisance’, a term used in informal speech to refer to anything that is annoying or troublesome, is also a form of tortious conduct with a long history in common law.Footnote 6 Legally, it is an ‘actionable annoyance’, which interferes with the use or enjoyment of public space or private property or the health or comfort of the public.Footnote 7 The source of a nuisance may itself be legal or even necessary, but if it results in harm or suffering, it is a nuisance. It is thus the effect rather than the cause that determines the presence of nuisance, making it a legal mechanism for members of the public to exert influence over the use of space beyond the boundaries of their own properties.
This article examines how a small group of Europeans racialized the issue of noise nuisance in Hong Kong and how the resulting legislation inscribed notions of racial difference onto the urban landscape of the colony. It is worth noting, as Vivian Kong has observed, that the term ‘European’ functioned as a euphemism for ‘white’ in colonial Hong Kong, and while I have chosen to maintain the language used in my sources to avoid confusion, the racial dimensions of the apparently geographical term should be kept in mind.Footnote 8 I analyse how complaints in the English-language newspapers about noises construed as distinctly Chinese, including hawker cries, Chinese music, firecrackers and shouting while playing the drinking game chai mui, produced a discourse of racial difference regarding noise production and tolerance. I then investigate the relationship between this and two distinct but related discourses: one on noise in London that focused predominantly on class, touching also on nationality and gender; and a broader transatlantic conversation regarding civilization and noise, which identified a preference for quiet in ‘civilized’ societies and a preference for noise in ‘primitive’ ones. The racially charged language of the discourse on noise in Hong Kong presented Chinese as noisy and noise-loving and Europeans as quiet and noise-averse, which might seem at first to draw directly upon the civilizational discourse, but I argue that it was mediated through the metropolitan discourse on noise and class. Ultimately, the conversation in Hong Kong, influenced by those based in the West, produced and maintained the notion that Europeans required protection from noise and that Chinese did not, thus enabling the passage of Ordinance 10 of 1872, which treated Chinese and European spaces differently and attempted to make them sonically distinct. The legislation and its enforcement reified notions of racial difference and concretely established an area of privileged European space, even if, in reality, the boundaries of that space were porous and many of its residents were Chinese.
Many historians of Hong Kong have examined the mechanisms of racial discrimination under colonial rule and their spatial dimensions. Christopher Cowell, for example, has shown how the desire to protect European bodies from an environment perceived to be hostile and rife with disease shaped the early growth of the town of Victoria.Footnote 9 Cecilia Chu has examined how colonial systems of segregation and hierarchical ordering came into conflict and negotiation with capitalist economic priorities in the colony’s urban development.Footnote 10 Furthermore, John Carroll has demonstrated how the economic anxieties of Hong Kong’s Europeans and their desire to preserve what they believed to be healthy space for themselves led to the exclusion of Chinese from the Peak District around the turn of the century.Footnote 11
However, the field of sound studies points to a novel avenue for understanding how the intersections of space and sound informed discriminatory colonial policies in Hong Kong. Historians of sound in Europe and the United States, including James Mansell, Mark Smith and Emily Ann Thompson, have traced the development of urban noise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and evolving bourgeois responses to it.Footnote 12 They explain how stereotypes about relative noisiness and the ability to tolerate loud and unpleasant sounds developed as markers of racial, cultural and class difference. While European and American subjects still dominate the field, more recently, historians have begun investigating sound in Asian contexts, some of them specifically examining cross-cultural and colonial sonic encounters. Both Barbara Watson Andaya and Jenny McCallum have explored the suppression of noise and the imposition of bourgeois European sonic preferences on the urban space of colonial Singapore.Footnote 13 Andrew Rotter, writing about the senses more broadly, has shown how stereotypes about the sensory perceptions of the poor, used to define the working classes as backward and uncivilized in Britain and the United States, transformed into evidence of the racial inferiority of the colonized in imperial India and the Philippines.Footnote 14 This article extends these investigations, analysing the mechanisms by which these ideas formed, circulated and became law in the specific context of nineteenth-century Hong Kong.
The main sources used are the Hongkong Daily Press, the colony’s first daily newspaper, established in 1857, and the China Mail, which was founded in 1845 and became a daily in 1867. These were the leading English-language newspapers in Hong Kong from the 1860s until the turn of the century, and while neither divulged their circulation, a note in the 1874 Blue Book, the annual summary of government finances and statistics, speculated that the Daily Press issued between 400 and 500 copies.Footnote 15 According to the 1871 Census, the Euro-American resident population was 2,520, accounting for around 2 per cent of the colony’s total population.Footnote 16 Many copies of the daily paper would have been sent to resident households, where they could be shared between family members. It was also common in the Anglosphere for individual newspapers to be read by multiple people in the semi-public spaces of coffee shops and taverns, and reading rooms, including one operated by the Daily Press, made newspapers freely available to the public.Footnote 17
While we can assume these papers were widely read by English speakers in the colony, their content did not necessarily reflect a settled ‘public opinion’, even within the small community. Editorials reliably reflect only the opinions of the editors, and letters from readers were not published indiscriminately. While the China Mail and Daily Press were frequent adversaries on issues of colonial governance, they agreed on the issue of noise. Most of the letters published conformed to the editorial stances of the two papers, which was that street crying was a nuisance, and even letters that resisted the racialization of the issue kept street crying in the news and the minds of readers. It is therefore difficult to determine what proportion of Hong Kong’s foreign residents understood street cries as a bona fide nuisance. Cowell has noted how, in the wake of devastating outbreaks of malaria in the colony’s earliest years, Europeans came to identify elevation with health, building hospitals, colonial institutions and homes for the wealthy on hilltops and the uphill area south of Caine Road, eventually known as the Mid Levels.Footnote 18 Altitude set these homes and institutions apart from the densely populated Chinese residential streets, where hawkers cried to attract the attention of potential customers. Perhaps the colony’s wealthiest Europeans, who did not have to spend significant time outside of the rarified spaces in which they lived, would not have experienced street cries as loud or persistent enough to consider them disruptive. Instead, it was in the streets closer to sea level, where veranda-ed buildings pressed up against the thoroughfares and European firms operated side by side with Chinese residences and businesses, that Europeans would have experienced street cries as a loud and sustained annoyance (see Figure 1). It is noteworthy then that the offices of the Daily Press on Wyndham Street and the China Mail on Wellington Street were both situated north of Caine Road, embedded in a mixed Chinese and European area full of prospective customers for hawkers.
Figure 1. ‘A street in the native quarter, Hong Kong, China’. Photograph by H.C. White Co. c. 1901. Archived in the Library of Congress Web Archives at www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97507749.
Noise in Hong Kong
British colonial rule was established in Hong Kong in 1842 and ushered in a great deal of noise. Much of it was characterized as evidence of the progress introduced to the island by empire, but its incessancy was most likely the cause of the outrage expressed by Europeans in 1844 that Chinese labourers were not observing the sabbath.Footnote 19 John Francis Davis, Hong Kong’s second governor, responded by ordering government construction projects to cease work on Sundays and later called upon all Christians in the colony to enforce the same restrictions on private construction.Footnote 20 One of the colonial government’s earliest pieces of legislation also addressed the problem of noise. Ordinance 17 of 1844, written specifically to stop Chinese watchmen from beating bamboo sticks when patrolling at night, made it an offence to produce any noise ‘calculated to disturb or annoy or interfere with the public tranquillity’ between sunset and 6 am.Footnote 21 Both issues cast the colonized as noise-makers and the colonizers as noise-sufferers, but fundamentally, they were cases of Chinese employees producing noise as they carried out work that benefitted their employers and the European colonial establishment. Their resolutions were temporal rather than spatial, setting time limits on noise production. The campaign against ‘Chinese’ noise that was waged in Hong Kong’s English-language newspapers in the late 1860s and 1870s emerged from these earlier noise issues, but it was distinct from them in that it produced and sustained a discourse of racial difference. It constructed the Chinese of Hong Kong as producers of constant noise, defined by their tolerance and even love for it, and Europeans as universally noise averse, paving the way for a spatial resolution to the issue of Chinese noise.
Unlike Nacken, for whom cries carried meaning and ordered the passage of time in their diversity, most of the newspaper correspondents collapsed the many and varied voices into hawkers’ cries. An editorial in the China Mail published in 1878, several years after the passage of Ordinance 10, observed that crying wares was an offence that ‘appears to cause an immense amount of annoyance to the majority of European residents here’.Footnote 22 While the author did not wish to prevent ‘the “Heathen Chinee” … from extolling his wares in his peculiar way among his own countrymen in the native parts of the town’, he thought that ‘surely his unintelligible screechings may be suppressed in those portions of the Colony devoted to foreign hongs and residences’. This comment illustrates the relationship between sound perception and use value: because Europeans of the professional class did not routinely buy from hawkers, they viewed any value derived from crying wares as divorced from their economic interests. These cries were thus mere noise to them: meaningless and gratuitous. Furthermore, the author maintained the idea that Chinese and Europeans had different tolerance thresholds for noise and endorsed a corresponding delineation of space. In doing so, he represented the ‘native parts of town’ and the areas ‘devoted to foreign hongs and residences’ as distinct. However, the central business district was home to many Chinese residents, which was precisely why street vendors cried wares within hearing distance of the foreign businesses. This illusion of clear residential segregation along racial lines, which this author was not alone in promoting, facilitated the passage of legislation that formally inscribed those lines onto the map of the colony, thereby reifying the notion that British Hong Kong was distinct from Chinese Hong Kong.
In addition to street crying, the use of firecrackers was another distinctly Chinese practice that provided an avenue for framing Chinese people as great producers of noise and, unlike Europeans, in no need of protection from it. ‘That cracker-firing should be regarded by anybody as a nuisance may be inconceivable to our Chinese friends, but to Europeans, who cannot show that singular indifference to irritating sounds which is characteristic of Chinese, a nuisance it most undoubtedly is’, declared one commentator in the China Mail. Footnote 23 These stereotypes were further reinforced by complaints that went beyond targeting specific noise-generating cultural practices and made broader claims about the nature and temperament of Chinese people. An article in the Daily Press reported that on Queen’s Road at night, ‘ricksha-coolies and their “fares” quarrel over the last cent, bawling at each other at the top of their voices and the depth of their vocabulary’.Footnote 24 Beyond the belief that Chinese were quarrelsome and quick to raise their voices, some Europeans also expressed a distaste for the sound of those voices and the language they spoke. The British traveller Isabella Bird Bishop wrote that she found the Chinese Pidgin English spoken in Hong Kong to be ‘revolting’ and expressed astonishment that Europeans ‘without distinction of rank’ would ‘demean themselves’ by communicating with the Chinese in ‘this baby talk’.Footnote 25 She thus presented Pidgin as evidence of the underdevelopment of Chinese society and implied the contagious nature of this backwardness. Such aesthetic judgments made an important contribution to the discourse on noise in Hong Kong because, as Thomas Irvine has argued, ‘“ugly” is a prelude to “abnormal.” The uglier Chinese sounds became, the less worthy of respect their makers sounded.’Footnote 26
Also considered a nuisance in the colonial discourse, although without the push to formally regulate it, was Chinese music, or as one writer put it, ‘teeth-grating harmonies proceeding from the native theatres’.Footnote 27 In the case of theatres, performances were fixed in place outside the major areas of European residence, even if the sounds they generated were not entirely contained by the walls. However, in a Daily Press article that advocated for legislation against street crying, the author also took issue with the presence of Chinese music in the streets and expressed a belief that it should be silenced. ‘Of course, it would be an impossibility to do this by Ordinance,’ he wrote, ‘but as most of the native musical talent is to be found among boys, compradores, cooks and coolies, a little legitimate moral pressure exerted by the employers would effect a great deal in this direction.’Footnote 28 The mention of compradors, who as agents working for foreign companies moved in more prosperous circles, alongside ‘boys…cooks and coolies’ reduced Chinese people of varying social and economic classes to a noise-loving monolith.
In 1869, the China Mail and the Daily Press each published letters to the editors complaining about the nuisance of street cries which made explicit appeals to the government to suppress them.Footnote 29 One directly referenced the control of such sounds in the metropole: ‘In the London papers we often hear of hawkers being punished for bawling out loudly in the streets, while in Hongkong they often bawl out so loud as to deafen one’s ears, without any hindrance.’Footnote 30 The letter implied that if the British government could protect Londoners from street cries, then the Hong Kong government must have similar means at its disposal to protect its European residents. The following year, the Daily Press published an editorial on the subject of noise in Hong Kong, asserting that ‘many of the unearthly sounds which add so much to the tortures of summer in Hongkong, are altogether peculiar to the place’.Footnote 31 While noting that not all of these sounds were avoidable, the writer insisted that some might be remedied via government intervention: ‘First, and foremost among these, stand the diabolical street cries.’ He suggested first that the registrar general had sufficient authority to abate the nuisance. Failing that, he believed that one of the unofficial members of the Legislative Council, ‘as representatives of the public’, should initiate discussion of the subject in council, taking the first step towards passing new legislation.
Noise in London
Before further examining the discourse on noise and its regulation in Hong Kong, it is worth considering the situation of noise in the metropole. While writers in Hong Kong claimed that the Chinese love of noise made the colony a uniquely noisy place, inhabitants of London also believed their city to be singularly noisy. The sounds of London’s poorer districts featured prominently in London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851 by the English journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew, which extensively described and categorized the lower classes of the city. The first volume was devoted to various kinds of street vendors and reveals that crying wares was a practice that was by no means ‘peculiar’ to Hong Kong hawkers. According to Mayhew, ‘all the goods they sell are cried or “hawked,” and the cries of the costermongers in the present day are as varied as the articles they sell’.Footnote 32 In fact, Mayhew presented the London hawker as an even more insistent maker of noise than his Hong Kong counterpart:
The continual calling in the streets is very distressing to the voice. One man told me that it had broken his, and that very often while out he lost his voice altogether…The repeated shouting brings on a hoarseness, which is one of the peculiar characteristics of hawkers in general. The costers mostly go out with a boy to cry their goods for them. If they have two or three hallooing together, it makes more noise than one, and the boys can shout better and louder than the men.Footnote 33
However, the sounds that elicited the most vocal outrage in London were various forms of street music, and, according to John M. Picker, the crusade against street music was instrumental in the formation of class identity among London professionals.Footnote 34 In 1864, in order to support legislation to suppress street music, the brewer and member of parliament Michael Thomas Bass compiled extracts from letters, newspaper articles and reports of magistrates’ decisions into his Street Music in the Metropolis with the stated aim of ‘[demonstrating] what great obstacles are opposed [sic] by street music to the progress of art, science, and literature; and what torments are inflicted on the studious, the sensitive, and the afflicted’.Footnote 35 The class-based nature of the conflict was made explicit in many of the letters, including one thanking Bass for his ‘advocacy of the suffering better classes’.Footnote 36
His correspondents asserted their right to quiet within the home, often citing fatigue from a day spent in the noisy public world: ‘I go home from the City, the brain overwrought, feverish, and fatigued, and I require rest and change of occupation – reading, writing, music – and these are impossible with the horrible street music from all sides.’Footnote 37 Such letters reflect a conflict between the right of the public to use public space and the sanctity of the middle-class home. For the Victorian bourgeoisie, the domestic sphere was in theory a refuge from the public world of work, progress and modernity, along with all their noisy and unpleasant by-products. But while homes were enclosed spaces under the control of their inhabitants, street noises had the power to penetrate their walls, undermining their protective function.
Some of the most ardent campaigners against street music cited the need for quiet in the pursuit of intellectual work, and as Picker has pointed out, the issue of street music was most salient for those who worked at home and lacked a spatial distinction between domestic life and work life.Footnote 38 One letter, signed by the novelist Charles Dickens, the poet Alfred Tennyson and the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, along with two dozen other ‘professors and practitioners of one or other of the arts or sciences’ stated that ‘in their devotion to their pursuits – tending to the peace and comfort of mankind – they are daily interrupted, harassed, worried, wearied, driven nearly mad, by street musicians’.Footnote 39 The mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage was another passionate opponent of noise, and he devoted a chapter of his 1864 autobiography to the nuisance of street music, ‘the great encouragers of [which] belong chiefly to the lower classes of society’.Footnote 40
Prejudices about nationality and gender also informed the street music debates.Footnote 41 While Babbage identified the lower classes as those who most enjoyed and encouraged street music, he identified foreigners as the principal makers of this form of noise. He took issue especially with German brass bands and Italian organ grinders, writing of the Italians, ‘it is said that there are above a thousand of these foreigners usually in London employed in tormenting the natives’.Footnote 42 The protection of women was rarely invoked in these debates, a surprising omission considering the concern with the penetration of noise into the home, the woman’s domain according to Victorian domestic ideology. One of the few correspondents featured in Street Music and the Metropolis to specifically mention women was J.E. Hall, a self-professed sufferer of ‘severe nervous illness’.Footnote 43 He wrote ‘Ladies should be able to protect themselves from the annoyance and interruption caused them in their household duties, or their own musical practices, by the public music in the streets.’Footnote 44 However, he wrote with much greater urgency of his own experience of noise, describing himself as ‘perfectly helpless, and caused much pain and serious interruption’.Footnote 45 The contrast illustrates the belief that men and women differed in their vulnerability to the effects of noise and points to the assumptions that underlay it. Noise constituted an annoyance to women, interfering with their performance of ‘household duties’ or their practice of music – a reference to the common practice among upper- and middle-class women of cultivating ‘accomplishments’, distinct from the more serious pursuit of music as a profession. Men of the professional class, however, were in far greater need of quiet due to their engagement in ‘brain-work’.Footnote 46 In fact, according to Babbage, women were inclined to enjoy street music, especially those of ‘elastic virtue and cosmopolitan tendencies’.Footnote 47 In general, the people who willingly listened to street music were ‘those whose thoughts [were] chiefly occupied with frivolous pursuits or with any other pursuits requiring but little attention from the reasoning or the reflective powers’.Footnote 48 Thus, in addition to signalling their class status, the construction of British men of the professional class as the most sensitive to noise nuisance in the street music debate conveyed their superiority over all groups construed as less intellectually and culturally developed.
Noise and civilization
The discourse on street noise in London did not develop in isolation. It was informed by beliefs about the relationship between civilization and noise that emerged out of the imperial encounters between Western powers and what they deemed ‘primitive’ societies. The American journalist E.L. Godkin’s articulation of this relationship was characteristic of the position of Western thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘In the primitive states of culture, the savage, the barbarian, and the semi-barbarian, the passion for noise is always strong. All savages and barbarians love to make all the row they can.’Footnote 49 ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progress of a race in civilisation may be marked by a steady reduction in the volume of sound which it produces in connection with its deaths, births, marriages, [and] feastings…The more culture of all kinds it acquires, the less noise it produces.’Footnote 50 These pronouncements had echoes both in the way middle-class commentators represented working-class noise making in London as well as in the way the English newspapers characterized Chinese noise making in Hong Kong.
The supposed parallels between the metropolitan working classes and ‘primitive’ societies were explicit in both Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and James Sully’s ‘Civilisation and noise’.Footnote 51 Mayhew began his book, an extensive project dedicated to describing and classifying London’s underclasses, with a discussion of ‘Wandering Tribes in General’, claiming that there were ‘two distinct races of men, viz.: – the wandering and the civilized tribes’, distinguishable by ‘a different form of head’ and frequently a different language.Footnote 52 According to Mayhew, ‘to each civilized tribe there is generally a wandering horde attached’ and he thus found it ‘curious that no one has as yet applied the above facts to the explanation of certain anomalies in the present state of society among ourselves. That we…are surrounded by wandering hordes…paupers, beggars and outcasts.’Footnote 53 Thus the noisy nature of the poor could be attributed to their primitive status, and Mayhew’s use of phrenological and linguistic ‘evidence’ established the lower classes, British or not, as fundamentally and irremediably different from his educated middle-class readership.
The English psychologist, James Sully, who wrote extensively about aesthetics, compared the sonic cultures of the ‘civilised man’ and the ‘savage’ in his article ‘Civilisation and noise’. In an argument not unlike those that motivated the differential treatment of Chinese and European space in Hong Kong, he wrote:
If the savage is incapable of experiencing the varied and refined delight which is known to our more highly developed ear, he is on the other hand secure from the many torments to which our delicate organs are exposed. The very fact that he takes pleasure in such rude and harsh sounds as those just alluded to, plainly shows that noises cannot mean for his ear what they mean for ours.Footnote 54
However, Sully noted that it was not only far-off ‘primitive’ societies who took pleasure in noise; members of his own supposedly civilized society did so too. He argued that this was because ‘Our mixed population represents all stages of human progress in auditory sensibility. The man with finely set musical ear has practically to live with barbarians who actually take pleasure in harsh and unlovely sounds, and with many more semi-civilised who are quite indifferent to such noises.’Footnote 55 The poor therefore represented the barbarians within civilized society.
Despite the emphasis on the supposed Chinese insensitivity to and love of noise in Hong Kong, the conversation on noise in the colony did not easily map onto the standard civilizational model that associated noise with ‘primitive’ societies and quiet with ‘civilized’ ones because in the nineteenth century, China occupied an ambivalent position in the civilizational discourse. According to Eric Hayot, China’s unique position in Western thought stemmed from its early encounters with modern Europe, where it represented ‘an actively competing civilizational model’ and thus a challenge to the ‘dream of the universalization of culture’.Footnote 56 He argues that the rise of European economic power, which surpassed that of China only in around 1815, enabled Westerners to forget China’s ‘massive impact on the European economy and imagination’ and eventually to dismiss Chinese legitimacy.Footnote 57 But this dismissal was not immediate, and lingering perceptions of China as a ‘civilizational other’ did not permit Chinese people to be cast as ‘savages’ as had members of so many other societies. Instead, the construction of Chinese culture as backward and even primitive was a process, and in Hong Kong, discourses on noise and the regulation they produced played a role in this process.
An article from the Globe, which was later extracted in the Hongkong Daily Press, illustrates the difficulty of incorporating China into a simple bipolar civilizational model. In accordance with other formulations of the relationship between noise and civilization, the author asserted that ‘refinement and noise do not often go hand in hand’ and that conversely ‘noise and barbarism are co-existent’.Footnote 58 While granting that during the Elizabethan period England was a noise-loving culture, the author claimed that ‘by degrees, however, we sobered down until it may be said that we are the most silent and quiet living of European people’. While ‘the English definition of refinement is comprised in the word quietness’, the author warned against too quick an ‘admiration of quietness’ or vice versa, as silence may ‘[arise] from sheer hollowness of mind’. Conversely, while ‘among Europeans the French is the most noise-loving nation’, he argued that this did ‘not imply the absence of refinement’. In fact, some civilizations’ propensity for quiet rendered them overly refined, such as the ‘Mahomedan’ whose ‘speechless, motionless, demeanour…gains for the bearded Oriental far more admiration and respect than by his real character he is entitled to’. His assertion that to Muslims ‘conversation…is distasteful, exertion contemptible’, pointed to the Orientalist trope of civilization in decline.Footnote 59 While so-called primitive or barbaric societies were noise-loving, the eerie silence of a decadent civilization was a symptom of its decay.
China occupies a complicated position within this model. In partial contradiction of Hong Kong’s many commentators on the noisy nature of Chinese people, the author wrote, ‘noise to the Chinaman is detestable, except as an ally in the battlefield. He will gabble and gesticulate fighting over a sixteenth percent brokerage in a transaction, but away from the strife of dollar-making his delight is to realise as nearly as possible the meditative serenity and impassiveness expressed in the features of his gods and philosophers.’Footnote 60 However, the author also hinted at the dangerous overtones of Chinese silence: ‘A Chinaman…receives insult or punishment with…frigid calmness. A box on the ear of a China “boy” produces no visible alteration in the expression of his countenance.’ Here, Chinese silence becomes a veil concealing insubordinate thoughts, tapping into colonial anxieties about the inner life and resentments of the unknowable ‘other’.
Synthesizing the discourse in Hong Kong
The conversation surrounding street cries in Hong Kong eventually conformed to aspects of the civilizational discourse, but it did so indirectly, by way of the metropolitan discourse on noise and class. Although the agitators against street crying in Hong Kong did not make specific reference to the anti-street music campaign in London, they were almost certainly aware of it. According to Simon J. Potter, newspapers in the settler colonies maintained close ties to the metropolitan press, and publications from Britain circulated widely throughout the Dominions, playing an important role in fostering imperial integration.Footnote 61 For the diminutive British community of Hong Kong, newspapers from ‘home’ probably constituted an even more important link to Britain and British identity than they did for the much larger populations of the Dominions. Hong Kong residents had access to a range of British and overseas papers, which arrived at a delay and could be purchased via news agents or read in public reading rooms.Footnote 62
Bass’ street music bill was passed in July 1864, becoming part of the Metropolitan Police Act, and, according to Picker, introduced ‘the power for householders to wield their privileges over an expanded urban environment, the ability to domesticate the streets’.Footnote 63 This was a privilege to which the European residents of Hong Kong also sought to lay claim, and the language used in the newspapers in discussions of noise and its effects closely followed that used in the metropole. In both places, the story went, noise was produced and enjoyed by one group, considered unrefined and backward, and caused the suffering of a more advanced and societally productive group. In London, the first group was the working class and the second group, the middle and upper classes. In Hong Kong, these were the Chinese and Europeans respectively, and the success of this discourse relied upon the flattening of social class within both groups.
It is not clear to what extent the sounds discussed in this article would have constituted a nuisance to Hong Kong’s Chinese residents because sources from this period are limited. Local Chinese-language newspapers were just emerging, and the earliest ones were affiliated with the Daily Press and the China Mail. Footnote 64 Hawkers, who were most directly affected by the noise nuisance discourse, generally had limited time and ability to record their opinions and lacked the connections to get them published. Furthermore, as Boutin has observed, the sounds of the past tend to have been documented by those to whom they were remarkable.Footnote 65 Those who wrote about sounds generally wrote about the ones they found exceptionally pleasant or unpleasant, surprising or unusual. Sometimes, as in the case of Nacken, people wrote about sounds because they understood them to convey something significant. However, to the criers themselves or the Chinese residents of Hong Kong who engaged their services, the street cries were commonplace, an aspect of daily life not worthy of comment. Moreover, to many of them, they were useful. For a person wanting to buy breakfast or ingredients for cooking, or who had items awaiting repair, the cries were not meaningless distractions but instead conveyed valuable information.
One episode from 1881 challenges the claim that Chinese residents of Hong Kong were unbothered by noise. A woman named Wong Ti Hi, a resident of Wellington Street near the Catholic cathedral, was charged with ‘unlawfully beating a gong and carrying on a musical performance at 4.30 a.m., calculated to disturb, annoy and interfere with the public tranquility’.Footnote 66 According to the court reporter at the China Mail, her defence before the magistrate was that ‘the priests were singing’.Footnote 67 It is not clear whether Wong beat the gong in retaliation, finding the early morning singing of the priests to be a nuisance, or was merely arguing that their singing was no less a disturbance to public tranquillity than her own noise making. Regardless, the episode reveals that she conceived of the Catholic performance of matins as noise.
Occasionally, pieces appeared in the newspapers arguing that the focus on Chinese noise was hypocritical given how noisy some Europeans could be. However, rather than contradicting the racial essentialism that dominated the discourse, these writers merely expanded the conversation to include both race and class, typically by drawing attention to the noise of sailors. According to Henry Lethbridge, the European population of Hong Kong was largely composed of ‘middle class sojourners’, and only a small minority could be considered working class.Footnote 68 However, as a major port, the colony was host to a large contingent of sailors, who sometimes outnumbered the European resident population.Footnote 69 In response to the 1870 editorial urging legislation to regulate street cries, a letter to the editor pointed out that ‘At least [the criers] are doing a legitimate business, and are making their diabolical cries for some purpose.’ In contrast, he believed that sailors were ‘by far the greatest nuisance in the Colony’. He claimed that ‘night after night our streets are invaded by bands of sailors who make night hideous, and regale the ears of respectable citizens with sound which could not with reason be effected this side of Pandemonium’.Footnote 70
Ultimately, such arguments took for granted the intrinsically noisy nature of both working-class Europeans and all Chinese, effectively drawing class distinctions within the European community while continuing to treat the Chinese of Hong Kong as homogeneous. One such article, which appeared in the Daily Press in 1871, contrasted both everyday Chinese noise and the noise of sailors with that of firecrackers, which was regulated in the colony and only permitted during certain festivals.Footnote 71 The author described the noise produced by both groups in the same caustic tone:
From the daily police cases in which wicked Chinamen are punished for disturbing the peace of Christian men by exploding their truly diabolical crackers, one might judge that this amount of noise at all events – the noise of the fire-crackers – is inadmissible. But there are various dins below that standard which are quite allowable, for aught that appears to the contrary. Licensed hawkers may wander through the streets at any hour of the day crying their wares in their own unmusical and unnerving drone. At any hour of the night convivial assemblies of heathens may drink unsanctified samshu to any extent, accompanied if they please by those hideous sounds which, originating in a competition as to who shall drink the least, result in signal proof that all have drunk the most.…On the other hand, parties of truly Christian young men, may return at night from – anywhere, informing the neighbourhood very distinctly that Champagne Charley is their name, or bidding Good-bye to John, in most emphatic, though not always very musical tones. These parties of gentlemen, all for the time being, rejoicing in the same appellative, and all parting at the same moment with the same mythical John, may, previously to their declaration of their new and temporary baptism, have ‘assisted at’ a festive assembly, where they may have listened to semi-sober speeches, tried to kick the floor through with applause, and finally, while drinking and assuring somebody that he is a jolly good fellow, attempted with some success to render themselves ‘jolly,’ and ‘fellows,’ if not more than ordinarily ‘good’. A great deal of this involves noise, and some of it is not more harmonious than the crackers before mentioned.Footnote 72
The emphasis on the rowdy drunkenness of both groups established each as lacking the self-control and dignity characteristic of ‘civilized’ people. The author concluded by drawing attention to ‘useless’ European ceremonial sounds, including firing salutes and ringing bells during festivals, declaring that ‘noise is sometimes useful and sometimes necessary, but where it is neither the one nor the other, it should be stopped as an insult to civilisation’.Footnote 73
Despite these examples, most commentators focused either solely or mostly on Chinese noise, and the legislation that this discourse produced was similarly racialized. Casting Chinese as producers of noise who were insensitive to its effects and Europeans as passive sufferers of such noise allowed legislators to carve out space for the protection of European ears alone.
Civilizing the soundscape
The bill that was eventually to become Ordinance 10 of 1872 was first introduced in the Legislative Council on 25 March of that year. Legislation already existed to address noise nuisance. Ordinance 17 of 1844, the law used to stop private watchmen from banging bamboo sticks and under which Wong Ti Hi was prosecuted for beating a gong, made it an offence to produce noise between sunset and 6 am. Ordinance 14 of 1845 was a wide-ranging law that addressed a broad range of nuisances, including ‘wantonly or unnecessarily blow[ing] any horn, beat[ing] any gong or drum, or mak[ing] any other noise calculated to annoy or alarm any person, or to frighten any horse’, as well as behaving in a ‘riotous, noisy, or disorderly manner, or…us[ing] any profane or indecent language’. The new bill targeted creaking wheelbarrows, cracker firing, street crying and shouting while playing the Chinese drinking game chai mui. Unlike Ordinance 17 of 1844 and Ordinance 14 of 1845, its framing reflected the discourse on noise in Hong Kong that had taken place in the newspapers and had echoes in the discussions that occurred after the passage of the ordinance as foreign residents urged the government to better enforce it. It addressed ‘certain nuisances’ which the governor, Richard MacDonnell, claimed had been ‘pressed on his attention by many persons’.Footnote 74 This language is significant, suggesting that MacDonnell did not personally experience the nuisance of street cries from his privileged position at Government House, perched on a hill and surrounded by open space (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Government House, Hong Kong. Photograph by John Thomson, 1868/1871. Wellcome Collection, reference: 18684i.
Upon introducing the bill, Governor MacDonnell invoked the civilizational discourse by declaring that ‘One of the liberties we gave up when coming to live in cities was the right to annoy our neighbours. We gave up the liberties of the savage for more civilised habits of life.’Footnote 75 Charles May, the acting colonial treasurer, reinforced the racialized division between noise making and noise suffering, insisting that ‘foreign residents were often disturbed, their rest broken, and their health impaired by noisy Chinese in their vicinity’.Footnote 76 Furthermore, alongside a range of nuisances, both auditory and olfactory, that the bill made illegal throughout the town of Victoria, it was proposed that certain ostensibly Chinese noises – street crying and chai mui – be subject to regulation only within ‘European’ space.
At the second reading of the bill, the section regarding chai mui prompted debate. Cecil Clementi Smith, the acting colonial secretary, objected to the fact that as drafted, the bill allowed police to enter a dwelling and arrest anyone playing chai mui in a manner they deemed too noisy.Footnote 77 He proposed that the subsection referring to chai mui be omitted entirely. An unofficial member, Henry Lowcock, countered that the noise of chai mui ‘was sometimes so great as to frighten horses’. Ultimately, a compromise was found by allowing the police to issue summons to anyone playing chai mui loudly between 11 pm and 6 am, rather than giving them the right to enter dwellings and arrest the players.
The bill was initially passed as Ordinance 2 in April of 1872.Footnote 78 However, in June, the government received a dispatch from the Colonial Office confirming the ordinance on the condition that some minor changes were made, including the removal of the subsection targeting the use of creaky wheelbarrows.Footnote 79 To avoid confusion, the Legislative Council decided to repeal Ordinance 2 in its entirety and pass a new ordinance – Number 10 of 1872 – with the updates.Footnote 80
In its final form, the ordinance made it a finable offence to ‘use or utter cries for the purpose of buying or selling any article whatever, or [to] make any noise whatever, with the object of disposing of or attracting attention to…goods, wares, or trade, within any district or place not permitted by some regulation of the Governor in Council’. The ordinance was passed on 5 September 1872 and was updated a few weeks later to allow hawkers to cry wares ‘in all parts of the city of Victoria, – except in No. 5 district, Queen’s Road, the Praya, Bonham Road, and the district to the south thereof’.Footnote 81 The restricted area corresponded to the central business district, the uphill areas of European residence and the main roads on which large European firms were headquartered (Figure 3). The ordinance thus responded to the discourse produced in Hong Kong’s English-language newspapers, which established that Chinese noise was a particular nuisance to Europeans. The fact that the legislation appeared to correspond closely with the opinions expressed in the newspapers suggests the power of the press as a means for foreign residents to make appeals to the government. Alongside hawkers’ cries, Ordinance 10 of 1872 explicitly forbade the utterance of shouts or cries while playing chai mui between 11 pm and 6 am in the same area in which street cries were forbidden. Unlike street cries however, the prohibition on producing chai mui-related shouts extended the regulation of sound beyond the public space of the street, and into the interior spaces of Chinese dwellings and businesses.
Figure 3. Map of Victoria showing area (in grey) within which street crying and shouting while playing chai mui were banned by Ordinance 10 of 1872 (southern border not defined). Map based on Plan of the City of Victoria, Hong Kong, 1889, The National Archives, Kew, CO700/HongKongandChina7.
After the passage of Ordinance 10, the boundaries between the soundscapes it created remained porous, and its enforcement was uneven. Hawkers were regularly fined for calling out in the restricted area, and complaints continued to be published in the local newspapers long after the introduction of the ordinance. As late as 1902, a writer for the China Mail claimed that ‘not a day passes without a contravention of the local laws in Wyndham Street, whilst the noise kept up by the chair coolies, street hawkers and others near…this office is sometimes so bad that work has to be suspended altogether’.Footnote 82 While allowing that the police made periodic attempts to enforce the ordinance, ‘they are not so persistent as the Chinaman, and so the nuisance continues’.Footnote 83
Conclusion
Sound is intangible and for most of human history has been transient, impossible to preserve. Because sound perception is historically and culturally conditioned, we cannot know exactly what the experience of hearing nineteenth-century urban noise was to city dwellers. However, noise complaints provide fragmentary glimpses into the sonic experience of the urban past and how it was perceived by those who wrote about it. It is perhaps ironic that only the sense of sight can now provide us this access via the written word. Paying attention to sound as it has been preserved in the historical record not only provides an avenue for better understanding the affective experience of the past; it also reveals how the sensory experience of empire and power converged to shape urban space. In London and Hong Kong, bourgeois city dwellers responded with annoyance to sounds made in the streets outside their workplaces and homes, which they found loud, repetitive and useless. They sought to silence these sounds by casting them as noise nuisance, insisting that hearing organ grinding or hawker cries inflicted suffering upon them and robbed them of productivity. Campaigners for quiet in both cities rested their arguments on the assumption that a preference for quiet – the state that enabled the vita contemplativa – was intrinsically more civilized than a preference for noise. Thus, the movements that sought to suppress noise in both cities made claims about what constituted the correct and civilized use of urban streets.
Bourgeois city-dwellers in both metropole and colony cast those who made noise in the streets as fundamentally different from themselves, naturally inclined to make useless sounds and insensitive to the effects of noise that the bourgeoisie felt so keenly. However, the different demographic makeup of the two cities and their different power structures meant that their anti-noise discourses diverged in important ways. These variances are revealing and point to the value in examining how noise abatement projects played out in different places and times. The suppression of street music in London was explicitly an issue of suppressing sounds made and enjoyed by working-class Londoners, as well as some immigrants and women, for the protection of men of the professional class engaged in ‘brain work’. In Hong Kong, however, the discourse surrounding the suppression of street noise was thoroughly racialized, producing a version of Chineseness that was noisy and noise-loving, not entirely replacing the older stereotype of Chinese people as silent and inscrutable. It simultaneously produced a uniformly noise-averse version of Europeanness, which required, and had the right to, protection from noise. This enabled legislation that banned certain ‘Chinese’ noises from the areas in which Europeans lived and worked, a move that further racialized the space of the colony. Ordinance 10 of 1872, although limited in actual effect, introduced the notion that the colonial government could create and maintain distinct and separate soundscapes, enshrining in law that the ‘European’ part of town was to be quiet and thus civilized, while the Chinese districts remained noisy and primitive.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was conducted for my MPhil degree, which was co-supervised by Elizabeth LaCouture and John Carroll, both of whom provided invaluable advice during this process. I would also like to thank the members of the Institute of Transnational and Spatial History at the University of St Andrews, who listened to an earlier version of this research in 2024 and provided thoughtful comments and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their thorough and constructive feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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