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Happy International Women’s Day!
- Thread starter LordElrond
- Start date
Is tat Auntie Gin and her faggot CAQ lover Assterix?We celebrate all women.
Since this is a thread about women,,,I have posted real articles about real women
Forgotten females: the role of 'protected women' in Hong Kong's history
A boatwoman of the southern Chinese Tanka ethnic minority. Hong Kong’s “protected women” were often of Tanka heritage.
PHOTO: Wellcome Trust
STUART HEAVER
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Mar 11, 2019
FacebookTwitterGoogle+Email
Every day, thousands of tourists, Hong Kong commuters and other locals travelling up and down the Mid-Levels outdoor escalator, in the city's Central business district, pass a historic site without realising it. The crumbling walls of blue-grey brick and rough stone steps partially concealed behind construction-site fencing near the junction of Cochrane and Wellington streets do not seem like much, but they're all that's left of the life of a remarkable woman.
Ng Akew (sometimes Ong Akew, Ong Mo Kew or Hung Mo Kew) was the de facto leader of Hong Kong's "protected women". Almost exclusively of Tanka descent (the Tanka are an ethnic minority in southern China), these young women were financially supported by male members of the Western elite and in turn provided a long-term sexual relationship to men who were thousands of miles from their homelands in Europe or America.
The women were not regarded as prostitutes or courtesans. Instead, protected by eminent merchants, they achieved an elevated, yet unofficial, social status, economic independence and local influence within a patriarchal and racist society.
The history of 19th-century Hong Kong is dominated by taipans, compradors, sea captains, colonial administrators and missionaries. It's a story about Western males written by Western males, but the small site in Central, part of which was once the home of Ng Akew, connects us to her story and the important role protected women played in the development of Hong Kong.
READ ALSO
Indonesia ranked second-most dangerous place for women in Asia Pacific: Study
"She was known to be protected by an American sea captain called James Bridges Endicott, who gave her a house in Central," says Libby Chan Lai-pik, assistant director of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum (Curatorial and Collections). "She later invested in property and in opium."
The museum is featuring some of Ng's lurid life story as part of an exhibition, "The Dragon and the Eagle: American Traders in China, A Century of Trade from 1784 to 1900". In an article in the exhibition catalogue, Nancy Davis, of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, describes Ng as "one of the most enterprising" of the protected women connected to American trade with China in the 19th century.
ADVERTISING
Heritage advocate Katty Law Ngar-ning has spearheaded a five-year campaign to find out more about Ng and preserve the site of the protected woman's former home.
"The lives of these women have been ignored. We talk about the taipans and the governors but never about the women. She lived on the sea but ended up living in the middle of Hong Kong and was at the centre of the city's story," says Law, who was the first to link Ng to the crumbling ruins in Central and runs the Facebook page Searching for Ong Mo Kew.
The ruins are within the Urban Renewal Authority's (URA) Peel Street/Graham Street development project, where extensive demolition will be carried out to accommodate tower blocks.
"I knew the URA project was coming and I was always curious about that site," says Law. "I thought, 'If we don't find out about it now, it will certainly be demolished.'"
In 2014, along with other historians and heritage enthusiasts, Law pored over old maps, photographs and Land Registry records. They discovered that the remains were those of tong lau, back-to-back tenement shophouses built in the 1870s. They faced onto Cochrane and Gutzlaff streets and some were owned by Hong Kong's best-known protected woman.
James Bridges Endicott.Photo: South China Morning Post.
A Tanka woman from Guangzhou, Ng was born around 1820 and became Endicott's lover in 1842, soon after his arrival in China (although some sources state that he arrived in 1833). He was a wealthy opium trader with homes in Macau and Hong Kong. It's thought Endicott procured Ng in Canton (Guangzhou), where she worked as a boatwoman, catering shore services to sailing ships arriving at the Whampoa anchorage.
Since they provided stores, water, laundry services, basic maintenance and shore transport, Tanka boatpeople would have been the first point of Chinese contact for many visiting Western ships, in Hong Kong as in Canton.
"They say Tanka women are traditionally very outgoing and confident; perhaps that appealed to him," says Law.
Tanka women were idealised in Western art as being of great beauty and charm. There is no image of Ng on record but on display in the Maritime Museum exhibition are stylised portraits of Tanka boatwomen painted by British artist George Chinnery, who portrays his subjects in a highly romantic light, as possessing an exotic, slightly coquettish beauty.
"They were good natured, pretty looking young women and smiled frequently exhibiting beautiful teeth," is how British traveller Charles Toogood Downing described Tanka boatwomen in 1837.
A painting of a Tanka boatwoman by George Chinnery (1774-1852). Photo: Hong Kong Maritime Museum
Poor and operating on the margins of Chinese society, Tanka women who entered into relationships with Western men did so for their material well-being. Consistent with the hypocritical social conventions of the time, covert relationships, like that between Ng and Endicott, were common knowledge among the Western elite but remained taboo.
In a rare break with 19th-century colonial protocol, the names of this particular pair first came to public notice in English-language newspaper reports of the 1849 "Cumsingmoon Affair".
Ng had bought eight chests of opium from Endicott, which he had sourced from the wreck of the Isabella Robertson, destroyed in a typhoon, but her illicit cargo was stolen by pirates before it could be delivered. Rather than accept her bad luck, Ng chartered a boat and visited the pirate lair to demand compensation for her loss.
The affair became public knowledge when this young Tanka woman was found, 18 nautical miles north of Macau (roughly where the new Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge makes landfall in China), sailing with junks stuffed full of contraband cargo received as compensation from the pirates. The respectable Endicott was helping his mistress ship the goods to Macau.
Wary of scandal, the authorities in Macau were reluctant to investigate a case involving a prominent American merchant, illicit opium trading, pirates and a protected Tanka woman. The American commissioner in Macau turned the case over to the superintendent of British trade in Hong Kong, knowing he had no jurisdiction in the matter. The legal case was buried but the story spread like wildfire.
Katty Law at the site of Ng Akew’s house in Cochrane Street, Central.Photo: South China Morning Post
The Friend of China newspaper report into the affair describes Ng as a "shrewd intelligent woman" and the high-profile coverage and associated gossip gave her a reputation as being a tough, independent businesswoman. Nonetheless, that and the fact that she was mother to five of his children was not enough to convince Endicott not to marry someone more socially acceptable. In October 1852, he and Englishwoman Ann Russell, sometimes referred to as Sarah, were wed in Macau. Just two days before his bride had arrived in Hong Kong by ship from England, though, Endicott had ensured Ng's financial security.
According to Land Registry records, Endicott put parts of Lot 104 (in Gutzlaff Street, where the ruins are now to be found) and Inland Lot 71 (a tavern on Queen's Road) in a trust administered by friends Douglas Lapraik and William Scott. The trust was for the sole benefit of "Ong Akew, spinster, a Chinese female resident at Macau" for the duration of her life.
READ ALSO
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The custody of their five children was split; Ng kept the eldest son (Achow), who was 10 years old at the time, and one (unnamed) daughter; the other three - James Jnr, Henry and a daughter, Sarah - moved in with Endicott and Ann, in Macau. How he explained this unconventional arrangement to his new wife is not recorded.
Supported by the property income and her independent opium-trading operation, Ng set up home in Gutzlaff Street, where she seems to have become an unofficial leader of the protected women community.
A newspaper notice dated March 23, 1878, details the auction of Ng Akew’s goods.Photo: South China Morning Post
In 1868, Ng bought property on Graham Street as the principal of 10 "single women", possibly as some sort of community centre or clubhouse for protected women. And a notice that appeared in the South China Morning Post in 1926 announced the auction of a property on Possession Street that had been taken up on a 999-year lease in September 1854 by an "Ng A. Kew".
"The most amazing thing is that Gutzlaff Street was named after her [the nickname of the street is Hung Mo Kew, "red-haired Kew"] so she must have been quite a famous character," says Law. "A leader and a special personality."
As the late historian Carl T. Smith, who first researched Ng, puts it, she was "abandoned into prosperity". She also operated with a large degree of economic independence in what was a patriarchal society. She became a key personality in the development of the vibrant area of Hong Kong known as the Middle Bazaar, which encompassed Wellington, Cochrane, Gutzlaff, Graham, Peel and Aberdeen streets.
Historian Ko Tim-keung, who assisted Law in her research into Ng, explains that Central district in the 1870s was recognised as a Western area but those few streets represented a transition zone. Early Eurasians lived nearby (including the businessman Robert Hotung and his brothers, later prominent) and those on the periphery or rejected by the Western and Chinese communities all found their spiritual home in the Middle Bazaar.
"There would have been Eurasians, Chinese, Japanese, Western sailors and low-ranking Western officials residing among brothels, bars and opium dens," he says, describing those busy few streets and lanes as "a microcosm of Hong Kong". And Ko thinks there is another significant aspect to Ng's story in terms of the development of Hong Kong.
"The women were important not just because they were women but because of their children," he says.
Fearing that their offspring would be despised by both communities, Ko says the protected women invested in the best schooling they could afford, qualifying their children to work for the big trading companies. These offspring subsequently formed a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures and became a key influence on the evolution of the city. One early historical account of colonial Hong Kong, written by E.J. Eitel, estimates that in 1882, there was already a significant Eurasian population in the city and that they were "almost exclusively the offspring of Tanka women".
"They occupied the twilight zone of old Hong Kong in social terms and their impact on the development of the city has been mostly forgotten," says Law, who adds that no one knows how many protected women there might have been.
An Urban Renewal Authority project area is outlined in red and includes the site of Ng Akew’s Gutzlaff Street home.Photo: South China Morning Post
Carl T. Smith writes of the four Lam sisters, daughters of a Western man surnamed Bartou. Three of the sisters had children (with Western merchants) "who became the progenitors of an emergent wealthy and influential Eurasian network in the closing decades of the 19th century", writes Smith.
One of the Lam sisters became the mistress of George Tyson, a partner at the American firm Russell and Company, for which Endicott worked as a sea captain. Lam Kew-fong became the protected woman of prominent American trader Albert Farley Heard, who left her property in Aberdeen Street before his return to America in May 1873. Lam Tsai-tai was the protected woman of Baron von Overbeck, a partner at the American firm Dent and Company, who left property for her in Sai Ying Poon in 1869. The other Lam sister bought a property in 1876 on Graham Street.
In 1856, Ng married, or at least took up with, an influential Chinese comprador called Fung Aching and they launched many joint business and property ventures together.
In 1878, evidence indicates that the formidable Ng had extended her business activities and was sued by her creditors. A newspaper advertisement dated March 23 of that year announced a public auction of her goods at her home in Gutzlaff Street. The notice lists such items as Canton-made blackwood furniture, engravings, lamps, clocks and even an iron safe. It suggests that she had sophisticated tastes and enjoyed a life of considerable affluence.
Endicott had five more children with his English bride and died a prominent member of the Western merchant community on November 5, 1870. He was buried in the colonial cemetery in Happy Valley. No one is sure when, where or how Ng died.
"In 1914, the property [she'd been given by her protector] reverted to a Richard Endicott, so maybe that was the year of her death. She would have been in her 90s but it's possible; she was a very tough woman," says Law, who is determined that the site where Ng lived, in the Middle Bazaar, is properly treated.
"The conservation of the site is not guaranteed yet," she says, explaining that the government's Antiquities and Monuments Office has refused to designate it a site of historical interest, so its fate lies in the hands of the URA.
In a written response to Post Magazine, a spokeswoman for the URA said it had announced its proposal to preserve the ruins of the tong lau houses behind Cochrane Street in March 2017. This would include the preservation of about 20 metres of the 34 metres of "in situ portions of the structures" and use salvaged bricks to create a public open space with a dedicated walkway.
However, in October 2017, the URA subcontracted the development to a consortium called Southwater Hong Kong, which has yet to confirm any plans to preserve the site.
"The design is under development," says the URA spokeswoman, and states the authority is working with Southwater and will keep the Central and Western District Council informed of progress. Campaigners such as Law and Ko remain concerned.
"There are not many sites like this that can be traced back to the protected women of Hong Kong," says Ko.
"So rarely do we hear about the women," says Law. "[Ng] was not a princess but she was brave and it's a true Hong Kong story: a hybrid of Eastern and Western culture."
This article was first published in South China Morning Post.
Forgotten females: the role of 'protected women' in Hong Kong's history
A boatwoman of the southern Chinese Tanka ethnic minority. Hong Kong’s “protected women” were often of Tanka heritage.
PHOTO: Wellcome Trust
STUART HEAVER
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Mar 11, 2019
FacebookTwitterGoogle+Email
Every day, thousands of tourists, Hong Kong commuters and other locals travelling up and down the Mid-Levels outdoor escalator, in the city's Central business district, pass a historic site without realising it. The crumbling walls of blue-grey brick and rough stone steps partially concealed behind construction-site fencing near the junction of Cochrane and Wellington streets do not seem like much, but they're all that's left of the life of a remarkable woman.
Ng Akew (sometimes Ong Akew, Ong Mo Kew or Hung Mo Kew) was the de facto leader of Hong Kong's "protected women". Almost exclusively of Tanka descent (the Tanka are an ethnic minority in southern China), these young women were financially supported by male members of the Western elite and in turn provided a long-term sexual relationship to men who were thousands of miles from their homelands in Europe or America.
The women were not regarded as prostitutes or courtesans. Instead, protected by eminent merchants, they achieved an elevated, yet unofficial, social status, economic independence and local influence within a patriarchal and racist society.
The history of 19th-century Hong Kong is dominated by taipans, compradors, sea captains, colonial administrators and missionaries. It's a story about Western males written by Western males, but the small site in Central, part of which was once the home of Ng Akew, connects us to her story and the important role protected women played in the development of Hong Kong.
READ ALSO
Indonesia ranked second-most dangerous place for women in Asia Pacific: Study
"She was known to be protected by an American sea captain called James Bridges Endicott, who gave her a house in Central," says Libby Chan Lai-pik, assistant director of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum (Curatorial and Collections). "She later invested in property and in opium."
The museum is featuring some of Ng's lurid life story as part of an exhibition, "The Dragon and the Eagle: American Traders in China, A Century of Trade from 1784 to 1900". In an article in the exhibition catalogue, Nancy Davis, of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, describes Ng as "one of the most enterprising" of the protected women connected to American trade with China in the 19th century.
ADVERTISING
Heritage advocate Katty Law Ngar-ning has spearheaded a five-year campaign to find out more about Ng and preserve the site of the protected woman's former home.
"The lives of these women have been ignored. We talk about the taipans and the governors but never about the women. She lived on the sea but ended up living in the middle of Hong Kong and was at the centre of the city's story," says Law, who was the first to link Ng to the crumbling ruins in Central and runs the Facebook page Searching for Ong Mo Kew.
The ruins are within the Urban Renewal Authority's (URA) Peel Street/Graham Street development project, where extensive demolition will be carried out to accommodate tower blocks.
"I knew the URA project was coming and I was always curious about that site," says Law. "I thought, 'If we don't find out about it now, it will certainly be demolished.'"
In 2014, along with other historians and heritage enthusiasts, Law pored over old maps, photographs and Land Registry records. They discovered that the remains were those of tong lau, back-to-back tenement shophouses built in the 1870s. They faced onto Cochrane and Gutzlaff streets and some were owned by Hong Kong's best-known protected woman.
A Tanka woman from Guangzhou, Ng was born around 1820 and became Endicott's lover in 1842, soon after his arrival in China (although some sources state that he arrived in 1833). He was a wealthy opium trader with homes in Macau and Hong Kong. It's thought Endicott procured Ng in Canton (Guangzhou), where she worked as a boatwoman, catering shore services to sailing ships arriving at the Whampoa anchorage.
Since they provided stores, water, laundry services, basic maintenance and shore transport, Tanka boatpeople would have been the first point of Chinese contact for many visiting Western ships, in Hong Kong as in Canton.
"They say Tanka women are traditionally very outgoing and confident; perhaps that appealed to him," says Law.
Tanka women were idealised in Western art as being of great beauty and charm. There is no image of Ng on record but on display in the Maritime Museum exhibition are stylised portraits of Tanka boatwomen painted by British artist George Chinnery, who portrays his subjects in a highly romantic light, as possessing an exotic, slightly coquettish beauty.
"They were good natured, pretty looking young women and smiled frequently exhibiting beautiful teeth," is how British traveller Charles Toogood Downing described Tanka boatwomen in 1837.
Poor and operating on the margins of Chinese society, Tanka women who entered into relationships with Western men did so for their material well-being. Consistent with the hypocritical social conventions of the time, covert relationships, like that between Ng and Endicott, were common knowledge among the Western elite but remained taboo.
In a rare break with 19th-century colonial protocol, the names of this particular pair first came to public notice in English-language newspaper reports of the 1849 "Cumsingmoon Affair".
Ng had bought eight chests of opium from Endicott, which he had sourced from the wreck of the Isabella Robertson, destroyed in a typhoon, but her illicit cargo was stolen by pirates before it could be delivered. Rather than accept her bad luck, Ng chartered a boat and visited the pirate lair to demand compensation for her loss.
The affair became public knowledge when this young Tanka woman was found, 18 nautical miles north of Macau (roughly where the new Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge makes landfall in China), sailing with junks stuffed full of contraband cargo received as compensation from the pirates. The respectable Endicott was helping his mistress ship the goods to Macau.
Wary of scandal, the authorities in Macau were reluctant to investigate a case involving a prominent American merchant, illicit opium trading, pirates and a protected Tanka woman. The American commissioner in Macau turned the case over to the superintendent of British trade in Hong Kong, knowing he had no jurisdiction in the matter. The legal case was buried but the story spread like wildfire.
The Friend of China newspaper report into the affair describes Ng as a "shrewd intelligent woman" and the high-profile coverage and associated gossip gave her a reputation as being a tough, independent businesswoman. Nonetheless, that and the fact that she was mother to five of his children was not enough to convince Endicott not to marry someone more socially acceptable. In October 1852, he and Englishwoman Ann Russell, sometimes referred to as Sarah, were wed in Macau. Just two days before his bride had arrived in Hong Kong by ship from England, though, Endicott had ensured Ng's financial security.
According to Land Registry records, Endicott put parts of Lot 104 (in Gutzlaff Street, where the ruins are now to be found) and Inland Lot 71 (a tavern on Queen's Road) in a trust administered by friends Douglas Lapraik and William Scott. The trust was for the sole benefit of "Ong Akew, spinster, a Chinese female resident at Macau" for the duration of her life.
READ ALSO
Saudi Arabia gears up to end women driving ban
The custody of their five children was split; Ng kept the eldest son (Achow), who was 10 years old at the time, and one (unnamed) daughter; the other three - James Jnr, Henry and a daughter, Sarah - moved in with Endicott and Ann, in Macau. How he explained this unconventional arrangement to his new wife is not recorded.
Supported by the property income and her independent opium-trading operation, Ng set up home in Gutzlaff Street, where she seems to have become an unofficial leader of the protected women community.
In 1868, Ng bought property on Graham Street as the principal of 10 "single women", possibly as some sort of community centre or clubhouse for protected women. And a notice that appeared in the South China Morning Post in 1926 announced the auction of a property on Possession Street that had been taken up on a 999-year lease in September 1854 by an "Ng A. Kew".
"The most amazing thing is that Gutzlaff Street was named after her [the nickname of the street is Hung Mo Kew, "red-haired Kew"] so she must have been quite a famous character," says Law. "A leader and a special personality."
As the late historian Carl T. Smith, who first researched Ng, puts it, she was "abandoned into prosperity". She also operated with a large degree of economic independence in what was a patriarchal society. She became a key personality in the development of the vibrant area of Hong Kong known as the Middle Bazaar, which encompassed Wellington, Cochrane, Gutzlaff, Graham, Peel and Aberdeen streets.
Historian Ko Tim-keung, who assisted Law in her research into Ng, explains that Central district in the 1870s was recognised as a Western area but those few streets represented a transition zone. Early Eurasians lived nearby (including the businessman Robert Hotung and his brothers, later prominent) and those on the periphery or rejected by the Western and Chinese communities all found their spiritual home in the Middle Bazaar.
"There would have been Eurasians, Chinese, Japanese, Western sailors and low-ranking Western officials residing among brothels, bars and opium dens," he says, describing those busy few streets and lanes as "a microcosm of Hong Kong". And Ko thinks there is another significant aspect to Ng's story in terms of the development of Hong Kong.
"The women were important not just because they were women but because of their children," he says.
Fearing that their offspring would be despised by both communities, Ko says the protected women invested in the best schooling they could afford, qualifying their children to work for the big trading companies. These offspring subsequently formed a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures and became a key influence on the evolution of the city. One early historical account of colonial Hong Kong, written by E.J. Eitel, estimates that in 1882, there was already a significant Eurasian population in the city and that they were "almost exclusively the offspring of Tanka women".
"They occupied the twilight zone of old Hong Kong in social terms and their impact on the development of the city has been mostly forgotten," says Law, who adds that no one knows how many protected women there might have been.
Carl T. Smith writes of the four Lam sisters, daughters of a Western man surnamed Bartou. Three of the sisters had children (with Western merchants) "who became the progenitors of an emergent wealthy and influential Eurasian network in the closing decades of the 19th century", writes Smith.
One of the Lam sisters became the mistress of George Tyson, a partner at the American firm Russell and Company, for which Endicott worked as a sea captain. Lam Kew-fong became the protected woman of prominent American trader Albert Farley Heard, who left her property in Aberdeen Street before his return to America in May 1873. Lam Tsai-tai was the protected woman of Baron von Overbeck, a partner at the American firm Dent and Company, who left property for her in Sai Ying Poon in 1869. The other Lam sister bought a property in 1876 on Graham Street.
In 1856, Ng married, or at least took up with, an influential Chinese comprador called Fung Aching and they launched many joint business and property ventures together.
In 1878, evidence indicates that the formidable Ng had extended her business activities and was sued by her creditors. A newspaper advertisement dated March 23 of that year announced a public auction of her goods at her home in Gutzlaff Street. The notice lists such items as Canton-made blackwood furniture, engravings, lamps, clocks and even an iron safe. It suggests that she had sophisticated tastes and enjoyed a life of considerable affluence.
Endicott had five more children with his English bride and died a prominent member of the Western merchant community on November 5, 1870. He was buried in the colonial cemetery in Happy Valley. No one is sure when, where or how Ng died.
"In 1914, the property [she'd been given by her protector] reverted to a Richard Endicott, so maybe that was the year of her death. She would have been in her 90s but it's possible; she was a very tough woman," says Law, who is determined that the site where Ng lived, in the Middle Bazaar, is properly treated.
"The conservation of the site is not guaranteed yet," she says, explaining that the government's Antiquities and Monuments Office has refused to designate it a site of historical interest, so its fate lies in the hands of the URA.
In a written response to Post Magazine, a spokeswoman for the URA said it had announced its proposal to preserve the ruins of the tong lau houses behind Cochrane Street in March 2017. This would include the preservation of about 20 metres of the 34 metres of "in situ portions of the structures" and use salvaged bricks to create a public open space with a dedicated walkway.
However, in October 2017, the URA subcontracted the development to a consortium called Southwater Hong Kong, which has yet to confirm any plans to preserve the site.
"The design is under development," says the URA spokeswoman, and states the authority is working with Southwater and will keep the Central and Western District Council informed of progress. Campaigners such as Law and Ko remain concerned.
"There are not many sites like this that can be traced back to the protected women of Hong Kong," says Ko.
"So rarely do we hear about the women," says Law. "[Ng] was not a princess but she was brave and it's a true Hong Kong story: a hybrid of Eastern and Western culture."
This article was first published in South China Morning Post.
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