We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2021
This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the ‘tropics’ as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of ‘othering’. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term ‘typhoon’ became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population.
1 This article was reprinted in many publications, such as ‘Terrific typhoon at Hong Kong’, Edinburgh Evening News, 28 September 1874, p. 3; ‘Typhoon in China’, Daily Telegraph & Courier, 29 September 1874, p. 3; ‘News in brief’, The Times, 29 September 1874, p. 3.
2 This was originally a quote in the Daily News but was reprinted in multiple publications, such as ‘The great typhoon’, Globe, 29 September 1874, pp. 2–3; ‘The typhoon in China’, Huddersfield Chronicle, 30 September 1874, p. 4.
3 ‘The great typhoon’, op. cit. (2). This typhoon of 28 September 1874 was widely reported and received coverage by metropolitan and local newspapers and periodicals across the British Isles even until December 1874.
4 Untitled, London Evening Standard, 29 September 1874, pp. 4–5; ‘The great typhoon’, op. cit. (2); ‘The typhoon in China’, op. cit. (2).
5 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, Northern Echo, 1 October 1874, pp. 2–3.
6 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (5).
7 ‘The great typhoon’, op. cit. (2).
8 ‘The great typhoon’, op. cit. (2).
9 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (5).
10 Mulcahy, Matthew, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006Google Scholar; Bankoff, Greg, ‘Storms of history: water, hazard and society in the Philippines 1565–1930’, in Boomgaard, Peter (ed.), A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007, pp. 153–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perez, Louis A., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001Google Scholar; Warren, James Francis, ‘Philippine typhoons since the seventeenth century’, in Bankoff, Greg and Christensen, Joseph (eds.), Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World, New York: Palgrave, 2016, pp. 105–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rohland, Eleanora, Changes in the Air: Hurricanes in New Orleans from 1718 to the Present, New York: Berghahn, 2019Google Scholar; Watt, Ian P., Essays on Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giles, Jana M., ‘Conrad's avant-garde sublime: spectacular language, nature, and the other in Typhoon’, Conradiana (2015) 47(3), pp. 163–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donovan, Stephen, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collett, Anne, McDougall, Russell and Thomas, Sue (eds.), Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Hurricanes and Cyclones, New York: Palgrave, 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 ‘Hong Kong’, Cornhill Magazine, reprinted in Evening Telegraph, 25 March 1878, p. 4.
12 As a free port, Hong Kong was also a site for all nations to trade under the protection of British law. By 1894, Hong Kong was ranked the third port in the empire after London and Liverpool, a reputation that only grew well into the 1930s. Jan Morris, Hong Kong: Epilogue to Empire, London: Penguin, 1997, p. 145.
13 ‘A Hong-Kong typhoon’, Western Daily Press, 2 November 1927, p. 11.
14 See Cowell, Christopher, ‘The Hong Kong fever of 1843: collective trauma and the reconfiguring of colonial space’, Modern Asian Studies (2013) 47(2), pp. 329–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peckham, Robert, ‘Hygienic nature: afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong Kong’, Modern Asian Studies (2015) 49(4), pp. 1177–1209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peckham, , ‘Hong Kong junk: plague and the economy of Chinese things’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2016) 90 (1), pp. 32–60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Lynteris, Christos, ‘A “suitable soil”: plague's urban breeding grounds at the dawn of the third pandemic’, Medical History (2017) 61(3), pp. 343–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Arnold, David, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800–1856, London: University of Washington Press, 2006, p. 5Google Scholar; Stepan, Nancy Leys, Picturing Tropical Nature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001Google Scholar; Driver, Felix and Martins, Luciana (eds.), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Arnold, David, ‘India's place in the tropical world, 1770–1930’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (1998) 26, pp. 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2.
17 Driver and Martins, op. cit. (15), p. 3.
18 ‘A Hong-Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (13).
19 ‘A Hong-Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (13).
20 National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, ‘What is the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon?’ (1 July 2020), at https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/cyclone.html (accessed 18 March 2020).
21 National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, op. cit. (20).
22 Great Britain Admiralty, Remarks on Revolving Storms, 2nd edn, London: Hydrographic Office, Admiralty, 1875, p. 3.
23 Great Britain Admiralty, op. cit. (22).
24 Great Britain Admiralty, op. cit. (22). The six authors mentioned are W.C. Redfield, Henry Piddington, Dr Thom, C.M. Meldrum, Colonel W. Reid and H.W. Dove, as translated R.H. Scott.
25 Amrith, Sunil, Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia's History, London: Penguin, 2018Google Scholar.
26 Anderson, Katherine, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Golinski, Jan, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, 12.
28 Marlon Zhu, ‘Typhoons, meteorological intelligence, and the inter-port mercantile community in nineteenth-century China’, unpublished PhD thesis, Binghamton University State University of New York, 2012; Robert Bickers, ‘“Throwing light on natural laws”: meteorology on the China coast, 1869–1912’, in Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (eds.), Treaty Ports in Modern China, London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 179–200, 179.
29 Here is a selection of periodical and newspaper articles that used the terms interchangeably: ‘Tyfoons in the China seas’, The Times, 6 November 1841, p. 3; ‘Abstract of the log of the Brig Kitty, Captain Willie, lying in Hong Kong harbor, civil time’, Journal of the Asiatic Society (July 1842) 127(43), p. 702; ‘Typhoons in the China seas’, Illustrated London News (hereafter ILN), 20 November 1847, p. 323; ‘A steamer in a typhoon’, The Times, 19 November 1851, p. 8; ‘Terrific typhoon at Hong Kong’, Liverpool Mercury, 26 October 1867, p. 4; ‘The typhoon at Hong-Kong’, ILN, 21 November 1874, p. 495.
30 Hirth, Frederick, word, ‘The “typhoon”: its history and origin’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1880) 50, pp. 260–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 260.
31 Sarah Grand, ‘The great typhoon’, Aunt Judy's Magazine, April 1881, pp. 358–70, 358.
32 Heinrich, Larissa, Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008Google Scholar.
33 I have used the names and spelling for those cities as they would have been referred to in 1842.
34 Bickers and Jackson, op. cit. (28).
35 Robert Bickers, ‘Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854–1950’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (June 2008) 36(2), pp. 221–6, 222.
36 Zhu, op. cit. (28).
37 Bankoff, op. cit. (10), p. 158.
38 Hirth, op. cit. (30), p. 260.
39 Hirth, op. cit. (30), p. 260.
40 Hirth, op. cit. (30), pp. 260–3.
41 Hirth, op. cit. (30), p. 264.
42 Hirth, op. cit. (30), pp. 266–7.
43 Schlegel, G., ‘Etymology of the word taifun’, T'oung Pao (1896) 7(5), pp. 581–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Bankoff, op. cit. (10), p. 158.
45 William Doberck, ‘The law of storms in the eastern seas’, Nature, 9 December 1886, pp. 135–41.
46 Doberck, op. cit. (45), p. 137.
47 Zhu, op. cit. (28).
48 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (5).
49 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, op. cit. (5).
50 ‘Havoc at Hong Kong from the fiercest typhoon on record there’, ILN, 18 September 1937, p. 480.
51 ‘The disasters by the Hong Kong typhoon’, Liverpool Mercury, 30 September 1874, p. 7; ‘The typhoon at Hong Kong’, Western Mail, 6 October 1874, p. 8; ‘Typhoon at Hong-kong’, The Times, 19 September 1906, p. 3; ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, Financial Times, 19 September 1906, p. 5; ‘10,000 dead at Swatow’, The Times, 8 August 1922, p. 6.
52 ‘The history of a typhoon’, Nature, 21 August 1884, p. 388.
53 MacKeown, P. Kevin, Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010Google Scholar.
54 Zhu, op. cit. (28), p. 180.
55 Zhu, op. cit. (28), pp. 125–77.
56 MacKeown, op. cit. (53).
57 ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, The Times, 20 September 1906, p. 3.
58 ‘Foreign help and sympathy’, The Times, 21 September 1906, p. 3.
59 ‘Foreign help and sympathy’, op. cit. (58).
60 ‘Foreign help and sympathy’, op. cit. (58).
61 ‘Telegram of sympathy from the king’, The Times, 20 September 1906, p. 3; ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, The Times, 4 August 1908, p. 5.
62 ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, op. cit. (57).
63 ‘Foreign help and sympathy’, op. cit. (58).
64 ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, The Times, 22 September 1906, p. 5.
65 ‘The Clubman’, Sketch, 26 September 1906, p. 340.
66 ‘Typhoon in the China sea’, op. cit. (29); ‘A steamer in a typhoon’, op. cit. (29); ‘A steamship wrecked in a typhoon’, Glasgow Herald, 2 December 1867, p. 7.
67 ‘A perilous voyage’, Graphic, 10 November 1900, p. 705; ‘Typhoon at Hong Kong’, ILN, 29 December 1900, pp. 982–3.
68 ‘Typhoon at Hong-kong’, Standard, 12 November 1900, p. 3; ‘Typhoon at Hong-kong’, Leeds Mercury, 12 November 1900, p. 7; ‘Typhoon at Hong-kong’, Star, 12 November 1900, n.p.
69 ‘Hong-Kong swept by typhoon’, The Times, 20 August 1923, p. 10.
70 ‘Great typhoon hits Hong Kong’, Nottingham Evening Post, 2 September 1937, p. 1; ‘British officials’ heroism in Hong Kong typhoon horror’, Western Times, 3 September 1937, p. 16; ‘Typhoon havoc in Hong Kong’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 3 September 1937, p. 11.
71 ‘Gallant rescues’, The Times, 19 September 1900, p. 4; ‘Royal Humane Society’, The Times, 16 February 1907, p. 7; ‘Rewards for gallantry’, The Times, 6 April 1907, p. 13; ‘Court circular’, The Times, 7 July 1925, p. 19; ‘The prince in the east end’, The Times, 18 February 1926, p. 16.
72 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon’, Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, 25 October 1906, p. 3. News of Bishop Hoare's death and tributes to his life also featured in the following: ‘The Hong Kong typhoon: how Bishop Hoare died’, Gloucester Citizen, 25 October, 1906, p. 4; ‘A bishop lost in the typhoon’, Wells Journal, 27 September 1906, p. 6; ‘The late Bishop Hoare’, Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, 28 September 1906, p. 3; ‘The world's news’, ILN, 29 September 1906, p. 432; ‘The Hong Kong typhoon: how Bishop Hoare died’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 25 October 1906, p. 4; ‘How Bishop Hoare died’, London Daily News, 25 October 1906, p. 8; ‘The late Bishop Hoare: details of death’, Kent and Sussex Courier, 26 October 1906, p. 7; ‘How Bishop Hoare died’, Norfolk News, 27 October 1906, p. 9; ‘Bishop's death in a cyclone’, Cheltenham Chronicle, 27 October 1906, p. 8; ‘The late Bishop Hoare’, Kent & Sussex Courier, 2 November 1906, p. 11; ‘How Bishop Hoare died’, Larne Times, 3 November 1906, pp. 7–8; ‘The late Bishop Hoare of Victoria memorial tablet’, Eastern Daily Press, 31 January 1908, p. 4.
73 ‘The Hong Kong typhoon: how Bishop Hoare died’, op. cit. (72).
74 MacDonald, Robert, Sons of Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Francis, Martin, ‘The domestication of the male? Recent research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century masculinity’, Historical Journal (2002) 45(3), pp. 637–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deane, Bradley, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 ‘Scenes in China’, ILN, 22 December 1900, p. 935.
76 ‘How the typhoon came’, Our Young Folk's Weekly, 12 February 1887, p. 107.
77 Keith Stewart Mackenzie, Narrative of the Second Campaign in China, London: Richard Bentley, 1842, p. 183.
78 Bernard, W.D., Narratives of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis, from 1840–1843: and of the Combined Naval and Military Operations in China: Comprising a Complete Account of the Colony of Hong Kong, and Remarks on the Characters and Habits of the Chinese, vol. 3, London: Colburn, 1844, p. 99Google Scholar.
79 ‘Tyfoons in the China Seas’, op. cit. (29).
80 Bingham, J. Elliot, Narrative of the Expedition to China, from the Commencement of the War to Its Termination in 1842: With Sketches of the Manner and Customs of That Singular and Hitherto Almost Unknown Country, vol. 2, London: Henry Colburn, 1843, p. 203Google Scholar.
81 H.C., , ‘A typhoon in the China Seas’, Colonial Magazine and the East India Review (1850) 18(1), p. 80Google Scholar.
82 Anderson, op. cit. (26), p. 177.
83 Anderson, op. cit. (26), pp. 177, 171–233.
84 Anderson, op. cit. (26), pp. 177, 171–233.
85 ‘Hong Kong swept by typhoon’, op. cit. (69).
86 ‘Typhoon havoc at Hong-Kong’, The Times, 3 September 1937, p. 12.
