Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour.

Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia

“…The catchwaters also demarcate the bound aries of conservation zones established to minimize the adverse impacts of human activity. These conservation zones were typically afforested to prevent soil erosion and protect the steep slopes, and Indigenous villa gers were prohibited from using the timber for fuel (Ho 2001, 30;Peckham 2015). In contrast to typical colonial forestry practices, afforestation in Hong Kong was necessary for securing water supply, and it eventually laid the foundation for an ecologically driven conservation strategy after World War II (Corlett 1999).…”

“…Each po liti cal shift or crisis determines the geo graph i cal extent that Hong Kong is entitled to rely upon in order to meet its water demand. The dramatic transformation of Hong Kong from barren rock into a territory of lush, afforested hillsides more than fulfilled the British colonial fantasy of a civilized landscape, as Robert Peckham (2015Peckham ( , 1180 has argued, but it is an infrastructural landscape carefully configured and reconfigured in response to po liti cal conflict at vari ous scales. The 2019-2020 pro-democracy protests once again amplified the politics of infrastructural integration and economic reliance between Hong Kong and the mainland, and it remains to be seen what new infrastructural rationales will emerge.…”

The Legacy Effects of Colonial and Apartheid Imprints on Urban Greening in South Africa: Spaces, Species, and Suitability

“…The legacy effects of colonialism on the composition and distribution of urban forests have only recently come under scrutiny (e.g., Pawson, 2008;Ignativea and Stewart, 2009;Säumel et al, 2009;Hosek, 2019;Hunte et al, 2019), and a great deal more is required to better understand the patterns, processes and implications across, local, national and international scales (Pawson, 2008;Anderson et al, 2020). For example, Hunte et al (2019) show how distance from the colonial center of Georgetown (Guyana) influenced the type of trees found in particular parts of the city, whilst Gwedla and Shackleton (2017) show how the location of a town in the former racially prescribed bantustans in South Africa influenced the current abundance of street trees.…”