A very long way from Rome - by Ruth Downie

If there’s a museum around, I’m usually to be found in the Roman section. But Roman sections are hard to come by in Hong Kong, where a recent visit forced me out of the comfort zone to discover the treasures beyond. Here are a few favourites.

The Time Ball Tower

This is set in a complex of Victorian buildings now renovated for modern use and collectively known as “1881 Heritage”

 If you know what a Time Ball does and why (and they’ve been around since 1829) then skip the next section. If you share my former bafflement, read on.

There’s a clue in the location: the Time Ball Tower is set on a hilltop that would have been visible to most of the ships in the busy Hong Kong Harbour below. And that’s the point. In order to navigate longitude, a ship’s captain needed to know exactly what the time was, and until the mid 18th century, timepieces were notoriously unreliable at sea. If you haven’t read “Longitude”, Dava Sobel’s account of how the inventor John Harrison solved that particular problem, then I thoroughly recommend it. But even Harrison’s marvellous marine chronometer would only work if it was set to the right time in the first place.

For many years ships visiting Hong Kong would set the time by the sound of a noon-day cannon. Well, maybe not by the sound. Because as anyone who’s watched distant fireworks will know, sound doesn’t travel as fast as light. The noise of the cannon could take up to three vital seconds to reach the far ends of the harbour, so what the sailors actually did was watch for the puff of smoke. A more accurate signal, but worryingly ethereal.

It was a British naval officer who invented the visual clue of the time-ball: a huge metal ball to be hoisted up a pole and then dropped at a precise time for all to see. Hong Kong adopted the idea in 1884 and the ball fell daily at 1.00 pm sharp, as determined by the nearby observatory.


Thus it was with great anticipation that Husband and I rushed over to the refurbished tower at 12.55pm, only to wait… and wait… and wait, until our mobile phones told us the moment had long passed. What we didn’t register until later was the day. The original time ball did not fall on Sundays or public holidays, and this was a Sunday. Time and tide might wait for no man, but the sychronising of timepieces evidently does.


 
The Odometer

Hong Kong Maritime Museum is always a treat, and they currently have an exhibition on map-making. Fundamental to making a decent map is being able to measure distances. While the Romans seem to have had some sort of wheeled vehicle with cogs that dropped pebbles through holes, the Chinese approach was far more stylish.

Here’s a replica of a machine in use during the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD). After a set distance the little men on top bang their drum. Much more fun than pebbles in a box, no?

Fishing-net weights

These are from the Hong Kong Museum of History and were in use in Neolithic times. Such a clever and simple idea. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I’ve never seen anything like them before.











The Rat Bin

The story of these grim but highly practical objects is told in the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences.

In 1894 Hong Kong was ravaged by plague. In the fight against the spread of disease, numbered bins were placed on lampposts all over the city for the collection of dead rats in disinfecting carbolic acid. Bins were emptied twice a day and each creature was marked with the number of the bin it had come from before being inspected. Any signs of plague infection in the rats gave the authorities a head start in surveying the local area for human cases.

(Incidentally, the bacterium responsible for plague was first discovered in Hong Kong during this outbreak. It’s named Yersina Pestis after one of its identifiers - Alexandre Yersin.)



St Paul’s, and a few St Nicholases

On a more cheerful note: some major cultural fusion in nearby Macau.

In the background: the stunning façade of St Paul’s. It’s all that remains of a church and college built in the 17th century by exiled Japanese Christians and Chinese craftsmen in a Portuguese-controlled territory under the direction of an Italian Jesuit. In the foreground: heralding a very twenty-first century Christmas.








 

Something familiar


And finally - there wasn’t a total absence of Romans.

These familiar-looking glass vessels (now in the Maritime Museum) arrived sometime between the second and ninth century, presumably via a trade route. And to demonstrate that the travel wasn’t all one way, recent work on Roman-era cemeteries in London and Somerset suggests that some of the occupants had origins in East Asia.

I wonder what their favourite British finds would have been?


Ruth Downie writes a series of murder mysteries set mostly in Roman Britain, and featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. To find out more, visit www.ruthdownie.com

Fragrant Harbour by Kate Lord Brown

Man Mo Temple - and the god of Literature

TEN VIRTUES OF INCENSE

It brings communication with the transcendent.

It refreshes mind and body.

It removes impurity.

It brings alertness. 

It is a companion in solitude. 

In the midst of busy affairs, it brings a moment of peace. 

When it is plentiful, one never tires of it. 

When there is little, still one is satisfied. 

Age does not change its efficacy. 

Used everyday, it does no harm. 

~Huang Tingjian Song Dynasty

The intoxicating smell of Hong Kong was described perfectly by Martin Booth in 'Gweilo': "Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement …'' Walking out into the night streets of Kowloon last week for the first time in fifteen years, the scent was exhilarating - rich incense, fetid durian fruits, meat roasting on roadside braziers, cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes. Much had changed since I travelled round the world with hand luggage, (not least that with two small children in tow it was now more noodles and an early night than Somerset Maugham and cocktails at The Pen). But the smell hadn't changed a bit.

The Chinese have used incense for over two thousand years, in worship and at home. From the pyramids of Egypt to the temple of Jerusalem and the giant swinging thurible of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, incense permeates our daily and spiritual human existence. Here in the Middle East you find small wood or metal 'mabkharas' burning Oud (agar wood) or bakhoor (woodchips moulded with resin, ambergris, musk, sandalwood, essential oils), everywhere from outside the doors of Carrefour to private homes. It's traditional for abayas and thobes to be perfumed by carefully standing over the mabkhara and allowing the incense to impregnate the fabric.

In Hong Kong I loved revisiting the Man Mo temple again, and it hadn't changed (unlike the rest of Hollywood Road, where junk shops and curio stores have given way to Ralph Lauren and chichi bars). That night brushing my children's hair, I could still smell the wonderful incense from the huge coils suspended from the ceiling above the gods of War and Literature. (That's the god of Literature's brass pen/brush top left - devotees light incense then give it a rub for luck or inspiration).

The most touching offerings are the small ones, like the tiny shrine (below), that someone had set up in an alleyway near Central. It reminded me of Bali, where you would wake to find offerings of flowers and incence burning in folded leaves in the door and gateways, or the spirit houses of Thailand where incense jostles with bottles of Yakult. Timeless, intimate acts of devotion whose origins are lost in history.

For those of you who write about the East, have you come across much about the history and use of incense? I wonder when it was first imported to Europe? I brought a bundle of joss sticks back, and burnt them on the first night home. Here, the effect sadly conjured more of my teenage purple tented bedroom than the exotic streets of the East. Perhaps this is one thing that is 'lost in translation', and I'll stick to my favourite 'Sacristy' candle for writing and inspiration: "THE STILLNESS AND BEAUTY WE FOUND IN AN ANCIENT CHAPEL. WOODEN PANELLING WITH YEARS OF BEESWAX POLISH, LEATHER-BOUND PRAYER BOOKS, PILLAR CANDLES AND A HINT OF INCENSE".

Location Envy: on knowing your place, but still envying others theirs, by Louisa Young

I write this in bed, with a turkey sandwich and a good book. A friend has given me this Christmas that mixed blessing: a copy of her bound proof of her novel, so that if I like it I might provide a pithy comment for the cover of the actual book.

What if I hate it it? Oh god. Why did I agree? Normally I don't - like Stephen Fry, only considerably less often, I decline gracefully, specially if I know the author. So why did did I say yes to this one? I don't even have the security of knowing beforehand that she's a good writer - though she is an experienced and skilled scriptwriter, this is her debut novel.

I'll tell you why: location envy. Location that is, not only in place but in time. (Is there a word for placing in time? There should be. Is there a dictionary where you can look words up by their definition? There should be.) Her book is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 1940s.

Ah, the images which swim before my mind! The jumble of wooden buildings, the long low cars, the junks silhouetted against the gunmetal surface of the harbour at dusk, the cocktail dresses, the flat white faces and the scarlet lipstick, the men in uniform, the shadows, and the waft of opium and jasmine . . . .

I have never been to Hong Kong. But I have seen In the Mood for Love (yes I know it was set in the 1960s) and The World of Suzie Wong and Macau and Shanghai Express and Shanghai Cobra and Empire of the Sun and even that terrible one with Madonna in it, so I know all about the imaginary landscapes of Shanghai and Hong Kong.

But I would never have the nerve to approach them as locations. Too alien! The very thing which makes them attractive scares me off. I prefer to have at least one foot in territory which is in some way familiar to me: the time, or the place, or the gender, or the political outlook, or at least something of the who what where why and when.

But I do not know what motivates the heart beneath the turquoise or crimson cheongsam. I cannot understand the dark purposes of the man with the thin moustache, the camellia buttonhole and the handmade silk suit. Look at this woman - what is her story?

Alas, I am not the one to tell you . . .

Yet I have written books set in ancient Greece and future London, imaginary Paris and the Caribbean, in 1918 and in 2046, in Cairo and god knows where else.

Strange how some times and places are possible for us to approach, and some are just not. Thankfully, we have other people to write about them for us.

*The Harbour by Francesca Brill, Bloomsbury, May 2012