Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy

Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy traces the life and career of the talented colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who rose to become governor of Hong Kong and then the Straits Settlements. He governed Hong Kong at a time of revolutionary upheaval in China which brought the city to its economic knees and threatened Britain’s possession of the territory. Clementi strongly objected to London’s attempts to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and sought to protect Hong Kong from the intellectual currents sweeping through the mainland by making the city a bastion of traditional Chinese culture. As governor of Straits Settlements and High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States, he championed the traditional rights of the Malay rulers and suppressed national sentiment among Malaya’s swelling Chinese population. Alarmed by his determination to press ahead with such policies despite opposition, the government in London forced Clementi into early retirement.

This is the first full-length biography of a highly gifted colonial administrator who spent half of his roughly 30-year career in Hong Kong and played a major role in the city’s history. As a young official, Clementi quickly mastered Chinese and published translations of Cantonese poetry. He undertook epic journeys across China on intelligence-gathering missions, was closely involved in the land settlement in the New Territories, and the creation of Hong Kong University. As governor, he championed the development of Kai Tak airport and the provision of Hong Kong’s water supply. He also appointed the first Chinese member of the city’s Executive Council.  Yet he resisted reforms to the controversial mui-tsai system under which Chinese girls served as housemaids to Chinese families on the grounds that it was a Chinese ‘tradition’. This study of his career, in which he was also posted to British Guiana and Ceylon, sheds light on how Britain administered the far-flung territories that formed its empire. 

Graham Hutchings is an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and an honorary professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He was a foreign correspondent based first in Beijing and then Hong Kong and was later director of analysis and managing director at Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and advisory company. His previous books include China 1949: Year of Revolution.

‘Cecil Clementi was one of the most extraordinary figures of empire – scholarly, political, and bureaucratic by turns, devoted to Chinese culture and yet fiercely opposed to that country’s search for nationhood. Drawing on rich sources and in compelling, lucid prose, Graham Hutchings tells the captivating story not just of a man, but of the rise and fall of imperial Britain.’

— Rana Mitter, S. T. Lee, Professor of US-Asia Relations, Kennedy School, Harvard University

‘This is a beautifully written critical biography of Governor Cecil Clementi and a highly valuable addition to scholarship on how Hong Kong was governed at the heyday of the British Empire. Anyone interested in how it fitted into Britain’s East Asian empire and the dynamics between colonial Hong Kong and China’s Guangdong province will also find it illuminating.’

— Steve Tsang, Director of the SOAS China Institute and author of A Modern History of Hong Kong