Sir Catchick Paul Chater was a tycoon like none other. Not only did he have a hand in many of colonial Hong Kong’s most pivotal enterprises, from Jardines to Dairy Farm to Hongkong Electric to The Wharf, he literally reshaped the city.
In 1889, a few decades after arriving in Hong Kong from his native Calcutta, where he was born into a family of Armenian origin, he founded Hongkong Land and laid the groundwork for Hong Kong’s first major land reclamation project. If you walk down Chater Road today, admiring the neo-classical architecture of the old Supreme Court or the luxury shop windows in the Prince’s Building, you are standing on the tangible legacy of Chater’s forward-thinking career.
And yet, like so many seminal structures in Hong Kong, Chater’s crowning achievement long ago fell to the wrecking ball. In 1901, he began construction on a palace to suit his outsized influence and vast wealth: Marble Hall. When it was completed, it stood 500 feet above Victoria Harbour, on a plot of land nearly 63,000 square feet in size: impossible to miss, with an even bigger reputation that extended far beyond the shores of Hong Kong.
When Chater first commissioned the house, he and his wife Maria Christine Pearson were living on Caine Road, next door to Chater’s business partner, Hormusjee Mody, and down the street from his brother and several other relatives. He also had a bungalow on Austin Road in Kowloon, and both houses had hosted prominent guests over the years, including an Armenian archbishop and the second-to-last Hawaiian monarch, King Kalākaua. Each residence was stately, especially the bungalow, which opened onto a large garden with a tennis court. But neither would compare to what Chater planned for the lot he had acquired at 1 Conduit Road.
He chose the name Marble Hall as a reflection of its primary building material: beautifully striated stone quarried in Greece and shipped halfway around the world to Hong Kong. “From whence did the idea of a marble house come?” asks historical researcher Liz Chater, a distant relative of the Hong Kong tycoon, in her pictorial review of Marble Hall. She speculates that he was motivated by the memory of his school in Calcutta, La Martinière, established in 1836 by philanthropist Claude Martin. “Martin had a passion for marble and perhaps the building made a lasting impression on Sir Paul,” writes Chater.
Marble Hall overlooking Central , 1930s
Paul Chater hired Hong Kong architecture firm Leigh & Orange, whose work at the time included the Ohel Leah synagogue, the original Prince’s Building and the Dairy Farm cold storage depot now home to the Fringe Club and Foreign Correspondents’ Club. (They would later design the Former French Mission, University of Hong Kong Main Building, Mandarin Oriental and many other local landmarks.) They designed a sumptuous neo-classical palace with colonnaded verandahs and twin cupolas on either end of the façade – another nod to Chater’s boyhood school. Construction took more than four years, complicated by the steep terrain, which was painstakingly levelled. (When Mody accompanied Chater to visit the house while it was being built, he slipped on a steep path and tumbled down the hillside, injuring himself enough to be bedridden for several days.) By 1904, however, the house was close enough to completion that Chater invited journalists from the Hongkong Telegraph to pay it a visit. They proclaimed it “the finest mansion owned by a private citizen in Hongkong” and opened their report with a long and evocative description of their approach to the residence:
Marble Hall in 1926. Its name refers to the widespread use of marble. Photo via HKU Libraries
Amid scenery which reminds the visitor now of the Trossachs in mid summer and again of the leafy lanes of Richmond, built up on a beetling crag which has defied the clinging of limpet-like creepers, stands the mansion which has been erected for Sir Paul Chater, the doyen of Hongkong’s merchant princes – a fitting abode for one who has given so liberally to all that was calculated to uphold the Colony’s credit. From the centre of the city to the battlemented walls that encircle the building a steep and ever steeper mountain path has to be negotiated, but at every turn new natural beauties unfold themselves while here and there the busy harbour looking its best peeps through the tangle of trees and rocky buttresses. A mountain rivulet carols down a gorge, below the pathway, and in these bright days when an English spring morning seems to pale by contrast with Hongkong’s clear atmosphere and bracing breezes, the ascent is wonderfully beautiful. An artist in colours would be charmed at every turn and winding of the path, and deem it in the end but a fitting prelude to the beauty of the mansion which crowns the hill.
“The mansion itself stands out clear-cut and cameo-like on the crest, backed by rugged hill which rises higher till in the early morning the topmost crest of all is lost in mist,” continued the report. The journalists praised the building’s “stately proportions and finely-finished exterior,” adding: “It is ornate, though by no means florid.” Chinese lions carved in Fuzhou flanked the entrance steps, leading up to Corinthian columns that flanked the front door. Mosaic tiles imported from England decorate the entranceway floor.
Inside, the reporters were astonished by “the magnificence of the adornment,” remarking that if there are any finer houses in Asia, they hadn’t heard of them. “From floor to ceiling, everything is marble,” they wrote. “The lofty columns are of Skyros marble; the colonnade and the staircase are all marble and even the supports of the staircase are of dark-grained marble of an exceeding rich appearance.”
The first floor consisted of a dining room, drawing room, billiards room and “an apartment which will probably be set apart for curios,” according to the report. Indeed, Chater was an avid collector of antiques, art, maps and other objects; when a Chinese viceroy later visited Marble Hall, he proclaimed Chater “the king of porcelain” for his vast collection of fine Chinese ceramics.
He was also a generous host: “It seemed that if one were in Hong Kong, passing through or planning to visit, Sir Paul Chater’s home at Marble Hall had a continuously open door,” writes Liz Chater. One visitor described Chater and his wife as “unusually nice people,” and the record of events held at Marble Hall seem to attest to their sociability: there were horticultural shows in the garden and club meetings in the drawing room. Marble Hall also seems to have been a happy place to work, at least according to the Telegraph reporters, who noted unusually good conditions in the servants’ quarters – although there is no record of what servants thought on the matter.
When Chater died in 1926, he bequeathed Marble Hall to the Hong Kong government, on the condition that his much younger wife could remain living there until the end of her days. (She died less than a decade later, in 1935, at the age of 56, after an unknown illness. She and Chater had no children.) The government handed it over to the British navy, which used it as an office until the Japanese invasion. Unfortunately, the house caught fire less than a year after Hong Kong returned to British control, and in 1953 it was finally demolished to make way for civil servants’ quarters.
Today, just two traces of Marble Hall remain: an old gatekeeper’s lodge, now a listed heritage building, and the name of the government flats that replaced the old mansion: Chater Hall.