The Lost Mansions of the Mid-Levels, Part IV: Idlewild

At the end of 1932, renowned Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw embarked on a round-the-world cruise with his wife, political activist Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend. They made it to Hong Kong in February 1933. Their reception was effusive. 

“Hong Kong’s European society tends to lionise visiting literary figures; the absence of much serious home-grown talent means that when internationally known writers pass through Hong Kong they are pounced upon,” reported the South China Morning Post at the time. “Literary dinners and readings are held for them, mostly attended by lawyer/banker types who combine artistic or literary pretensions with the financial resources to pay high prices in return for name dropping privileges afterwards.”

Shaw was less enthused than his hosts. He declined an invitation to speak at the local Rotary Club, which he saw as little more than a venue for self-satisfied speechifying and pointless gladhanding (“Where is Rotary going? It is going to lunch,” he once wrote). He did accept an invitation to speak at the University of Hong Kong, with an audience that included students, top government officials, members of Hong Kong’s colonial elite and important figures from the local and overseas Chinese communities. But his speech quickly became a scandal. Standing at the lectern in the farthest reaches of the British empire, Shaw urged Hong Kong’s youth to embrace revolutionary communism. “If you are not a red revolutionist at 20, you have some chance of being up-to-date at 40,” he quipped.

Robert Ho Tung and George Bernard Shaw, with Ho Tung’s wife Margaret at left, Clara at right and family in the background. Photo via Hong Kong University Library

Shaw’s political inclinations were no secret, as was his willingness to bite the hands that fed him, but he had apparently agreed not to discuss politics in his speech. Hong Kong was on edge: mainland China was in the midst of a civil war between the Communists and Nationalists, and the city had been shaken by years of labour unrest, especially the 16-month Canton-Hong Kong strike that crippled the colony’s economy in 1925 and 1926. Shaw’s speech left Hong Kong’s establishment fuming at his perfidy; he and his wife soon set sail for San Francisco. But not before visiting a mansion in the Mid-Levels whose architecture — and occupant — would leave a lasting impression on Shaw.

Hong Kong’s most powerful man

The house was Idlewild and its occupant, Sir Robert Ho Tung, Hong Kong’s richest and most influential man. Located on Seymour Road where it curves uphill from Caine Road, Idlewild was popularly known as the Red House because of the hue of its plaster walls; it had a commanding view over the harbour and could be seen from many points in the crowded neighbourhoods below. Ho Tung had many properties around Hong Kong, including four houses on the Peak for which he had been granted special dispensation from the Hong Kong government, as people of Chinese descent were banned from living there at the time. But the more conveniently located Idlewild, which Ho Tung had purchased in 1897, was his main residence. 

Its name was not Ho’s choosing: it had been picked by the mansion’s original owner, a man known as Dr. Murray, who built the house as an investment property in 1876. At the time, Ho Tung was 14 years old and leading a very different life to the one he would later enjoy. He was one of five children born to a Dutchman named Charles Henri Maurice Bosman and Sze Tai, who had been sold into prostitution when she was 13 and was now a “protected woman” supported by Bosman. 

Bosman worked in the coolie trade, which was eventually banned by many countries as a form of slavery. He managed to cultivate a position of influence as Hong Kong’s Dutch consul, with part ownership of the luxurious Hongkong Hotel and a directorship at the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company. But Bosman’s business ventures were never entirely successful. He abandoned the family and left for London when Ho Tung was seven years old.

Hong Kong was not an easy place for a Eurasian, whose mixed heritage ran up against the colony’s strict racial hierarchy. Ho Tung probably could have passed for white — he had pale skin, red hair, blue eyes and generally European features — but he instead embraced his Chinese heritage, dropping his father’s surname and dressing himself in the Chinese robes. He was quick-witted and charismatic, and after finishing his studies at Queen’s College in 1878, he found work as a clerk for the Chinese customs office in Guangzhou. 

Returning to Hong Kong two years later, he joined venerable British trading firm Jardine Matheson as an assistant comprador. By 1894, he had worked his way up to head comprador, a powerful position that saw him responsible for Jardines’ business dealings, for which he received considerable commissions. Ho Tung savvily invested his earnings in property and other business ventures. By the age of 35, when he bought Idlewild, he was Hong Kong’s richest man. 

He had two wives, both Eurasian. His first wife, Margaret MacLean, was born to the Chinese mistress of a man from a wealthy Scottish family that had made a fortune in India and Macau. His second wife, Clara Cheung, was MacLean’s cousin; she had two Eurasian parents and her paternal grandfather was Thomas Ash Lane, co-founder of Lane Crawford. Polygamy was common in Chinese society at the time, but as May Holdsworth notes in her biography Sir Robert Ho Tung: Public Figure, Private Man, the relationship between Ho Tung, MacLean and Cheung was unusual: MacLean welcomed Cheung into the marriage as an equal partner, rather than as a concubine.

When Ho Tung married Cheung in 1895, he and MacLean already had one son, Sai-wing, born in 1884. The family would soon grow. Ho Tung and Cheung’s first daughter, Victoria Jubilee Kamchee, was born in 1897, shortly before the clan moved into Idlewild. They went on to have another three sons and five daughters. 

A grand old house for a grand old man

Idlewild matched the fluid background of the sprawling family. From the outside, it was a quintessential example of the Mid-Levels mansions built by Hong Kong’s British merchant class in the 19th century, with a three-storey façade of arched verandahs and an ornate cornice facing Seymour Road. But Ho Tung gradually transformed the 150,000-square-foot compound into a totem of Eurasian identity. He installed the Chinese symbol for prosperity (luk6 祿) inside the decorative wrought-iron grille suspended above the house’s grandiose entranceway, which was capped by the word “IDLEWILD.” – full stop included. And he eventually built a Chinese temple inside the house, similar to the one Eu Tong-sen would later build in his nearby mansion, Euston Castle.

This temple captivated George Bernard Shaw when he visited Idlewild during his stay in Hong Kong. By then, Ho Tung had become known as the “grand old man of Hong Kong.” He had spent the first four decades of his life accumulating as much wealth as possible; he spent the next three decades building influence. 

Ho Tung had grown up in a colony whose Chinese residents were not just marginalised but outright vilified, subjected to a nighttime curfew, residential segregation and separate criminal penalties that were much harsher than those for non-Chinese. That instilled a sense of national pride in Ho Tung, who avidly supported Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, and who urged understanding and sympathy for striking workers in the 1920s, going up against an increasingly virulent anti-Chinese attitude among Hong Kong’s elite. Ho Tung served as a first chairman of the Chinese Club, a counterpart to the whites-only Hong Kong Club, and he served on the board of the Tung Wah Hospital, among other charities. 

He did this while remaining a staunchly loyal British subject, one whose business interests extended to virtually every important Hong Kong company. He was knighted not once but twice, in 1915 and 1935. He served as the director of Hongkong Land and invested in Hong Kong Electric, the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock, the Peak Tram, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Green Island Cement and more. Rising from a difficult childhood as a member of a stigmatised caste, Ho Tung had become indispensable to Hong Kong.

Shaw’s soothing experience

Perhaps that is why Shaw seemed to feel a certain kinship to Ho Tung: both had come from modest means, worked hard to achieve success, and were outsiders in societies that viewed people of their backgrounds with scepticism at best. In a 1946 essay, “Aesthetic Science,” Shaw recalls how Ho Tung took him “upstairs into what in England would have been a drawing room.

It was a radiant miniature temple with an altar of Chinese vermilion and gold, and cushioned divan seats around the walls for the worshippers. Everything was in such perfect Chinese taste that to sit there and look was a quiet delight. (…) A robed priest and his acolyte stole in and went through a service. When it was over I told Sir Robert that I had found it extraordinarily soothing and happy though I had not understood a word of it. ‘Neither have I,’ he said, ‘but it soothes me too.’ It was part of the art of life for Chinaman and Irishman alike, and was purely esthetic.

It left such an impression on Shaw that he was still thinking about it more than a decade later. In 1946, he wrote to Ho Tung, “I am now very old (90) and still too busy to think of the past, but when I do, nothing soothes me more than the recollection of that service in your celestial private temple and the afternoon we spent together.”

Shaw died four years later, at the age of 94; Ho Tung followed in 1956, at the age of 93. After his death, Ho Tung’s descendants sold Idlewild, which was eventually demolished to make way for a 27-storey apartment tower, Hong Kong Garden that was completed in 1975. As usual in Hong Kong, there is nothing to commemorate the venerable old mansion’s presence. 

But it lives on in an unexpected place: Shaw’s last full-length play, Buoyant Billions, which premiered in 1948. It tells the story of a young man courting the daughter of an elderly billionaire who maintains a Chinese temple inside his London mansion.