We’re continuing our exploration of the lost mansions of the Mid-Levels with a look at two specific houses: Rose Hill and Buxey Lodge.
Employees of Russell & Co in front of Rose Hill, Hong Kong, ca. 1885 – Photo courtesy Peabody Essex Museum
Rose Hill
If the name Delano means anything to you, it’s likely because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. But if you’re a keen student of the 19th century elite, you might recognise it as representing something else: the Boston Brahmins. This was the name given to the upper class families who traced their ancestry to the first settlers of New England in the early 17th century.
Just as ice travelled from the frozen ponds of New England all the way to Hong Kong, so did the scions of the Boston elite, who made a fortune smuggling opium and shipping goods along the Pearl and Yangtze rivers. Among them was FDR’s maternal grandfather, Warren Delano Jr., who began working for an American trading firm in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1833, when he was 24. After building a vast fortune, he returned to the United States only to lose his money in the 1857 financial crash. He decided to make his way to the upstart colony of Hong Kong to get back into the opium trade.
Delano settled into a neoclassical house, Rose Hill, built in 1858 by another American trader, John Murray Forbes, who had also come to Hong Kong after suffering losses in the 1857 crash. Not only were the Forbes another Boston Brahmin family, they would soon be related to the Delanos by marriage: Forbes’ younger brother, William Howell, married Warren Delano’s eldest daughter Dora in 1867.
Rose Hill was located next to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, just above Caine Road. Dora’s younger sister Sara — FDR’s mother — later recalled it as “a fine house above the town, with the Peak rising behind it.” To get there, the family hired workers to carry them in sedan chairs up from the harbour, an undoubtedly arduous journey that underlined why Hong Kong’s wealthiest residents preferred the Mid-Levels over the Peak, which was mainly used for summer holidays until the Peak Tram opened in 1888.
Then as now, the upper class never stayed in one place for long. The Delanos and Forbes often travelled to Canton, Macau and Shanghai on business, and even after the younger children were sent back to the United States for school — Hong Kong’s muggy climate was deemed unsuitable for their health — they returned to visit Dora. “Dora Delano Forbes maintained the family connection with the Far East until the turn of the century, first in Hong Kong and later in Shanghai,” writes historian Robert Butow in the journal Prologue. “She never learned Chinese, but she could speak ‘pidgin-English,’ the lingua franca of the China coast, ‘very rapidly and amusingly.’”
Dora Delano Forbes and her husband eventually left Hong Kong, making their way to Shanghai before ending up in Paris and finally back in the United States. Rose Hill, for its part, disappeared at some point towards the middle of the 20th century. Block 3 of Robinson Heights, a three-tower estate completed in 1989, now stands on the site of the old mansion.
Now let’s walk down Caine Road to the site of another lost mansion with connections to the opium trade.
Buxey Lodge in the 1970s, photo courtesy of Tim Ko, via RASHK Survey
Buxey Lodge
There’s a curious stone pillar near the corner of Caine Road and Aberdeen Street. It stands at the base of Albron Court, a 27-storey apartment tower built in 1985. Tucked beneath a brown tile canopy and standing in front of a chain supermarket, the pillar looks decidedly out of place with its carved granite cap and bilingual inscription; the tower’s Chinese name (Fung1 Lok6 Gok3 豐樂閣, “Plentiful Joy Pavilion”) is written in a florid cursive script. You might wonder why the developers of this otherwise unremarkable housing complex would have invested in such an ancient-looking stone monument.
The answer is, they didn’t. The pillar is a remnant of the site’s previous occupant, a house known as Buxey Lodge, which was built in 1876 by a man whose name might sound familiar: Hormusjee Naorojee Mody. If you’ve been to the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong, you’ve seen his bust, which honours a generous contribution that was instrumental in setting up what is now a top-ranked international university. You’re probably also thinking of Mody Road in Tsui Sha Tsui, which was named in honour of the prolific entrepreneur who built Buxey Lodge.
Mody was born in 1838 in British-controlled Bombay, where his family was part of the city’s Parsi community. They were descended from a group of Zoroastrians who had fled their homeland of Persia more than a thousand years earlier, when the Islamic conquest led to their religion being suppressed. (Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of a sixth century BC prophet and poet named Zarathustra or Zoroaster, whose ideas influenced the Abrahamic religions, as well as the thinking of Greek philosophers like Plato and Pythagoras.) The Parsis have never been a large community; to this day there are no more than 200,000 of them around the world and about 200 in Hong Kong. But they managed to carve out a niche as traders. When the British asserted their control over India, Parsis began migrating throughout the empire, setting up businesses wherever they went.
That was the case for Mody’s uncle, Jehangirjee Buxey, who moved to Hong Kong after its establishment as a crown colony to work in the opium trade. Mody joined him in 1858, working at his uncle’s company and the Bank of Hindustan, China and Japan before meeting another Indian-born entrepreneur, Catchick Paul Chater. They went into business together, buying and developing land in Kowloon after it became part of the colony in 1860, and eventually working on the Praya Reclamation Scheme that would expand the Central waterfront into Victoria Harbour – a pioneering project that laid the groundwork for a century of land reclamation across Hong Kong.
Buxey Hall, named in honour of Mody’s uncle and built next door to Chater’s first home, was a testament to his success. It was an ornate structure with two pitched tile roofs surrounded by a flat roof terrace that offered panoramic views of the harbour. Twin cupolas marked each side of the building’s Caine Road frontage, with a two-storey bay window in the centre, topped by a plaster cornice painted with an elaborate frieze.
At the time, Caine Road marked the highest point in the Mid-Levels, the last layer of urban development before the steeply sloped bushlands that led up to Victoria Peak. But not for long. When Buxey Lodge was built, work was already underway on Robinson Road about 170 metres uphill, which was followed by Conduit Road another 82 metres higher up. In 1909, Mody purchased an even larger house on Conduit Road called Newlands, which he renamed Buxey Lodge. He and his wife Maneckbai moved in and spent two years there together before Mody died in 1911 at the age of 72.
Maneckbai continued living at the second Buxey Lodge until her death in 1926. As instructed by her will, it was donated to the Hong Kong government, which demolished it in 1960 and replaced it with a new block, still named Buxey Lodge, that was used to house civil servants.
After Mody’s death, the original Buxey Lodge was sold to a man named Pun Young-wo. It was finally demolished in 1981 to make way for Albron Court. The old pillar — part of the original mansion’s entrance gate — is all that remains on the site. But other vestiges of the mansion were preserved, including a stained glass door, tables and chairs. They are now housed in the collection of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.