By Stuart Braga 25 January 2017
This odd-sounding name has now been completely forgotten, but Mato Moiro was well-known to all the Portuguese inhabitants of Hong Kong for much of the first eighty years of the British colony [1]. It
was where they all lived in a little group of crowded streets in what much later became known as the Mid-Levels. This is now a highly desirable place to live and is filled with tall apartment blocks. Access to the city below, then known as Victoria and now as Central, is much easier than it was in the nineteenth century, as the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, built in 1993, takes all the effort out of toiling 135 metres up the steep hill.
Within a few years of their arrival in Hong Kong in 1841, the British community had established all the organisations that marked a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant colony of the mid-nineteenth century. They were all grouped near Government House: there was an elite gentlemen’s club, the Hong Kong Club, a Masonic lodge, Zetland Lodge, the Hong Kong Cricket Club, St John’s Anglican Cathedral and a little further away, the Hong Kong Jockey Club. The grand residences of the taipans, the heads of wealthy trading companies, were nearby on the waterfront. In the 1860s, the Botanical Gardens were laid out nearby, the governor reporting to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London that ‘a place of recreation, whereto the inhabitants may resort after the toil and heat of the day, is not only a luxury, but indispensable in a climate such as that of Hong Kong’.[2] He meant just the British inhabitants. Besides serving the interests of the rulers, these institutions also reflected and established geographical and social boundaries which excluded not only the Chinese, but also severely constrained what became a quite substantial Portuguese community from Macau. They could not join the Hong Kong Club, the Masonic lodge or the Cricket Club. They would never have gone anywhere near the Protestant cathedral. Even to glance inside its door was regarded as a mortal sin.[3]
To the west of this British elite area, in what is now the Sheung Wan district, was a rapidly growing Chinese settlement. As this area became overcrowded with a huge influx of people escaping from the turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s, settlement spread uphill into Tai Ping Shan, above Sheung Wan and straight below the steep rise of Victoria Peak. A dense population was crammed into filthy slums constructed without any planning controls until a serious outbreak of bubonic plague in 1894 forced the authorities to take drastic action. The problem had been ignored, not remedied, and the price then paid was a heavy one both in deaths and badly soured relations between the Chinese community and their British rulers.
Between the Chinese settlement and the British City of Victoria, a small Portuguese enclave developed. At first this was near the waterfront, and here the first Catholic church was built in 1843. However, during the 1850s, rents in this area rose because of the influx of Chinese people fleeing the turmoil in China, so that the Portuguese were gradually forced out, and moved up the hill to the vicinity of the mosque. It was termed by its residents Mato Moiro, ‘the field of Muslims’, the name deriving from the Jamia Mosque, built as early as 1843. Several units of the British garrison were Indian regiments, so it was deemed necessary to build a mosque as quickly as possible. After the Portuguese Catholic population moved out, the site of the original church was sold, and the present Catholic Cathedral was built in 1888.
The people who lived here were the first wave of the diaspora from Macau, those who came soon after the British occupation of Hong Kong. In Macau the whole Portuguese population had lived within the sound of church bells. So it would be in early Hong Kong. Intensely devout, they lived within the sound of the church bells of the Catholic cathedral which sounded the Angelus each evening. With Chinese "heathen" on one side and English Protestants on the other, the Portuguese community drew closer together in defence of and in commitment to the Catholic faith.
The Portuguese enclave was readily identifiable by the dress of the women, many of whom attended Mass twice a day. They usually appeared in public wearing a dó, a long black cape-like costume, a coverall. It was very distinctive and Portuguese women wearing it were immediately recognisable.[4]
Thus an enclave was established that would exist until the early twentieth century, an area of small terraces extending up the hillside, near the mosque. Here, within a kilometre of each other were the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, the mosque, a non-conformist chapel and, later, the Jewish synagogue. It was an appropriate symbol of much religious diversity, and was made necessary by the tiny wedge of land on which the city of Victoria was built in its first half century. The adherents of place of worship each saw themselves in some sense as ‘defenders of the faith’.
In consequence, this community became self-contained and inward looking. It was for a long time a religious concentration, rather like a Jewish ghetto. Orthodox Jewish communities often seek to set up an eruv, a physical demarcation of the boundary of the distance that a worshipper might walk to synagogue on the Sabbath. Similarly, the Portuguese community felt they had to live within the sound of church bells. It was a kind of aural eruv. The evening Angelus was the sign for a family gathering, movingly described by J.P. Braga, who grew up in the Mato Moiro.
‘No attempt to delineate an average Portuguese family in Macao or Hongkong would be complete without a description of the family prayers and devotions which are an important part of life in most Portuguese homes – and especially of the old-fashioned homes. The family group assembles in the parents’ room, as a rule after the evening Angelus. The senior feminine member generally leads the prayers, and the responses are said by the others in unison before the little family altar (no matter how humble, each home has its family altar). The whole of the five mysteries of the rosary are recited. At the conclusion, upon rising, the children in turn take the right hand of their parents and kiss them “Good-night”, invoking their blessing in a single word: “benção”, to which the parents reply: “Deus dei graça” (“May God bless you.”).[5] He added that ‘this formula is the Macao patois for corrupted Latin. In Portugal, the correct reply is “Deus te abençoe” ’.’
In the early twentieth century, a growing population led to overcrowding in Mato Moiro. It was still squeezed in by the bastions of British colonial power on one side and the still more crowded Chinese tenements on the other. Moving up to the top of the Peak was out of the question. Power and wealth ensured that only the ‘taipans’, the heads of British commercial concerns and senior government officials, would be able to live in this exalted location, cooler and far more pleasant in summer than the sweltering city beneath. To ensure that this exclusivity remained, the Peak District Reservation Ordinance was passed by the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 1904, reinforced by the Peak District (Residence) Ordinance in 1918, which required that all applications to live there should be approved by Government.[6] In 1922, a Peak Residents’ Association was formed in case the Governor let them
down, but there was no chance of that. Therefore the people of Mato Moiro had to look elsewhere.
They looked across the harbour to Kowloon, which was being developed in the 1920s, having had little development for many years after the British acquired it in 1860 from China. During the 1920s, most of the Portuguese in Mato Moiro moved out. For many more years, they formed tight-knit communities, one centred on Rosary Church in Tsim Sha Tsui, built on Chatham Road in 1905, the other on St Teresa’s Church in Kowloon Tong, built in 1928 at the corner of Prince Edward Road and Waterloo Road.
Half a century later, these communities also disappeared, as Portuguese people left Hong Kong for places with greater opportunities and greater security: principally North America, but also Portugal, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. The once very close-knit community of Mato Moiro had disappeared into the mists of time. Its name was no longer even a distant memory.
The two maps are reprinted by courtesy of António M. Jorge da Silva. They first appeared in his The Portuguese community in Hong Kong, a pictorial history, 2007.
[1] The name is spelt in several different ways, but this is the spelling used by J.P. Braga in a little booklet issued in 1941 to mark the centenary of Hong Kong, Portuguese pioneering: a hundred years of Hong Kong. Braga lived in Mato Moiro for fifty years.
[2] Sir Arthur Kennedy to Lord Kimberley, 15 July 1873, R.L. Jarman, Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941, vol. 1, p. 406.
[3] The priests gave Meno Baptista, now living in Oregon, USA, this solemn warning when he was at school in Hong Kong.
[4] A.M. Amaro, ‘Sons and daughters of the soil of the first decade of Luso-Chinese diplomacy’, Review of Culture, July/ September 1994, No. 20 (2nd series), pp. 13-67.
[5] J.P. Braga, The Portuguese in Hongkong and China, p. 166.
[6] P. Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, p. 3.