The story of Hong Kong’s Portuguese community, as seen in a new exhibition
This Museum of History exhibition focuses on the Portuguese contribution to Hong Kong, from sports to education
Over the years, regular readers of this column will have noticed periodic references to Hong Kong’s local Portuguese community, and its many-faceted contributions to local society. Under-recognised and underappreciated, this ethnic group were among the first incomers to make their homes and lives here after British rule was established.
The earliest permanent settlers came across from Macau with Captain Charles Elliot, and were present when the British flag was raised on Hong Kong Island on January 26, 1841. From those urban beginnings to the present day, their direct descendants have displayed an outstanding legacy of personal commitment and dedicated public service to their new adopted homeland vastly disproportionate to the community’s overall size.
In mainstream historiography, Hong Kong has typically been portrayed as a primarily Anglo-Chinese – or Sino-British – joint creation. This convenient, wildly inaccurate binary view of the local past conceals the extraordinary levels of textural richness that lie within “Asia’s World City”. Various ethnic groups made their homes and lives in Hong Kong, and did not merely come and go as temporary sojourners. Instead, permanent family roots were set down and – for the past six generations – have left their bones in the soil of this place.
Consequentially, broader public recognition of the contributions made by these “other” Hong Kong belongers has remained patchy. At last, this imbalance has been redressed with the newly opened Hong Kong Museum of History exhibition, “Estórias Lusas – Stories of the Hong Kong Portuguese”, in preparation since 2016.
To relate a few examples, Hong Kong’s printing industry was largely operated by two local Portuguese families: Noronha and Xavier. Early Portuguese trading houses, with commercial links spanning India, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines and China, played a role vastly larger than the community’s actual size, and helped connect Hong Kong to the world. Few today realise, when they open a cold bottle of San Miguel beer, that a member of the local Barretto family first established the brewery in the Philippines in 1890, and built Malacañang Palace – now the presidential residence in Manila – as his private home.
