Civilising the Colonial Soundscape: Space and the Regulation of “Chinese Noise” in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong

Lauren Nicole Vaughan The University of Hong Kong

In 1872, Hong Kong’s colonial government passed an ordinance “to prevent certain nuisances,” which banned the crying of wares from a clearly delineated space encompassing the central business district and the island’s prosperous European residential district. This legislation was precipitated by complaints in the local English-language newspapers targeting “Chinese noise,” including hawker cries, firecrackers, and Chinese music. This talk demonstrates how the discourse formed by the writings of Europeans in nineteenth-century Hong Kong about noise that they construed as distinctly Chinese was shaped by two related discourses: one on noise nuisance in London and the other a broader discussion of the relationship between noise and civilisation. In the colonial context, the emphasis on class dominant in the metropole shifted to an emphasis on race, and the civilisational discourse was flattened, establishing a binary model in which Chinese were producers of noise and unaffected by hearing it while Europeans were intrinsically quiet and suffered from hearing noise. On the local level, this process served to justify the differential treatment of space in local legislation, enabling the creation of an area of privileged “European” space that was legally protected from certain sounds construed as “Chinese.” On a broader level, it contributed to the transformation, begun in the eighteenth century, of the Chinese from a civilised other into a backwards one in need of the civilising influence of the British Empire.