British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East by James R. Fichter

Author:James R. Fichter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319979649
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Fig. 8.7Sources of coal imported for use of the state at Saigon. (Cochinchine, État 1880–1885. Re-exported coal was sent from Saigon to Taiwan, Tonkin, and Annam.)

French Coal, British Ports: Tonkin and Hong Kong

And yet if the conquest of Tonkin and the allocation of coal concessions there were intended to end dependence on foreign coal and foreign coaling stations, they failed. As the anonymous French author of a note on the subject wrote in the early 1890s, “one of the reproaches” one could make of the French colonial administration was that it did not use French colonial ports and “looked too frequently abroad.” The French fleet in the Gulf of Siam grew but still coaled at Singapore, not Saigon. As the French fleet in the China Seas grew, it coaled at Hong Kong or in Japan, not Haiphong. Ships in the Gulf of Siam were “nearly forced” to coal at Singapore and Hong Kong, since those ports had such large coal stocks.64 This “enriched” British ports and did nothing for Saigon. Why not enrich French colonial ports instead? Japanese or Australian coal could be kept in depots on the Vietnamese coast (Tonkin did not produce sufficient coal for the squadron yet). What the “British did at Hong Kong,” the author suggested, “which does not produce any coal at all, we can do at Tourane and Halong Bay.” It was only politique to have provisions for the fleet in French domains, in case “the port of Hong Kong is closed to us” again. Why not, he suggested, have another Djibouti at Tourane?65

As implied (and carefully never stated) in the above letter, a major reason the French navy avoided coaling in Indochinese ports was the initially poor quality of Indochinese coal. Early efforts to extract coal from the mines at Hongay and Kébao (Hongay was first exploited in 188866) produced coal serviceable for the boats of the Tonkin protectorate67 but not the French navy, which refused to use coal from the Société Française des Charbonnages du Tonkin because its briquettes were too crumbly. In 1894, the navy conducted new tests and found the briquettes improved.68

And yet these Tonkin coals were still drawn to the Hong Kong market by the same logic that pulled in Australian and Japanese coals: Hong Kong was where the buyers were. The Société, controlled by Crédit industriel et commercial (CIC), a metropolitan French bank founded to promote industrial development, purchased a Kowloon property in 1895 and was represented in Hong Kong by Jardine Matheson & Co., which sold coal on its behalf. The Société’s Hong Kong administrators included Sirs Paul Chater and H. N. Mody—Bombay merchants who had migrated to and found success in Hong Kong. The firm Chater and Mody was a major banking and industrial concern in late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong. The two men were among the Société’s founders and their financial and industrial ties aided the Société’s success: Hong Kong would provide the lion’s share of the Société’s sales (not least because of the demand created by Hong Kong Electric, which Chater also helped found).

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