Column

Letter from Hong Kong...

No history of Indians’ contributions to Hong Kong’s development down the ages can be considered complete without acknowledging the men who, in the early 20th century, steered the Hong Kong Mule Corps!

The erstwhile British colonial government felt it imperative for compelling reasons to bring in shiploads of Indians to steer the mule convoys that were then in use to transport military goods and equipment through the territory’s mountainous terrain.

According to contemporaneous accounts, Indians were considered necessary for even so undistinguished a job because local Chinese “coolie transport” was “expensive, bad and liable to strike.”

Also, the colonial government felt it prudent, on considerations of security, not to recruit from among the Chinese community for anything that had even remotely to do with affairs of the armed forces.

The Mule Corps was formed in 1912, and over the next 10 years, it came to have in excess of 500 personnel. When a reinforcement of mules was felt necessary, some 105 mules were shipped all the way from Karachi to Mumbai and then on to Hong Kong at the princely rate of Rs 60 a mule without fittings.

When more hands were needed to tend to these mules, local army officials found it difficult to enlist the services of local Indians at the minimum wage of HK$19 a month (plus an additional consideration towards living quarters and a bonus and clothing).

Additional incentives were offered to Indians to entice them to move to Hong Kong. A good many Indians did yield to these blandishments, and went on to serve the Mule Corps.

In anticipation of a Japanese attack during the Second World War, the men of the Mule Corps were even trained for armed combat. But even until some time before the Japanese invasion, a troubling shortage of personnel appears to have been manifest, with no satisfactory effort at fresh recruitment.

A last-minute request was made to the Indian government (then headed by the British) to send more mule drivers to Hong Kong. Whether that request was serviced is not known. In any case, with the outbreak of hostilities and the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, it must have been rapidly overtaken by events.

Once the war ended, Hong Kong did away with the Mule Corps in its entirety. But the record in service of the Indians who served in the force — and obviously got a kick out of it! — is forever immortalised in history books.