Maritime Spot: The boom at noon

Paul Ash observes some of Hong Kong's maritime past - and present

A few minutes before noon every weekday, a man in a dark uniform and peaked cap leaves the Jardine Matheson building in Causeway Bay, crosses under the car-choked boulevard of Gloucester Road and unlocks the iron gates of a tiny park on the edge of the sea.

The park is dominated by a Hotchkiss QF 3-Pounder naval gun, mounted on a pedestal and pointing out over some warehouses towards Kowloon.

A small crowd gathers to watch as the man fusses over the gun. Its barrel and mounting are painted a fetching electric blue but the gleaming brass breechblock shows this is no mere ornament.

Then, with a minute to go, the gunner stands to attention, stiff-backed like a grenadier guardsman. As the second hand marches towards 12, he takes up the slack in the cord attached to the breechblock. Noon. He jerks the lanyard. Bam! The gun fires with a flat, heavy boom which, for the briefest of moments, drowns out the eternal roar of Hong Kong's traffic.

The white gun smoke dissipates in the moist midday air. The gunner marches back to his office. A couple of tourists climb up to the Hotchkiss for pictures. And Hong Kong carries on with its frenetic day.

I like seeking out oddball relics such as noonday guns and it's hardly surprising to find such a tradition in Hong Kong, with its long history as a pivot in the former British Empire.

There are other time guns in the world. Cape Town's noon gun is higher and louder - you know when it's noon in the city - and Edinburgh has the One O'clock gun, a bona fide field piece, fired by a district gunner from the Royal Artillery. Both are better known than the Hong Kong gun - the Edinburgh gun even has a book about it, called What Time Does Edinburgh's One O'clock Gun Fire?

Noel Coward may have thought he was immortalising the Jardine gun in his song about mad dogs and Englishmen - "In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a noonday gun/To reprimand each inmate who's in late" - but that the tradition survives at all in the thrusting, new-millennium, neon-lit chaos of Hong Kong is probably the Royal Navy's fault.

The ritual dates back to the 1860s when Jardine, one of the biggest trading hongs in China, would welcome its visiting tai-pans - Cantonese slang for "big shots" - to the bay with a single round from a gun on the shore.

One day the gun was fired when a Royal Navy warship happened to be anchored in the bay. Incensed at the apparent effrontery, the British commander ordered that, as punishment, Jardine fire a gun every day at noon in perpetuity.

The Hotchkiss, along with the classic green-and-white Star ferries that ply between the island and Kowloon, is one of few of the city's full-sized maritime relics. Yet even if it has no ships for visitors to prowl around in, the Maritime Museum that occupies one of the old Star Ferry piers is an absorbing distraction.

The heat - 34ºC and 93% humidity on the day I was there - is as good a reason as any to seek the air-conditioned sanctuary of the museum. Between exhibits, I watched the Star Ferries chugging across to Kowloon, slipping between the freighters and fast tourist boats like ballerinas gone to fat but still capable of pulling some moves.

The museum tells the story of Hong Kong in pictures, maps, paintings and exquisite models of junks, tea clippers, Dutch East Indiamen and warships. Many of the exhibits are devoted to Zheng He, the Chinese eunuch diplomat who, between 1421 and 1423 - nearly a century before the great European explorers set off into the Atlantic in their creaky caravels - dispatched "treasure fleets" of 1000 ships or more on expeditions across the Indian Ocean, to the Americas and Australasia and beyond.

Just in case anyone got the wrong idea about the purpose of the great admiral's expeditions, a stone he had erected on the banks of the Yangtze River in 1431 carries the following inscription: "The countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects and to the most western of the western or the most northern of the northern countries however far away they may be."

As far as the Imperial court was concerned, the world consisted of all under heaven with China at the centre. Nations on the outside were subservient and expected to pay tribute. The further away a country was, the less civilised it was thought to be.

Six centuries later, there is nothing new under the sun.

History proved the emperors correct in their disdain for the rest of the world. When they came, the foreigners brought opium and degradation and war. Gunboat diplomacy, they called it later.

"Foreign stuff, foreign smoke, foreign drug, foreign mud," reads a line from a Chinese poem about the opium business.

In between the trading, there was more war, more struggle. In the 1960s, traffickers known as "snake heads" smuggled in refugees from mainland China. Others tried to swim and were taken by sharks or run down by fishing boats. In the 1980s the boat people came from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of them, jammed into stinking freighters and leaky sampans, only to eke out an uncertain future in refugee camps.

Having the bay and the dancing ferries just outside the windows gives the museum an edge that few would be able to match. Even so, I am startled to see a man pointing an AK47 at me (turns out he is the Somalian part of an exhibit on "sea-banditry"), and I jump at the creaking timbers of a sailing junk.

It is the model of French torpedo-destroyer Fronde, immortalised in a diorama, that reminds me that not all the gunboats were up to no good. The Fronde sank in the great typhoon that hit Hong Kong in September 1906, rammed by a steamer while going to the aid of wrecked fishermen. Five French sailors drowned.

The Fronde is shown running at speed - a bone in her teeth, sailors would say - heading into a golden dawn. French sailors with their blue-and-white bibs and wearing a naval "Bachi" red-bobbled bonnets - stand on deck. One sailor is cleaning one of the destroyer's guns.

I'd know that shape anywhere. A Hotchkiss QF 3-Pounder. - Ash was a guest of Cathay Pacific Airways

•  Next week: 52 hours in Hong Kong

Quick facts

 The maritime Museum is at Central Ferry Pier 8 on Hong Kong island.

Opening hours: 9.30am-5.30pm, Mon-Fri, 10am-7pm Sat-Sun. Entry is HK$30 for adults at $15 for children. See hkmaritimemuseum.org.