Then & Now | How, to spread culture and reduce inequality, Britain built bandstands in the Victorian era, and the civic-minded Parsees in Hong Kong who in 1864 paid for one
- The revolutions that shook Europe from 1789 onwards showed inequality drove social unrest. Victorian Britain’s response to this was to build bandstands
- The idea was that culture was not the preserve of the elite, and spread to British colonies such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where an 1864 bandstand survives
Imaginative use of a city’s less obvious heritage features can help illustrate broader historical lessons – especially for primary- and secondary-level students who might otherwise be bored by drily irrelevant, textbook-based classroom learning.
Overlooked backstories behind certain “public artefacts” – in Hong Kong and other locations – can reveal surprisingly interesting facts about economic activities both locally and on the other side of the world; trade and transport requirements, manufactured-goods shortages in one place and raw-materials surpluses in others.
The rise and decline of global consumer tastes, along with fluctuating supply and demand in general terms – an almost-endless variety of macro- and microeconomic examples can be drawn on.
Imaginatively re-evaluated heritage objects can also reveal the pivotal roles played by often overlooked ethnic minority groups in the evolution of colonial societies such as Hong Kong. All too often, such richly hybridised societies are portrayed in politically convenient binary Sino-British/Anglo-Chinese storylines and foundational myths.
This monochromatic approach tends to happen for a series of interlocking reasons – either want of accurate, reliable primary source information, a sad lack of broad-based vision by either professional academic historians or other, more popular writers, or to fit within a preferred editorial framework.
Social attitudes can be revealed by the lingering presence of certain heritage objects, and suggest what civil society values might once have meant in the time these artefacts were created.
