About O Patriota (Hong Kong)

O Patriota (Hong Kong)

O Patriota ("The Patriot") was a Portuguese-language weekly newspaper published in Hong Kong from 1902 to 1904 for the territory's Macanese community — the Portuguese Eurasians, most of them born in or descended from families of Macau, who staffed Hong Kong's printing houses, counting houses, government offices and commercial firms. It is remembered chiefly for its campaign in the second half of 1902 against the Macau police commander Bragança, in the course of which it and its fellow Hong Kong Portuguese newspaper, O Porvir, were banned from circulation in Macau, evaded the ban by posting their copies as letters, and were reported on by the English-language Hongkong Telegraph. The paper's short life is documented by two independent bodies of evidence: the holdings of bound copies preserved at the Senado Library of the Macao Public Library, and the scholarly study of Hong Kong's Lusophone public sphere published in the journal Itinerario by Cambridge University Press, which quotes the paper's issues of the summer of 1902 in detail.

The Macanese community of Hong Kong

The first diaspora of Portuguese subjects from Macau to the port cities of East Asia began in the 1840s with the British colonisation of Hong Kong. By 1897 the "Portuguese" population of Hong Kong totalled 2,265, of whom 1,241 had been born on British territory, 931 came from Macau, and the rest originated from other parts of Asia or Europe. The community sustained an unusually rich press for its size: Monsenhor Manuel Teixeira, the historian of the Portuguese periodical press in the Far East, counted twenty-five Portuguese titles in Hong Kong. As the University of Essex thesis on the freedom of the Portuguese press in Macau observes, during periods of stricter censorship in Macau, Hong Kong was used as the printing place for opposition newspapers, which were then sent back into Macau; the British colony's freedom from Portuguese press law gave its Portuguese-language papers a liberty their Macau contemporaries did not enjoy. O Patriota belonged to this tradition, and it continued a line of Hong Kong Portuguese papers that included the weekly Echo do Povo, the long-running O Porvir (1897–1907) and O Extremo Oriente, with which it shared the community's public arguments.

A weekly of 1902–1904: the surviving record

The Macao Public Library's catalogue of bound foreign-language newspapers at the Senado Library records "O Patriota (Hong Kong), 1902–1904" as a weekly publication, preserved in two bound volumes on microfilm roll 2. The surviving issues run from number 2 of 1902 (issues 2–7, 16, 18 and 22–23 are held for that year) through numbers 26–31, 33, 35, 37–38, 42–44 and 47, 49–52 of 1902–1903, numbers 1–23 of 1903, and numbers 24–53 of 1904, closing with number 53 of 1904. The numbering shows a weekly that kept a continuous count across its three years and reached at least fifty-three numbers in its final year. The Senado Library also catalogues a separate O Patriota of 1919, a Macau fortnightly of six numbers bound with other papers; the catalogue treats it as a distinct title from the Hong Kong weekly, and the two should not be confused. The Hong Kong paper's own run, as catalogued, begins in 1902 and ends in 1904.

The Bragança affair of 1902

The paper's documented public life is dominated by a single controversy. In 1902 the conduct of Bragança, the commander of police in Macau, became the subject of a Macanese protest campaign in Hong Kong. The Itinerario study records that two Hong Kong Portuguese-language newspapers, O Porvir and O Patriota, "collectively demanded justice for the Macanese". The editors of O Patriota repeatedly asked for Bragança's abuse of power to be reviewed, and maintained that only justice could elevate the nation and make its people happy. The paper printed correspondence on the case from within the community: its issue of 5 July 1902 carried, on page 2, a letter from Henrique Lourenço Noronha to the Governor of Macau. Its issue of 30 July 1902 carried the article "Macau e seus melhoramentos" ("Macau and its improvements"), on page 6, and its issue of 6 August 1902 a further piece on the doings of the Macau police commander. A well-attended meeting was held at the Club Lusitano, the community's club, where members gathered to express their indignation, and the club sent a telegram to the Portuguese minister in Lisbon — but to no avail.

A republican voice against Macau's government

The paper's criticism ranged beyond the single case. In a tone that the Itinerario study describes as echoing the republican criticism of the Portuguese monarchy, an article in O Patriota condemned the Macau government for its state of moral decay and Portugal itself for "taking hasty steps towards discredit and ruin" (caminha a passos apressados para o descrédito e para a ruína). A contributor to the Hongkong Telegraph feared that the Portuguese newspapers in the British territory would need to use more vigorous language, not against the actions of the Macau authorities, but against their inaction. The controversy was one episode in a longer pattern of Lusophone public argument in Hong Kong that scholars have traced through three set-piece events: the Camões festival of 1880, the celebration in 1898 of the fourth centenary of Vasco da Gama's arrival in India — in which O Porvir and O Extremo Oriente had sparred over the organisation of the festivities — and the Portuguese king's birthday in 1902, the year of O Patriota's campaign.

The gag-law background

The Macau government's answer was suppression, and the authorities of the period disposed of increasingly severe press laws with which to pursue it. The Itinerario study sets the episode against the 2ª lei das rolhas (second gag law) of 1890 and the 1896 lei dos anarquistas (law of anarchists), which were increasingly exercised to punish individuals who published content perceived as "subversive". Hong Kong's position outside Portuguese jurisdiction was the community's protection: the criticism that would have exposed a Macau printer to prosecution under those laws could be printed in the British colony, and the grievance of the Hong Kong Macanese was carried on in the Hongkong English press as well as in their own papers.

Ban, evasion and prosecution

In line with this legal background, and in view of the emerging attacks on the Macau government appearing on British territory, the government of Macau banned the circulation of Portuguese-, Chinese- and English-language newspapers from Hong Kong. The office of O Patriota attempted to evade the ban by delivering its newspapers into Macau as letters, but the government ordered the Macau post office to open and inspect the newspapers, causing delays of four hours in delivery. In September 1902 the Macau government published in its official gazette, the Boletim Oficial, a new law directed at prosecuting Portuguese subjects who offended against the restrictions. The episode was reported in Hong Kong's English press: the Hongkong Telegraph carried a correspondence item, "The Portuguese Press and the Macao Government", on 11 September 1902, and an item headed "Despotism at Macao" on 17 September 1902.

End and preservation

The paper continued to appear weekly after the 1902 confrontation: the Senado Library's holdings run through 1903, with a continuous numbering, and into 1904, ending with number 53 of that year. No record consulted for this profile establishes the reason for its closure, and it should be recorded simply as a Hong Kong Portuguese weekly that appeared from 1902 to 1904. Its physical survival is owed to the Senado Library in Macau, whose collection of bound foreign-language newspapers — 101 titles in all, 88 of them preserved in binding in 1,839 volumes, of which 86 are in Portuguese — preserves its two volumes on microfilm roll 2. That a Macau library collected and bound the file of a paper its own government had banned is part of the paper's story: the run that the Macau post office was ordered to open and delay in 1902 is the run that survives in Macau today.

Assessment

O Patriota lasted only three years, but its campaign of 1902 makes it one of the best-documented small newspapers of Hong Kong's Portuguese community. The scholarly record preserves its arguments in its own words, its correspondents by name, its issues by date and page, and its adversary's counter-measures in detail, a density of evidence rarely available for a community weekly of its size. It illustrates, in one small title, the essential structure of the Lusophone public sphere in British Hong Kong: a diaspora community arguing about the government of Macau in Portuguese, on British soil, precisely because the argument could not safely be printed in Macau itself. Its name — "The Patriot" — was its programme: the paper that demanded the review of a police commander's abuse of power did so in the language of Portuguese patriotism, holding that justice, and only justice, could elevate the nation.