Although the European community seldom concerned itself with Chinese customs, it managed to raise a considerable storm over their “places of convenience” during the 1860s. These creations of the colony’s Chinese merchants were a sort of employee-retirement plan which consisted of taking one’s elderly or ailing workers to a crude shelter located on the north slope of Victoria Peak. There the faithful employee was rewarded for his long service by being given a quantity of drinking water and a coffin and left to die; if he were blessed with friends, they might visit him at this place, offer him an occasional scrap of food or a fresh ration of drinking water, and finally bury him. Often he died alone and without proper burial. This was too much, even for European opium traders, and Governor Richard Macdonnell stilled their protests by offering a free site for a Chinese hospital at Possession Point. This replacement of the terrible “dying-houses” was financed by the wealthier Chinese for their destitute countrymen. It became the first of the Tung Wah Chinese hospitals, now greatly expanded and modernized. The inevitable outcry that provision of the simplest medical care for the destitute would cause these facilities to be jammed by hordes of undeserving poor was raised—as it still is today—and proved false. Sanitary conditions among the Chinese were horrible when the British arrived and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. The colony government made many attempts to improve them, but it was regularly stymied by the tenement dwellers who opposed any form of health inspection as an invasion of privacy, and by landlords who resented any proposal which threatened their profit margins. During the bubonic plague epidemics of the 1890s, the government provided a special plague burial-ground and offered the families of the dead quantities of lime to render the bodies of the victims noninfectious. The Chinese responded by abandoning their dead in the streets or throwing them in shallow graves; the donated lime was sold to building contractors. The surviving tenements of the Western District of Hong Kong Island are still a shock to visiting Westerners. Still, their dark, dirty and overcrowded condition is a distinct improvement upon the disease-ridden pestholes of the last century. Sanitary inspectors, no longer detested and attacked by the population, can go anywhere and they carry full police powers for enforcing corrective action. The Chinese, never any fonder of dirt than the English, have been converted to the belief that the once-hated British methods can help them to achieve cleanliness.