Sir Arthur Kennedy, who followed Macdonnell, was one of the colony’s most popular governors. He knew his job thoroughly and he combined this knowledge with sound judgment, a lively sense of humor, and a rare talent for pleasing the traders and the Colonial Office. He initiated the Tai Tam water-supply system and continued Macdonnell’s relentless fight against crime. Kennedy threw his more orthodox colleagues into a dither by entertaining Chinese merchants at official receptions in Government House, his executive residence. He went so far as to invite these Chinese to suggest improvements in the laws of the colony, and they promptly asked for a law to punish adulterous Chinese women. Knowing that each of the petitioners had several wives and concubines, Sir Arthur realized that his volunteer legal advisers were actually looking for government sanction to hobble their restless bedmates. He tabled the petition with tact. External changes produced surprising mutations in the progress of the colony. Its isolation diminished with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the completion in the next year of direct overland telegraph connection with England. No longer was a governor left to his own devices for days and weeks, improvising policy at the peril of his job until orders arrived from home. The hazards of life on the South China coast remained. In 1874, the colony was devastated by the worst typhoon since 1841. Flying rooftops filled the skies above the island, and 2,000 Chinese fishermen and their families drowned in the ruins of their floating villages. Sir Arthur’s departure to become the Governor of Queensland was a melancholy time for the colony’s Chinese. They were openly devoted to him—the first governor who had treated them more or less as equals. Even the English liked him, and he became the first and only governor to have a statue erected to his memory in the colony’s Botanic Garden. The statue disappeared during the Japanese Occupation of World War II. Kennedy’s successor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, not only preserved this solicitude for the Chinese but provoked a storm of protest from European residents by practicing leniency toward Chinese prisoners. When murders and burglaries increased, his humanitarian policies were blamed. Hennessy, a resourceful debater who was at his best in defending his own policies, was not intimidated. The weak side of his administration showed in a quite different area—his habitual neglect of essential paper work. Hennessy’s friendliness toward the Chinese unexpectedly involved him in controversy with the Chinese themselves. For centuries, wealthy Chinese families had “adopted” little female domestic slaves by purchasing them from their parents or relatives. In the households of the rich, these Mui Tsai could be identified at once by their shabby clothing and their general appearance of neglect.