The Jewish Governor Who Built Hong Kong’s Golden Mile

Nathan Road is one of the most famous streets in Asia.

Walk Nathan Road on any evening and you will find the whole world there. Mainland Chinese tourists with rolling suitcases. Commuters pouring out of the MTR. Shoppers moving between the jewelry stores and electronics shops. Visitors disappearing into the labyrinthine corridors of Chungking Mansions. The neon signs are famous. The density is famous. The road runs the length of the Kowloon Peninsula from the harbor to the hills, and it has been called Hong Kong’s Golden Mile.

Yet almost nobody can say who Nathan was.

Sir Matthew Nathan was born in Paddington, London, in 1862. He was the second of nine children of Jonah Nathan, a Jewish businessman of German origin, and his wife Miriam. He attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and trained as an engineer. He served in Sudan and India before entering Britain’s colonial service. In March 1899, Queen Victoria appointed him to govern Sierra Leone. It was the first time in the history of the British Empire that a Jew had been appointed to a colonial governorship. From there he went to the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, before arriving in Hong Kong in 1904 as its thirteenth governor.

He was forty-two years old, single, and about to build something that would outlast everything else he ever did.

Kowloon in 1904 was largely undeveloped. It was marshy, flat, and ignored by the British colonial class that had long concentrated their attention on Hong Kong Island across the harbor. Nathan saw it differently. He had an engineer’s eye and an engineer’s instinct for what a city could become. He established Hong Kong’s first urban planning office. He then set about laying out a road that would run the full length of the Kowloon Peninsula to the border with China.

His colleagues were not impressed. They thought the project was absurdly ambitious and called it “Nathan’s Folly.”

Today Nathan Road is lined with jewelry stores, electronics shops, and international hotels. It passes through Mong Kok, one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth. The Kowloon-Canton Railway, whose construction Nathan also initiated, was the predecessor of the rail link that today carries millions of passengers between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The folly became the spine of a city.

Nathan also did something quieter. The small Jewish community in Hong Kong at the turn of the century numbered barely 165 people. Most were merchants from Baghdad and Bombay, families like the Sassoons and the Kadoories who had built commercial empires across Asia. They had recently completed their first formal synagogue, the Ohel Leah, built in 1902 by the Sassoon brothers and named after their mother. Nathan served as its honorary president. He extended the lease on the Jewish cemetery. Historians of the community have described his three years as governor as the high point of Jewish life in Hong Kong. For the first time, a tiny Jewish community in a Chinese colony under British rule had one of its own at the very top.

Nathan was not a particularly observant Jew. His family’s religious practice had faded before he entered public service. But he never denied the identity. He had joined the Anglo-Jewish Association in 1892 to advocate for Jews in Persia. In Hong Kong he showed up for his community in the most visible way available to him.

He also had a difficult time socially. He was single in a world built around couples and dinner parties and formal social customs. His distance from the colonial social scene drew comment. The colonial class was a closed world, and Nathan, however accomplished and however decorated, remained in some sense an outsider to it.

After Hong Kong, Nathan governed Natal in South Africa, where politicians openly attacked him for being Jewish. By 1916 he was the senior British official in Ireland when the Easter Rising erupted in Dublin. Criticized for failing to act on intelligence warning of rebellion, he resigned shortly afterward. He later governed Queensland before retiring to England, where he died in 1939.

But it is Hong Kong where his legacy sits, literally embedded in the map of one of the world’s great cities.

Every day, people ask for directions to Nathan Road. Taxi drivers hear the name hundreds of times. Tourists photograph its neon signs before walking past the hotels, the jewelry stores, and the electronics shops. Few stop to wonder who Nathan was.

They do not know that the road was laid out by the first Jewish governor in the history of the British Empire. A man who served Hong Kong’s Jewish community as honorary president of Ohel Leah Synagogue. A man who looked across a stretch of marshland in Kowloon and saw the backbone of a future city, even as his contemporaries dismissed the project as absurd.

Yet the street is itself his monument. Long after the governors’ portraits have faded into archives, the road he imagined through Kowloon’s marshes remains one of the busiest streets in Asia. His name is spoken every day by people from every corner of the world, most of whom have never heard his story. They have simply spent their lives walking through his legacy.