Queen Victoria's statue stood under an ornate canopy in front of the Hongkong Club.

A square marks the centre of many great cities. London has Trafalgar Square and Hong Kong has Statue Square. Tourists may note that it contains only a single, lone statue, that of the former chief manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Sir Thomas Jackson, Bart. The bank, which owned the square at the time, erected it in 1906.

Before World War Two, the square was crowded with statues, mainly of royalty, and was in fact originally named Royal Square by Sir Paul Chater, the great property developer who founded Hong Kong Land. Chater descended from Armenian princes and was an ardent royalist. The first statue he presented to the good people of Hong Kong was a sculpture of Queen Victoria's son, the Duke of Connaught. Unfortunately they had no idea where to put it and for over a decade it mouldered in a mat shed until at last it was erected in Statue Square in 1902.

When the noble duke revisited Hong Kong in 1907, his statue was moved to the bottom of Pedder Street, so that when he stepped off the boat at Blake Pier he would be confronted by his own graven image. The South China Morning Post of the day expressed the sincere hope that the duke would survive the shock.

During his visit the duke unveiled two royal statues, one of King Edward VII, the reigning monarch, and another of the then Prince of Wales, who later became King George V. Sir Paul donated the sculptures of Edward VII, and John Bell-Irving, a fellow director of Sir Paul's Hong Kong Electric Company, donated that of George V. These bronzes joined a statue of Queen Victoria that had been donated by the public in 1896. Above this statue was an ornate canopy that resembled something between the Albert Memorial in London's Hyde Park and a gigantic wedding cake.

The public later provided a statue of Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward, and Sir Hormusjee Mody commissioned a sculpture of Queen Mary. This rich Parsee merchant was a close associate of Sir Paul. He also paid for most of Hong Kong University.

In 1923, a seventh statue appeared. It was of a popular former governor, Sir Henry May. On the day he arrived to take up his governorship he was attacked by a Chinese madman armed with a revolver who missed shooting His Excellency from a range of three feet. Unperturbed, Sir Henry proceeded at a stately pace in his sedan chair to his inauguration ceremony at City Hall.

Sir Henry, who had formerly been Governor of Fiji, explained why he was attacked: "He mixed up Fiji with South Africa (feichau in Cantonese) and thought I was the Governor of the Transvaal and had turned his compatriots out of that country." It was obviously a case of mistaken identity. Some years after the event, May pardoned his would-be assassin.

By the 1930s, the nickname Statue Square had replaced Royal Square. During the occupation of Hong Kong in World War Two the statues were shipped off to Japan and the square was statueless. After the war, the United Kingdom Liaison Mission in Tokyo reported the presence of a statue of Queen Victoria dumped on the Osaka army arsenal's scrap-heap together with "a bronze statue of a man in a frock coat, bare headed, domed forehead and moustache" and "a pair of bronze lions, one with its mouth open."

Jackson and the bank's lions can be seen in the square today. Queen Victoria was not so lucky. Her monument mouldered away in a garage for eleven years before it was stuck on a pedestal in Causeway Bay's Victoria Park from where she glowers furiously at the traffic.