The wedding of Captain William Armstrong and Dora Humphreys on November 6, 1909. The bridesmaids were the Holyoak twins.

Soon after I arrived in Hong Kong, the first novel I read about this place was Tai-Pan by James Clavell. After I had met a few 'taipans', I realised that Clavell had a rather romantic view of these creatures. His hero was a swashbuckling Scottish opium smuggler called Dirk Struan, whereas the taipans I met seemed to be almost respectable. Taipan is the Chinese name for the senior executive of a 'hong', which in turn is the local word for a foreign-owned company that has operated in China for a few generations.

In 1911 Shanghai, journalist Jay Denby produced the classic definition of a taipan. He wrote: "A taipan, let me explain, is a red-faced man (the redder the face, the taipanner the taipan) who has either sufficient brains or bluff to make others work for him and yet retain the kudos and the bulk of the spoil for himself."

Today, you can still find a few genuine taipans skulking in the Bowling Alley Bar of the Hong Kong Club but almost all the hongs have been sold off to faceless multinationals or taken over by Chinese property developers, so today's taipans could be classified as an endangered species.

The taipans used to live in fine colonial mansions on The Peak. Some years ago, I came across a battered old photograph album in a junk shop. The first picture was of a society wedding. Above the photograph was scrawled the date of the happy event: November 6, 1909. I immediately recognised the bridegroom from a picture I had seen recently in a book called Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, so I bought the album.

Captain William Armstrong of the Hong Kong Volunteers was born in the colony. He had been a military aide to the former governor Sir Matthew Nathan. Armstrong had commanded the No 2 Company Volunteers Artillery when it won a shooting competition in 1907.

The files of The Hong Kong Weekly Press revealed that the bride's name was Dora Humphreys. Her family was in the property business and Humphreys Avenue, off Nathan Road, is named after them.

The people who really interested me were the bridesmaids who obviously owned the album originally. These two evil-looking little twin girls were Margaret and Dorothy Holyoak. Their father, Percy, was at the time the taipan of Reiss Brothers, a small trading firm. Later in his career he became very grand, but in 1911 he lived in a modest mansion (modest, that is, by taipan standards) called Capsuimun in Barker Road on the Peak.

The album reveals the family's lifestyle. For transport, they had two sedan chairs in which family members were carried by four splendidly-uniformed Chinese chair coolies to the nearby Peak Tram Station. There was a tennis court where the girls rode their tricycles and played with a small pack of fox terriers.

Percy had hired a professional photographer to take pictures of almost every room in the house. The Holyoaks' taste was a strange mixture of delicate Chinese furniture that clashed rather violently with massively grotesque Victorian tables and cheap bamboo chairs. The family covered every flat surface with china ornaments, vases, teapots and other knick-knacks.

As a visual social document, the album is quite fascinating. The children seemed to spend a lot of time as bridesmaids. I was showing the album to a Hong Kong financial guru, whose Auntie Dora just happened to have been Captain Armstrong's bride, when he noticed the picture of the bathroom. It contained a massive, decorated, earthenware Chinese bathtub. "We had one just like that in Shanghai before the war," he reminisced. "It took two coolies to fill it with hot water. Unlike Hong Kong, where you called your servants by their actual names, in Shanghai they would be called Number One Bathroom Boy and Number Two Bathroom Boy. We never knew their real names."