Mad dogs and Chinamen.

AMONG old China hands, few more contentious issues exist than that of the "No Dogs or Chinese" sign said to have hung outside the Public Gardens atop the Bund of old Shanghai.

Never mind that the heirs of Chairman Mao run shops, restaurants, and hotels full of goodies reserved for foreigners and Party functionaries (membership has its privileges?). Never mind too that the sign never existed--not, at least, the way legend has it. Countless Chinese schoolboys still grow up with it drummed into their heads, and references continue to pop up in the press, Western as well as Eastern, inevitably to illustrate the wickedness of European colonialism. I have cited it to nice effect myself, once even after I was pretty sure it had never been there.

The last laugh, however, almost always belongs to history. Nowhere is this more true than in China. European colonialism may not have been the most congenial of systems, but a half-century of experience with its Asiatic competitors (not least of which has been Chinese Communism) makes Kipling look downright tender. And events finally came full circle in Hong Kong recently when it turned out that a luxury apartment building had posted signs banning both maids and dogs from the main elevator. The prohibition on maids appeared in Chinese and Tagalog (the most common of the Philippines' many languages) and was posted under another sign forbidding dogs. Apparently the signs had been there for some time but had not been enforced until a recent change in management.

What lends the notice a racial cast in Hong Kong is the more or less exclusive identification of "maid" with "Filipina." Years ago, many families here had a Chinese maid, or amah, whose primary charge was the children. Today affluence has made the Chinese amahs largely a thing of the past, replaced by Filipinas forced by a succession of idiotic governments at home into seeking work as domestics abroad. Many of these Filipinas have college degrees. Even more have other family members here as well-mothers, sisters, daughters--working in other homes raising Chinese and European children so that their own might eat. And where five years ago there were just 25,000 Filipina maids here, today there are 105,000.

Now, one of the most striking things for Americans living abroad is how little attention the rest of the world pays to our racial conventions. The Cantonese expression for foreigner, gwei loh, translates roughly as "foreign devil," and though the expatriate community here takes it as a joke, the word is in its origins as rude as "nigger" is in English--and it can still have the same connotation. Of course, the Chinese are no more or less prejudiced than other Asians. On the whole, they do not much harbor illusions about a yellow man's burden.

In particular they dislike the thousands of Filipina amahs descending upon the city square on their one day off each week. A couple of months back, Hong Kong Land, which owns much of the commercial space around the area and is in turn owned by the powerful conglomerate Jardine Matheson (the real-life Noble House), became an instant press villain when it launched a push to sweep the Filipinas from the square. Although the charges of "ethnic cleansing" were absurd, so was the proposed alternative gathering place: a parking garage. More embarrassment followed when the amah for Jardine taipan Nigel Rich was quoted as saying that her boss's attempt to move the Filipinas to an underground garage "was not a nice idea."

This was the background to the brouhaha set off when a Filipina maid named Linda faxed off a note to the South China Morning Post about "No Dogs or Filipinas" signs posted in Tregunter Towers, where apartments rent for $7,500 per month. Although the signs were hastily removed, the spirit behind them lingers on. Just a few days after the story broke, the following note was slipped under the doors of Filipinas living in the building:

YOU SHOULD TAKE THE SERVICE LIFT

WHERE YOU BELONG! IF YOU DON'T

LIKE IT, PLEASE GO BACK TO YOUR

COUNTRY.

DON'T FORGET THAT YOU ARE EMPLOYED

HERE AS SERVANTS!

DON'T RUIN THE REPUTATION OF

YOUR OWN KIND WHO DISAGREE WITH 

YOUR ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS.

OBVIOUSLY THIS APPLIES TO THE USE

OF THE SHUTTLE BUSES ALSO. Not much subtlety here. It was signed "a group of very angry tenants."

Reaction was swift and ludicrous. The Philippine consul general lodged a protest and drew parallels with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi movement. The United Migrant Workers, United Filipinos in Hong Kong, and the Mission for Filipino Migrant Workers all issued denunciations. The incident was particularly embarrassing for some British Hong Kong civil servants (including Governor Chris Patten's press secretary) who live in Tregunter Towers and have now hurriedly denounced a sign they had given no thought to before.

But mostly the war has been carried out on the letters page of the Post, where hostilities have raged between those urging sympathy for the long-suffering Filipinas and those saying the Filipinas need to learn their place. "Yes, we are domestic helpers, but that doesn't make us less human," wrote Marrz Saludez Balaoro.

"Experienced colonials, unlike the nouveau expatriates, knew how to employ staff and treat them well, without going overboard," allowed Mina Kaye.

"Although some of them allege that they are college graduates in the Philippines and therefore seem to have a corresponding sense of superiority, they come here to work as domestic helpers, and they should not expect to be treated more favorably than others in their position," said J. Ong.

But the most priceless letter came from a man who signed his name Robert Thio and was fool enough to append the letters "PhD" after it. The signs, he declared, "were not put up without a valid reason." He then gave that reason. "I have observed," said Dr. Thio, "that many Filipino maids speak loudly among themselves in the lifts of the building and on public business (particularly in mini-buses). This is a nuisance and generates resentment among other people."

Well, the dam burst after this one. Anyone who has heard Cantonese speaking among themselves will concede that they are not exactly Trappist monks, a fact pointed out by the next round of correspondents.

Up at Treganter Towers soon after, I ran into two Filipina amahs who work in the complex but say they have decent employers. They tell me that the publicity has angered some Chinese in the building. "I don't know why they treat us like we're not human," says one. "We are the ones who are raising their children."

And the infamous sign from atop the Bund? Again, the news is not comforting for those who associate all villainy with the West. In 1973 Richard Hughes returned to Shanghai after many years of absence and devoted his subsequent column in the Far Eastern Economic Review to puncturing the legend. The sign, he said, was not a sign at all but "a paragraph in a great list of municipal proscriptions--in Chinese, never in English--which was exhibited outside the park from 1868 until 1925. Following the May 30 demonstrations in that year, the British quietly removed it." That may explain the origins. But no one has yet explained how so many people came to believe otherwise.

Until now, that is. Lynn Pan, author of several books on Shanghai, says the source of the myth was revealed to her during a visit to the basement of the Shanghai Museum. In the course of her research for a just-released photo essay on old Shanghai, she stumbled across not one but an entire cache of "No Dogs or Chinese" signs that had been manufactured by Party authorities to parade before visiting foreign delegations as evidence that Noel Coward really had it right when he linked mad dogs with Englishmen. "People swear until they are blue in the face that they saw it on the Gardens," says Miss Pan, who fled the city with her family in the 1950s. "But it was never there." Perhaps it was the noonday sun.

Mr. McGurn is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.