By
Philip Norman
10:57 EST, 26 May 2013
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11:25 EST, 26 May 2013
Until this year, I’d visited Hong Kong only once, back in the 1970s when it was one of our last remaining colonies. British policemen in black caps and khaki shorts patrolled the streets and I met officials with Victorian titles such as District Commissioner.
During my week-long stay, I sampled everything for which ‘Honkers’ used to be famous.
Past and future hand in hand: Hong Kong is an intriguing mixture of heritage and modernity
I bought a cut-price cassette-recorder, had a green silk Chinese dressing-gown run up for me in 24 hours, visited the old colonial mansions on the Peak and was rowed by sampan out to one of the huge floating restaurants in Aberdeen Harbour.
There was already an end-of-empire feel about the place, although two decades more would pass before Britain’s lease ran out and it was handed back to China.
You didn’t have to be an imperialist to feel sadness when our flag was lowered on an island that had played a key role in British maritime history for a century and a half.
Nor to fear for its future as truckloads of Chinese troops took over, each grim-faced soldier rather sinisterly clutching a party balloon.
But the expected meltdown to communism never came.
Instead, China’s leaders have used Hong Kong – along with Shanghai – to symbolise their new love of Western capitalism, if not democracy. In that role, its growth has been phenomenal – voted the world’s top economic centre by the World Economic Forum for the past two years.
It may seem an odd choice for a long weekend break such as I chose for my return visit, especially with the ten-hour BA night flight both ways. But there’s a certain restfulness in going somewhere so utterly removed from Britain’s current economic woes and our hang-ups about wealth and conspicuous consumption.
And although my primary purpose was a trip down journalistic memory lane with my wife Sue, Hong Kong seemed far more fascinating this time around.
Hit the slopes: You can find plenty of things to buy (and plenty of things not to buy) in the busy Central district
The first great change, infinitely for the better, is touching down. The old Kai Tak Airport used to be in the centre of Kowloon, the colony’s mainland settlement, with its runway jutting out into Victoria Harbour. Landing was a white-knuckle ride, with mountains looming on one side and overcrowded apartment blocks on the other, so close that you could see people through their windows.
Since the Chinese takeover, a highly efficient international airport has been built 18 miles away at Chek Lap Kok, which I wish I could pronounce without a stupid schoolboy-ish smirk.
One might have thought China’s first priority would have been obliterating every last trace of colonial rule. But the island’s street and place names still exude 19th century Britishness: Victoria Harbour, Connaught Road, Queen’s Road Central, Repulse Bay, Stanley Market.
The Star Ferry, plying between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, has its same Victorian termini with plank walkways like Margate Pier and iron turnstiles made in Lancashire.
Downtown Hong Kong, though, is a different storey (misspelling intentional). A brand-new city has taken shape, which glories in its glass and metal skyscrapers, and the riches they contain, just as New York used to do pre-9/11. Here, bankers aren’t reviled, but looked up to in every sense. The showiest high-rises are the headquarters of international banks, none more so than Sir Norman Foster’s creation for HSBC, which resembles a giant pink and grey jukebox.
Rather than the crusty old colonial Brits of yesteryear, there is now a huge international, and mostly young, expatriate population working in the ever-booming financial sector and enjoying one of the world’s lowest tax rates.
Living space is at such a premium that even newish apartment buildings are routinely torn down and replaced by brand-new ones allowing even greater numbers of occupants to be crammed in.
‘A flat will be advertised as being so many square feet,’ one young British businessman told me. ‘What you don’t realise is that that includes your parking spot and your share of the communal pool.’
World wonder: You can gain a tremendous view of Victoria Harbour and Central from Victoria Peak
On the streets – with their smogmasked crowds, slimline trams and outsize public ashtrays – money doesn’t just talk, it uses a loud-hailer. The old instant tailors and shirtmakers and cut-price electronics bazaars have given way to stores and malls selling every top European fashion label – Prada, Chanel, Armani, Max Mara – through innumerable outlets.
There are more branches of Hermes here than in Paris.
Every day, thousands of shoppers pour in from mainland China to return weighed down with designer carrier bags. Outside the main Chanel store, there is still a long queue at past 10pm.
One thing you won’t see, though, however hard you look, is any trace of the People’s Republic of China and the ideology that is so diametrically opposed to all this capitalism.
During our three-day visit, communism makes only one coy appearance.
After dark, the skyscrapers around Victoria Harbour put on a collective light show, underlining what regular guys these business people are.
The show is best seen from a luxurious junk named Aqualuna, in a rather non-Chinese way. Towards its end, the junk’s piped disco track dies away and a solemn voice lists the creators of the spectacle: ‘HSBC… Samsung… Hitachi… Canon… the Chinese People’s Liberation Army…’
Next day, we travel, by Britishlooking double-decker bus, to the south of Hong Kong Island, where its best beaches are to be found.
On the journey, we pass Repulse Bay, which commemorates a famous British naval victory against pirates in the early 19th century (nowadays, our mariners probably would just look on, wringing their hands and talking about risk-assessment).
Overlooking the bay, there used to be an old hotel, famous for its roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Sunday lunches. I once drank whisky sours there with legendary foreign correspondent Murray Sayle – he who once defined a journalist’s most essential attribute as ‘rat-like cunning’.
The end of the line is Stanley Market, a seemingly endless labyrinth of stalls selling such traditional Chinese goods as Def Leppard T-shirts and multicoloured backpacks.
Bags of style: Hong Kong is flooded with day-trippers from China seeking the latest styles
Others display lingerie or tablecloths, with labels handwritten in English as they used to be in old-fashioned London stores: ‘Very stylish’… ‘Exceptionally popular’… ‘Something a little different.’
Our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental in Connaught Street, is one of the island’s strongest links with the past. Built in 1963, it was the first in today’s worldwide chain of Mandarin Orientals – a brand that for me, in whatever country, always comes pretty near perfection.
When this one opened 50 years ago, as just the Mandarin, its 27 floors made it Hong Kong’s tallest building. It was also the first hotel in Asia to offer en-suite baths with every room, prompting its bemused architect to ask: ‘Is every guest going to be amphibious?’
The island now boasts two Mandarin Orientals within a short walk of each other, but only Connaught Street’s has the wood-panelled Captain’s Bar where far-from-home Brits can drink draught beer from their own engraved silver tankards just as they might in days gone by on Sunday mornings in Surrey’s stockbroker belt.
In its Clipper Lounge – lined with black-and-white photographs of women from 1963 with beehive hair and men in mohair suits – Hong Kong’s biggest deals are said to be done over English-style afternoon tea with scones and rose-petal jam.
The last time I visited Hong Kong, my most memorable meal was fish-lip and crabs’ egg soup on a ramshackle floating restaurant in Aberdeen Harbour. This time, it’s a ten-course lunch in the Mandarin’s exclusive Krug Room, prepared by German celebrity chef Uwe Opocensky and themed to the hotel’s 50th anniversary.
Our dessert, recalling another notable construction from more than 50 years ago, is a chocolate model of the Berlin Wall. We feel thoroughly weird, demolishing this symbol of old-fashioned Western communism at the epicentre of the new-style Eastern kind.
Many Hong Kong Chinese feel nostalgia for the days of British rule, especially the older generation who sought refuge here from mainland China during the brutal Mao Zedong era.
I talk to Jimmy Lau, the Mandarin Oriental’s immaculate ‘concierge-ambassador’, who arrived from Shanghai with his grandfather when he was a small boy and earned his first living as a child busker.
A little of what you fancy: Captain’s Bar at the Mandarin Oriental offers a potent taste of tradition
Before Jimmy joined the Mandarin group 42 years ago, he tells me, he worked as an inspector for Hong Kong’s energy supplier, China Power and Light, with a beat that included the notorious Walled City of Kowloon.
This was an area in the centre of Kowloon that officially belonged to China, but which it could not administer and which Hong Kong’s colonial government dared not. As a result, it was completely lawless, a centre of the opium trade and safe haven for the Triads, the Chinese mafia.
Coincidentally, my previous Hong Kong visit was to write a magazine article about the Walled City. I remember how its unregulated buildings stood so close together that the streets were permanently dark, and residents on the top floors could step from one block to another via their windows.
It was bulldozed flat years ago, Jimmy Lau tells me, and is now a public park. From the hotel in Connaught Road, a short walk leads to Hong Kong’s very own Soho in the foothills of the Peak. Those who don’t fancy a steep climb can take the world’s longest outdoor escalator.
In Soho’s hilly markets, bargaining for a jade necklace or a carved wooden box, you might think you’d finally escaped Britain’s lingering embrace. But not so.
Among the sizzling food stalls, one seems vastly more popular than all others, and its permanent queue is entirely Chinese.
So what’s it selling? Dumplings? Deep-fried won ton? No, fried egg and Spam sandwiches.
Travel Facts
British Airways (0844 493 0758, www.ba.com/hongkong) offers three nights at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong (www.mandarinoriental.com/hongkong) from £1,289.
This includes return flights from Heathrow and room-only accommodation.
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Lived in HK for three years, loved it! I explored every nook and cranny and it was a wonderful experience. The Harbour at night was fab. I was lucky enough to live on the waterfront on the Island, albeit 20 floors up but the view was the best.
On this planet
,
Tampa, United States,
27/5/2013 22:55
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Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport was NOT built by the Chinese government after the 1997 Handover. It was planned, designed and substantially constructed under British rule. The reason it did not open as planned before the Handover was that China dragged its feet approving a substantial financial investment in completing the project. Publicly their reason for this was to avoid the British leaving a large debt for the post-Handover government to deal with. In fact the Chinese did not want the airport to open during British rule. Also the Chinese could not destroy Hong Kong’s colonial heritage after 97 even if they wanted to. Hong Kong’s government has a substantial degree of autonomy and China would not propose such an action. A post-Handover legislator did ask for the crown on top of the 19C Legislative Council building to be removed. The Planning Department said this was not possible as the building was listed!
Honkypudlian
,
Liverpool, United Kingdom,
27/5/2013 20:41
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Great to see a piece that may change some antiquated perspectives of Hong Kong, but it is quite cliched and riddled with inaccuracies. First of all, Hong Kong is not an island, it has an island but it’s not only one island. Then, there’s no trace of “pink” at the HSBC headquarters, so not sure how it could resemble a pink and grey jukebox. I am also wondering about the number of fish and crabs needed to create “fish-lip and crabs’ egg soup” and have never known it to be a dish as a local. There are a few other ones but you get my drift. Lastly, I would have to agree with docmartin above that one should explore beyond Stanley and the Mandarin, unless you are a staunchly stubborn imperialist.
cy
,
Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
27/5/2013 04:50
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Hong Kong holidays: Ghosts of Britain past on China"s colonial island
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