Hong Kong (25 page)

It all makes for a constant nervous brio. A sort of universal
frisson
runs through the town, when the newspapers announce a suspension of stock-dealing, for instance, or a dashing new development by an Australian millionaire, or for that matter a shift in Chinese policy, a passage of words between Moscow and Washington, a threat of protectionism, or anything else which may, for better or for worse, affect the sensitive balance of the Hong Kong economy. When, in 1961, Jardine’s shares were for the first time offered to the public, the offer was over-subscribed by fifty-six times; and when in 1980, in a move to thwart hostile takeover plans by Chinese magnates, Jardine’s bought 40 per cent of Hong Kong Land, and Hong Kong Land bought 40 per cent of Jardine’s, it was like the climax of a soap opera.

Nowadays the ups and downs of the volatile share market keep the investing classes constantly on their toes. Playing the exchange has become a vastly popular form of gambling in Hong Kong, and there are always knots of Chinese at shop-windows displaying the Hang Seng financial index, like the little crowds that assemble around television shops in London when a Test match is being played. Successive economic crises have given many people nasty shocks, especially the great world crash of 1987, which closed the Stock Exchange for three days and very nearly wrecked the Futures Exchange; but so far Hong Kong has always proved its resilience by bouncing back and keeping most of the punters out of bankruptcy.

Land is the cause of much excitement. Since the foundation of the colony all land on Hong Kong has been vested in the Crown (the only exception is said to be the site of the Anglican Cathedral, which was bestowed upon the Church as freehold in 1847). The original leases were for as long as 999 years, so permanent seemed the prospect of the imperial sway; as the realization of 1997 dawned more clearly, they were limited to seventy-five years, while in the New Territories they were always sold to expire in 1997, like the lease of the territories themselves – 27 June was the standard completion date, giving the lessee three days to pack up. The matter of leases was crucial to the 1984 agreement with Beijing – even the wildest gambler was reluctant to invest in a colony where tenure had become so brief and uncertain. They can now be granted until 2047, the year in which,
under the terms of the treaty, Hong Kong capitalism may legally be abolished.

But leasehold could be as profitable as freehold, and from the start land speculation played a large part in the development of Hong Kong. In the original auctions of the 1840s some people bought far larger tracts than they needed, in the hope of prosperity to come, and others made themselves rich by acquiring small lots all over the place. Long before the acquisition of the New Territories astute investors were buying land in the peninsula: they included several members of the Navy League, an organization vociferously demanding cession of the New Territories for strategic reasons. Every now and then there has been a sudden eruption of land prices – between 1975 and 1980, for instance, rents for offices in Central rose by 500 per cent, and the price of luxury flats by even more. There are frequent killings to be made, and a whole new class of investor, from many parts of the Pacific world, has put its money into Hong Kong properties.

On the most popular level, far below these mighty transactions, the gusto of capitalism is just as apparent – more so, because more of it happens out of doors. From one end of Hong Kong to the other markets are seething. In the New Territories the old market villages have been metamorphosed into overwhelming concentrations of tower-blocks, but still at their feet the open marts carry on as always in canvas-roofed enclaves among the concrete, selling vegetables and fruit from the remaining local farms, fish, pigs from China, herbs, crafts, oysters, ducks. The village of Lau Fau Shan, on the west mainland coast, is in effect one large seafood market. Its unlovely alleys are lined with tanks full of eels or garupas, trays of crabs and twitching prawns, and are all but permanently blocked by men pushing huge barrows of oysters, their wheels squelching horribly through the mixture of mud and fish-scale which surfaces the streets.

Up the steep slopes of west Central, around Hollywood Road and the stepped tumultuous passageway called Ladder Street, the stalls have an established air. They have been there almost since the foundation of the colony, and are supplemented by secondhand shops of all kinds. Like most Chinese markets they sell almost anything, but they specialize in old-fashioned bric-à-brac, silks sometimes, pictures and antiques of varying worth. Scholars still sometimes find valuable books and manuscripts around here, and tourists are happily deceived by the prevailing air of Confucian integrity.

On the other hand the vast market area which comes to life each
evening around Temple Street, in the Yau Ma Tei area of Kowloon, is nothing if not contemporary. Interspersed with hundreds of al fresco restaurants, bubbling and steaming beneath their bright lights, and with shops stacked with cages of twittering birds, the stalls of Temple Street sell everything to do with modernity: everything to do with radios, calculators, computers, car engines, videos, televisions, telephones – every chip and plug and junction box – every distributor head, every kind of cable – new and secondhand, sham and genuine, legal and illicit, pristine, chipped, dented and re-built. Juvenile electronic geniuses wander here and there, inspecting circuits through thick spectacles. Housewives rummage through boxes of light-plugs. A Pekingese is curled up fast asleep upon a doorstep, and a man composedly watches TV on a chair outside his shop, and a woman is selling fish soup out of a huge cauldron, and a butcher is offering bloody eviscerations of sea-turtle, together with yellow-dyed segments of chicken; and through it all the radios blast, the transformers wink, the woman yells recommendations of her soup, the birds deafeningly twitter, the dog sleeps, and a huge good-natured crowd ambles and surges by.

Nearby there is a place called the Golden Shopping Arcade, which is famous for its counterfeit computerware. The counterfeit has long been a Hong Kong speciality, though nowadays, as the territory grows more sophisticated, many of its counterfeit merchants are moving on to Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and even China. In 1895 Henry Norman complained about counterfeit editions of English books. In 1986 Cartier watches, Dunhill lighters, Cussons Imperial Leather Soap, well-known brands of wine and dish-washing liquid were all being faked in Hong Kong, sometimes under not very subtly misspelled names: the Japanese Sharp Elsinate calculator, for instance, a favourite device of the 1980s, turned up in copyright-evading pseudonyms as the Shrap Elsmate, the Eisimate, the Spadb and the Spado (the Shrap 838 sold especially well in China because of its lucky number – two eights and a three).

The Golden Arcade is gloriously brash about it. It is a bright emporium, on three floors, divided into multitudinous premises like the old Chinese tenement houses and stuffed to the ceiling with all-but-authentic goods bearing all-but-accurate names. They sell often for a tenth of the original price, sometimes for a twentieth, and there are dealers who will, for a couple of dollars, copy almost any program onto your own computer disk.

From time to time the authorities clamp down upon this place, seize the more outrageous infringements of copyright and issue stern warnings: but the instinct of the Golden Arcade, which is to a heightened degree no more than the instinct of Hong Kong itself, is impervious to such pedantries, and business soon returns to normal.

Lounging in the shafts of their ancient vehicles, outside the Star Ferry terminal at Central wait the very last of the rickshaws. They remind me of the very last of the Bath chairs, antediluvian outside the Great Western Railway station in the Somerset of my childhood.

For a hundred years and more every Hong Kong memoir has made reference to the rickshaws. Every Victorian globe-trotter went for a rickshaw ride as a matter of course, and generations of servicemen, British, American and doubtless Japanese, indulged their high spirits in rickshaw races, or were carried insensible to their ships and barracks by worldly rick-men through the night. Today the venerable survivors of the rickshaw men do not try very hard for custom, only halfheartedly bearding ferry-passengers who look sufficiently inexperienced; and if you ever see a rickshaw actually in service, conveying a doubtless just-arrived visitor through the streets of Central, the frail and stertorous rickshaw man is likely to look as though this really might be his last run, while the passenger almost certainly sits bolt upright behind him in a posture of acute embarrassment.

Tourism has long been one of Hong Kong’s purposes, but this has never become a tourist city. Its tourist industry is all mixed up with everything else, and those rickshaws are almost the only touristy thing to be seen downtown. There is a reconstructed Song Dynasty Village in the New Territories, and a huge pleasure compound, Ocean Park, above the sea on Hong Kong Island, but in general tourism is incidental to the nature of the place. The shopping districts of Kowloon which cater largely for the tourist trade, with their endless shelves of radios and cameras, their multitudinous tailors and their acres of toys, do not feel like tourist traps, as they would in most of the world’s cities; they seem organic elements of a great merchant centre – more like medieval fairs of Europe than, say, duty-free shops at airports.

Nevertheless many of the greatest Hong Kong firms have concerned themselves, in one way or another, with the visitors’ trade, whether as an extension of the transport industry, or a useful adjunct to real
estate, or a source of foreign currency. Not including Chinese, nearly six million visitors came to Hong Kong in 1990, more than half of them from other Asian countries; and although there are really not many sights to see, except the grand sight of Hong Kong itself, so stimulating is the pace of things, so various is the cuisine, so seductive are the bargains and so exotic the sensations that few tourists seem to go away disappointed. Every week the Tourist Association’s magazine asks visitors what they have enjoyed most; buying a camera, they usually say, but often they mention the food.

To house this multitude Hong Kong never stops building hotels. Great fortunes have been sustained by the hotel industry, and several of the best-known hongs and merchant families have been hoteliers in their time. Today many of the greatest buildings around the harbour are hotels, from the dignified old Peninsula at Tsim Sha Tsui to the glassy palaces of the big international chains, with their preposterously accoutred doormen and their statutory indoor waterfalls; in obscurer sites behind, especially among the garish streets of Kowloon, thousands of lesser hostelries proliferate, ranging from modestly respectable family lodgings to houses of frank disrepute.

There have been good hotels in Hong Kong since 1866, when the Hong Kong Hotel was opened on the site of the defunct Dent and Company’s offices, immediately beside Pedder Wharf. Its restaurant was nicknamed ‘The Grips’, nobody seems to know why, and it became at once a centre of local social activity, as well as the place into which every first-class traveller, escaping with relief from shipboard life, fell as soon as possible after disembarkation. It appears in many an old photograph, looking sombre but comfortable enough, rather like some of the old imperial hotels which still precariously survive in India, Pakistan and Burma, and described itself in 1892
⁶
as being ‘the most commodious and best-appointed hotel in the Far East’. It had bathrooms
en suite
, its bedrooms were gas-lit, its grill-room served chops or steaks at any hour, and it was equipped with ‘hydraulic ascending-rooms of the latest and most approved type’. In later years it became almost a parody of the British colonial style; Chinese were banned from some of its public rooms, and when in 1926 fire broke out in the east wing, raging for two days and nights despite the efforts of fire brigades, army detachments and men from the warships in harbour, afternoon tea was served as usual in the west wing.

The Hong Kong Hotel survived into the 1940s, but by then had long
been overtaken by the glamorous Peninsula and its sibling the Repulse Bay Hotel. The Peninsula flourishes still, but the Repulse Bay Hotel is perhaps the most universally mourned of all the buildings torn down during Hong Kong’s relentless development of the 1980s. It was a dear old place, beloved by many for its view over the bay between Stanley and Aberdeen. Its famous teas, its wicker chairs, its string orchestras, its verandah above the beach – all these were the very epitome of British colonial life. Where it used to stand, now surrounded by high-rise apartment blocks, they have built a replica of its restaurant, scrupulous in architecture as in potted plants; but it can never be the same.

The top hotels of Hong Kong are among the best anywhere, and are repeatedly voted so in polls among readers of travel magazines. Competition between them is intense. As the launches used to outdo each other in smartness, when they went to pick up passengers from the ocean liners, so rival Mercedes and Rolls-Royce limousines nowadays attend the hotel guest arriving at Kai Tak. Ever more exclusive fashion designers show their clothes in the salons of the great hotels, ever more powerful companies hold their annual conferences there, ever grander chefs from Europe, from India, from China, from California are invited to display their cuisines. Except perhaps for Manhattan in the years between the world wars, I doubt if there has ever been a city in which the hotel has played so prominent a social role.

Some of the hostelries are quintessentially Hong Kong. The Peninsula, with its enormous lobby, chic restaurants and rooftop heliport, figures in almost every description of the place. The Kowloon Hotel offers a computer in every bedroom. The Island Shangri-la provides CD players.
⁷
A plaque at the Hilton used to mark the table where Richard Hughes, an Australian journalist who was for years probably the best-known of Hong Kong expatriates,
⁸
liked to drink with his friends and brainpickers. And for the moment there are few institutions more pungently characteristic of
fin d’Empire
Hong Kong than the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Central, which was opened in 1963 and has repeatedly been nominated the Best Hotel In The World.