definitely an excitement in the air as the clock wound
down on the colonial era, with the handover set for midnight on July 1st.
Many of the newspapers ran countdown calendars on the front page,
showing how many days were left as a colony, and inside the papers, the
big banks had taken out full-page ads promoting their competing
fireworks spectaculars. (Some people joked at the time about the irony of
banks falling over each other to celebrate the city’s handover to a
Communist government.) There were flyers posted all around town
advertising raves and club parties and bar parties for the big event. And
there were other, cheesier attempts to capitalize, with one group of guys
meriting a story in the South China Morning Post for selling empty,
sealed aluminum cans of “colonial air.”
The goings on had attracted a swarm of visitors from around the region
and the wider world, wanting
to see a piece of history. There
were also pro-democracy
demonstrations being held
around town, with the
occasional political banners
strung up along some of the
busy intersections, or stickers
with slogans slapped onto
bus-stop benches.
The food was good — we ate
some dim sum, but also
admittedly a lot of baguette
sandwiches at DeliFrance, an East Asian fast-food chain that serves
French food, and we had some great paneer and curry at an Indian
restaurant that was surprisingly clean and homey considering that it was
located on an upper floor of the Chungking Mansions.
We took the ferry over to the Hong Kong side each day to sightsee, taking
the tram up to Victoria Peak and so on. We visited some friends living in
a typically tiny one-bedroom flat some 30 stories off the ground. I also
spent time in the downtown “Central” district getting a new Taiwan visa.
Since China and Britain don’t recognize Taiwan as a separate country
from China, the de-facto Taiwan consulate had to call itself "Chung Hwa
Travel Service."
find a hostel over in Tsim Sha
Tsui (pronounced something
like "Jim Sa Joy"), the busy
commercial area of Kowloon
running along the harbor-front
where the Star Ferry to Hong
Kong Island docks. It was and
still is a popular shopping area
for locals, but it also had a mix
of sketchy enterprises and
hole-in-the-wall offices. Also,
all the cheap travel hostels
were there, and so as a tourist
walking down the main street,
Nathan Road, you would be
constantly accosted by dudes
from Bangladesh trying to sell
you a three-piece suit, or older
Chinese guys selling fake
Rolexes and half-whispering "copy watch?" at you. (Tsim Sha Tsui was
apparently the capital of the copy watch.)
There was a popular Hong Kong movie that had come out the previous
year called “Chungking Express” (重庆森林) which consisted of a pair of
interconnected love stories involving philosophical policemen. The title
took its name from the Chungking Mansions, a large, run-down, semi-
notorious 17-story building in Tsim Sha Tsui which served as the site, in
the movie at least, of an international heroin-smuggling operation.
Actually, the real Chungking Mansions was a towering jumble of
noodle-shops, money changers, Indian tailors, and some super-cheap
guesthouses. The building smelled a little funky, and once inside the
maze of passageways, it had a dirty and dank “Blade Runner”
industrial look to it. Anyway, it all seemed very exotic to me, and so we
found a hostel in the
Chungking Mansions where
they had windowless rooms
large enough only for the bed
that filled it, and leaving just
enough space for the door to
open and close.
In fact it was a little gloomy,
and after my friend was bitten
by bedbugs the first night, she
insisted we move to a different
hostel in the almost identical
Mirador Mansions building
next door. The new place was
much nicer, and had windows
with a great view of some
Tsim Sha Tsui sidestreets.
The End of British Hong Kong, 1997
was still using Kaitak Airport,
famous for the view during take-
offs and landings. It was located
right off the edge of the harbor
in Kowloon, situated between
the clusters of ultra-high-rise
apartment buildings that Hong
Kong is well known for. When
your plane landed, it would
swoop in over the water and
then over a runway cut between
the housing complexes so that
you could see into people’s
living rooms as you landed.
(They have long since built a
giant international airport on an uninhabited stretch of outlying Lantau
Island, though it requires a 25-minute train ride to get into the city.)
I had been working at an English-language newspaper in Taipei for the past
year, but I had really wanted to see Hong Kong and especially the handover
from British to Chinese rule, which was being billed as East Asia’s super
party of the decade. This was my first trip there, and so everything was new
to me: the bright red taxis and the double-decker buses, the closely-packed
skyscrapers and 40-story-tall residential towers, the ferries and trams going
everywhere, the tiny-smallness of the stores and apartments.
(I spent the last week of June 1997 in
Hong Kong to see the handover of the
territory from Britain to China.)
At that time, Hong Kong
One of the things I found interesting was that while Hong Kong had (and
still has) its own currency, the government doesn’t print it — instead, the
three biggest banks split the job, literally making their own money, with their
own branding and logos on it.
HSBC’s Hong Kong dollars all
feature a lion, which is the bank’s
symbol, while Bank of China’s
dollars all have a picture of the
iconic Bank of China building, and
Standard Chartered goes a classier
route by putting artsy drawings of
different mythical Chinese
animals on their banknotes.
(Actually, the government does
print the less-used HK$10 note,
but really its main focus is minting
the inventively shaped coins.)
There are two big, densely
populated parts of Hong Kong.
First, there’s Hong Kong Island
— it has the financial center and
is sort of like a large Manhattan,
but with a gigantic mountain in the middle of it. They even build
skyscrapers up the slope of the mountain, Mt. Victoria, at least part way,
and in the steep Mid-Levels district they have the world’s largest outdoor
escalator, so you can travel twelve blocks up the mountain without having
to climb the inclined streets. Hong Kong Island has all the landmark
buildings, the famous sites, and seemingly all the rich people.
Across the busy harbor from Hong Kong Island is Kowloon, which is kind
of like the “Brooklyn” of the territory. Back then at least, it seemed to be
the slightly more gritty and downscale part, and its contingent of
immigrants from India, Africa, and Southeast Asia gave the Kowloon side
more of a major port city vibe, compared to the “world financial center”
atmosphere over on the Hong Kong side.
I was traveling with a friend from Taipei, and we made our way to
The Union Jack flies over the British Garrison
HQ which, a week after this photo was taken,
became the Hong Kong headquarters of the
People’s Liberation Army. The yellow banner
on the buildng behind it says “Celebrate the
Handover.”
(Mouse over photos for detailed view)
These notices were posted all around town,
warning the British they would now need
residency cards.
The Hong Kong handover was
merchandised in every way possible. This
shirt was one popular option, and it was
on sale years before the handover. (Britain
first agreed to return Hong Kong in 1984.)
The view of a Kowloon street, as seen from
the guesthouse room in Mirador Mansions.
A day or two before the handover, my friend came down with the
flu and was still feeling a little out of it by the night of June 30th, so
instead of going to a
rave on the Hong
Kong side, we
decided to stay in
Kowloon and hit a
bar instead.
In the evening, we
walked down Nathan
Road to the harbor to
watch one of the
many bank-
sponsored fireworks
shows, and then
ended up at a
seriously touristy
Australian pub called Ned Kelly's Last Stand, just a couple blocks from
our guesthouse. It was crowded, and as far as I could tell all the
customers were other tourists, but it was cozy enough. They had a nine-
piece jazz band playing, all of them dressed in tuxedos and all looking
like they were locals, except for the band leader who was an older
Australian guy and presumably the bar’s owner.
We had some beers, and then just before midnight the music stopped
and they turned up the sound on the large projection TV so we could all
watch the handover ceremony. As Prince Charles and President Jiang
Zemin gave their respective speeches, the band leader burst in with
occasional commentary:
PRINCE CHARLES: Over the years, Hong Kong has developed its own
vibrant economy.
BAND LEADER: Copy watch?
When the ceremony finally
ended, the band leader
announced that everyone
was now in China. "Any
British citizens here, I am
required to ask you to
proceed outside, where there
is a truck waiting to take you
away," he said. The musicians
had somehow managed to
change costume into old-
style Chinese silk gowns and
hats, and they started
playing "Slow Boat to
China."
Back outside, the streets
were packed, a festival of
Chinese, British, Filipino and
other assorted revelers, with maybe only half of them truly drunk. We
wandered around for a while, watching tourists get their photos taken
with policemen, or wasted young kids vomit on the sidewalk, and then
eventually returned to the hostel.
The next day was anti-climactic. It had begun raining, and while it was a
public holiday, most people seemed to be staying inside and
recuperating from the previous night’s party, or else just taking it as any
other day off work. We made one last trip over to the Hong Kong side to
eat some breakfast and then headed to the airport and back to Taipei.
Protesters, onlookers, and the media
converge at a demonstration at the Star Ferry
terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui. The banner on the
left reads “Democracy Square.”
A double-decker city bus tries to make its way through
a crowd of revelers on Nathan Road in Kowloon on the
night of handover. You can see one of the infinity of
news crews shooting off to the right.
All through the night, tourists got their
photos taken with the police keeping order
for the celebrations. Here, a young English
guy photo-bombs someone’s keepsake
picture by holding up a British flag behind
the policemen’s backs. When this prompted
passersby (myself included) to also take
photos, the police realized something was
up, and they noticed the guy seconds after
this picture was taken. They were very upset.
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Above, the flags of the United Kingdom and the colony of Hong Kong flutter from
a flagpole in Hong Kong’s Central District a few days before the end of British rule.
Below, the Chinese flag hangs down on the same flagpole on the first day of
Chinese rule, amid a sudden outburst of rain. The building with the round
windows off to the right is called Jardine House, and it’s the headquarters of the
massive global trading company Jardine Matheson. (“They’re the ones who brought
opium to China,” a British woman once told me.) The round windows are supposed
to look like portholes on a ship, but some Hong Kong people refer to the building
in Cantonese as the House of Ten Thousand Assholes.
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There was