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Said a recent U.S. visitor: "Hong Kong is just a city you like. You arrive, and you fall in love with it the way you do with San Francisco or Paris."
Tourists file through the garish, neon-lit Wanchai quarter—the world of Suzie Wong—dodging red rickshas and the green, double-decker tramcars. There are bars and bar girls on every corner, big dance halls, and at Typhoon Shelter, prostitutes perched on the deck of sampans call their wares to passing sailors along the quay. But Hong Kong night life is hardly wild in the old Shanghai tradition and barely compares with that of present-day Tokyo or Manila.
Thieves' Market. Evenings, most tourists ride the funicular railway up the 1,800-foot Peak, which was once the exclusive citadel of British taipans and has a view of sea, sky and islands that puts the Bay of Naples to shame. They go to the floating restaurants at the fishing village of Aberdeen, where patrons select the live fish that will be served them at dinner. Between bouts of shopping, visitors wander amid the outlandish statuary of the Tiger Balm Garden or prowl the stairway streets above Queen's Road and look into the thieves' market of Cat Street, where Chinese antiques from the mainland are sold at bargain prices because they cannot be brought into the U.S., which still maintains a total embargo on all goods from Red China. The antiques (many of dubious antiquity) are often bought by British and Italian dealers, shipped to Europe, and then imported into the U.S. without needing a "certificate of origin."
A "must" tour is the 20-mile drive from Kowloon through the New Territories to the border with Red China, marked by a barbed-wire fence and a few Communist soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms at the frontier station on the Kowloon-Canton railway. Looking across the border at the blue hills and rounded mountains of China, the tourist feels the mystery of the unknown and unknowable, the amorphous weight of 670 million humans whose purposes and aims remain hidden. His mood is very like that of the 16th century Europeans who first set foot in China and stared with wild surmise at the Manchu Empire lying hugely between sleep and waking.
No Rhubarb. In the ancient, changeless East, Hong Kong is remarkable for youth. When it was founded in 1841, Chicago was already a city, and New Orleans had been an important seaport for more than a century. Hong Kong's difficult birth resulted from a clash of wills between Britain's eager merchants and the mandarin aloofness of the Manchu court. The West desperately wanted the tea and silk of China; China wanted chiefly to be left alone.
The only Western commodity that interested the Chinese mandarins was gold, and the China trade might have drained all the gold out of Europe if shrewd merchants like Jardine, Matheson, Dent and Joseph Henry had not found a substitute currency in opium grown in British India. They were soon landing the drug in the Pearl River estuary at the rate of 6,000,000 lbs. a year. They defended themselves morally by calling opium "a harmless luxury and precious medicine except to those who abuse it," while taking the business line that if they did not sell it to the Chinese, someone else would.