Hong Kong
They have moved the Star Ferry. How could they move the Star Ferry? The view of the harbour from my room at the Ritz-Carlton should be one of the great sights of Asia. But it is a building site of land being messily reclaimed and another corner of the ‘perfumed’ harbour getting paved over. I was here only six months ago but now Queen’s Pier has gone, the Star Ferry Pier has gone and those iconic green-and-white ferries have been shunted out to where you catch the boats to the outlying islands. Visitors to Hong Kong will never again ride the Star Ferry looking for the ghosts of William Holden and his Suzie Wong. But how can you complain about change in Hong Kong? It is like whining that the Arctic is a bit parky.
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‘I’ll have a dry sherry,’ someone murmurs at the bar of the Hong Kong Club, a sentence I haven’t heard since, oh, Frinton in 1974. Some things do not change. It is ten years since the handover but in the Hong Kong Club we still queue for our steak and kidney pies, and from the balcony you can still look down on the immaculately kept Cenotaph and its inscription to the glorious dead. The Hong Kong Club is still the place to be if you like a little colonial splendour with your apple crumble and custard. What has changed since 1997 is that the pre-handover fear has vanished. Nobody seriously expects the People’s Liberation Army to turn Chater Road into another Tiananmen Square — and it was once a recurring Hong Kong nightmare. ‘Nice boys,’ someone says of the PLA soldiers, who are occasionally glimpsed in the back of their trucks. ‘They always wave to the children.’
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Fusion.
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