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Hong Kong stands at the crossroad of vastly different worlds and is the meeting point of cultures where the profound wisdom of the east faces up to the youthful brashness of the west, where the tranquility of a Chinese garden clashes with the exuberance of the stock market, where capitalism flourishes under communist rule and all come away richer for having interacted with the other.

To the discerning traveller, Hong Kong presents two faces – the old and the new in a harmonious interplay seen in street scenes where venerable old men in traditional attire shuffle alongside brisk paced young men in pinstriped suits, in the juxtaposition of ancient Chinese pagodas with high rise temples of commerce and trade. The chiaroscuro of contrasts in Hong Kong is limitless, as glittering malls sell designer wear cheek by jowl with traders hawking ready-mades, as laptops rub elbows with joss sticks in the space and grace of a home in Victoria Peak as it looks down upon the congestion of houseboats in Kowloon Harbour and in the smallness of an island that houses an entire world of international business.

Hong Kong is the

‘City of Life’ - the one place where Mammon is unashamedly worshipped, where the lure of lucre seduces even the most spartan, where entrepreneurs are ‘stars’, where energy and economic activity fuse together to create unimaginable wealth for the enterprising and where loss of ‘face’ is more painful than the loss of an empire.

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The literal translation of Hong Kong is ‘fragrant harbour’.

Hong Kong is the most densely populated place in the world with the most skyscrapers and the most Rolls Royce cars per person!

Historically Speaking

Evidence suggests that the earliest that man was on these islands in the Neolithic age. Only a small fishing community and sundry pirates inhabited Hong Kong, till the British finally got here in the early 19th century and made the island their base for conducting trade with China.

The British opium trade attracted Chinese censure by 1839 and soon the region was plunged in what was called The Opium Wars. They ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking and the British coming off victorious. The British traders turned expansionist and in the face of waning Chinese power, they managed to acquire several islands around Hong Kong as well as Kowloon Peninsula in 1860. The 99-year lease was signed in 1898 and Hong Kong passed into British hands where she remained till 1997, the last bastion of British imperial power in Asia.

The first major wave of immigrants from Mainland China came to Hong Kong in 1911 during the Revolution. The second wave was that of people escaping the Japanese invasion in the 30s and the last was during the civil war 1945-1949. During the Second World War Hong Kong was attacked by the Japanese

at the same time as Pearl Harbour and the Japs held the island for 4 years from 1941 to 1945.

By the 60s the economy, so far largely dependent on the opium trade and fishing, diversified and industrialisation began in right earnest. The Hong Kong of today, leader of the South East Asian financial success, has its seeds in those early years.

In 1997 the British returned Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China with the expiration of the lease at the end of 99 astoundingly successful years. Today Hong Kong is one of the Special Administrated Regions of China and apprehensions about communist China’s interference have been quite conclusively allayed.

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