October and April, he can scarcely find the cricketers for the
red-and-white-capped youngsters bounding about in various sectors of the
field, playing a dozen different games without apparent confusion. All
the players are from four to twelve years old; mostly boys, with a few
girls here and there. It is the weekly workout of the Tingle Athletic
Association, one of the colony’s honored institutions. Billy Tingle,
an ex-boxer and lifetime physical culture instructor, has taught 50,000
children to kick, throw, catch, swim and master the rudiments of cricket,
soccer, rugby and basketball. Billy is a short, compactly built man about
sixty, who speaks softly but accepts no back talk; discipline is as much
a part of the job as athletic skill, he believes.
Parents are permitted to look on from the grandstand while Billy and his
nine assistants put 350 children through a three-hour workout. These are
“upper-class” boys and girls, but Billy also conducts classes among the
shack dwellers in Wanchai. The colony’s schools, with 700,000 pupils,
often resort to three daily shifts to accommodate them. Very few schools
can afford any physical training program.
At the seaward end of Statue Square, the government has remedied a
deficiency of many years by erecting a City Hall, a five-unit complex
with a 12-story tower, concert hall, theater, banquet hall, library,
museum, art gallery and municipal offices. Architecturally, it is modern,
rectangular and unadorned, in sharp contrast to the curlicues of the
Hong Kong Club next door. Part of the hall was opened in 1962, with the
rest planned for completion in 1963. Sir Malcolm Sargent and the London
Philharmonic Orchestra launched the concert hall with suitable fanfare,
presumably ending the long, lean era in which visiting artists had to go
from one private hall to another, hoping that music lovers would find
them.
The Star Ferry terminal, right beside City Hall at the waterfront, is the
tie that binds Kowloon and Hong Kong Island together. Every day, 100,000
commuters cross the harbor on these spotless new boats at a first-class
fare of 3½ cents or second-class at less than 2 cents. The ferry stops
running at 1:30 A.M. on most nights, and for the late prowler it’s a
“walla-walla” and a 50-cent trip on this rolling, pitching, cross-harbor
motor launch. Walla-walla is the Cantonese equivalent of “yak-yak,” and
memorializes the endless bickering over fares that the launch owners
indulged in before a flat rate was set by the government. Sir Lancelot,
the Calypso King who plays many Hong Kong engagements, was trapped on one
of these wallowing tubs and composed a “Walla Walla Calypso,” celebrating
“the rockin’ and the rollin’ and the quakin’ and the shakin’” they
inflict on night owls.
Walla-wallas and sightseeing boats operate from the Queen’s Pier in Hong
Kong and the Public Pier in Kowloon, both less than a block east of the
Star Ferry terminals. There is more of the flavor of the old days at
Blake Pier, a few hundred feet west of the Star Ferry terminal on the
Hong Kong side. Private yachts and mailboats discharge there, and there’s
always a bustle of arrivals and departures. But the colony’s reclamation
scheme will before long swallow up Blake Pier and its works. The General
Post Office, a moldering antique opposite Blake Pier, is also to be
replaced soon; until it goes, it is a handy place to mail packages or to
buy Hong Kong government publications.
Wyndham Street, which runs south off Queen’s Road Central, is the last
resting place of another antique, the sedan chair, which was the favored
conveyance when roads were too steep or too rough for rickshaws. Of the
four registered sedan chairs left in the colony, two are generally parked
there, waiting patiently for a fare. A few of the older Chinese residents
still use them, but Europeans have grown chair-shy, possibly worried
about what kind of picture they present while riding between two poor
fellows panting along in the traces. And well they might be.
A line of rickshaws also parks along Wyndham Street, but their business
is better than that of the sedan chairs. Tourists and many Chinese
continue to hire them; tourists enjoy the picturesque novelty and the
Chinese find them practical for funeral processions or for hauling
packages too large to carry on a bus or tram without causing a riot.
Police report 866 registered rickshaws, with the number declining each
year. Many people shun them as degrading and inhumane; others are
unwilling to risk their lives by weaving through motor traffic in such
a flimsy craft. Rickshaw drivers, subjected to alternate sweating and
cooling, are particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis.
The alleys and side streets of the Central District are a source of
wonder and surprise to tourists. Pedder Lane, branching off Pedder Street
directly opposite the Gloucester Hotel, is lined with open-air cobblers.
Hundreds of shoes, mended and unmended, are racked behind the repair
stands, and the cobblers are as busy as Kris Kringle’s toy-builders on
December 23d. Shoeshine Alley, a short section of Theater Lane which runs
from the west end of Pedder Lane to Des Voeux Road Central, has ten to a
dozen shoeshine boys stationed along the pavement. Customers stand in the
alley with rickshaws and motorbikes brushing their coattails while they
get shoeshines.
Shoeshine Alley is no silent workshop; a steady stream of walla-walla
flies back and forth among the boys, and if a passing pedestrian pauses
or glances in their direction, several boys pounce on him, demanding his
patronage. The moment he selects one lad for the job, the others shower
the winner with Cantonese insults and heckle him while he works. The
victim pays no attention; it’s an accepted professional hazard. Besides,
the boy is too busy studying the customer, trying to decide whether he’s
an American. Americans are easy marks; always willing to pay three times
the going rate. With an American, the canny lad can simply say “thanks”
and pocket twice as much change as he’s entitled to. Fifty cents Hong
Kong or 8½ cents American is a generous rate, but few Yankee tourists
seem conscious of the local scale.
For the tourist whose curiosity extends beyond the Central District, one
of the major departure points is the Hongkong and Yaumati Vehicular Ferry
Pier, four blocks west of Pedder Street, at Connaught Road and in front
of the Fire Brigade Building. Several different passengers ferry lines
and the Kowloon truck-and-auto ferry use the pier. The paved area at the
pier entrance is the main depot for bus routes to all parts of Hong Kong
Island.
Until the new Hang Seng Bank building was erected, the Li Po Chun
Chambers was the tallest building on the western fringe of the Central
District. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong occupies the
penthouse of the building, named for its owner, seventy-five-year-old Li
Po Chun, eighth son of Li Sing, late multimillionaire merchant who was
a founder of the Tung Wah Hospital. Li Sing, one of the most colorful
of Hong Kong’s early Taipans, once donated $100,000 for a flood-control
project at San Wui, his native village in Kwangtung Province. About
a century ago, when a foreign ship carrying thousands of Chinese to
California struck a rock near Hong Kong, he chartered a steamer, stocked
it with food and sent it to the rescue, saving everyone aboard the
stranded vessel.
The Central Market, a bare concrete building located a block south of the
Vehicular Ferry Pier, offers every kind of meat, vegetable, fish or fowl
eaten by the people of Hong Kong. Everything is fresh, because Chinese
customers reject any sort of tired produce. It exudes a wide range of
smells, with fish out-smelling all the rest. An inexperienced shopper
must move cautiously or he may be sideswiped by a hog carcass as it
bounces along on a man’s shoulders en route from a delivery truck to one
of the meat stands.
Visitors who grow tired of walking may increase their range by riding the
Hong Kong Tramway. Its green, double-decked streetcars cover the full
length of the island waterfront. First-class passengers sit on the upper
deck, where the fare is 3½ cents. Starting from the Central District, the
car marked “Kennedy Town” goes the farthest west, and the Shau Kei Wan
car runs to the eastern extremity of the line.
The trolley tourist may hop off the car at any corner that interests
him. In the evening, the street market beside the Macao Ferry Pier on
the western waterfront presents a pavement-level carnival. Merchandise
is spread out on the asphalt paving—combs, flashlights, toys, food and
clothing—with gasoline lanterns lighting the scene. Several spaces are
reserved for pitchmen who, though they speak in Cantonese, are obviously
delivering a spiel about products guaranteed to double the customer’s
life-span, make him an eternal delight to women and quadruple his earning
power—all at prices so low it would be folly not to snap them up.
The tram shuts down around midnight, but there is hardly an hour of day
or night when street stands are not open. Families run most of them,
with each member taking his turn at waiting on trade. Children are on
the streets all night—sometimes because they have no place else to go.
The 1961 census turned up thousands of families who rented a bedspace
for eight hours a day, sharing it with two other families entitled to
the same eight-hour shift. When one family is asleep in the cubicle, the
other two are either working or wandering the streets. Visitors must walk
carefully in the Western District at night, not for fear of attack, but
to avoid sidewalk sleepers.
During racing days of the October to May season at Happy Valley Jockey
Club, every tram is packed. Not far from the jockey club on the tram line
is Victoria Park, finest of the colony’s public recreation grounds. A
statue of Queen Victoria overlooks the park, honoring the royal matron
who treated the acquisition of Hong Kong as a family joke. The Causeway
Bay Typhoon Shelter raises a forest of masts and spars at the seaward
edge of the park.
Happy Valley, studded with schools, sports arenas, cemeteries and
hospitals, comes down to the waterfront at Wanchai. The tightly packed
tenements of Wanchai have refugee shacks on their rooftops and rows
of sailors’ bars and cabarets at street level. When night comes on,
subsidized intimacy is available on every street corner, but the eleven
movie theaters in the area are less expensive.
North Point, the next waterfront community east of Wanchai, is the
“Little Shanghai” that boomed after 1949, when refugee industrialists
from Shanghai established factories there. It has a prospering night life
zone along King’s Road, and introduced “key clubs” to the colony. These
were semiprivate bar-and-girl flats to which the member gained admission
by paying $50 to $100 for a key. The clubs spread to the Central District
and Kowloon before police raids began to hit them. A number survive,
drawing their clientele from open-handed tourists and tired but hopeful
businessmen. In contrast to these nocturnal playpens, some of the best
new housing projects line the North Point waterfront.
To the east of North Point, the towering cranes of the Tai Koo Dockyards
jut up along the shore. Shau Kei Wan, at the end of the tram line, is a
fishing and junk-building center.
Tram lines don’t serve the towns and resorts on the south side of the
island; to reach these, the tourist must take buses, taxis or guided
tours.
The south shore town of Aberdeen is important to the colony as a fishing
and marketing center, but visitors will remember it for its floating
sampan population and its floating seafood restaurants, the Sea Palace
and the Tai Pak Fong. The latter, decorated with unsparing flamboyance,
are dazzlingly outlined in lights after dark. Fish dinners are netted
from large tanks at the rear of the restaurants. The service is as much
a part of show business as it is of the food trade. Both branches are
represented on the dinner check.
There are two ways for the visitor to reach the floating restaurants.
The first is to take a taxi across the island to Aberdeen, then hail
a girl-powered sampan for a short trip across the harbor. Another
thoroughly luxurious way is to board the 110-foot luxury cruiser _Wan Fu_
any evening at Queen’s Pier or the Kowloon Public Pier, making the entire
trip by sea around the west end of the island. The _Wan Fu_, a modern,
Diesel-powered ship, is a fully rigged brigantine built along the lines
of the early opium-trade escort vessels, with 18 simulated gun-ports on
its sides. It makes the evening cruise to Aberdeen, stops for dinner at
the Sea Palace, and returns to town about midnight. Cost of the meal and
trip totals $10. Its skipper, Mike Morris, is a former Marine Police
Inspector.
Aberdeen is on the regular itinerary of the daytime round-the-island
automobile tours which take four hours. A car meets the traveler at the
top of the Peak Tram, winds down the mountainsides to Happy Valley
and includes a stop at Tiger Balm Gardens, the fantastic creation of
Aw Boon Haw. The late Mr. Aw made his fortune by selling Tiger Balm—an
“infallible” cure for every form of psychosomatic ill. He has furnished
his gardens free-style, throwing in everything from folklore to scenes
from the Buddhist Hell. There is even a 165-foot pagoda, which has repaid
its cost a dozen times by its use on Hong Kong travel posters. The whole
place is living proof of the swathe a Chinese millionaire can cut when he
feels like splurging. Texans seem tame by comparison.
Mr. Aw’s tastes were no more extravagant than those of Mr. Eu, who built
two medieval castles on Hong Kong island—Eucliffe and Euston. Eucliffe
is at Repulse Bay, a summer resort and the next stop on the island motor
tour. The legend of Mr. Eu has several versions, but they generally
agree that he was a Chinese who, several decades ago, settled in Malaya
with his mother. When the two struck hard times, Mr. Eu felt that his
fellow-Chinese were indifferent to the family’s difficulties, and he
vowed never to help other Chinese or to return to China—an extraordinary
act for any Chinese. He indentured himself as a miner, saved enough to
buy his freedom, and married a woman who owned a small grocery store. The
couple pooled their earnings to buy an abandoned tin mine where he had
formerly worked. Either he knew something or played a hunch, because the
mine yielded rich quantities of ore that made him a millionaire.
But his mother never reconciled herself to his anti-Chinese vow and hired
a fung shui expert who reported that the real trouble stemmed from the Eu
family tomb, which faced south, away from China, influencing her son to
turn his back on his homeland. The tomb was realigned to face north, and
Mr. Eu relaxed his anti-Chinese prejudices sufficiently to return to Hong
Kong—if not to China.
He began erecting two enormous stone castles, acting on a Chinese belief
that he would live as long as its building continued. Mr. Eu has passed
on, but his castles survive. When completed, Eucliffe was crammed with
European suits of armor and several upstairs rooms were hung with oil
paintings of nudes. Euston, at 755 Bonham Road, on the northern slope
of Victoria Peak, is a seven-storied anachronism. Its twin towers and
mullioned windows give no evidence of Chinese design, but they may
represent the Chinese reply to functional architecture.
Repulse Bay, with a curving beach and the luxurious Repulse Bay Hotel,
is the colony’s best-known summer resort. Like the upper Peak area, or
Shek-O and Stanley in the southeast part of the island, it has many
wealthy residents and large homes.
The auto tour passes Deep Water Bay Golf Club—one of several golf
courses in Hong Kong—and the Dairy Farm, a major source of the colony’s
fresh milk. Queen Mary Hospital lies along the route near the west end
of the island; an outstanding institution that emphasizes the scarcity
of first-class hospitals in the colony. There are less than 10,000
hospital beds for 3,300,000 people, and the majority of the hospitals
are overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated and well below first-class
standards of care. The colony government is in the midst of a campaign
to raise the capacity and standards of its hospitals, however. More than
1,000 beds are to be added by the end of 1963, but Hong Kong will remain
well below English and American norms of hospital care.
Nevertheless, Hong Kong has made substantial medical progress during the
last decade. Tuberculosis causes about eight times more deaths than all
other infectious diseases, but the T.B. death rate has been reduced from
158.8 per 100,000 population in 1952 to 60.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1961.
Hong Kong University and the Chinese business section of the Western
District are the last sightseeing attractions of the motor tour before it
returns to the center of town. A motor trip around the island costs $7,
plus the price of meals for the tourist and his driver-guide.
The Western District is seldom included on tourist maps of Hong Kong
Island; the assumption seems to be that if a traveler ventures beyond the
Central District, he will instantly be swallowed up by the earth. This
assumption is twaddle. Jan Jan’s Map of Hong Kong, sold at bus and ferry
terminals, gives an excellent layout of the Western District, but even
without its help, a sightseer may visit a number of places in the Western
District without getting lost.
Pottinger Street, in the section running south off Queen’s Road Central,
has a lively array of ribbon, button and zipper stands. Cochrane Street,
parallel to Pottinger and one block west of it, has a few stores selling
silk “dragons” (actually, lions’ heads). Such dragons, made to order, may
cost as much as several hundred dollars each, and at least three weeks
are required to fashion a large one.
These dragons, priced according to their overall length and elaborateness
of detail, weave through the streets on Chinese holidays operated by a
line of men marching under the flexible silk-covered framework.
Wing On Street, a dark narrow alley between Queen’s Road Central and Des
Voeux Road, is hemmed in on both sides by dozens of stands selling cotton
and wool yard-goods. Everything is open to the street, and there is no
charge for inspecting the bewildering assortment of cloth and color.
Goldsmiths’ shops are strung along Queen’s Road Central in the vicinity
of the Kwong On Bank at Gilman’s Bazaar. They stock every kind of gold
jewelry—a particular favorite of Chinese women. But what the women enjoy
most is sitting at the counters and gossiping with the clerks and shop
owners. Such conversations often go on for as much as an hour, yet the
dealer does not fly into a rage if the prospect fails to buy; it is
even possible that the talk hardly touches on buying. Most women buy
eventually; meanwhile, a pleasant exchange of gossip is enjoyed by both
parties.
Wing Sing Street, running north off Queen’s Road, is a cavernous alley
resembling a silent-movie setting for a dark tale of Oriental intrigue.
Actually, its most frightening characteristic is its nickname: “Rotten
Egg Street.” Piles of crates line its wholesale and retail egg stands,
yet there is nothing to indicate that the eggs have lingered beyond their
normal retirement age. The nickname is simply a local joke applied to all
egg-selling streets.
A dozen or so glass-enclosed shops, each no larger than a pair of
telephone booths, are located on Man Wa Lane, between Des Voeux Road and
Wing Lok Street. All are engaged in cutting dies for business cards,
seals and stamps, and the passer-by is welcome to watch their craftsmen
at work.
Ladder Street, a flight of steps leading off Queen’s Road Central, takes
the inquisitive shopper to Upper Lascar Row, popularly called Cat Street.
Cat Street’s dingy shops sell everything from jade carvings to used
bottles, from rare china to chipped and broken junk, valuable antiques
to outright fakes. The customer has nothing but his own wits to protect
him. Americans would be unduly optimistic to expect a Comprehensive
Certificate of Origin from merchants who don’t know and seldom care
whether their goods are “hot” or legitimate. But Europeans who know
Chinese antiques thoroughly have come to Cat Street, bargained shrewdly,
and resold their purchases at home with sufficient profit to pay for
their Hong Kong vacations.
Man Mo Temple, at 128-130 Hollywood Road, stands a short way back
from the street. Buddha enjoys the most prominent altar in its gloomy
interior, but the temple mixes Buddhist and Taoist elements, with
Kwan Tai and Man Cheong as two of its honored deities. Legions of
minor divinities line the walls, including several seated in tall,
glass-enclosed boxes. In former days, such boxes were equipped with long
handles so that the faithful could carry them through the streets in
times of disaster to soothe the angry spirits.
Visitors are free to enter the temple if they behave as they would in
any other house of worship. Straight and spiral incense sticks burn
before the numerous shrines, and the many statues looming in dark corners
suggest a spiritual serenity.
A more urgent reminder of other worlds may be had at the Tak Sau coffin
shop, 252 Hollywood Road. Massive pine coffins, ordered in advance of the
prospective occupant’s death and tailored to his physical dimensions,
are stacked about in plain sight. An ordinary model, costing from $50
to $150, can be turned out by a pair of carpenters in about 20 hours.
The larger boxes once required 16 men to carry them, but modern trucks
have now assumed the burden. A millionaire’s coffin, lined with silk
and elaborately carved, may cost $3,000 or more. To demonstrate their
continuing concern for the departed, surviving relatives visit a nearby
shop which sells notes written on the “Bank of Hell.” No one likes to
deliver these notes personally, and so they are burned to assure the
deceased that his credit rating will be maintained in the spirit world.
Most of the Western District may be covered on foot, but taxis are
necessary for trips to more distant points, such as Stanley or Shek-O,
particularly at night. Drivers often have only a sketchy knowledge of
English, but the passenger can usually make his destination clear by
pointing to it on a road map, or by printing the address on a sheet of
notepaper; if the driver cannot read it, he will find a colleague to
translate it for him. Taxis are about 25 cents for the first mile and
18 cents for each succeeding mile on Hong Kong Island. Kowloon taxis
are slightly lower. Holders of valid drivers’ licenses from their home
country, or international drivers’ licenses, may hire cars for $11.50 a
day or $70 a week, plus gasoline costs. In the English fashion, all cars
have right-hand drive.
Sightseers operating on a tight budget may cover almost every part of
the island on its 18 bus routes. Most of these start from the Vehicular
Ferry Pier and their routes are fully outlined on the reverse side of
Jan Jan’s Map. Trams give smoother rides and more frequent service along
the island’s densely populated waterfront, but the only low-cost means
of visiting outlying places, such as Shek-O, Stanley and Sandy Bay—all
worth seeing—is by bus. This transportation is not for the timorous or
those with queasy stomachs; Hong Kong bus-jockeys are competent, but they
slam and jolt their passengers about as they whirl through a never-ending
succession of upgrades, downgrades and hairpin turns.
Foreign passengers unfamiliar with Hong Kong public transportation
may be startled at times to hear their fellow-riders yelling at one
another. What sounds to a greenhorn like a violent exchange of insults
is nothing more than cheerful gossip. The Cantonese are naturally gabby
and exuberant, and only the Gwai-lo (foreign devil) seems subdued and
inscrutable.
Transportation to Kowloon, directly across the harbor from Hong Kong
Island, is by Star Ferry for most tourists, although there are many other
trans-harbor ferries. The Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon is the focal
point of practically every kind of transportation on the peninsula. Most
Kowloon bus lines turn around directly in front of the ferry terminal.
The Kowloon-Canton Railway, which runs through Kowloon and the New
Territories to the Red Chinese border, is situated next to the bus
terminal. Taxis and rickshaws start from the same area—a big, multiple
loop that keeps vehicles moving with a minimum of congestion or delay.
The Kowloon side of the colony has no streetcars, but its double-deck
buses are almost as bulky as trams.