custom-made clothes for men and women, because the workmanship is cheap
and the quality high—this applies to coats, suits, dresses and shoes.
For women, silk and woolen garments are good buys, especially when they
require extensive hand work on beading and embroidery. If planning to
wash the garment, make sure that the outer material and the inner lining
are pre-shrunk and color-fast.
The Cheongsam, with its side-slit skirt and carefully fitted collar,
is worth individual attention here. The Cheongsam is a closely fitted,
shape-clinging dress that shows to best advantage on a slim, small-boned
Chinese girl. Put the average Western woman in one and she looks
beefy, which certainly isn’t the effect she is striving for. If she’s
overweight, the sight of her in a Cheongsam is enough to make Chinese
children hide behind their mother’s slit-skirt where their howls and
giggles won’t be too evident.
Men can get excellent bargains in custom-tailored suits of English
woolens, Japanese woolens, Dacron, mixed silk and wool, or cashmere
and wool. Pure cashmere looks and feels luxurious in the shop, but it
is extremely expensive and doesn’t wear as well as a cashmere-and-wool
combination. If the tailor puts in cheap lining, the collar and lapels
will look like an elephant’s hide after a few cleanings. If he skimps
on the thread, and some do, the suit may pull apart under strenuous
circumstances. The worldwide story about the $20 Hong Kong suit that
can be perfectly fitted in 24-hours may have been circulated by some
show-business comedian trying to impress his friends; it is not, and
never was, true.
Assuming that a good Hong Kong tailor is located—and there are scores of
them—a man will be able to get the finest kind of custom-made suit for a
little less than he would pay for a ready-made suit of the same materials
in the United States. That would be around $75 for a pure cashmere sport
jacket, $40 for a cashmere-and-wool jacket, $70 for a tuxedo of English
worsteds, and $40 to $60 for a suit, with the higher-priced one of
English woolen and the cheaper of a lightweight wool. A custom-tailored
shirt of Sea Island cotton will cost about $6—considerably less than an
American ready-made shirt of the same material.
The chances are that an established Hong Kong tailor will start by
asking a higher price for all of these articles. By patient haggling and
comparison-shopping, he may be wheedled down by 5 to 20 percent. And
don’t be afraid that hard bargaining will drive him out of business; he
always allows a comfortable profit margin for himself. Ignore his claims
based on the famous people he has made suits for; they may have been
given the ultimate in special care at a price far below the going rate
for serving to advertise the shop.
One thing a tailor cannot do is to turn out a well-fitted suit without
three or four fittings. This will require no less than five days, and
two weeks would yield even better results. In busy periods, before the
Christmas and Chinese New Year holidays, a tailor might need three weeks.
One can buy a better-looking ready-made suit in the United States than
almost any Hong Kong tailor can turn out in 24 hours; he’s good, but he’s
not a miracle worker.
Women shopping for top-grade American and British ready-made clothing
should have a look at Mackintosh’s in Alexandra House, Paquerette (in the
Gloucester Arcade), Lane, Crawford’s, and Whiteaway Laidlaw & Co. A wide
range of high-style tailored clothing for women is offered by Charlotte
Horstmann of Duddell Street and Town and Country of Queen’s Road, both on
the Hong Kong side, and at three Kowloon shops in the arcade of the Hotel
Peninsula: Dynasty Salon, Betty Clemo, and Star of Siam.
Men’s tailoring shops are most numerous on the Kowloon side, and many of
them also make women’s clothing. A sample survey might include Y. William
Yu and Frank L. Chan of Kimberley Road, Ying Tai & Co., and Harilela’s of
Nathan Road, James S. Lee & Co. of Nathan Road (and Gloucester Road, Hong
Kong), and Tailor Young & Co. of Humphreys Avenue. In the blocks from
Mody Road to Kimberley Road, all branching east from Nathan Road, tailors
seem to occupy about every third storefront. Take nothing for granted at
any of them, and be watchful to see that the cloth ordered is supplied.
Hong Kong has outstanding bargains in hand-made shoes, handbags, jewelry,
watches, cameras, radios and furniture. It is desirable to know prices
and to shop around extensively, comparing values. The Man Yee Building,
previously mentioned, the Gloucester Arcade, and the arcades of the
Ambassador and Miramar Hotels in Kowloon should give an idea of what’s
available, though they may be undersold by some side-street shop.
Kowloon has dozens of small shops, often combined with back-room
“factories,” where one can buy Chinese handicrafts or watch them being
turned out by superlative craftsmen. These products are duplicates
of those that China has produced for centuries, and may require a
Comprehensive Certificate of Origin to get them through U.S. Customs.
Hankow Road, just west of the Hotel Peninsula, has the greatest number
of wood-carving shops. They all stock sets of wooden horses in several
sizes; also Buddhas, Gods and Goddesses in profusion, wild animals, fish
and birds. The asking price is outrageous, but can be whittled down as
much as 50 percent by patient haggling. A well-made carved horse about
four inches high can be bought for 75 cents. It would cost six times as
much in New York.
No other article more convincingly demonstrates the skill of the Chinese
craftsman than carved ivory. There are ivory factories along Nathan
Road and its side streets that produce beautifully carved chess sets,
intricately fashioned concentric balls of ivory, and miniature temples,
flower boats and pagodas.
Fine cabinetmakers turn out highly polished teak and rosewood chests
trimmed with brass and lined with silk. Each one is a masterpiece of
workmanship, but there’s one catch—if the wood has not been carefully
kiln-dried, the chest may split when it is shipped home. This is a point
on which a customer will want to quiz the dealer, then decide whether his
answers are satisfactory. Carved and lacquered screens can be an artistic
delight, but don’t forget to include the shipping costs when figuring
their price. Carved and full-rigged Chinese junks are sold in a wide
range of sizes.
The shopper can forget about the give-no-quarter type of bargaining when
he enters one of the stores operated by Hong Kong welfare organizations
for the benefit of physically handicapped refugees. These are strictly
nonprofit operations, with all but basic overhead costs being turned
over to the needy people who make the handicrafts. The quality of their
products is high and their prices are reasonable. Two of these shops are
the Welfare Handicrafts on Salisbury Road, opposite the Kowloon Post
Office, and The Rice Bowl, on Minden Row. To find The Rice Bowl, turn
east off Nathan Road at Mody Road; Minden Row is the first street south
off Mody. Both stores have Comprehensive Certificates of Origin.
The Tsim Sha Shui section of Kowloon is developing so rapidly that it
will probably have a dozen shopping arcades by the end of 1963. The
Central District of Hong Kong Island is also planning new arcades.
Tourists may wind up a day’s shopping by attending one of the 72 movie
theaters in the colony. Of these, 16 show English-language films and
13 are first-run houses. Foreign films reach Hong Kong as soon as they
appear in the world market. In Kowloon, Nathan Road is the main movie
avenue; in Hong Kong, they are spotted along the principal streets from
Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan. All seats are reserved, and selected from
a seating-chart at the box office; daily show-times are carried in the
local press. Chinese films have a big following, but many colony Chinese
prefer American movies with plenty of action and spectacle. English
films strike them as stodgy and slow, European art films bore them, and
sexy importations from Italy and France offend their sensibilities.
English-language films usually carry Chinese subtitles which look like
embroidery to Western viewers.
If it’s night clubs the tourist is looking for, there’s nothing to
get wildly excited about. Floor shows run to jugglers, acrobats and
pony chorus lines, with an occasional comedian as a star attraction.
Vaudeville isn’t dead; it simply shuffled off to Hong Kong. Prices are
steeper than the entertainment warrants. Most of the musicians are
Filipinos; individually able, but their band arrangements follow the
blast-off traditions of American stage bands in the 1930s.
For a predinner cocktail with a magnificent view, two of the best
locations are the lounge on top of the Imperial Hotel, Nathan Road, and
the 11th floor Marigold Lounge of the Park Hotel at Cameron and Chatham
Roads, both in Kowloon. Just as the finest daytime view is from the
upper slopes of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, the most satisfying
after-dark panorama is from Kowloon. From either of these lounges you can
see the banks of lighted apartment houses along the Hong Kong hillside,
tied together by festoons of streetlamps as the roads zig-zag up the
slopes, shining blue at the lower levels, then turning to vapor-piercing
amber as they climb above the fog line. The Imperial has the closest
view of the multi-colored neon signs glowing along the Hong Kong side of
the harbor in English and Chinese characters. The Park Hotel overlooks
the whole sweep of Kowloon Bay and the wavy, mountainous horizon of
the island, with the brilliantly lighted boats of a dozen ferry lines
criss-crossing the harbor in every direction. A line of lights passes
directly under the window—a Kowloon-Canton train returning from a trip to
the Red China border. If one could compress all of his memories of Hong
Kong into a single glance, this would be it.
Kowloon holds two-thirds of the colony’s fifty hotels, and many of these
are quite new. Hong Kong Island will add two major hotels in 1963, the
1,000-room American and the 600-room Queen’s, but Kowloon will retain its
leadership in room capacity for many years. Altogether, about a dozen
hotels will be added by the end of 1964 if business holds up.
The tremendous surge in hotel growth means that after years of lagging
behind, Hong Kong has finally roused itself to meet the needs of
tourists, in room capacity, at least. The expansion has been so frantic
that a number of the newer hotels have shaved every possible corner in
construction, skimping on the number of elevators and unduly shrinking
the size of rooms to squeeze every cent out of their cubic-foot capacity.
Hotel help is scarce, and as each new hotel opens, it raids the staffs
of existing hotels; this raises wages slightly, but saves the raider the
time and expense of training his own people. It also lowers the quality
of service and leaves the older hotels to scramble for replacements.
With these limitations in mind, it is remarkable that hotel service is
as good as it is, and much of the credit must go to the staff people
themselves. They are hard-working, cheerful and obliging to a degree
seldom seen in large cities. Because of inadequate training and the
inevitable language difficulties, they are sometimes caught off-base, but
when they know what a guest wants, they will do everything possible to
get it. Americans and British whose democratic principles do not always
prevent them from getting pretty high-handed about the way they are
served will just have to be a little less fussy.
The Peninsula Hotel and its jointly managed addition, the Peninsula
Court, occupy the same place in the colony that the Plaza does in New
York—smart, eminently respectable and expensive. The Park, the Imperial
and the Ambassador are among the best of the large, new hotels in
Kowloon. The Gloucester has the greatest status of the Central District
hotels, and the Repulse Bay, on the south shore of Hong Kong Island,
rates as the island’s most luxurious resort hotel. There are about a
dozen other first-rate hotels and approximately 30 additional ones that
range from satisfactory to catch-as-catch-can. All those recommended
by the Hong Kong Tourist Association are acceptable, but their quality
varies with their rates, though not always in proportion.
Two outlying hotels worth noting are the Carlton and the Shatin Heights,
both in the New Territories but not far from Kowloon. The Luk Kwok in
Wanchai, once the locale for Richard Mason’s _The World of Suzie Wong_,
prospered so handsomely from the publicity that it is now a quiet,
middle-class hotel.
Confirmed hotel reservations, arranged well in advance of your arrival,
are advisable for all tourists who are not thoroughly familiar with
Hong Kong. Certainly it would be unwise to arrive without them and be
forced to rely on sheer luck or the noisy touts who besiege incoming
passengers at Kai Tak. The touts are kept behind a fence nowadays, but if
the unsuspecting visitor lets them steer him to a hotel, their kick-back
will be added to the bill. Experienced visitors sometimes check into a
modestly priced hotel for the night and spend the next day bargaining
for the lowest rates at one of the better places which, when business is
slow, regularly knock 30 percent off the stated charges. For newcomers,
this is seldom done.
Some European and American visitors cannot be persuaded to try Chinese
food. Either they think it will make them ill, which it certainly will
not, or they believe they’ll look silly fumbling with chopsticks. It
must be conceded that inexperienced users of chopsticks usually look
rather foolish, but practically every Chinese restaurant will provide a
knife and fork if asked for them.
No difficulty should arise from a determination to stick to one’s usual
diet. Every first-class hotel serves an international cuisine. Prices are
tailored to the room rents; high at the Peninsula, cheap at the Y.M.C.A.
next door to it. In general, the meals are as good as those at American
hotels and they cost considerably less. Steaks are tougher than Choice U.
S. beef, and occasionally one resembles a small portion of a welcome mat.
Apart from the hotels, there are about a dozen good European restaurants.
In Mandarin Chinese, there is a saying that “food is the heaven of the
ordinary people,” and the Chinese in Hong Kong, like their countrymen
all over the world, do their remarkable best to impart a foretaste of
heaven to their cooking. Their food reaches the table in edible form,
and does not have to be slashed and hacked before the guest is ready to
eat it. Chopsticks are all that is needed to lift the food to the mouth.
(Foreigners take weeks to get over the shock of seeing a three-year-old
Chinese child manipulating chopsticks; it seems so infernally clever.)
Chinese restaurants of the colony serve four different kinds of cuisine:
Cantonese (from southern China); Shanghainese (from east-central China);
Pekinese (from northern China) and Szechuan (central China).
Cantonese is the type most familiar to Americans, since most of the
Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are owned by Southern Chinese. Chop suey
and chow mein are not Chinese at all, except that they were invented by
Chinese cooks in the United States to please their American customers.
None the less, Cantonese restaurants serve them in Hong Kong, as well
as egg rolls, egg foo yung, and sweet-and-sour pork, if only to keep the
visiting foreigners happy.
Authentic Cantonese dishes are strong on seafoods. Steamed fish seasoned
with ginger, mushrooms, spring onion, salted black soya beans, garlic,
salad oil, sherry, soy sauce, and sugar is a particular favorite. Shark’s
fin soup which includes not only the fins but crab meat, sliced chicken,
chicken broth, cornstarch, and peanut oil is a floating potpourri.
Other Cantonese delicacies are gut lee hai kim, shelled fat crabs dipped
in butter, fried in deep oil and served with a tart wine-and-vinegar
sauce; goo low yuk, the Cantonese name for sweet-and-sour pork; and ho
yau ngau yuk, slices of beef tenderloin quick-fried with an oyster sauce
and garnished with greens. Cantonese cooks are sparing in their use of
salt and grease.
A lunchtime specialty of Cantonese restaurants is dim sun (tiny bits of
food), which includes twenty different kinds of sweet and salty dishes;
among them, steamed biscuits with various meat fillings, rice cakes,
sweet buns and chicken rolls.
A few of the better Cantonese restaurants are: Tai Tung, 234 Des Voeux
Road; Golden City, 122-126 Queen’s Road Central; Miramar and Ambassador
(both in hotels), Nathan Road; and the Sky, 8 Queen’s Road Central.
They’re accustomed to tourists, and will help with the ordering, if need
be. Tai Tung is typical of the large Cantonese restaurants, catering to
family parties and group dinners. Kam Ling, at 484 Queen’s Road West in
the West Point section of the island, is another Cantonese giant.
Dinner at one of the multi-story Chinese restaurants may cause a shock
to the nerves from a series of violent and unexpected explosions. The
blasts, which sound like closely bunched machine-gun fire, seem to be
coming from right outside the window. No cause for alarm—it’s just a
string of firecrackers celebrating a wedding or some other joyous family
event. A solid string of firecrackers is suspended from a crane at the
top of the building, then lighted at the bottom; as the bursting crackers
eat their way up the string, a man with a guide rope slowly lowers the
string to keep the explosions at street level, thus preventing the paper
from blowing all over the surrounding streets. A portable, circular wire
screen is also placed around the explosion zone to confine the mess,
and a policeman stands by to see that the fireworks are being handled
according to law. All large restaurants have a swing-out firecracker
crane, and when they book a family party for a special celebration, a
police permit is obtained for the noise-making. The rattle of explosions
often lasts ten minutes or more, costing the host from $100 to $300,
depending on the length and elaborateness of the string.
Shanghainese cooking, which became more popular in Hong Kong after the
arrival of Shanghai refugees in the late 1940s, is sweeter and more salty
than Cantonese food, and uses a lot more oil. Its characteristic dishes
include: la dze jee ding, fresh chicken diced and fried with peppers and
flavored with soy sauce; chao ha yen, small shelled shrimp garnished with
green herbs or bean sprouts; and sze tze tao, pork sautéed with Chinese
white cabbage and often served in a casserole.
Beggar’s chicken is highly regarded by colony residents, both Chinese and
English, and can be ordered at Tien Hong Lau on Woosung Street, Kowloon;
or other Shanghai places such as Winter Garden, Nathan Road; or Four Five
Six, 340 King’s Road, North Point. Bamboo shoots, boiled crab and fried
eel, in season, are also Shanghai treats.
Szechuan food is hot and spicy, with such representative dishes as: suan
la tang, sour peppery soup; dried beef with peppers; and Szechuan duck,
deep-fried to cook both the skin and the flesh brown, spiced with pungent
black pepper and served with the meat so tender that it may be picked
off the bones with chopsticks. The Ivy, at 11 D’Aguilar Street, in the
Central District, is a familiar Szechuan establishment. There are others
in the Diamond Hill section of New Kowloon, north of Kai Tak Airport, but
one would probably need the guidance of a long-time colony resident to
find them.
The Pekinese cuisine is best known for Peking duck, served as a suitable
entrée for a meal that begins with assorted cold meats and proceeds
through chicken and walnuts to the celebrated bird. The duck is basted
with salad oil and roasted until brown, then the skin is dipped in soya
paste with scallions and wrapped in thin pancakes to be eaten as a kind
of sandwich; the meat is dipped and eaten in a similar manner and the
bones of the duck are made into a soup with cabbage and mushrooms. Toffee
apples and caramelized bananas (sugared and deep-fried, then immersed in
cold water) top off the feast.
Two of the popular Pekinese restaurants are the Peking, 1 Great George
Street, Causeway Bay; and the Princess Garden, Kimberley Road, Kowloon.
Hard to classify but too good to miss is the Mongolian steamboat, a
cooking utensil used for Northern and Cantonese dishes. Hot coals are
placed in the bottom of the vessel from which the heat rises through a
chimney at the center. Water or soup stock boils in a little open-top
tank that encircles the chimney. In the Cantonese style, tiny baskets
of sea food, meat and vegetables are hung into the boiling water until
they are done, then the contents are fished out with chopsticks. In the
Northern Chinese variation, a soup stock is put in the reservoir with
very thin slices of meat and sea food being dipped in until they are
cooked, which takes only a few seconds. Both styles use various sauces
and condiments to flavor the food after it is cooked and drawn out with
chopsticks. The steamboat sits in the center of the table, puffing
energetically, and every diner has a fine time dipping and fishing for
his food.
The Peking Restaurant at Causeway Bay and the Wong Heung Min, at
191-193 Gloucester Road along the Wanchai waterfront, are two steamboat
anchorages of note.
The various styles of Chinese cooking do not differ so radically that the
same restaurant cannot prepare food in two or more regional ways. Many
restaurants do so and quite capably. Americans sometimes choke at the
thought of bird’s nest soup, which is made from the saliva that swallows
use to build their nests. The saliva is separated from the straw and
feathers by boiling and evaporation, and the dried saliva extract is
added to a stock of chicken broth, combined with sliced ham and minced
chicken. The end-product, served in most Chinese restaurants, is a prince
among fine soups.
If one wants to prowl around a bit, he can locate a restaurant or two
that serves snake meat or civet cat. The Chinese have a theory that
they can make anything taste good with the right amount of cooking and
a judicious use of sauces, spices and condiments. What is more, they
usually prove to be correct. But a taste for snake meat is like the
appreciation of Cantonese opera; it takes years of conditioning.
For those who enjoy sukiyaki and other Japanese dishes, they are
available at the Tokyo Restaurant, on the 17th floor of the Imperial
Hotel, and in the dining room of the Daimaru department store at Causeway
Bay. The Bombay Restaurant at 19 Prat Avenue, Kowloon, has a good
selection of Indian dishes. For Russian specialties, especially fine
cakes and pastries, Rikki’s restaurant at Cameron and Carnarvon Roads,
Kowloon, is a plain but acceptable spot.
Assuming that one has had at least a one-week stay in Hong Kong, and has
applied himself to eating, shopping and sightseeing to the limit of his
energies, there is every reason to believe that he will go home happy,
stimulated, exhausted, and broke.
It is the common lot of Hong Kong’s 210,000 annual visitors.
Index
Aberdeen, 58, 191, 195, 271, 281
Aberdeen reservoirs, 165
Acheson, Dean, 144
Advisory Comm. on Corruption, 201, 222-5
Afro-Asian Conference, 98
Agriculture, 120, 177-8
Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry Dept., 181
Agriculture & Forestry Dept., 182, 184, 187
Air France, 159
Air-India International, 98
Albert Path, 263
Amah Rock, 279-80
Ambassador Hotel, 130, 301
American Marine, Ltd., 138-40
American military visitors, 132
Americans, 256-7
Animals, 177-8
Anslinger, Harry J., 94, 209
Anson’s Bay, 21
Anti-Corruption Branch, 223-4
Ap Chau, 71-2
Applegate, Richard, 94
Apprentice system, 135
Armed forces, China and Hong Kong, 87
Army in “Double-Ten” Riots, 104
_Arrow_, The, 28
Artificial insemination of pigs, 188-9
Atomic water distillation, 173
Attlee, Clement, 76
Austin Road, Kowloon, 103
Au Tak, 159
Aw Boon Haw, 272
Bank of China, 263-4
Bank of Hell, 276-7
Bargains, 294
Barnett, K. M. A., 59, 60
Barton, Hugh, 148-9, 150, 152
Beriberi, 42
Beverage industry, 119
Bias Bay, 27
Black, Gov. Robert Brown, 11, 221-2
Blackie, W. J., 175
Blake Pier, 266
Blind musicians, 253