Gene Gleason

“The journey of a thousand miles commences with a single step.”

—Chinese Proverb

At the upper terminus of the Peak Tram, two-thirds of the way up Victoria Peak, a narrow promenade called Lugard Road winds around the mountain until its name changes to Harlech Road and then continues along the south face of the mountain to return to the Peak Tram terminus. By strolling along this route on a fine clear day, a visitor can see the whole of Hong Kong stretching out in all directions.

Often the view is cut off by thick jungle growth, stretching over the road like the green arches of a natural cathedral. But there are narrow gaps and occasional wide, treeless spaces where the stroller can look up the rocky slopes to discover the mansions of the Taipans, jutting through the tangled trees. Rococo palaces of pink, yellow, and dazzling white stand isolated from one another and the life of the community by the intertwining trees that hide their approach roads. Their isolation is fortified by barbed-wire fences, warning signs and snarling watchdogs. The only uninvited guest that breaches these barriers is the heavy mist that envelops the Peak above the fog line for six months of the year, covering furniture and clothes with green mold unless drying closets and dehumidifiers are kept in full operation.

Once the British held exclusive title to the foggy heights; in the days before auto roads were built to the top, they chartered the Peak Tram to carry their party guests to its upper end, where they were met by sedan chairs which took them the rest of the way. Now Chinese millionaires share the majesty and the mist of the Peak, and there are tall apartment buildings for more exalted government employees and prosperous civilians.

To tourists and Taipans, the heights of Victoria Peak offer a matchless view of the harbor. The distant deep-blue water crinkles in the wind as the sun glints on its surface. Dozens of ferryboats point their arrowhead wakes at Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, or head outward for the coasts and islands of the New Territories. An American aircraft carrier rides at anchor off Wanchai with its escort vessels near at hand.

West of Kowloon Peninsula, a triple line of cargo ships turn lazily around their anchor buoys; each one having enough room to make a full circle without touching another ship. Six rows of junks and sampans, each row lashed to the sides of a freighter while they transfer its cargo, move in unison with the freighter’s slow swing, looking like a gargantuan, improvised raft. Unattached junks duck in and out, anywhere and everywhere, clearly with the special blessings of T’ien Hou, for they rarely collide.

North of the harbor, beyond the wedge-shaped outline of Kowloon, past the Kai Tak airstrip that cuts through Kowloon Bay like the white streak of a torpedo, is Hong Kong’s “Great Wall”—a line of hills that looms jagged and forbidding across the southern fringe of the New Territories. These are the “nine dragons” from which Kowloon got its name, but they are difficult to single out, except for unmistakable ones like Lion Rock and Kowloon Peak, because they are so tightly packed together.

Even Ti Ping, the Sung Emperor who was prodded into naming them the Nine Dragons, complained that he could find only eight, until an obliging courtier reminded him that the dragon is the symbol of the Emperor, thus making him the ninth peak. Ti Ping, quite young at the time, was placated by this rationalization.

Due west of Victoria Peak, small islands string out like steppingstones until the eye stops at the ridge-backed mass of Lantau, largest island in the colony and nearly twice the size of Hong Kong Island. Some of the defeated followers of Ti Ping are reported to have settled there after the death of their Emperor, but until a few years ago it was a barren and remote isle, inhabited only by a few thousand farmers and fishermen and a few monasteries.

Halfway down the western slope of Victoria Peak, a small mound of earth thrusts itself against the mountainside. Dong Kingman, the Chinese-American watercolorist who grew up in the crowded tenements at the foot of the Peak, recalls that he and his young friends used to watch that mound with considerable apprehension. From where they stood, it looked exactly like a turtle climbing the mountain. The Chinese consider it to be a real turtle, and believe that when the turtle reaches the summit of the Peak, Hong Kong will sink into the sea. Dong and his fellow-watchers made regular checks to see that the turtle hadn’t stolen an overnight march on them.

The most beautiful side of Hong Kong Island lies to the south and east of Victoria Peak, with forested hillsides and a green valley that slopes down to Pok Fu Lam, the colony’s first reservoir. Lamma Island, a favorite digging ground for colony archaeologists, looms large to the south.

When visitors grow squint-eyed from the panoramic view, they often wind up their excursion by stopping at the little restaurant near the Peak Tram terminus to eat a sandwich or some Chinese small cakes. Spirits revived, they linger on the breezy terrace to watch the sun go down beyond Lantau.

The Peak Tram is almost as famous as Victoria Peak, and needs no endorsement except to note that its fares are very low and that it hasn’t had an accident since 1888. In eight minutes, the tram carries its passengers down to the edge of the Central District, where they may catch a bus or a taxi.

Government House and the Botanic Garden are just across Garden Road from the lower end of the Peak Tram. Looking like a Franciscan Mission of early California with its white walls and square tower, Government House is the private residence of the colony governor. The sightseer may look around the outside, and with luck, see all hands snap to when the governor’s black sedan enters or leaves the circular driveway, displaying red crowns at front and rear instead of license plates. The English manage their official exits and entrances with great style, and everything moves precisely on time.

The Botanic Garden is a land of split-level Eden planted with thousands of subtropical plants and flowers. Its small zoo and aviary are popular with children, and the bird collection is a bright splash of brilliant colors. Small signs in English and Chinese identify the plants and animals. A good deal of family snapshot-taking goes on around the fountain at the lower end of the garden. It might be a scene in New York’s Central Park, except that Chinese children are better behaved.

Albert Path, a serpentine walk shaded by tropical shrubbery, winds down from the Botanic Garden past Government House to Ice House Street and the rear of the First National City Bank. Ice House Street continues downward a couple of blocks to the West Wing of the Central Government offices at Queen’s Road Central.

On Battery Path, directly in front of the West Wing, a lampshade stand operates on what is obviously government property. It’s all quite official; the owner has a permit from the Department of Public Works. Sin Hoi, late father of the present owner, Sin Hung, had sold lampshades on the site for thirteen years before the West Wing was built in 1954. Lady Maurine Grantham, wife of the former governor, was a frequent shopper at the stand, and when she saw it threatened with displacement by the government offices, she put in a word for Sin Hoi. His son now runs it under the grand name of The Magnific Company, selling lampshades and small china animals.

One block north on Ice House Street and a block east on Des Voeux Road is Statue Square, where parked cars outnumber the statues 200 to 1. This area is more than the center of the colony’s financial institutions; it is an ideal cross-section of colony architecture. The honeycomb-and-gingerbread design of the Hong Kong Club is typical of what most of the colony’s buildings looked like in 1890, as is the Prince’s Building on the opposite side of the square.

Post-World War II buildings like Union House, two blocks west along the waterfront, represent a kind of “no nonsense modern”—big, plain and blocky. The tower of the Bank of China, just east of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, rises massively above its old established neighbor. The Red Chinese operate it now and many of its upper offices are vacant; the bank itself is a quiet institution with fewer guards than most local banks have. The Chartered Bank, on the other side of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, is the newest, tallest and most curious of the three moneyed giants, with a fortresslike tower and a green faÇade that resembles a vast electronic switchboard.

The Hongkong and Shanghai building, older than either of the banks beside it, surpasses them in architectural distinction, with its bold vertical lines and its solid central tower surrounded by lower wrap-around structures and crowned by a ziggurat roof that tapers upward like a truncated pyramid. It looks like a building that nothing could push over, which seems the right emphasis for a bank.

Directly south of the Hong Kong Club lie three and a half acres of the most valuable land in the colony, all of it laid out in cricket fields except for a small corner occupied by the building of the Hong Kong Cricket Club. If the land were for sale, bidding would start at about $175 a square foot; but the British would as soon sell the playing fields of Eton. Cricket is an integral part of life under the Union Jack. Most Americans find it too strenuous, even as a spectator sport; they often become exhausted by the effort of trying to figure it out.

If a visitor drops by the Cricket Club on any Saturday morning between 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.

The greatest concentration of tourist shops and hotels is in the Tsim Sha Tsui section at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula and within a five-minute walk of the Star Ferry terminal. Nine-tenths of the Kowloon hotels and luxury shops are strung along Nathan Road, the central thoroughfare, and its intersecting streets. At its best, Tsim Sha Tsui is a tourists’ Happy Hunting Ground; at its worst, it is an outrageously over-priced deadfall.

The refugee resettlement estates spread across the upper end of the Kowloon Peninsula, several miles north of Tsim Sha Tsui. Visitors who want to see what has been done to help the colony’s refugees—and to appreciate how much must still be undertaken—should visit the resettlement estates and the remaining squatter shacks with either a guide or an experienced Hong Kong welfare worker. The terrain is too irregular and the estates too extensive to be covered on foot.

Visitors with an archaeological turn of mind may want to have a look at the Li Cheng Uk tomb in Sham Shui Po, about a mile north of the Kowloon-New Territories boundary. Workmen excavating for the Li Cheng Uk Resettlement Estate discovered the tomb in August, 1955. Its T-shaped chambers and barrel-vault roof containing pottery and bronze objects from the Later Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220) and Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589) indicate that the Chinese may have settled in Hong Kong and neighboring Kwangtung Province many centuries earlier than had been supposed. The colony government preserved the tomb by encasing it in an outer shell of concrete, built a small garden and museum around it, and opened it to the public in 1957.

A guided motor tour, probably the best way of seeing the New Territories, carries the visitor through the manufacturing center at Tsuen Wan, then west past the beaches and eroded hillsides to Castle Peak. The tour proceeds through some of the colony’s best farmland to the marketing and shopping center at Yuen Long.

Brown cattle and water buffalo are the only aids to human labor on these farms, and every square foot of land is fertilized, weeded, irrigated and tilled with unsparing diligence. Walled cities, such as Kam Tin, appear along the way. Once they were fortresses to protect the farming families against marauding bands; today they are packed with poor people living in cubicles.

If border conditions are stable, the driver may continue to Lak Ma Chau, a hillside overlooking Red China’s farming communes on the far side of the Sham Chun River. The return route is through the fishing settlement at Tai Po, with a view of Tolo Harbor, one of the finest in Hong Kong. In the Shatin Valley, with its intricate pattern of terraced rice fields, the sightseer may catch a glimpse of Amah Rock, a natural formation resembling a woman with an infant on her back.

Chinese legend depicts the rock as the survival of a woman whose husband left to fight in China many centuries ago. For days and months she climbed the hill and looked out to sea, awaiting her husband’s return. Their child was born before she at last caught sight of her husband’s ship, and she was so overcome by excitement and joy that she died on the spot. After her death, her neighbors were astonished to see a heap of rocks take on the appearance of a woman carrying a child on her back.

As the car passes through the reservoir area above Kowloon, a wild rhesus monkey of the surrounding forests may be seen begging for a roadside handout. Game of any kind is not abundant in the colony, but there are a few ferret-badgers, civet cats, otter, barking deer, rodents and an exceedingly rare leopard. There are 38 kinds of snakes, including the banded krait, king cobra and pit viper, although deaths from snake bites very seldom occur. Over 300 species of birds have been identified. Hundreds of kinds of tropical butterflies, including the Atlas Moth, with a maximum wing-spread of nine inches, present the brightest specks on the countryside, sometimes covering a forest grove like an extra set of leaves.

Since Hong Kong embraces 237 islands besides the Kowloon Peninsula and the mainland portions of the New Territories, a tourist must take to the boats if he is to see more than a fraction of its varied topography. Boat service to the larger inhabited islands is frequent and cheap.

Every Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock an excursion boat leaves the Vehicular Ferry Pier for a three-hour circuit of Hong Kong Island. It cruises east along the waterfront, through Lei Yue Mun pass at the eastern harbor entrance, then turns south off the island’s east coast. The rugged coast and fine homes of Shek-O are at the right, with the outlying islands of Tung Lung and Waglan at the left. The course swings past the south shore resort coast, around the west end of the island and back to the starting point. This trip, at 50 cents for adults and a quarter for children, is the seagoing bargain of Hong Kong.

A more leisurely round-island voyage, taking 4½ hours, leaves the Kowloon and Queens piers every morning, and includes a close-up of the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter on the west side of Kowloon Peninsula. Going west around the island, it sails as far as Repulse Bay, turns back toward Deep Water Bay and stops at Aberdeen for lunch before returning around the west end of the island to its starting point. A variation of the trip permits the excursionist to leave the boat at Aberdeen and complete the tour with a motor trip via Stanley, Tai Tam Reservoir, Shau Kei Wan, Tiger Balm Gardens, Wanchai, and Victoria Peak. Lunch and soft drinks are included, but this is not a low-price attraction.

A two-hour afternoon water tour offers tourists a view of the harbor, including the island waterfront, Kai Tak airstrip and the harbor islands. If one prefers travel in a craft rather loosely resembling a junk, he may cover most of the same harbor points visited by the regular launch.

The brigantine Wan Fu, in addition to its evening cruise to Aberdeen, puts on a plush inter-island tour lasting five hours, with cocktails, canapÉs and a catered buffet luncheon served aboard. The Wan Fu sails through Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter, westward past Stonecutters Island, Lantau, and the little island of Peng Chau before tying up at Cheung Chau for an informal walking tour around this fishermen’s settlement, scene of the annual Bun Festival.

Cheung Chau is one of the pleasantest islands in the colony, with neat vegetable gardens planted in its interior hollows, a long stretch of sandy beach and a cluster of English summer homes on its low hills. The village shopping area is a busy place, with narrow, crowded streets, an old temple and a sidewalk shrine to a tree-god. Cost of the Wan Fu cruise is in line with its luxurious accommodations.

Ferry services to Cheung Chau, Peng Chau, Tsing Yi Island and Lantau are operated by the Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry Co. Excursion boats may also be hired at fixed rates for reaching any of these islands. Once the visitor gets to the islands, he will have to depend mostly on his feet to get around. As a matter of course, he should determine in advance when the next boat is scheduled to return to Hong Kong Island; otherwise, he may spend the night in some rural retreat with no tourist hotels.

Peng Chau, with a population of about 4,000 persons, has several small industries typical of an earlier day in Hong Kong, such as tanning and lime burning. It was an important match manufacturing center before Macao competition overshadowed it. It also harbors small farming and fishing settlements.

Hei Ling Chau, a nearby island, houses the colony’s leprosarium, run by the local auxiliary of the Mission to Lepers. It has 540 patients, including refugees from Red China who were turned out of a leprosarium near Canton when the Communists closed it down. A visit to the island may be arranged through the Mission in Hong Kong and is worthwhile on two counts; it will clear up many common misconceptions about the disease and show the visitor how far medicine has progressed in treating a disease that was once considered fatal. When a Chinese became a known sufferer from the disease, he was, until a few years ago, driven from the community and his family were subjected to abuse by their former friends.

Hei Ling Chau conveys no sense of hopelessness today. Its well-kept stone cottages, workshops, hospital and chapel are arranged around a thriving vegetable garden cultivated by the patients. The unsatisfactory chaulmoogra oil treatment has been replaced by streptomycin, sulfones and other new drugs. Surgery has helped to restore the function of hands crippled by the disease. It is not true that the fingers of lepers drop off; the bones shrink if the disease is not checked.

Most cases on the island are infectious, but chances that a visitor will catch the disease are almost nil. Its chief victims are the undernourished poor. Although leprosy is not hereditary, children may contract it from parents. About 30 young victims of leprosy presently attend a primary school on Hei Ling Chau while being treated. Their chances of recovery are excellent. Early, mild infections can often be cleared up within a year; advanced cases may take many years to cure.

Under staff instruction, many patients have become competent tailors, embroiderers, carpenters, cabinet makers or basket weavers. Very few are bedridden, unless they have an additional disease such as tuberculosis. About a third of the patients are women. Everything concerned with the operation of Hei Ling Chau reflects intelligence and devotion in helping lepers to find their way back to useful living.

Tsing Yi Island, off Tsuen Wan, has a few minor industries such as lime burning and brick making, and its steep hillsides grow an especially sweet variety of pineapple. There is also a community of fishermen and a small village with stores where one may purchase food and soft drinks. Chickens and chow dogs, unmenaced by autos, roam its streets. When cold weather comes, some of the chows will vanish. Many Chinese regard chow meat as a delicacy that will keep the consumer warm in winter, increase his strength and fortify his virility. Killing chows for food is illegal, but every winter the police arrest dozens of dog killers, and the courts hand them high fines and jail sentences.

Lantau Island has only one stretch of paved road in its 55-square-mile extent, but it is a favorite spot for hikers and religious pilgrims. There is a good bathing beach at Silvermine Bay, where the ferry stops, and the paved road, traveled by a new bus line, connects it with the dam-building site at Shek Pik.

Some years ago the island was so isolated that its people built stone towers as redoubts against the forays of pirates. By government permission, residents were allowed to keep arms to defend themselves against raiders. Several of the old towers still stand.

The Buddhist monastery of Po Lin Chi, on a mountain plateau two miles north of Shek Pik, is inhabited by a small community of monks and nuns living from the produce of its fruit trees and gardens and the contributions of pilgrims who struggle up a mountain path to visit the retreat. Visitors are welcome and may stay overnight at a guest house on the grounds. Meals are prepared on wood fires in an ancient, smoke-stained kitchen. Surrounded by its orchards and with two or three massive tombs on the surrounding hills, Po Lin Chi is a quiet echo of James Hilton’s Shangri-La.

There are other monasteries on Lantau, with the Trappist Monastery at Tai Shui Hang, in the northeast part of the island, perhaps the best-known. In the last decade its community of 22 priests, lay brothers and novices has planted and redeveloped its large farm acreage.

Tai O town, on the west coast of Lantau, is its largest settlement, with nearly 8,000 inhabitants. Tai O has a community of Tanka fishing people living in wooden huts raised on stakes over a muddy inlet. A regular ferry service brings hiking parties from Hong Kong Island to toil up the hillsides to Po Lin Chi. They stay overnight at its guest house and descend on the opposite side of the mountains to catch the ferry at Silver Mine Bay for the trip home.

For a completely different kind of scenery, the inquisitive traveler may visit Tap Mun Chau, an island at the eastern edge of the New Territories. The Kowloon-Canton Railway takes him to Tai Po Station on Tolo Harbor, where he may catch the Tap Mun Chau ferry. The boat nudges up to the foot of Ma On Shan, a craggy, 2,300-foot peak, unloads a cargo of pigs and a few Hakka farmers, and pushes east through Tolo Channel, bordered by round hills. Three Fathoms Cove is the boat’s second stop. It is just south of Plover Cove, the deep inlet from Tolo Channel which colony engineers propose to seal off, pump out its salt-water contents, and replace with a fresh-water reservoir.

Most of the stops along this six-hour run are made offshore, disembarking passengers reaching land in small sampans. The boat turns south at the seaward end of Tolo Channel and travels the length of Long Harbor between high, barren hills. Looking at these hills, the passenger may understand how easily Chinese pirates of the last century could slip out of this hidden harbor, pounce on passing ships and make their escape behind the sheltering mountains.

Villages are strung along the water’s edge at intervals, but their shallow harbors and small docks cannot handle the ferry boat. The usual sampan, sometimes adroitly propelled by a pair of half-grown boys, rows out to meet the larger boat. There is a dock-side stop at Tap Mun town, where the harbor is crowded with fishing junks, but the layover is too short to permit a walk ashore.

Darkness comes on slowly while the boat heads back, non-stop, to Tai Po, but there are bright patches of light along the water—fishermen using gasoline lanterns to lure their catch into a net spread between two boats. The stars look down from a cloudless sky, and through a gap in the bulky hills, the lights of Hong Kong Island glow in the distance. By early evening, the traveler has gotten his train and is back in Kowloon.

There is so much to see in this colony that no one can compress it into a single visit. Many tourists have returned a dozen times, knowing that each trip would bring some new revelation of unsuspected beauty, some fresh insight into the character of Hong Kong’s people.

No book, map nor brochure can tell a colony visitor exactly what to expect. He walks down a street and comes upon the unexpected every day. It may be a Chinese funeral procession with a marching band playing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Or a professional letter-writer, taking dictation with a stylus at his sidewalk table. Or the clatter of Mah Jongg players as they slam the pieces on the table.

It may be a visit to Temple Street in Kowloon, with its odd restaurants and all-night bustle of activity. Or the Kee Heung Tea House at 597 Shanghai Street, Kowloon, where customers bring their caged birds and discuss them while they sip.

Even the hardiest tourist will be exhausted long before he has exhausted the sights and sounds of Hong Kong.