Hey, you're always asking me where I find stuff...
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Hidden Things
10 years ago the British gave Hong Kong back to China. We missed the 10th anniversary celebrations as we were in Thailand, but probably the only really interesting thing we missed was the fireworks display. Oh, and seeing the People's Liberation Army actually outside their barracks (they tend to stay out of sight so as to not disturb the sensibilities of the local population who all remember the Tiananmen Square massacre).
So that's the really obvious thing that's going on, and there's been a flood of articles about whether the 10 year experiment of "one country, two systems" is working. As I said, we were just in Thailand and when I came back to Hong Kong yesterday I got the curious feeling I always get when I have been out of Hong Kong for a day or two that the city had moved on without me. It's the kind of feeling you get when you've been away from home for some time, and you go home remembering it in a particular way only to find that your memory of home has been superseded. But only in Hong Kong do I get that feeling after only 3 days!
It's worth stopping to think about how quickly things change here, especially to the physical environment. A great example of this is the terrible Jean Claude van Damme film Bloodsport, which features footage of Hong Kong's old Walled City. Van Damme's character is in Hong Kong to compete in a bloody fight tournament, which takes place in the Walled City, and the movie actually features some footage of him walking through the city. It's incredible - the Walled City was an anarchic conglomeration of building piled upon building. There was no official running water or electricity, and the police hardly ventured there. There was almost no natural light due to the closeness of the structures. In the film we see the tiny alleys, the filthy water dripping down, the cramped and squalid conditions.
The Walled City was torn down in 1994, and is now a nice park, where families can relax and the only signs of its former past are some reinforced concrete posts near one of the gates and a temple that used to sit in the centre of the city.
The point is though, that unless you get hold of that terrible film, or find one of the few books available about it you would never know that it ever existed. And so all the stories about 10 years of Chinese rule seem to me to miss some essential point - it's all very well to ask about whether the new arrangement in Hong Kong has been a success, but if it's hard to actually compare what you have now with what you had then the question becomes harder to answer. From my point of view, I don't know what the city was like 10 years ago so I can't really say how it's changed. But I am sure it has, and I bet a lot of people haven't even noticed what the changes were.
So that's the really obvious thing that's going on, and there's been a flood of articles about whether the 10 year experiment of "one country, two systems" is working. As I said, we were just in Thailand and when I came back to Hong Kong yesterday I got the curious feeling I always get when I have been out of Hong Kong for a day or two that the city had moved on without me. It's the kind of feeling you get when you've been away from home for some time, and you go home remembering it in a particular way only to find that your memory of home has been superseded. But only in Hong Kong do I get that feeling after only 3 days!
It's worth stopping to think about how quickly things change here, especially to the physical environment. A great example of this is the terrible Jean Claude van Damme film Bloodsport, which features footage of Hong Kong's old Walled City. Van Damme's character is in Hong Kong to compete in a bloody fight tournament, which takes place in the Walled City, and the movie actually features some footage of him walking through the city. It's incredible - the Walled City was an anarchic conglomeration of building piled upon building. There was no official running water or electricity, and the police hardly ventured there. There was almost no natural light due to the closeness of the structures. In the film we see the tiny alleys, the filthy water dripping down, the cramped and squalid conditions.
The Walled City was torn down in 1994, and is now a nice park, where families can relax and the only signs of its former past are some reinforced concrete posts near one of the gates and a temple that used to sit in the centre of the city.
The point is though, that unless you get hold of that terrible film, or find one of the few books available about it you would never know that it ever existed. And so all the stories about 10 years of Chinese rule seem to me to miss some essential point - it's all very well to ask about whether the new arrangement in Hong Kong has been a success, but if it's hard to actually compare what you have now with what you had then the question becomes harder to answer. From my point of view, I don't know what the city was like 10 years ago so I can't really say how it's changed. But I am sure it has, and I bet a lot of people haven't even noticed what the changes were.
Labels: anniversary, handover, hongkong, kowloon, walledcity
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The New Territories
On the weekend we went for a brief trip to the New Territories. The what? Yes - the New Territories. The bit of China that got handed over to the British in 1898 - 57 years after they took possession of Hong Kong. Hence the name "New Territories".
These days the New Territories are the remnants of the rural areas of Hong Kong - a conglomeration of old Hakka villages and new urban high-rises. It's quite an interesting place. The pace of life definitely feels slower than on Hong Kong Island or in Kowloon, and the residents look a little less well-off. (But there are still a lot of BMW's and Benz's zooming around.) Piles of wrecked or disused cars and shipping containers are lumped next to old temples, ancestral halls, houses and farms, all lined up along tiny winding roads. And then suddenly there'll be a sleek modern KCR railway station, conveniently located near a dozen or more towering apartment blocks. The whole place has a faintly transient quality - it's the buffer zone between Hong Kong and China, and buffer zones always feel a bit looser than other places.
I had the feeling that everyone was waiting for someone else to come along and tidy it up, but that no-one was particularly anxious for that to occur either. Unfortunately I don't really have any photos - for various reasons we ended up seeing most of what we saw from the inside of a public minibus, and when we finally did manage to get out and walk around we'd ended up at a Buddhist temple that seemed to be in a transitional state itself - moving from being a monastery to a theme park.
I guess the next thing to do is head north a few more kilometres and visit the ultimate human intertidal zone - Shenzhen.
tags: hongkong | newterritories
These days the New Territories are the remnants of the rural areas of Hong Kong - a conglomeration of old Hakka villages and new urban high-rises. It's quite an interesting place. The pace of life definitely feels slower than on Hong Kong Island or in Kowloon, and the residents look a little less well-off. (But there are still a lot of BMW's and Benz's zooming around.) Piles of wrecked or disused cars and shipping containers are lumped next to old temples, ancestral halls, houses and farms, all lined up along tiny winding roads. And then suddenly there'll be a sleek modern KCR railway station, conveniently located near a dozen or more towering apartment blocks. The whole place has a faintly transient quality - it's the buffer zone between Hong Kong and China, and buffer zones always feel a bit looser than other places.
I had the feeling that everyone was waiting for someone else to come along and tidy it up, but that no-one was particularly anxious for that to occur either. Unfortunately I don't really have any photos - for various reasons we ended up seeing most of what we saw from the inside of a public minibus, and when we finally did manage to get out and walk around we'd ended up at a Buddhist temple that seemed to be in a transitional state itself - moving from being a monastery to a theme park.
I guess the next thing to do is head north a few more kilometres and visit the ultimate human intertidal zone - Shenzhen.
tags: hongkong | newterritories
Labels: hongkong, kowloon, newterritories
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