Hong Kong: Fragrant Harbor

As any good travel agent will tell, Hong Kong is a paradise of sights and sounds and is perfumed with the scents of opium, spices, incense and the special sensuous fragrance of warm silk. The tourist who arrives by plane and is whisked along an airy boulevard to an air-conditioned hotel may not disagree —until he explores the island colony. Then he will wonder why it was ever called Hong Kong, which means Fragrant Harbor.

Nowadays the fragrance of Hong Kong comes from dead fish, firecracker dust, rotting cabbage, auto exhausts and night soil, all woven into a unique miasma. There are 100,000 people who live afloat in suburbs of sampans and never use a toilet or garbage pail. But the main source of trouble is a place ten miles from the city quaintly named Gin Drinkers’ Bay by the British and more accurately known as Garbage Bay to the Chinese.

To fill in the bay and create industrial sites, the government dumps more than 1,000 tons of garbage there every day. Since typhoons carried away parts of the barrier that was supposed to contain the offal, it drifts out and forms a putrescent bilge that swills around the city. For a long time, not even her best friends would tell her. Then last week Senior City Councilor Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales took an olfactory tour of Hong Kong in a helicopter and pronounced that even from 300 feet up the place stank. The government promised that Gin Drinkers’ Bay will be contained by a new wall next month and that the first of two big, modern incinerators will start work early next year.