HONG KONG: The Fragrant Harbor

(See Cover)

The cluster of green, sugarloaf islands huddles close to the China coast. As the jet airliner glides in, sunlight reflects from the rippled sea, the brown batwing sails of Chinese junks turn in the wind. The travelers look down on rocky hills with terraced fields, deeply indented coves alive with sampans, a wide harbor carrying a honking traffic of freighters, tugs, barges and ferries.

The jet swoops past the great city rising from the water’s edge toward the towering Peak—shipyards, smoking factories, villas drowned in gardens, balconied tenements, squatters’ huts clinging to bare rock, bright new skyscrapers still wrapped in bamboo scaffolding. Coming in low over rooftops fluttering with blue and white laundry, the jet roars down upon the 8,000-foot runway of Kai Tak Airport. Thus, last week, another planeload of tourists landed amid the sights, sounds, smells and bracing excitement of Hong Kong.

Danger Zones. The jet age has narrowed the vast Pacific Ocean to a sleeper jump. Bustling Hong Kong, served by 1,000 flights a month, is 14 hours from San Francisco, only 18½ hours over the North Pole from New York City. The Far East used to be the domain of the reckless adventurer or the traveler who could afford the money and leisure for a two-month cruise. Now Tokyo, Bangkok and Hong Kong are as accessible as Paris, Rome or London. Ten thousand tourists a week pour into the Orient, and many, traveling economy class, pay as little as $1,500 round trip.

Travel in Europe follows well-worn paths in and out of cathedrals, galleries, great museums and famous restaurants. The U.S. visitor is culturally never very far from home. But the Far East is a plunge into the strange and unfamiliar. Music suddenly becomes an atonal screeching; men bow instead of shaking hands, sit cross-legged on the floor to eat dinner and mostly wear twisted cloths or even skirts instead of trousers. The straight lines of Western architecture are replaced by curlicues and curves; landscapes become shrouded in Oriental mist; night sounds have an uneasy difference. And poverty is not a shabby destitution but something as stark, as cruel and as immediate as death.

Different Faces. The Far East has nearly as many different faces as it has gods. Some tourists try to capture its flavor by slipping into Japanese kimonos and sleeping on the tatami floors of Kyoto inns, where Kannon, the goddess of mercy, dreams among the maple trees. They go as pilgrims to the Great Buddha of Nakamura or, if they get as far as Southeast Asia, stand in awed silence at Angkor, whose 40 square miles of ruins in the Cambodian jungle are about all that remain of the ancient 8th to 11th century Khmer civilization.

Other tourists follow a different vision: that of the slender, small-boned and submissive women of the East who have long haunted the imagination of the West. They are visible in the statuary, paintings and bas-reliefs of a thousand temples, in the ceremonial dancers who weave their intricate and flowing patterns in palace courtyards, in shops and streets and paddies, or bathing with modest nudity in roadside canals. Most famed are the tawny bare beauties of Bali and the tiny, remote girls of Solo in Indonesia. For those who wish to pursue the investigation more intimately, Manila has an infinitude of dance halls and brothels. Tokyo provides beautiful girls in endless, well-displayed quantity from the nude chorus line at Nichigeki Music Hall to brassy burlesque shows complete with U.S.-style striptease. Tokyo, like Paris, is the place for a gay night out. Like Paris, it can also be ruinously expensive.

There are some tourists who find Asia an endless torment. They are dismayed by ramshackle hotels, the stupefying odors of human sweat and excrement, the maddening delays and disappointments caused by the faulty Asian time sense. The special quality of the East must be searched for, and tourists who lack energy spend their hours sitting in dank hotel lobbies in Rangoon or Nara or Kuala Lumpur wondering why their travel agents sent them there.

Kamikaze Taxis. But from Tokyo in the north to Colombo deep in the Indian Ocean, governments and businessmen are frenziedly trying to please all types of tourists. New resorts are being built and old ones modernized. In Japan, baseball, amusement parks and horse racing compete with such traditional attractions as the drum pounding, seasonal festivals in honor of dolls, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums and cherry blossoms. Tokyo, the world’s largest city, has more bars and coffee houses than Rome and Paris put together. Nightclubs are either as big as gymnasiums or so intimate that the hostesses have no place to sit but on the patron’s lap. Police are learning English in preparation for the 1964 Olympic Games and have launched a safety drive against Tokyo’s kamikaze taxicabs. Some $400 million will be spent to improve Japan’s lamentable highways, and brand-new cruise ship’s with air-conditioned cabins cleave the smooth waters of the enchanting Inland Sea with its 700 islands, seemingly sprung straight out of Japanese paintings.

Thailand has great charm and an air of mystery. Bangkok, with its rivers and winding canals, is an Asian Venice filled with hundreds of temples rising above the sluggish klongs like gilt and gaudy dreams. India, for most tourists, is limited to Bombay (where they land), Delhi (where they go to see the Taj Mahal at nearby Agra), Banaras (for its burning funeral ghats) and Calcutta (famed for slums and the Black Hole). Many tourist wonders lie off the beaten track but lack good hotels. Exceptions: the rose-pink city of Jaipur and Purion the Bay of Bengal, only 18 miles from the Black Pagoda at Konarak, famed for its delicately erotic carvings of gods and goddesses. Malaya is orderly and well-kept, almost resembling a rural England with tropical trimmings, and has 30 golf courses and fine beaches where the swimming is made more exciting by the presence of poisonous water snakes. Singapore still boasts Raffles Hotel but has lost much of its racy, raffish tradition.

Golden Domes. South Korea is anxious for tourists, but roads are poor and sights few. Formosa offers good Chinese food, lovely scenery at Sun Moon Lake and hot sulphur baths at Peitou. Indonesia offers rewards for visitors fortified by optimism and durability. Accommodations are poor and government officials often both inept and insolent, but there are wonderful drives from the seedy capital of Djakarta through jungle-clad hills to cool Bandung and Bogor. Bali has two good hotels and is always lively with festivals, cockfights, legong dances and gala cremations. Burma is not much like Kipling’s description of it, but Mandalay, Pagan and Rangoon have thousands of superb Buddhist monasteries and gold-domed temples alive with tinkling silver bells. With newer and better hotels, steadily improving plane service and a gradual understanding of visitors’ needs, tourist traffic in the Far East is up 20% over 1959, should total 890,000 for this year.

Yellow Stars. Hong Kong is far and away the most efficient tourist center and the most knowledgeable in combining the exotic, flavorful atmosphere of the East with the well-policed comfort and orderliness of the West. The city itself, officially called Victoria, is on Hong Kong Island. But the crown colony includes some 248 other islands, mostly small, barren and uninhabited, plus Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories on the Chinese main land—altogether some 398 square miles jammed with 3,000,000 people, 99% of whom are Chinese. Hong Kong booms with banks and stockbrokers, merchants and money lenders, smugglers and illicit dealers in gold, narcotics and women. As fast as new land is reclaimed from the sea, it sprouts offices, apartments, factories, mills, warehouses, docks. Ships flying a score of flags sail from Hong Kong to the far parts of the earth—Abidjan, Khorramshahr, Miri, Zanzibar. Nearly 20,000 Chinese junks and sampans drift over its waters, and green-painted barges marked with the yellow stars of Red China slip down the Pearl River from Canton.

Whining Music. To tourists, Hong Kong seems at first a vast department store. As they step from plane or ship, tailors’ touts press calling cards on them and promise custom-made suits within 24 hours for only $25. On their way to the hotel, the cab driver offers his services as guide, confidant and business agent. Climbing the broad stairs to the lobby of the popular, 274-room Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, which commands an unrivaled view of Hong Kong itself banked against the Peak across the harbor, the visitor is surrounded by shop after shop selling bargain-priced brocades, silks, cameras, pearls, jade, tape recorders, linens, carved ivory and inlaid furniture.

The short ride by Star ferry across the harbor from Kowloon to Hong Kong introduces tourists to a popular local pastime: watching Hong Kong girls, wearing cheong-san dresses slit to the thigh, cope with the wind. The first impression of Hong Kong itself is of noise: the staccato of pneumatic drills, thump of pile drivers, cries of hawkers, click of mah-jongg tiles behind shuttered doors, the shouts of coolies dancing under the weight of bamboo shoulder poles. Brass bands sound funeral dirges in the narrow streets; radios whine the cacophony of Cantonese music; the rataplan of $1,000 worth of firecrackers announces a wedding, a birth, or the grand opening of a new noodle store.

Said a recent U.S. visitor: “Hong Kong is just a city you like. You arrive, and you fall in love with it the way you do with San Francisco or Paris.”

Tourists file through the garish, neon-lit Wanchai quarter—the world of Suzie Wong—dodging red rickshas and the green, double-decker tramcars. There are bars and bar girls on every corner, big dance halls, and at Typhoon Shelter, prostitutes perched on the deck of sampans call their wares to passing sailors along the quay. But Hong Kong night life is hardly wild in the old Shanghai tradition and barely compares with that of present-day Tokyo or Manila.

Thieves’ Market. Evenings, most tourists ride the funicular railway up the 1,800-foot Peak, which was once the exclusive citadel of British taipans and has a view of sea, sky and islands that puts the Bay of Naples to shame. They go to the floating restaurants at the fishing village of Aberdeen, where patrons select the live fish that will be served them at dinner. Between bouts of shopping, visitors wander amid the outlandish statuary of the Tiger Balm Garden or prowl the stairway streets above Queen’s Road and look into the thieves’ market of Cat Street, where Chinese antiques from the mainland are sold at bargain prices because they cannot be brought into the U.S., which still maintains a total embargo on all goods from Red China. The antiques (many of dubious antiquity) are often bought by British and Italian dealers, shipped to Europe, and then imported into the U.S. without needing a “certificate of origin.”

A “must” tour is the 20-mile drive from Kowloon through the New Territories to the border with Red China, marked by a barbed-wire fence and a few Communist soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms at the frontier station on the Kowloon-Canton railway. Looking across the border at the blue hills and rounded mountains of China, the tourist feels the mystery of the unknown and unknowable, the amorphous weight of 670 million humans whose purposes and aims remain hidden. His mood is very like that of the 16th century Europeans who first set foot in China and stared with wild surmise at the Manchu Empire lying hugely between sleep and waking.

No Rhubarb. In the ancient, changeless East, Hong Kong is remarkable for youth. When it was founded in 1841, Chicago was already a city, and New Orleans had been an important seaport for more than a century. Hong Kong’s difficult birth resulted from a clash of wills between Britain’s eager merchants and the mandarin aloofness of the Manchu court. The West desperately wanted the tea and silk of China; China wanted chiefly to be left alone.

The only Western commodity that interested the Chinese mandarins was gold, and the China trade might have drained all the gold out of Europe if shrewd merchants like Jardine, Matheson, Dent and Joseph Henry had not found a substitute currency in opium grown in British India. They were soon landing the drug in the Pearl River estuary at the rate of 6,000,000 lbs. a year. They defended themselves morally by calling opium “a harmless luxury and precious medicine except to those who abuse it,” while taking the business line that if they did not sell it to the Chinese, someone else would.

The Chinese government reacted with moral lectures (“It is wrong to make a profit out of what is harmful to others”) and threatened to ban the sale of rhubarb to Europeans, relying on the firmly held Chinese belief that all foreigners, and especially the English, would die of constipation if deprived of rhubarb’s laxative qualities.

These measures failing, the imperial government seized and burned the British opium stocks at Canton. In the Opium War that followed, the primitive Chinese navy was blown to pieces and its feudal armies scattered. Under the peace treaty, the humiliated Emperor had to permit free trade at five Chinese ports, pay an indemnity of $21 million, and give to the British “a large and properly situated island” off the coast, “from which Her Majesty’s subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled.”

Amusing Choice. The island selected by the British plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger, was Hong Kong (Fragrant Harbor). It was so barren and lacking in water that even the Chinese considered it uninhabitable. Pottinger’s choice aroused derision in London, where “Go to Hong Kong” became a euphemistic form of cussing among fashionable ladies. And Queen Victoria wrote a friend: “Albert is so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong’s warehouses were soon piled high with opium, and some 80 clipper ships smuggled the drug to Chinese dealers along the 4,000-mile coast of the mainland. Reckless men poured in from every land. When the potent Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. was founded in 1864, it was backed by 14 different firms—British, American, German, Indian, Turkish, Danish—and its first manager was a Frenchman. A British visitor warned that “anyone compelled to come by duty to Hong Kong should have a stout heart and a lively trust in the mercy of God.”

Though opium was not officially outlawed in Hong Kong until 1945, the merchant taipans gradually shifted to less questionable ways of making money. Creating nothing itself, Hong Kong became a vast free port and shipping point. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and took the New Territories on a 99-year lease from China in 1898. Every disorder on the mainland increased the power and population of Hong Kong. By the turn of the century, 230,000 Chinese were residents; in the 1930s, the chaos caused by Japan’s invasion of China brought in a million refugees. On Dec. 8, 1941, the Japanese dive-bombed Kai Tak Airport. Hong Kong’s garrison surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day, 1941—exactly 100 years after the British had founded the colony.

Master Stroke. At war’s end. Hong Kong was a wreck. Its harbor facilities had been destroyed by bombings, and two-thirds of its population had fled. The colony was flooded with worthless currency called “duress notes,” which the Japanese had forced the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. to issue. The British acted boldly: with the help of the local government and the Bank of England, the corporation redeemed every duress note at face value—an operation costing $30 million. “A master stroke,” sighed one relieved financier. “Nothing did more to restore Hong Kong’s prestige so quickly.”

Hong Kong was soon back in business as the world’s most famous free port, where German cameras cost less than they do in Germany, Swiss watches less than in Switzerland. British merchants quickly rebuilt their trade networks throughout the Orient. Between 1946 and 1948, trade doubled. By 1950, it doubled again. Population grew nearly as fast. Refugees fleeing the Red conquest of China choked Hong Kong with 3,000,000 people. Britain, largely in Hong Kong’s interest, recognized Red China, and at first the bargain seemed to pay off, since by 1951, exports to the Communist mainland rose to $280 million annually.

But with the entry of Red Chinese “volunteers” into the Korean war, the bubble burst. The United Nations embargo on the export of strategic commodities to the mainland was scrupulously enforced in Hong Kong. Deprived of trade with China, the colony seemed ready to sink into obscurity.

Transportation. Hong Kong was saved by its Chinese refugees. Most of them were desperately poor, but among them were Shanghai businessmen and industrialists. Overseas Chinese, frightened by the rising nationalism of the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia, brought their families and their money to the safety of Hong Kong. Soon they were investing in everything from laundries to new hotels. They set up factories first in cellars, then in empty stores, finally in new-built plants. In ten years, they transformed Hong Kong from simply a trading center and transshipment depot into the fastest-growing industrial city in the Far East. Ten years ago, 90% of Hong Kong’s income was from the reexport of goods produced somewhere else—in Britain, Germany, Japan, India, Red China. This year, 75% of its exports are goods manufactured by the colony’s humming factories and enterprises. The U.S. has become Hong Kong’s major customer, taking 18% of its exports, followed by Britain. Exports to Red China have dwindled to an inconsequential 3%.

Chinese Fashion. The transformation was confused, typically Chinese, and as free as enterprise can get. Typical was the story of one Adrian R. Wu, who fled from Shanghai with his wife in 1949. Wu speculated briefly in gold and put his profit into a toy factory. It failed. Undaunted, Wu borrowed money from an uncle and started another factory making plastic buttons, which became a modest success and was sold to an eager buyer. In all his operations, Wu maintains a series of loose partnerships with other Chinese businessmen, who in turn have partners of their own. Thus A, B and C deal in textiles; A, D and E are in toys; B, F and G make flashlights; C, D, F, H, and an unknown American with U.S. outlets set up an underwear factory. When Wu heard that Italian-made plastic flowers were the rage in New York at $2 to $4 each, he got together some “partners,” obtained a sample flower from a U.S. importer and, with a borrowed mold and a truckload of polyethylene, began making similar flowers which now sell briskly for 50¢ to 75¢ in U.S. supermarkets.

Expiring Lease. The British still run Hong Kong and still control its banks and commercial enterprise. But the industrial millionaires are seldom British. Some of the top entrepreneurs:

¶ Kansas-born Linden Johnson, 46 (no relation to Vice President-elect Lyndon Johnson), served with the U.S. Air Force in India, Burma and China, took his discharge overseas in 1948, and was trapped by the Red Chinese when they captured Shanghai. Released in 1950, Johnson arrived in Hong Kong “so busted he didn’t have a bed to sleep in.” Becoming the partner of a Chinese friend, Johnson rented factory space, hired a few score workers and began production of high-fashion women’s clothes trademarked Dynasty. He now has a large factory in Kowloon, a showroom in the Peninsula Hotel and exports his clothes around the world. “A lot of guys come out here exploring,” says Johnson, “but there’s a general reluctance to stay and ride herd on the operation. And that’s the only way to make it work.”

¶ Soft-spoken Chen Che Lee, 49, began operations in Hong Kong in 1946 with a small textile mill and 150 workers. Today his 5,000 employees work three shifts daily producing 150,000 pajamas and blouses a month. In 1956 he sold a million dollars worth of clothes in the U.S.; last year his American exports totaled $12 million.

¶ Piero Calcina, 63, is a small, jovial Italian who came to China after World War I to sell airplanes and moved down to Hong Kong in 1948. On Calcina’s desk stand 19 direct-line telephones to Hong Kong banks. A licensed gold bullion dealer, his investments range from financing a jute mill in South Viet Nam to a $532,000 loan to U.S. Lawyer Roy Cohn to help him acquire control of the Lionel Corp. (TIME, April 18). Living in the comfortable Repulse Bay Hotel, Calcina has an abhorrence of possessions, says of Hong Kong, “I don’t want to own anything here. I learned my lesson in China.”

As a colony, Hong Kong has personal freedom and uninhibited free enterprise but no trace of political democracy. The colony is run by the British governor, and only 20,000 specially selected citizens have any vote at all. Though U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt considered Hong Kong an embarrassing hangover from colonialism and twice urged Britain to return Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek’s China, there is no irredentist sentiment among Hong Kong’s Chinese, or even any agitation for independence. As they well know, an independent Hong Kong would be swallowed up by Red China in a matter of months.

Saving Usefulness. In Peking, Communist officials say casually: “We can take Hong Kong any time. But for the moment we do not think it necessary.” Why not? The colony is not only unashamedly capitalistic; it is also an escape hatch for thousands fleeing Red oppression on the mainland. Entire fleets of fishing junks have arrived at Hong Kong with their crews and families. Some desperate men have swum to safety; others escape by being packed like sardines under the floorboards of coastal ships.

The hard fact is that the crown colony of Hong Kong exists because and only because it is useful to both sides. It will continue to exist as long as it remains so. Hong Kong is worth its weight in hard currency to Red China. Last year Peking earned $180 million with sales of food and textiles to Hong Kong, and in 1960 sales are running 10% higher. Communist agents cross the border easily and legally and use the colony as a base for political intelligence, propaganda, commercial and financial operations. The imposing, 17-story Communist Bank of China throws its shadow on such relics of British imperialism as the Hong Kong Club and the Cricket Club. The Reds also operate a tourist office, trade outlets, and a huge department store selling everything from canned dumplings to baseball bats.

For the West, Hong Kong is in many ways a better listening post than China itself, since in Peking, non-Communist diplomats and newsmen must live in a ghetto for foreigners. U.S. and European businessmen find Hong Kong a comfortable, efficient community where the telephones work, taxes are low, and communications with the rest of Asia ideal. The Hong Kong attitude was best defined by its former governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, when he said, “We are just simple traders who want to get on with our daily round and common task. This may not be very noble, but at any rate it does not disturb others.”

Money Back. But when the colony’s lease on the New Territories expires in 1997 the Communists can legally swallow nine-tenths of Hong Kong without lifting an aggressive finger. As a result, British and Chinese businessmen specialize in quick turnovers, usually siphon a percentage of their profits overseas. “We always get our money back in five years,” says a conservative British merchant.

For all its factories and air-conditioned offices, its marble banks and Western ways, Hong Kong is still the Orient. A Chinese accountant educated at the University of Wisconsin audits his ledgers on an abacus. A Hankow Road doctor who graduated from Queen’s College treats his patients with powdered tiger bone and cobra bile instead of sulfanilamides. Chinese speculators discuss deals in Chicago wheat futures and Sahara oil while lunching on sea slugs and “beggar’s chicken,” rolled in lotus leaves and baked in mud.

Tired Work Horse. The rest of Asia is only slowly coming to grips with the tourist flood. For example, Cambodia’s magnificent ruins at Angkor are serviced by a single ramshackle hotel. Pagan, in central Burma, is famed for its collection of 5,000 Buddhist temples but it has no hotel at all.

But Hong Kong is energetically expanding its facilities. Last week eight new hotels were either complete or under construction. Work has started on an air terminal equipped to handle 550 passengers an hour. There is so much on sale so inexpensively (even Japanese businessman complain that Japanese products sell for less in Hong Kong than they do at home) that many tourists go broke “saving money.” Often they stagger away from Hong Kong with their stomachs full and their pocketbooks empty, gamely determined to see the other attractions of the Far East, but poorly equipped to do so. While Hong Kong lasts, its nimble businessmen and cool British governors are determined to see that the situation does not change.