Hong Kong’s fading Britishness

Not much of Hong Kong still feels British. There is the odd tube stop – Admiralty, Kennedy Town, Prince Edward – but that’s about it. On the car ride from the airport, I chatted to the driver as we passed under half-built concrete arches covered in green construction cloth. He told me the authorities were building another runway; we’ve been arguing over a third runway for the best part of 30 years, I said, and it still hadn’t started. He laughed. ‘We used to be run by England. Now the communists are in charge, it’s much easier.’ 

My cheapy British phone contract is allergic to Hong Kong networks and insists on gobbling up around £20 of credit a day. None of my bank cards seem to work either. I tried beeping onto the metro with a debit card. Nothing. So I went to get out some cash. Declined. Card blocked. It turns out the ATMs pin pads are identical in style but the numbers are back to front: 987,654,321. Years of muscle memory left me stranded among the knock-off handbags of Mong Kok. 

On the long walk back to the hotel I found an industrial steel pagoda surrounded by tables and plastic stools. I asked for a Skol, seeing a pile of empty bottles on the floor by a group of merry Cantonese men. The laminated ring-bound menu offered Hot Chilli Frog. Wimpishly, I ordered the sweet and sour pork which, despite the Skol haze, I’m sure contained curry powder. A little hint of Britishness perhaps, the consequence of what once went on around Admiralty tube station?

I’ve been put up in the Regent on Victoria Harbour for a few days. I had searched for pictures before arriving and planned on describing it as ‘looking like the Trump Towers architect built a multi-storey car park’ (a bit of snark to offset the fact I’m on a freebie). Actually, the Regent looks nothing like that. I’ve grown quite fond of its confident lines, its brown tinted windows and bright metal cladding. At night the building wakes up, glowing against the waters of the bay. The place has been redesigned along feng shui lines; it was imperative, we were told, that a dragon could pass through the newly-opened Nobu unmolested. 

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One evening we were taken to the hotel’s steakhouse. Afterwards a rumour went around that the cows had been fed only gummy bears and M&Ms. It was hotly debated. All the luxury journalists apparently knew of cattle reared on a strict diet of chocolate, but gummy bears? They’re a different breed, these hotel reviewers. I got chatting to one writer who has spent years being sent from five-star hotel to five-star hotel, only paying his own way on the rare occasion that a PR is unwilling to sub this life of insecure opulence. 

Over breakfast, I spoke with a Catholic journalist from Northern Ireland who has lived in Hong Kong for over 20 years. She told me she had felt nothing as the Union flag was lowered for the last time in 1997. In her mind, it was merely one government with a questionable history handing over to another. She had been staying at the Regent that night and watched the ceremony with a British friend; as the royal yacht left the harbour, he turned to her and said: ‘You know, it feels like when my father dropped me off at prep school.’ I felt a little sorry for those abandoned Brits.

With us on the trip is a squad of Chinese influencers. They take their job very seriously. Each has at least one assistant, kitted out with professional cameras and make-up bags. These austere-looking young women seem to spend their days arranging themselves into ritzy scenes of wealth and indifference. After one mini shoot on the bow of a junk, I watched the influencer grab her assistant’s camera, swiping through the photos with the tap of a manicured nail. A group of Hong Kong teenagers standing by the water seemed to recognise her and began pointing and laughing with excitement. 

The Regent is surrounded on three sides by luxury goods shops. Cartier, Alexander McQueen, Michael Kors. If you wanted to retreat, you’d find yourself back in the harbour. There’s a Canada Goose outlet and another ski shop, whose name I can’t remember, selling nothing but puffa jackets. It’s 27C here and you can feel the humidity coming down from the subtropical hills. Who, I wonder, is buying this stuff? They can’t all have skiing holidays booked in Zermatt or Hokkaido. It reminds me of a mythical pub in Thailand that a backpacker once told me about where they whack up the AC and light a wood fire, serving Sunday roasts to homesick Brits and their perplexed mail-order brides. Somewhere in the city is a group of wealthy Chinese sitting around in a chilly apartment, laughing over fondue and schnapps. 

I went to Java Road in search of the morgues and black bunting of Lawrence Osborne’s latest novel, hoping to pay my respects to his imagined dead. The book is about a middling British journalist in Hong Kong (I’m not a particularly adventurous reader), his old university friend and a rich, beautiful pro-democracy protester who goes missing. I texted a Chinese friend to ask whether it might cause a problem at customs, bringing in a book about the failed anti-Beijing protests. ‘It isn’t North Korea,’ she said, ‘there’s an 85 per cent chance you’ll be fine.’

I found the famous tenement walls of endless AC units, whose drips I confused for rain, and great, precarious bamboo scaffolds, some over 20 storeys high. The feet of these bamboo scaffolds are cut at an angle – seemingly against all reason – so that they appear to pirouette on the immaculate pavements. An old man walked past with one of those wizened Chinese beards that imply great and ancient knowledge, wearing Bermuda shorts and an England football shirt. A supporter of the old regime? I didn’t find the morgues, discovering only a 7/11 and a place to get a phone charger.