Day 118 (Sun 10 Jan): Hong Kong (Victoria Peak)

An amazing view… if it hadn’t been covered in thick cloud:

And the audio guide kept gushing about how good the view was, so here’s what I was missing (courtesy of someone who picked a better day for their visit):

Victoria Peak has long been a hill-top retreat of the great and good (and the not-so-great and good, I suspect); for centuries, visitors have come to admire the views. For us, this took about thirty seconds, but the rest of the audio guide made interesting listening:

Early tracks to the top turned into trails, with sedan chairs the main form of transport before Alexander Findlay Smith, who had purchased the hotel at the top, researched ways (it’s 27 degrees to vertical in places) to make it easier for people (and their money) to get there resulting in the Peak Tram
Nowadays the spirit of the place lives on with a large shopping mall at the top (surprise, surprise)
“Nine Dragons” are the peaks you can see as you look towards Kowloon. But there are only eight of them; an emperor totted them up and was told (by one of his minions who was clearly trying to score brownie points) that he, as an emperor, was also considered a mountain
Victoria Harbour is one of the world’s deepest natural harbours
The Mong Kok (“prosperous and crowded corner”) area of the city was (or maybe still is – I haven’t checked), the most densely populated place on earth (as certified by the Guinness Book of Records) with 7 million people occupying just 400sqkm.
International Financial Centre 2 (IFC2) is very auspicious. Remember that Asians, in general, believe in luck. In their language, eight is “baa”, which sounds very similar to their word for “prosper”. So a building with 88 floors was always going to do well. Only it doesn’t have 88 floors… Because some have been left out: you won’t find Floor 24 (in Chinese it sounds like “easily dies”) or Floor 14 (try renting out a floor that sounds like “definitely dies”). Good business, even if not numerical, sense. This also explains why many hotels we’ve stayed at in China number their rooms starting at 8100 (first floor is our ground floor, so they precede the usual numbering with an eight)
In contrast, there were problems with the Bank of China building because the straight lines and triangles favoured by the architect were at odds with the principles of feng shui; luckily, a strategically located fish pond, line of trees and the regularity of the adjacent building sorted things out nicely
Today, Repulse Bay’s beaches and shallow waters make it popular with families; in the past it was popular with pirates, driven away by Britain’s HMS Repulse; the area also houses a hotel with a hole in the middle of it. Any ideas why they’d build a hotel with a piece missing? Exactly – to let the energy from the mountains flow down to the river. Feng shui again.

In fact, HK itself is beautifully positioned by feng shui principles, protected by a river on one side and mountains on the other. Remind you of anything? Yep, the strategic locations of temples in Champa (now Cambodia and southern Laos).

It also had more interesting nuggets about the city itself:

Brief history: Belonging to China in the third century BC, Hong Kong was ceded to the British as a crown colony during the opium wars; it was popular so Great Britain asked for a bit more land to accommodate the growing population and was given Kowloon in 1898 for a period of 99 years; when it came time to give Kowloon back (1997), Hong Kong was handed back as well
When it was handed back, the Chief Executive (interesting title, supporting the description of HK as a company subsidiary with its own management) agreed to “maintain the socioeconomic system” for fifty years
Seventy percent of HK is green, and one third of that is protected which makes it less surprising that…
HK has one of the highest life expectancies in the world (but no mention of what it was)

Then back to Hong Kong courtesy of the Peak Tram. It’s steep. Really steep. No, no, even steeper than that. This photo was taken with my camera held horizontally:

Back in the city we came across this:

Hundreds and hundreds of women camping out for the day. Plazas, underpasses, in the lee of buildings. A quick chat with some confirmed it was purely social: they talk, eat, massage, and take care of each other. All day. None of the women in the group we spoke to even knew where their boyfriends/husbands were, let alone what they were doing. Childcare surely must feature – a sizeable proportion of the women were of childbearing age, but there was a conspicuous absence of little ‘uns.