Hong Kong · Asia

Overview

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To stand on the tip of Kowloon Peninsula and look out across the harbor to the full expanse of the Hong Kong island skyline -- as awesome in height as Manhattan''s, but only a few blocks deep and strung along the entire north coast -- is to see the triumph of ambition over fate. Whereas it took Paris and London 10 to 20 generations to build the spectacular cities seen today, and New York 6, Hong Kong built almost everything you see before you in the time since today''s young investment bankers were born. It is easy to perceive this tremendous creation of wealth as an inevitable result of Hong Kong''s strategic position, but at any point in the territory''s history things might have happened slightly differently, and the island would have found itself on the margins of world trade rather than at the center.

When the 78-square-km (30-square-mi) island of Hong Kong was ceded to the British after the Opium War of 1841, it consisted, in the infamous words of the British minister at the time, of "barren rock" whose only redeeming feature was the adjacent deep-water harbor. For the British, though, it served another purpose: Hong Kong guarded the eastern edge of the Pearl River delta, and with it access to Guangzhou (Canton), which in the mid-19th century was China''s main trading port. By controlling Hong Kong, Britain came to control the export of Chinese products such as silk and tea, and to corner the Chinese market for Western manufactured goods and opium. The scheme proved highly profitable.

If British trade were all Hong Kong had going for it, however, its prosperity would have faded with the rest of the empire. No, the real story of Hong Kong began in the 1920s, when the firstwave of Chinese refugees settled here to avoid civil unrest at home. They were followed in the ''30s and ''40s by refugees fleeing the advance of the invading Japanese army. But the biggest throngs of all came after the 1949 Communist revolution in China -- mostly from the neighboring province of Guangdong, but also from Fujian, Shanghai, and elsewhere. Many of these mainland arrivals came from humble farming backgrounds, but many others had been rich and had seen their wealth and businesses stripped away by the revolutionaries. They came to Hong Kong poorer than their families had been in generations, yet by virtue of their labor, their descendants are the wealthiest generation yet.

Hong Kong has always lived and breathed commerce, and it is the territory''s shrines to Mammon that will make the strongest impression when you first arrive. The Central district has long been thick with skyscrapers bearing the names of banks and conglomerates, and yet more continue to be built, squeezed into irregular plots of land that would seem insufficient for buildings half the size. When that doesn''t work, the city simply reclaims more land from the harbor and builds on it almost before it dries. For a few years it will be obvious which land is reclaimed and which is old as the ground is turned and foundations laid, but soon enough the two will meld into one, just as they have before: you now have to walk four blocks from the Star Ferry Terminal, through streets shaded by office towers, to reach Queen''s Road Central, the former waterfront. You may well ask what one can know for sure in this world if not where the earth ends and the oceans begin, but Hong Kongers have gotten used to such vagaries.

Watching younginvestment bankers out on a Friday night in Hong Kong''s nightspot haven of Lan Kwai Fong, reveling in their outrageous good fortune at being in this place at this time in history, you can''t help but wonder whether this can possibly last. There''s a heady, end-of-an-era exuberance to it all -- a decadence that portends doom ahead. Yet visitors to Hong Kong have felt this same sentiment for almost a century and a half and, save for the rare economic downturn, the day of reckoning has not come. One of those rare exceptions came within a month after Hong Kong''s handover back to China. But the change of sovereignty was not the issue which many expected to be the source of problems. Rather, it was the Asian crisis which took almost everyone by surprise. For a moment during these uncertain times, it seemed Hong Kongers would have to permanently scale back their ambitions. But then the moment passed and the usual breakneck growth returned.

Rapid change has not been limited to Hong Kong Island or the crowded Kowloon Peninsula, but extends up through the "new towns" of the New Territories. Some of these, like Sha Tin, were rice paddies 20 years ago and now form thriving cities of a half million people. The most ambitious project of all is the one you see on arrival: the leveling of Chek Lap Kok, an uninhabited island of rock and scrub, that made way for Hong Kong''s stylish, ultraefficient international airport, the final legacy of British-ruled Hong Kong. Arriving in Hong Kong may now lack the rooftop-grazing shock of flying into the old Kai Tak, but you''re whisked through the airport in no time and can then zip into Central in just 23 minutes on the Airport Express train.

Amid all the change it can be easy(even for residents) to forget that most of Hong Kong has nothing to do with business or skyscrapers: three-quarters of it is actually rural land and wilderness. A bird''s-eye view reveals the 236 islands that make up the lesser-known parts of Hong Kong; most are nothing but jagged peaks and tropical scrub, just as Hong Kong Island itself once was. Others are time capsules of ancestral China, with tiny temples, fishing villages, and small vegetable farms. Even Hong Kong Island, so relentlessly urban on its north coast, consists mostly of rolling green hills and sheltered bays on its south side. So whether you''re looking for the hectic Hong Kong or the relaxed one, both are easy enough to find -- indeed, sometimes only a few minutes apart.