Oh Hong Kong!

 Oh gosh, I love this place. It may not be true, but they say if you like Singapore, you won't like Hong Kong, and vice versa. I mustn't like S, because I love HK.

I love it's energy, dramatic geography and architecture, and the fact that there is always something to do, to see and to eat (and often all three at the same time).

This flying visit allowed me to take part in an Irish music session (one Japanese player, one American, one Chinese, and a flute player from Ireland but whose dad was from here). It was lovely, in an open-fronted bar on a humid night in the steep streets of the 'Mid-Levels' area on Hong Kong island. Plus catching the lovely old Star Ferry across from Kowloon (50p to get the photo at the top).

Then this morning I met up with an old work colleague who is a lifetime Hong-Konger of the old school. His parents came here in the early 60s during very turbulent times on both the mainland and here in the territory itself, which had been for over a hundred years in the dubious possession of the British crown.

You may do your own research on how we on our tiny northern island came to own this rocky part of the South China coast, but the fact that we wanted to sell opium into the great empire to the North of Hong Kong has a lot to do with it. Also, as a nautical friend, and great devotee of Hong Kong points out, it is the only decent typhoon protected harbour on this long coast, a matter of great weight when your empire (and I'm not talking about the Qing Empire here) depends on the projection of your massive sea power. Swap that for stealth bombers and Diego Garcia and you'll get the picture. 

However, by whatever reasons this colony came about, it has produced a delicious and - if your boat floats in that direction - quite addictive mash-up of South China culture and Western (not just British either, this place draws in every type of Westerner with it's love of business and risk-taking). And as my HK friend pointed out, in a smallish statelet (or SAR, to give it its proper acronym), there is an element of instability that will attract gamblers of the financial kind because the instability makes their potential profits greater, not less.

Another notable fact about Hong Kong, is that it is steeped in the language culture of Cantonese (or perhaps more properly 'Yue' Chinese). The point is (and I am definitely a language 'amateur' in these matters but I think I get the main drift), that people in Beijing and Hong Kong both speak Chinese but such majorly different forms of it that they are essentially *mutually unintelligible* in speech. And if you hear them you can tell how different they are. For one thing, the 'tonal' nature of the language (by which intelligibility requires not just the correct phoneme, but also for it to be rendered with the correct 'tone', rising, falling, whatever) is very different between the majority Mandarin Chinese and the South China Cantonese Chinese. The former has four main tones and the latter has far more (seven, I think).

But the bonkers fact for a Western brain is that although the two languages or dialects are mutually unintelligible, and far further apart than Italian and Spanish say, they are mutually intelligible in writing! So the characters are pretty much the same (although Cantonese has kept the older 'complex' versions). And if the two speakers write down what they want to say, it will work. I saw this on my plane from HK, where the non-Cantonese-speaking cabin crew wrote down the food options in characters on post-it notes for the Cantonese-speaking passengers.

So the cultural and linguistic mix here is heady, and has not - according to my friend - got any less heady since the territory was reunified with China. The risk to HK's financial strength seems to have not materialised, and access to HK for mainlanders has actually stimulated and supported the jobs market and the financial markets. To the extent that the previously very unusual step of a Mandarin speaker learning Cantonese has now become very normal, and a business opportunity for many Cantonese speakers.

And because the huge northern adjacent city of Shenzhen just over the border has about half the cost of living, loads of Hong-Kongers go there for shopping and meals out, and even retire there, to escape the eyewatering housing costs of Hong Kong itself.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, and I am so happy that Hong Kong is part of it. 

And on my last night there, I treated myself to an expensive beer on this rooftop terrace, just because.