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THE CITY OF LIGHTS

“ As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.”

—Lao-Tzu 604 BC to 531 BC

It was not a dark and stormy night. It is never a dark and stormy night. Such things are unknown in Hong Kong. We never get true, jet-black darkness here. After dusk, the sky over the city becomes a huge, opaque, shifting, gray ghost. Only the brightest stars can be seen. (We’re very discriminating in that way.)

Let’s face it, our home is nothing less than one of the world’s biggest tributes to Thomas Edison. If the inventor of the light bulb were brought back to life and shown this place, he would surely be astonished, and would race to tell the Edison descendents to flood the city with billions of claims for residual royalties.

The lights shine brightly here, and there are lots of them. With many of the residents coming from rural China or elsewhere in Asia, electric lights are still something to celebrate, and we’re delighted that neon blinks at us from every downtown corner.

The poky boxes in which we live are much cheered by the rainbow of lights that flicker into them. I lived in one flat in which the neon-lit Chinese character pronounced “On” (from the department store Wing On) blazed into my front room. The character meant peace and our feng shui master saw it as a highly positive sign.

I recall many years ago walking down Nathan Road, a glittering neon-lit commercial thoroughfare in Kowloon, and wondering aloud to a knowledgeable friend: “Wouldn’t it be incredible to own all the electricity in Hong Kong?”

“Actually, someone does,” my friend replied. “His office is right there.” He pointed to a building on the east side of the road.

It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. The electricity in Hong Kong is not owned by one person; it is owned by two. Utilities are not state enterprises in the city; power is provided by two commercial companies, the principals of which are very wealthy indeed.

Yet in terms of rainbow-coloured eye-hurting super-cities, Hong Kong still lags far behind the kings of the genre, such as Las Vegas, or downtown Tokyo. There’s a good reason for this. For much of Hong Kong’s history, the main air strip was at Kai Tak, a piece of land bordering one of the most densely packed residential areas in the world. Descending aircraft used to skim so close to Kowloon City that air travellers could actually look through people’s windows and see what they were having for dinner—this is not a joke!

This wonderful shot captures the elemental nature of Hong Kong—surging sea, soaring mountains, and glittering human infrastructure which mixes Chinese and Western influences.

A nebula of fallen stars. It’s hard to believe that glassy, glittering Hong Kong was described by its first British masters as “a barren rock.” Most harbour-side buildings stand on reclaimed land, alongside a harbour that today is half its original width.

From the plane’s portholes, you could see the traffic lights on the road and could not help but wonder whether the pilot would stop for them.