The Peak Tram is almost as famous as Victoria Peak, and needs no endorsement except to note that its fares are very low and that it hasn’t had an accident since 1888. In eight minutes, the tram carries its passengers down to the edge of the Central District, where they may catch a bus or a taxi.
Government House and the Botanic Garden are just across Garden Road from the lower end of the Peak Tram. Looking like a Franciscan Mission of early California with its white walls and square tower, Government House is the private residence of the colony governor. The sightseer may look around the outside, and with luck, see all hands snap to when the governor’s black sedan enters or leaves the circular driveway, displaying red crowns at front and rear instead of license plates. The English manage their official exits and entrances with great style, and everything moves precisely on time.
The Botanic Garden is a land of split-level Eden planted with thousands of subtropical plants and flowers. Its small zoo and aviary are popular with children, and the bird collection is a bright splash of brilliant colors. Small signs in English and Chinese identify the plants and animals. A good deal of family snapshot-taking goes on around the fountain at the lower end of the garden. It might be a scene in New York’s Central Park, except that Chinese children are better behaved.
Albert Path, a serpentine walk shaded by tropical shrubbery, winds down from the Botanic Garden past Government House to Ice House Street and the rear of the First National City Bank. Ice House Street continues downward a couple of blocks to the West Wing of the Central Government offices at Queen’s Road Central.
On Battery Path, directly in front of the West Wing, a lampshade stand operates on what is obviously government property. It’s all quite official; the owner has a permit from the Department of Public Works. Sin Hoi, late father of the present owner, Sin Hung, had sold lampshades on the site for thirteen years before the West Wing was built in 1954. Lady Maurine Grantham, wife of the former governor, was a frequent shopper at the stand, and when she saw it threatened with displacement by the government offices, she put in a word for Sin Hoi. His son now runs it under the grand name of The Magnific Company, selling lampshades and small china animals.
One block north on Ice House Street and a block east on Des Voeux Road is Statue Square, where parked cars outnumber the statues 200 to 1. This area is more than the center of the colony’s financial institutions; it is an ideal cross-section of colony architecture. The honeycomb-and-gingerbread design of the Hong Kong Club is typical of what most of the colony’s buildings looked like in 1890, as is the Prince’s Building on the opposite side of the square.
Post-World War II buildings like Union House, two blocks west along the waterfront, represent a kind of “no nonsense modern”—big, plain and blocky. The tower of the Bank of China, just east of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, rises massively above its old established neighbor. The Red Chinese operate it now and many of its upper offices are vacant; the bank itself is a quiet institution with fewer guards than most local banks have. The Chartered Bank, on the other side of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, is the newest, tallest and most curious of the three moneyed giants, with a fortresslike tower and a green façade that resembles a vast electronic switchboard.
The Hongkong and Shanghai building, older than either of the banks beside it, surpasses them in architectural distinction, with its bold vertical lines and its solid central tower surrounded by lower wrap-around structures and crowned by a ziggurat roof that tapers upward like a truncated pyramid. It looks like a building that nothing could push over, which seems the right emphasis for a bank.
Directly south of the Hong Kong Club lie three and a half acres of the most valuable land in the colony, all of it laid out in cricket fields except for a small corner occupied by the building of the Hong Kong Cricket Club. If the land were for sale, bidding would start at about $175 a square foot; but the British would as soon sell the playing fields of Eton. Cricket is an integral part of life under the Union Jack. Most Americans find it too strenuous, even as a spectator sport; they often become exhausted by the effort of trying to figure it out.
If a visitor drops by the Cricket Club on any Saturday morning between October and April, he can scarcely find the cricketers for the red-and-white-capped youngsters bounding about in various sectors of the field, playing a dozen different games without apparent confusion. All the players are from four to twelve years old; mostly boys, with a few girls here and there. It is the weekly workout of the Tingle Athletic Association, one of the colony’s honored institutions. Billy Tingle, an ex-boxer and lifetime physical culture instructor, has taught 50,000 children to kick, throw, catch, swim and master the rudiments of cricket, soccer, rugby and basketball. Billy is a short, compactly built man about sixty, who speaks softly but accepts no back talk; discipline is as much a part of the job as athletic skill, he believes.