Parents are permitted to look on from the grandstand while Billy and his nine assistants put 350 children through a three-hour workout. These are “upper-class” boys and girls, but Billy also conducts classes among the shack dwellers in Wanchai. The colony’s schools, with 700,000 pupils, often resort to three daily shifts to accommodate them. Very few schools can afford any physical training program.
At the seaward end of Statue Square, the government has remedied a deficiency of many years by erecting a City Hall, a five-unit complex with a 12-story tower, concert hall, theater, banquet hall, library, museum, art gallery and municipal offices. Architecturally, it is modern, rectangular and unadorned, in sharp contrast to the curlicues of the Hong Kong Club next door. Part of the hall was opened in 1962, with the rest planned for completion in 1963. Sir Malcolm Sargent and the London Philharmonic Orchestra launched the concert hall with suitable fanfare, presumably ending the long, lean era in which visiting artists had to go from one private hall to another, hoping that music lovers would find them.
The Star Ferry terminal, right beside City Hall at the waterfront, is the tie that binds Kowloon and Hong Kong Island together. Every day, 100,000 commuters cross the harbor on these spotless new boats at a first-class fare of 3½ cents or second-class at less than 2 cents. The ferry stops running at 1:30 A.M. on most nights, and for the late prowler it’s a “walla-walla” and a 50-cent trip on this rolling, pitching, cross-harbor motor launch. Walla-walla is the Cantonese equivalent of “yak-yak,” and memorializes the endless bickering over fares that the launch owners indulged in before a flat rate was set by the government. Sir Lancelot, the Calypso King who plays many Hong Kong engagements, was trapped on one of these wallowing tubs and composed a “Walla Walla Calypso,” celebrating “the rockin’ and the rollin’ and the quakin’ and the shakin’” they inflict on night owls.
Walla-wallas and sightseeing boats operate from the Queen’s Pier in Hong Kong and the Public Pier in Kowloon, both less than a block east of the Star Ferry terminals. There is more of the flavor of the old days at Blake Pier, a few hundred feet west of the Star Ferry terminal on the Hong Kong side. Private yachts and mailboats discharge there, and there’s always a bustle of arrivals and departures. But the colony’s reclamation scheme will before long swallow up Blake Pier and its works. The General Post Office, a moldering antique opposite Blake Pier, is also to be replaced soon; until it goes, it is a handy place to mail packages or to buy Hong Kong government publications.
Wyndham Street, which runs south off Queen’s Road Central, is the last resting place of another antique, the sedan chair, which was the favored conveyance when roads were too steep or too rough for rickshaws. Of the four registered sedan chairs left in the colony, two are generally parked there, waiting patiently for a fare. A few of the older Chinese residents still use them, but Europeans have grown chair-shy, possibly worried about what kind of picture they present while riding between two poor fellows panting along in the traces. And well they might be.
A line of rickshaws also parks along Wyndham Street, but their business is better than that of the sedan chairs. Tourists and many Chinese continue to hire them; tourists enjoy the picturesque novelty and the Chinese find them practical for funeral processions or for hauling packages too large to carry on a bus or tram without causing a riot. Police report 866 registered rickshaws, with the number declining each year. Many people shun them as degrading and inhumane; others are unwilling to risk their lives by weaving through motor traffic in such a flimsy craft. Rickshaw drivers, subjected to alternate sweating and cooling, are particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis.
The alleys and side streets of the Central District are a source of wonder and surprise to tourists. Pedder Lane, branching off Pedder Street directly opposite the Gloucester Hotel, is lined with open-air cobblers. Hundreds of shoes, mended and unmended, are racked behind the repair stands, and the cobblers are as busy as Kris Kringle’s toy-builders on December 23d. Shoeshine Alley, a short section of Theater Lane which runs from the west end of Pedder Lane to Des Voeux Road Central, has ten to a dozen shoeshine boys stationed along the pavement. Customers stand in the alley with rickshaws and motorbikes brushing their coattails while they get shoeshines.
Shoeshine Alley is no silent workshop; a steady stream of walla-walla flies back and forth among the boys, and if a passing pedestrian pauses or glances in their direction, several boys pounce on him, demanding his patronage. The moment he selects one lad for the job, the others shower the winner with Cantonese insults and heckle him while he works. The victim pays no attention; it’s an accepted professional hazard. Besides, the boy is too busy studying the customer, trying to decide whether he’s an American. Americans are easy marks; always willing to pay three times the going rate. With an American, the canny lad can simply say “thanks” and pocket twice as much change as he’s entitled to. Fifty cents Hong Kong or 8½ cents American is a generous rate, but few Yankee tourists seem conscious of the local scale.
For the tourist whose curiosity extends beyond the Central District, one of the major departure points is the Hongkong and Yaumati Vehicular Ferry Pier, four blocks west of Pedder Street, at Connaught Road and in front of the Fire Brigade Building. Several different passengers ferry lines and the Kowloon truck-and-auto ferry use the pier. The paved area at the pier entrance is the main depot for bus routes to all parts of Hong Kong Island.
Until the new Hang Seng Bank building was erected, the Li Po Chun Chambers was the tallest building on the western fringe of the Central District. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong occupies the penthouse of the building, named for its owner, seventy-five-year-old Li Po Chun, eighth son of Li Sing, late multimillionaire merchant who was a founder of the Tung Wah Hospital. Li Sing, one of the most colorful of Hong Kong’s early Taipans, once donated $100,000 for a flood-control project at San Wui, his native village in Kwangtung Province. About a century ago, when a foreign ship carrying thousands of Chinese to California struck a rock near Hong Kong, he chartered a steamer, stocked it with food and sent it to the rescue, saving everyone aboard the stranded vessel.