The Central Market, a bare concrete building located a block south of the Vehicular Ferry Pier, offers every kind of meat, vegetable, fish or fowl eaten by the people of Hong Kong. Everything is fresh, because Chinese customers reject any sort of tired produce. It exudes a wide range of smells, with fish out-smelling all the rest. An inexperienced shopper must move cautiously or he may be sideswiped by a hog carcass as it bounces along on a man’s shoulders en route from a delivery truck to one of the meat stands.
Visitors who grow tired of walking may increase their range by riding the Hong Kong Tramway. Its green, double-decked streetcars cover the full length of the island waterfront. First-class passengers sit on the upper deck, where the fare is 3½ cents. Starting from the Central District, the car marked “Kennedy Town” goes the farthest west, and the Shau Kei Wan car runs to the eastern extremity of the line.
The trolley tourist may hop off the car at any corner that interests him. In the evening, the street market beside the Macao Ferry Pier on the western waterfront presents a pavement-level carnival. Merchandise is spread out on the asphalt paving—combs, flashlights, toys, food and clothing—with gasoline lanterns lighting the scene. Several spaces are reserved for pitchmen who, though they speak in Cantonese, are obviously delivering a spiel about products guaranteed to double the customer’s life-span, make him an eternal delight to women and quadruple his earning power—all at prices so low it would be folly not to snap them up.
The tram shuts down around midnight, but there is hardly an hour of day or night when street stands are not open. Families run most of them, with each member taking his turn at waiting on trade. Children are on the streets all night—sometimes because they have no place else to go. The 1961 census turned up thousands of families who rented a bedspace for eight hours a day, sharing it with two other families entitled to the same eight-hour shift. When one family is asleep in the cubicle, the other two are either working or wandering the streets. Visitors must walk carefully in the Western District at night, not for fear of attack, but to avoid sidewalk sleepers.
During racing days of the October to May season at Happy Valley Jockey Club, every tram is packed. Not far from the jockey club on the tram line is Victoria Park, finest of the colony’s public recreation grounds. A statue of Queen Victoria overlooks the park, honoring the royal matron who treated the acquisition of Hong Kong as a family joke. The Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter raises a forest of masts and spars at the seaward edge of the park.
Happy Valley, studded with schools, sports arenas, cemeteries and hospitals, comes down to the waterfront at Wanchai. The tightly packed tenements of Wanchai have refugee shacks on their rooftops and rows of sailors’ bars and cabarets at street level. When night comes on, subsidized intimacy is available on every street corner, but the eleven movie theaters in the area are less expensive.
North Point, the next waterfront community east of Wanchai, is the “Little Shanghai” that boomed after 1949, when refugee industrialists from Shanghai established factories there. It has a prospering night life zone along King’s Road, and introduced “key clubs” to the colony. These were semiprivate bar-and-girl flats to which the member gained admission by paying $50 to $100 for a key. The clubs spread to the Central District and Kowloon before police raids began to hit them. A number survive, drawing their clientele from open-handed tourists and tired but hopeful businessmen. In contrast to these nocturnal playpens, some of the best new housing projects line the North Point waterfront.
To the east of North Point, the towering cranes of the Tai Koo Dockyards jut up along the shore. Shau Kei Wan, at the end of the tram line, is a fishing and junk-building center.
Tram lines don’t serve the towns and resorts on the south side of the island; to reach these, the tourist must take buses, taxis or guided tours.
The south shore town of Aberdeen is important to the colony as a fishing and marketing center, but visitors will remember it for its floating sampan population and its floating seafood restaurants, the Sea Palace and the Tai Pak Fong. The latter, decorated with unsparing flamboyance, are dazzlingly outlined in lights after dark. Fish dinners are netted from large tanks at the rear of the restaurants. The service is as much a part of show business as it is of the food trade. Both branches are represented on the dinner check.