There are two ways for the visitor to reach the floating restaurants. The first is to take a taxi across the island to Aberdeen, then hail a girl-powered sampan for a short trip across the harbor. Another thoroughly luxurious way is to board the 110-foot luxury cruiser Wan Fu any evening at Queen’s Pier or the Kowloon Public Pier, making the entire trip by sea around the west end of the island. The Wan Fu, a modern, Diesel-powered ship, is a fully rigged brigantine built along the lines of the early opium-trade escort vessels, with 18 simulated gun-ports on its sides. It makes the evening cruise to Aberdeen, stops for dinner at the Sea Palace, and returns to town about midnight. Cost of the meal and trip totals $10. Its skipper, Mike Morris, is a former Marine Police Inspector.
Aberdeen is on the regular itinerary of the daytime round-the-island automobile tours which take four hours. A car meets the traveler at the top of the Peak Tram, winds down the mountainsides to Happy Valley and includes a stop at Tiger Balm Gardens, the fantastic creation of Aw Boon Haw. The late Mr. Aw made his fortune by selling Tiger Balm—an “infallible” cure for every form of psychosomatic ill. He has furnished his gardens free-style, throwing in everything from folklore to scenes from the Buddhist Hell. There is even a 165-foot pagoda, which has repaid its cost a dozen times by its use on Hong Kong travel posters. The whole place is living proof of the swathe a Chinese millionaire can cut when he feels like splurging. Texans seem tame by comparison.
Mr. Aw’s tastes were no more extravagant than those of Mr. Eu, who built two medieval castles on Hong Kong island—Eucliffe and Euston. Eucliffe is at Repulse Bay, a summer resort and the next stop on the island motor tour. The legend of Mr. Eu has several versions, but they generally agree that he was a Chinese who, several decades ago, settled in Malaya with his mother. When the two struck hard times, Mr. Eu felt that his fellow-Chinese were indifferent to the family’s difficulties, and he vowed never to help other Chinese or to return to China—an extraordinary act for any Chinese. He indentured himself as a miner, saved enough to buy his freedom, and married a woman who owned a small grocery store. The couple pooled their earnings to buy an abandoned tin mine where he had formerly worked. Either he knew something or played a hunch, because the mine yielded rich quantities of ore that made him a millionaire.
But his mother never reconciled herself to his anti-Chinese vow and hired a fung shui expert who reported that the real trouble stemmed from the Eu family tomb, which faced south, away from China, influencing her son to turn his back on his homeland. The tomb was realigned to face north, and Mr. Eu relaxed his anti-Chinese prejudices sufficiently to return to Hong Kong—if not to China.
He began erecting two enormous stone castles, acting on a Chinese belief that he would live as long as its building continued. Mr. Eu has passed on, but his castles survive. When completed, Eucliffe was crammed with European suits of armor and several upstairs rooms were hung with oil paintings of nudes. Euston, at 755 Bonham Road, on the northern slope of Victoria Peak, is a seven-storied anachronism. Its twin towers and mullioned windows give no evidence of Chinese design, but they may represent the Chinese reply to functional architecture.
Repulse Bay, with a curving beach and the luxurious Repulse Bay Hotel, is the colony’s best-known summer resort. Like the upper Peak area, or Shek-O and Stanley in the southeast part of the island, it has many wealthy residents and large homes.
The auto tour passes Deep Water Bay Golf Club—one of several golf courses in Hong Kong—and the Dairy Farm, a major source of the colony’s fresh milk. Queen Mary Hospital lies along the route near the west end of the island; an outstanding institution that emphasizes the scarcity of first-class hospitals in the colony. There are less than 10,000 hospital beds for 3,300,000 people, and the majority of the hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated and well below first-class standards of care. The colony government is in the midst of a campaign to raise the capacity and standards of its hospitals, however. More than 1,000 beds are to be added by the end of 1963, but Hong Kong will remain well below English and American norms of hospital care.
Nevertheless, Hong Kong has made substantial medical progress during the last decade. Tuberculosis causes about eight times more deaths than all other infectious diseases, but the T.B. death rate has been reduced from 158.8 per 100,000 population in 1952 to 60.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1961.
Hong Kong University and the Chinese business section of the Western District are the last sightseeing attractions of the motor tour before it returns to the center of town. A motor trip around the island costs $7, plus the price of meals for the tourist and his driver-guide.
The Western District is seldom included on tourist maps of Hong Kong Island; the assumption seems to be that if a traveler ventures beyond the Central District, he will instantly be swallowed up by the earth. This assumption is twaddle. Jan Jan’s Map of Hong Kong, sold at bus and ferry terminals, gives an excellent layout of the Western District, but even without its help, a sightseer may visit a number of places in the Western District without getting lost.