The Tsim Sha Shui section of Kowloon is developing so rapidly that it will probably have a dozen shopping arcades by the end of 1963. The Central District of Hong Kong Island is also planning new arcades.
Tourists may wind up a day’s shopping by attending one of the 72 movie theaters in the colony. Of these, 16 show English-language films and 13 are first-run houses. Foreign films reach Hong Kong as soon as they appear in the world market. In Kowloon, Nathan Road is the main movie avenue; in Hong Kong, they are spotted along the principal streets from Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan. All seats are reserved, and selected from a seating-chart at the box office; daily show-times are carried in the local press. Chinese films have a big following, but many colony Chinese prefer American movies with plenty of action and spectacle. English films strike them as stodgy and slow, European art films bore them, and sexy importations from Italy and France offend their sensibilities. English-language films usually carry Chinese subtitles which look like embroidery to Western viewers.
If it’s night clubs the tourist is looking for, there’s nothing to get wildly excited about. Floor shows run to jugglers, acrobats and pony chorus lines, with an occasional comedian as a star attraction. Vaudeville isn’t dead; it simply shuffled off to Hong Kong. Prices are steeper than the entertainment warrants. Most of the musicians are Filipinos; individually able, but their band arrangements follow the blast-off traditions of American stage bands in the 1930s.
For a predinner cocktail with a magnificent view, two of the best locations are the lounge on top of the Imperial Hotel, Nathan Road, and the 11th floor Marigold Lounge of the Park Hotel at Cameron and Chatham Roads, both in Kowloon. Just as the finest daytime view is from the upper slopes of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, the most satisfying after-dark panorama is from Kowloon. From either of these lounges you can see the banks of lighted apartment houses along the Hong Kong hillside, tied together by festoons of streetlamps as the roads zig-zag up the slopes, shining blue at the lower levels, then turning to vapor-piercing amber as they climb above the fog line. The Imperial has the closest view of the multi-colored neon signs glowing along the Hong Kong side of the harbor in English and Chinese characters. The Park Hotel overlooks the whole sweep of Kowloon Bay and the wavy, mountainous horizon of the island, with the brilliantly lighted boats of a dozen ferry lines criss-crossing the harbor in every direction. A line of lights passes directly under the window—a Kowloon-Canton train returning from a trip to the Red China border. If one could compress all of his memories of Hong Kong into a single glance, this would be it.
Kowloon holds two-thirds of the colony’s fifty hotels, and many of these are quite new. Hong Kong Island will add two major hotels in 1963, the 1,000-room American and the 600-room Queen’s, but Kowloon will retain its leadership in room capacity for many years. Altogether, about a dozen hotels will be added by the end of 1964 if business holds up.
The tremendous surge in hotel growth means that after years of lagging behind, Hong Kong has finally roused itself to meet the needs of tourists, in room capacity, at least. The expansion has been so frantic that a number of the newer hotels have shaved every possible corner in construction, skimping on the number of elevators and unduly shrinking the size of rooms to squeeze every cent out of their cubic-foot capacity. Hotel help is scarce, and as each new hotel opens, it raids the staffs of existing hotels; this raises wages slightly, but saves the raider the time and expense of training his own people. It also lowers the quality of service and leaves the older hotels to scramble for replacements.
With these limitations in mind, it is remarkable that hotel service is as good as it is, and much of the credit must go to the staff people themselves. They are hard-working, cheerful and obliging to a degree seldom seen in large cities. Because of inadequate training and the inevitable language difficulties, they are sometimes caught off-base, but when they know what a guest wants, they will do everything possible to get it. Americans and British whose democratic principles do not always prevent them from getting pretty high-handed about the way they are served will just have to be a little less fussy.
The Peninsula Hotel and its jointly managed addition, the Peninsula Court, occupy the same place in the colony that the Plaza does in New York—smart, eminently respectable and expensive. The Park, the Imperial and the Ambassador are among the best of the large, new hotels in Kowloon. The Gloucester has the greatest status of the Central District hotels, and the Repulse Bay, on the south shore of Hong Kong Island, rates as the island’s most luxurious resort hotel. There are about a dozen other first-rate hotels and approximately 30 additional ones that range from satisfactory to catch-as-catch-can. All those recommended by the Hong Kong Tourist Association are acceptable, but their quality varies with their rates, though not always in proportion.
Two outlying hotels worth noting are the Carlton and the Shatin Heights, both in the New Territories but not far from Kowloon. The Luk Kwok in Wanchai, once the locale for Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong, prospered so handsomely from the publicity that it is now a quiet, middle-class hotel.