Our reference: 13/4 Your reference:
BRITISH TRADE COMMISSION IN HONG KONG
7th Floor, Shell House, Queen's Road, Central, Hong Kong Mail Address: P.O. Box No. 528, Hong Kong Cable Address: "Uktrade Hongkong" Telephone: 230176
29 March 1973
A C Stuart Esq
Foreign & Commonwealth Office
HKI OD
London SW1
Dear Andrew.
HONG KONG ARTS FESTIVAL
LAST
ALF.
With the departure of the London Ballet Group and the Menhuin Orchestra and the return of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from Peking we have come to the end of the Hong Kong Arts Festival which has enlivened life in Hong Kong for the past month. Insofar as any detailed report on the Festival might be prepared I suppose that it will be done by someone in the Secretariat and I will not trespass on this ground. I thought, however, that it might be useful for you to have just a brief comment and testimonial from someone looking from the outside in. As I have seen it from this position, and heard from the comments among businessmen etc with whom I have mixed during the many parties linked to the Festival, it has been a considerable success. Financially it will probably show a loss, although this should be well within the limits of the guarantees offered by local businessmen before the Festival began. Naturally the Festival organisers would have wished it to have been self financing but this is a lot to ask from any festival and, particularly, from the first time at it. It is possible that the loss might have been less if there had not been so much concentration in the first instance in trying to sell the tickets oversea to tourists. This was, of course, done because the Festival was originally conceived as a tourist attraction effort as much as anything else. But I think experience has demonstrated that the possibility of seeing the London Philharmonic Orchestra or the London Ballet is unlikely to attract tourists from centres where such cultural manifestations are fairly common and, in the event, many of the block bookings allotted to oversea tourist agencies were returned and more readily sold here. Unfortunately some did not come back, or did not come back quickly enough, so that there were on occasions empty blocks of seats which was disconcerting for the artistes even if the box office could take some consolation from the fact that some of them at least had been paid for by local companies and simply not distributed. I suspect that on the next occasion the Festival Committee will concentrate more on selling their seats locally, and I would judge that for many of the
/performances
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