4
REVIEW
It was a community that had learned to live with natural disasters. The fires that con- sumed whole squatter areas, depriving thousands of their homes and possessions, were followed in the early to middle 1960s by huge typhoons and a rainstorm which washed away streets and houses and left whole districts like The Peak marooned for days, with residents supplied by food drops from helicopters. Great landslides gouged-out giant claw marks on the hills and their outlines remain visible to this day.
Wanda, the super-typhoon of 1962 which hit Hong Kong dead-centre, was the worst since the titanic storm of 1937 and, like its predecessor, scattered ships like so much flotsam on the shores and claimed a heavy loss of life. Again, the hillside dwellers and boat people bore the brunt and with little complaint demonstrated a humbling resilience to their more fortunate fellow citizens.
Water shortages added to their miseries. Long queues gathered outside emergency standpipes with a variety of buckets and basins to collect a four-day supply and then struggled up steep hillside paths, balancing shoulder poles. But in adversities of this kind the refugee population retained longer memories of a grimmer past, and for the most part stood with quiet patience and admirable endurance.
There were, however, queues of another kind which often gave way to quarrels and bit- terness in the middle and later 1960s. Long before the growing number of banks were required to hold a minimum amount of liquid assets, the temptation by managements and proprietors to invest heavily in property proved the undoing of two well-patronised local institutions. This led to a run not just on the banks affected but on others as well, and long queues formed all over the territory as people rushed to recover their life's savings. The ensuing shortage of Hong Kong currency forced the government to fly out sterling notes from Britain as a stand-by, and declare them legal tender. They were not used, but the episode was a salutary lesson on the virtues of regulation of liquid assets and cash flow that Hong Kong was quick to learn.
The Stormy Mid-60s
There was, however, to be trouble of another kind the next year, illustrating a growing public consciousness of rights and wrongs, and in an era of public protest elsewhere in the world over weightier issues such as the Vietnam war, a small number of disgruntled Hong Kong young people took up the cudgels over a five-cent increase in the first-class Star Ferry fare. The riots of 1966, were the first since the serious 'Double Tenth' riots of 1956, and were to be followed by a convulsion far greater and more damaging in its impact in the following year, shaking as it did one of the foundations on which Hong Kong's security and confidence was built.
Across the border, an ominous tension was building up in a land which had stabilised its society in the aftermath of tumultuous campaigns such as the 'Great Leap Forward' and 'The Hundred Flowers'. Hectic years spent trying to achieve economic equality with the Western world with a proliferation of backyard furnaces, lapsed into an era of sullen moodiness. Preoccupied with its own domestic turmoil, Hong Kong was in turn shaken when its great neighbour suddenly awoke from the torpor of a revolution gone stale, and broke out in a new frenzy of political activity. Hong Kong had watched similar manifes- tations in the past as campaign fever gripped the country and sent hundreds of millions rampaging in the streets and across the countryside with drums, posters and slogans. But never one like that which came to the boil in 1966 and burst over the borders with a sizzle and a crackle a year later.