ENG-1980 — Page 12

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Torches, rubber shoes, enamelware, ivoryware and metal goods flourished alongside a now thriving textile industry. The awakening of a world-wide demand for Chinese cuisine came from early exports of potted ginger, tinned lychees and soya sauce. And from over- seas, began the first small stream of tourists, as much to sample the delights of this bright new oriental pearl as to buy its wares from the front counter of this fascinating eastern emporium.

If wages rose slowly in those years, the government was also cautious in assuming the powers of a progressive and modern welfare state. Its concerns were basic: build housing, however limited; provide schools, however rudimentary; set up clinics to meet the most urgent health needs (like tuberculosis, which ravaged thousands each year); give food and rations where needed and succour only to the most desperate and deserving. And happily, in those days, many international relief associations came in to help Hong Kong.

An Ability to Adapt

There was fortunately no shortage of people for the ever-growing industries that were set up in the townships of Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong, on the west and east of the Kowloon peninsula. The year 1962 saw a huge surge of immigrants following a temporary break- down of order in Guangdong (Kwangtung) province in China. Hong Kong worried then, as now, where they would live, who would feed and employ them, how they would be housed and cared for. But again events overtook plans as new industries took root, often in back-streets, in dreadful conditions and with old and decrepit machines, but handled by workers with a genius for making them productive. Wives and daughters strung plastic flowers and leaves on threads as the rice pot bubbled.

'biscuit boxes' they were

Resettlement blocks increasingly dominated our skyline somewhat derisively called. Yet, for thousands, they were home: proof against the fierce wind of the typhoon or the consuming flame of an overturned kerosene lamp or charcoal chatty. These blocks marched across the old shanty areas of Sham Shui Po, Shek Kip Mei, Wong Tai Sin and Choi Hung - a growing concrete tide sweeping east and west, day by day, along the shoreline, up the hill and over the ridge. And in them the life of Hong Kong took root with surprising adaptability, great patience and good grace.

The old criss-cross runways of Kai Tak, good enough for DC-4s and DC-6s, and even the propeller-driven tri-tail Constellations of the late 1950s, were no longer adequate for the jet age which came first with the Comet and, eventually, the 707s. And gradually the long arm of the new runway reached out into Kowloon Bay to catch the tourist planes with their loads of eager buyers and sightseers. A good place for clothes, then as now, Hong Kong offered the best and the latest that Europe could provide at prices that were far cheaper. There were also Japanese cameras and pearls, Chinese antiques and handwork, Hong Kong-made jewellery and furniture, not to mention a local cuisine that would take the world by storm offering the knife and fork the nimble, intriguing challenge of the chop- sticks. The counter-reformation of the chicken leg and the hamburger was still more than a decade away.

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Hong Kong in the early 1960s was taking on the appearance of a settled and stable com- munity with a rising standard of living. It bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pigs, vegetables, fish, eggs and delicacies from its neighbour in addition to the produce of the New Territories market gardeners and the fishing fleet - and paid for them with the hard cash it earned stitching suits, shirts, underwear, overcoats, jerseys, dresses, skijackets and shoes for the people of North America, Britain and Europe. Cash was the name of the game; there were few bad debts and Hong Kong could be trusted by the world.