Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  If you are holidaying, the Repulse Bay Hotel, across the island and fronting a reasonable beach, is recommended. (HK$30 to 95.) This is set in lovely gardens and the local beauties, wives and concubines offer a dazzling display at the Sunday afternoon tea-dances. The food is better than at the Peninsula or the Miramar. But it takes half an hour to cross the island to the business, shopping and social centre of Hong Kong (officially called Victoria).

  The Luk Kwok, Suzie Wong’s original official address, encourages a livelier clientele. Single room (an interesting aspiration), HK$11; double (virtually de rigueur), up to HK$35.

  (For comparison, a Chinese can get a bed of a sort in a wooden hut or ‘garage’, shared with half a dozen companions, in the industrial areas for HK$8 (10s.) a month.)

  Eating

  For Western food, the Marco Polo in the Peninsula Court is the most expensive restaurant and can sometimes be the best. Gaddi’s, off the Peninsula ground-floor marble lobby, is also recommended. On the island, the Parisian Grill (the ‘P.G.’) is the oldest and best-known restaurant, jam-packed at lunch; but standards and prices at Jimmy’s Kitchen and the Gloucester (now operating a rejuvenated kitchen) are roughly equivalent. Maxim’s and the Café de Paris charge slightly more. More Chinese go to Maxim’s than to the ‘P.G.’, and there is dancing in the evening; Hong Kong’s feminine elegance glitters at Maxim’s at the cocktail hour. You can get bear’s paw – overrated – at the Gloucester. (N.B. The best and biggest martinis in the colony are served in the Mexican bar in the Gloucester.)

  All visitors want to eat on the floating restaurants at Aberdeen. As this venture involves a forty-minute taxi haul from Victoria, the earnest diner might care to break his journey at the Repulse Bay Hotel and brace himself with a few shots on the veranda around sunset before tackling the next fifteen-minute stage to reach the floating restaurants at twilight.

  Dinner at the Carlton, four miles out of Kowloon on the main road to the New Territories, unfolds one of the world’s most memorable panoramas: the jewelled lights of Kowloon, the harbour and the island.

  Chinese food

  The range and quality of Chinese cuisine in Hong Kong are matched only in Taipeh. Beggar’s chicken at the Tien Hong Lau in Kowloon is incomparable; if possible, it should be ordered the day before. Peking duck is the speciality of the Princess Garden in Kowloon and the Peking Restaurant on the island. The Ivy (on the island) serves exotic Szechuanese-style food. The Café de Chine serves Cantonese-style dishes in two huge connecting dining-rooms on the top floor of a ten-storey building in the heart of Victoria. A regular wealthy Chinese visitor from San Francisco always goes to the Tai Tung for one special dish which he claims is unequalled anywhere else: roast sucking pig à la Cantonese. Everyone has his favourite. You can feast cheaply at the lot.

  Night Life

  Generally, night life in Hong Kong is much as anywhere else. There are twenty-five registered night-clubs, some of which tolerate second-rate floor shows on the dreary Asian circuit (Singapore – Kuala Lumpur – Bangkok – Hong Kong – Manila – Tokyo). None are in the same class as the Tokyo night-clubs, and chauvinistic Hong Kong apologists, with desperate parochialism, are compelled to find compensation in the proud boast that the local night-clubs don’t close until two a.m., while the lights go out reluctantly in the Tokyo cabarets (but not the bars) at midnight.

  The dance-hostesses are on call which does not mean by telephone, but by personal arrangement at seventy-six ‘ball-rooms’. The prettiest girls and the best bands tend to be in places like the Tonnochy Ballroom and the Golden Phoenix (on the island) and at the Oriental (in Kowloon), where most of the patrons are Chinese and no hard liquor is served, only tea, soft drinks and melon seeds.

  There are 8,000 registered hostesses, whose company (financed by a coupon system) ranges from 60 cents to HK$5. 50 per twenty minutes. At the Tonnochy or the Metropole (where you should ask to study the telephone-directory-like album, which shows the photographs and names of available hostesses), an hour’s dancing will thus cost HK$16.50 (just over £1). Most of the girls in the higher-priced ballrooms are glamorous and English-speaking and, subject to financial adjustment with the proprietor, will gladly leave the ballroom and accompany a visitor to a night-club; this invitation, of course, gives them great face. The tourist has the patriotic satisfaction of knowing that the colony’s government collects ten per cent tax on every dance-girl’s coupons.

  There are scores of brash and noisy bars along Lockhart Street and in Wanchai and North Point (on the island) and throughout the back lanes of Kowloon, some of which, when the navies are in port, are a dim echo of Shanghai’s old Blood Alley.

  Although not featured in the prim official tourist handbooks, small sampans at Causeway Bay (on the island) offer a mild variation of the old Shanghai and Canton flower-boat entertainment as once available in the dear dead days before the coming of Mao Tse-Tung. A curtain gives the passengers privacy from the pilot, and the sampan either drifts with wind and current in seclusion, or moves, as desired, to floating markets and teashops and rafts of singers and musicians. (Tariff: about HK$1 an hour or up to HK$10 for the night.)

  2

  MACAO

  GOLD, HAND IN hand with opium, plays an extraordinary secret role through the Far East, and Hong Kong and Macao, the tiny Portuguese possession only forty miles away, are the hub of the whole underground traffic.

  In England, except between bullion brokers, nobody ever talks about gold as a medium of exchange or as an important item among personal possessions. But from India eastwards gold is a constant topic of conversation, and the daily newspapers are never without their list of gold prices in bullion, English sovereigns, French Napoléons and louis d’or, and rarely a day goes by without there being a gold case in the Press. Someone has been caught smuggling gold. So-and-so has been murdered for his gold hoard. Someone else has been counterfeiting gold. The reason for this passionate awareness of the metal is the total mistrust all Orientals have for paper money and the profound belief that, without one’s bar or beaten leaf of gold concealed somewhere on one’s person or kept in a secret place at home, one is a poor man.

  The gold king of the Orient is the enigmatic Doctor Lobo of the Villa Verde in Macao. Irresistibly attracted, I gravitated towards him, the internal Geiger-counter of a writer of thrillers ticking furiously.

  Richard Hughes and I took the S.S. Takshing, one of the three famous ferries that do the Macao run every day. These ferries are not the broken-down, smoke-billowing rattletraps engineered by whisky-sodden Scotsmen we see on the films, but commodious three-decker steamers run with workmanlike precision. The three-hour trip through the islands and across Deep Bay, brown with the waters of the Pearl River that more or less marks the boundary between the leased territories and Communist China, was beautiful and uneventful. The communist gunboats have given up molesting Western shipping and the wallowing sampans chugging with their single diesels homewards with the day’s catch, the red flag streaming from the insect-wing sails, were the only sign that we were crossing communist waters. At the northern extremity of Deep Bay lies Macao, a peninsula about one-tenth the size of the Isle of Wight that is the oldest European settlement in China. It was founded in 1557 and is chiefly famous for the first lighthouse built on the whole coast of China. It also boasts the graves of Robert Morrison, the Protestant missionary who compiled the first Chinese–English dictionary in 1820, of George Chinnery, the great Irish painter of the Oriental scene, and of the uncle of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord John Spencer Churchill. It is also noted for the gigantic ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral built in 1602 and burned down in 1835; and finally – save the mark! – for the largest ‘house of ill-fame’ in the world.

  So far as its premier citizen, Dr Lobo, is concerned, the most interesting features of Macao are that there is no income tax and no exchange control whatever, and that there is complete freedom of import and export of foreign currencies; and all forms of bullion. To take only the case of go
ld bullion, it is, therefore, perfectly easy for anyone to arrive by ferry or seaplane or come across from Communist China, only fifty yards away across the river, buy any quantity of gold, from a ton down to a gold coin, and leave Macao quite openly with his booty. It is then up to the purchaser, and of no concern whatsoever to Dr Lobo or the chief of the Macao police, to smuggle his gold back into China, into neighbouring Hong Kong or, if he has a seaplane, fly off with it into the wide world. These considerations make Macao one of the most interesting market-places in the world, and one with many secrets.

  As we came into the roadstead, we were greeted by a scene of great splendour. The sun was setting and in its pathway lay a spectacular fleet of many hundreds of junks and sampans at anchor. This caused much excited chattering amongst our fellow-passengers and it was only on the next morning, when this fleet and other fleets from the outer islands were spread all over the sea, now under the rising sun, all heading for the mouth of the Pearl River, that we learnt the answer. The Sea Fishing Co-operative of Communist China had ordered all fishermen to a great meeting at which new fishing laws were to be promulgated – matters such as that the smaller junks should fish home waters within a certain radius, while the larger junks and sampans would be confined to the more distant fishing grounds. It all sounded very orderly and sensible, and very un-Chinese.

  The Portuguese Navy, represented by a small Kiplingesque gunboat with one gun behind a square shield (surely a gatling!), stood guard over the interior harbour, but no courtesies were exchanged with the Takshing, nor could there have been, for the signal halyard had been run from the short mast to the muzzle of the main armament and was now hung with the crew’s variegated washing, from which it was discernible that Persil appeared to have been but sparingly used for the Navy’s big wash.

  The waterfront was an astonishing mixture of rotting godowns announcing in sun-faded letters that they were, for instance, FABRICIA DE AGUAS GASOSAS or the KWONG HUNG TAI FIRECRACKER MANUFACTURING COMPANY, interspersed with the ruined facades of once grandiose private houses ornamented with the most exquisite, though dilapidated, baroque plaster and stonework. The whole town is like this, a jumble of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century highly ornamented European styles, gimcrack modern ferro-concrete, and spruce, hideous villas. Half the streets are cobbled alleys and half wide, empty modern highways at whose pretentious crossings an occasional rickshaw waits for the otiose traffic lights to change to green. In short, the place is as picturesque as, and deader than, a beautiful graveyard.

  We repaired to the Macao Inn on the junction of the waterfront and the Travesso do Padre Narciso. There we met ‘Our Man in Macao’ and drank warm gins and tonics under a banyan tree while I enlightened myself about the four Mr Bigs – who, with the Portuguese Government in the background, control pretty well everything that goes on in this enigmatic territory. In America these four men would be called the Syndicate, but here they are just friendly business partners who co-operate to keep trade running along the right channels. They were at that time, in order of importance, the aforesaid Dr P. J. Lobo, who looks after gold; Mr Foo Tak Yam, who concerns himself with gambling and associate activities, which may be broadly described as ‘entertainment’, and who owns the Central Hotel, of which more later; Mr C. Y. Leung, a silent partner; and Mr Ho Yin, the chief intermediary for trade with Communist China.

  The fortunes of these four gentlemen rose during and after the war – during the war through trade with the Japanese who then occupied the mainland, and, after the war, during the golden days when the harbour of Macao was thronged with ships from Europe smuggling arms to Communist China. Those latter days had turned Macao into a boom town when a single street running half the length of the town, the ‘Street of Happiness’, had been one great and continuous street of pleasure and when the nine-storey-high Central Hotel, the largest house of gambling and self-indulgence in the world, had been constructed by Mr Foo to siphon off the cream of the pleasure-seekers. Those golden days had now passed. Communist China was manufacturing her own weapons, the Street of Happiness had emptied through lack of roistering sailors, and now pleasure, devoted only to the relaxation of Hong Kong tourists, was confined to the Central Hotel.

  Having got all this straight in our minds, it was obvious to Dick and me that only one question remained: where to have dinner before repairing to the Central Hotel? We were advised to choose between the Fat Siu Lau, the ‘Loving Buddha’, in the Street of Happiness, noted for its Chinese pigeon, or the Long Kee, famous for its fish. We chose the Loving Buddha, dined excellently and repaired to the Central Hotel, whose function and design I recommend most warmly to the attention of those concerned with English morals.

  The Central Hotel is not precisely a hotel. It is a nine-storey skyscraper, by far the largest building in Macao, and it is devoted solely to the human so-called vices. It has one more original feature. The higher up the building you go, the more beautiful and expensive are the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling tables, and the better the music. Thus, on the ground floor, the honest coolie can choose a girl of his own class and gamble for pennies by lowering his bet on a fishing-rod contraption through a hole in the floor on to the gaming tables below. Those with longer pockets can progress upwards through various heavens until they reach the earthly paradise on the sixth floor. Above this are the bedrooms. In the pursuit of information which would be in accordance with the readership of the Sunday Times, it was a matter of course that, very soon after our arrival at the Central Hotel, Dick Hughes and I should take the lift to the sixth floor.

  The sixth floor was spacious and well-lit with the sort of pseudo-modern decor you would find in a once-expensive French cafe that is on the way downhill. Across the entrance hall was the gambling hell to which we were drawn by the rattle of dice and the cries of the attractive, as it turned out, feminine croupiers. Here we found fan-tan being played, and a rather complicated dice game known as hi-lo. Having read about fan-tan in my Doctor Fu-Manchu days, when I had assumed that this must be the most sinful game on the face of the earth, I made straight for the fan-tan table, changed a hundred Hong Kong dollars (about £6 5s. 0d.) into counters and sat firmly down at the sparsely occupied table next to the ‘dealer’, an almond-eyed witch in a green cheong sam. On the other side of the table, beside the rack of chips, stood a similarly dressed girl with an air of authority. It was she who ran the game, while the girl on my right went through the necessary motions.

  I must say that the adventure books of one’s youth do give one false impressions. Fan-tan is simply a rather pretty, childlike way of inevitably losing your money. To begin with, the odds are 10 per cent in favour of the house compared with about 1.35 at roulette, and anybody who gambles at those odds is either off his head or a Chinaman.

  The game proceeds as follows: in the centre of the table is a square of painted wood divided into four compartments, marked 1, 2, 3 and 4, and you place your bet on one of these numbers. The croupier has in front of her a large pile of two or three hundred small white plastic buttons, a species of inverted brass goblet, and a thin wooden wand about two feet long. When the bids have been placed, she muddles the inverted goblet around in the pile of buttons, pushes it out in front of her, well away from the original mass of buttons, and lifts it away. She then takes her wand and delicately separates the buttons, four by four, from the pile heaped in the middle of the table. The winner is he who has guessed that at the end of her separating of these buttons, four by four, she will leave either one, two, three or four buttons behind. If you have bet on the correct remainder you are paid two to one, less 10 per cent, The girl then rakes in the central pile of buttons to join the mass in front of her, muddles them all together and squashes her goblet once again down in amongst them,

  It is a pretty, restful game containing only one point of interest. A third, or not later than halfway, through the separating of the pile of buttons, the experienced fan-tan player, or certainly the organizing croupier, will hold up o
ne, two, three or four fingers to predict the winning figure although perhaps fifty buttons have still to be separated and these are still piled up in an apparently unfathomable muddle, some on top of others and most of them overlapping. While I duly and happily lost my hundred dollars, enjoying the gentle ritual, the authoritative girl opposite was never wrong in divining the winning number from the piled-up jumble. It was quite uncanny, and the girl smiled appreciatively at my polite applause.

  After Dick and I had had enough of this dainty piracy, we repaired to the neighbouring hell to try our fortunes at the more adult game of hi-lo. This is a game played at a long table with a green baize board marked out in various sections rather in the fashion of American craps. Behind this sits the usual beautiful croupière (if that is the feminine for croupier) with, in front of her, a shining aluminium contraption which looks like a cross between a pressure-cooker and an atomic war-head but is, in fact, a locked container containing three dice. When, after a good deal of mumbo-jumbo, she shakes the apparatus and removes the lid, the game is completed and up to a maximum of three sixes, or eighteen, and a minimum of three ones, will be displayed by the dice. So far as the even chances are concerned, you can either bet on the numbers three to eight inclusive, which is ‘lo’, or ten to fifteen, which, is ‘hi’, the number nine in the middle being zero. On these you get even money odds. You can also bet on single numbers from three to eighteen and various combinations, such as three of a kind, or a sequence. If you have bet on ‘hi’ or ‘lo’ and three of a kind turned up, you have lost. These nuances are complicated and I could not work out the odds in favour of the house. It seemed easier to stick to ‘hi’ or ‘lo’, which I did until a further hundred dollars of the Sunday Times’s money had gone down the drain.