Hong kong is not like any place you have seen. A fossil of Old China encysted in concrete, glass and steel and the ways of England, it's probably the most schizophrenic city on earth.
If Kipling were alive today Hong kong would make him eat his words. At every turn East and West meet here with a boldness that jars the mind and calibrates it to the city's nerve-racking, often enchanting but always invigorating neurosis: a crisis of identity.
Suckled by an adopted mother, then the British, Hong kong grew up a world apart from China. Modern, frenetic, the gaudiest market place of free enterprise and consumerism on earth, it hangs on the edge of rural China, a jigsaw piece from unrelated picture. Beneath the concrete, steel and polychrome lights, Hong kong remains true child-truer to the traditions of the East than the mainland, which ideology had changed.