Men are known for bragging and of course size is always important. In the time-honoured anecdote about the rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma, a Texan guy says he can drive all day and still be driving on his own land. In fact with a little coffee he can drive all night and at daybreak he will still be driving on his own land. The guy from Oklahoma spits his chewing tobacco at his dog and admits to the Texan that he can just about remember a time when they used to have cars like that in Oklahoma too.
The amount of land you own or the space you live in are indicators of your personal freedom and for many these have come to mean more than money in the bank, cars in the garage or implants in the erogenous zones. Space in the city gives you the freedom to make as much noise as you like without upsetting the neighbors. Likewise space in the country allows you to shoot things which are quietly chewing your grass or suckling their young under your tree.
At the most basic level, Hong Kong Island is a collection of hills rising steeply out of the sea to a modest height of just 550m.
The granite is is very time consuming to quarry and even today requires dynamite to remove in any significant quantity. There really is very little flat space available, so it is maybe not the easiest place to build a successful modern metropolis. However today, with a population of only 7.5m people (c/w London 9m, Greater Seoul 25m), HK can claim to be among the world's top 10 importers, exporters and hard currencies, not to mention having the 2nd highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. And all this comes bundled with free trade, no sales tax (VAT) and even tax returns that you can file online in under 30 minutes while waiting for your pizza to be delivered. Improbable? Maybe. Impossible? Evidently not.
When Jorge Álvares dropped anchor in 1534 to introduce himself as a European, he found the island sparsely populated with unwitting natives settled in a handful of coastal villages. The villagers had found it easier to build houses on stilts in the river mud and beach sand rather than the unstable soil of the steep slopes under the leafy tree canopy. Some echoes of this lifestyle can still be seen in places like Tai-O.
Either way the villagers weren't buying anything Snr Álvares was selling so they politely directed him to their neighbors in Macau. This bought them about 300 years of peace (and Macau 300 years of prosperity) until British gunboats arrived in 1841 citing every entrepreneur's right to push opium at the fiery end of a musket.
China's desperate efforts to 'Just Say No' resulted first in the loss of HK Island and subsequently the Kowloon Peninsular (later New Territories) across the harbour.
With China's resolve broken, the Brits then set about doing what they always did on their forays abroad; they named the place Queenstown (later Victoria), taught the natives the virtues of civilisation (with the cruelest examples of barbarism), then set about making the whole place more pleasant for enjoying tea and sandwiches under a tree in the afternoon. This is, after all, the main aspiration of every Englishman at home.
The island was quickly secured with a flurry of forts, a cache of cannons and munition stores supplied by wagons running on rails around the hillsides. Fortifications were gradually followed by mansions for the governor, parks and statues dedicated to Victoria and Albert, berths for unloading all the opium sent over from the British Raj and loading up all the fine silks, tea and porcelains to be shipped back to Blighty. Churches sprang up to show that refined manners confer a refined relationship with the Almighty, meanwhile new-fangled ideas like hospitals and schools quickly appeared to provide the full cradle-to-grave service for the growing population. All this left precious little land available for anything else; until that is, something most fortuitous happened - a fire.
In December 1851 a devastating blaze reduced more than 450 homes to charred rubble along the western harbour front. Not knowing quite where to put it, someone decided to push all the rubble into the shallow water of the harbour, build a new sea wall around it and top it off with some soil scraped from the hillslopes behind. When complete, this provided a new strip of prime real estate 45ft (15m) wide which could be sold at a handsome profit to build new moorings, warehousing and businesses. So even before HK had established its first bank (HSBC in 1864) and banks had issued their first banknotes (1866), dumping rubble into the water to extend the land into the sea had already become a virtual license to print money. And that's still how it's done today.
Land created this way now accounts for 25% of HK's developed areas. It accommodates 27% of the population, a whopping 70% of businesses and the entirety of the 'new' airport. Evidently the business of demolishing old buildings, piling the rubble in the sea and erecting new buildings has never been such good business.
Of course, not everyone was impressed when their thriving colonial hotels, apartments and business premises, blessed with views of the harbour and romantic sunsets, were suddenly relegated to non-descript backstreets, with views eclipsed by taller, brighter buildings which suddenly attracted all the customers.
HK's 'Lifers' are the expats who have knocked back anything up to 40 years of artery-hardening corporate schmoozing each night, then re-powered themselves on lavish Eggs-Benedict brunches the next day. They have long since avoided the undignified scramble for waterfront property which lures the Scotch-Egg munching riff-raff who are just here for a fast buck. The Lifers have done this by simply rising above it all - literally. Soaring market prices now make it feasible for developers to cut level platforms into the slopes on which to build forests of apartment towers offering breakfast views of the harbour which were previously only available to helicopter pilots.
Almost two centuries after the fire of 1851, HK's license to print money continues to deliver handsomely.
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