When you are in the China Seas be careful to keep all your flannel-wear to hand. In an hour the steamer swung from tropical heat… to a cold raw fog, as wet as a Scotch mist. Morning gave us a new world–somewhere between Heaven and Earth. The sea was smoked glass: reddish grey islands lay upon it under fog-banks that hovered fifty feet above our heads. The squat sails of junks danced for an instant like autumn leaves in the breeze and disappeared, and there was no solidity in the islands against which the glassy levels splintered in snow. The steamer groaned and grunted and howled because she was so damp and miserable, and I groaned also because the guide-book said that Hong-Kong had the finest harbour in the world, and I could not see two hundred yards in any direction. Yet this ghost-like in-gliding through the belted fog was livelily mysterious, and became more so when the movement of the air vouchsafed us a glimpse of a warehouse and a derrick, both apparently close aboard, and behind them the shoulder of a mountain. We made our way into a sea of flat-nosed boats…

All Hong-Kong is built on the sea face; the rest is fog. One muddy road runs for ever in front of a line of houses… You live in the houses, and when wearied of this, walk across the road and drop into the sea, if you can find a square foot of unencumbered water. So vast is the accumulation of country shipping… Beyond the launches lie more steamers than the eye can count… I watch the fleets of Hong-Kong from the balcony of the Victoria Hotel.
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One cannot sit down to think with a new world humming outside the window–with all China to enter upon…
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When I went into the streets of Hong-Kong I stepped into thick slushy London mud of the kind that strikes chilly through the boot, and the rattle of innumerable wheels was as the rattle of hansoms. A soaking rain fell, and all the sahibs hailed ‘rickshaws,–they call them ‘ricks here,–and the wind was chillier than the rain. …there were signs of building everywhere, and gas-jets in all the houses …colonnades and domes were scattered broadcast, and the Englishmen walked as Englishmen should–hurriedly and looking forward. All the length of the main street was verandahed, and the Europe shops squandered plate glass by the square yard…

The same Providence that runs big rivers so near to large cities puts main thoroughfares close to big hotels. I went down Queen Street, which is not very hilly. All the other streets that I looked up were built in steps… and under blue skies would have given… scores of good photographs. The rain and the fog blotted the views. Each upward-climbing street ran out in white mist that covered the sides of a hill, and the downward-sloping ones were lost in the steam from the waters of the harbour…
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…it was clean beyond the ordinary, because the houses were uniform, three storied, and verandahed, and the pavements were of stone. …The Chinese naturally have the town for their own… Their golden and red signs flame down the Queen’s Road…
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…each shop was good. Though it sold shoes or sucking pigs, there was some delicacy of carving or gilded tracery in front to hold the eye, and each thing was quaint and striking of its kind. A fragment of twisted roots helped by a few strokes into the likeness of huddled devils, a running knop and flower cornice, a dull red and gold half-door, a split bamboo screen–they were all good, and their joinings and splicings and mortisings were accurate. The baskets… were good in shape, and the rattan fastenings that clenched them to the polished bamboo yoke were whipped down, so that there were no loose ends. You could slide in and out the drawers in the slung chests of the man who sold dinners to the ‘rickshaw coolies…

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“…What made this… shopman here take delight in a dwarf orange tree in a turquoise blue pot?”…

…he filled a tobacco-pipe from a dull green leather pouch held at the mouth with a little bracelet of plasma, or it might have been the very jade. He was playing with a brown-wood abacus, and by his side was his day-book bound in oiled paper, and the tray of Indian ink, with the brushes and the porcelain supports for the brushes. He made an entry in his book and daintily painted in his latest transaction. The Chinese of course have been doing this for a few thousand years, but Life, and its experiences, is as new to me as it was to Adam, and I marvelled.
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Is there really such a place as Hong-Kong? People say so, but I have not yet seen it. Once indeed the clouds lifted and I saw a granite house perched like a cherub on nothing, a thousand feet above the town. …a man came up the street and said, “See this fog It will be like this till September. You’d better go away.” I shall not…