Hong Kong - 10 years

Spitfir3 · 30 Jun 2007 at 14:18

I was lying body down on the carpet in the lounge in my old semi detatched house which, once, seemed huge. My parents were watching on the couch concentrating on the 12 year old television. I remember watching for a while before asking "what is this?" or something and they explained. I remember thinking the equivalent of "grr" as growing up I watched a lot of the crude old WWII films where the British mostly came up on top as well as the war storys from my grand parents. I also remember the white naval uniforms a lot of people wore on that day.

Well thats about it, a strangly vivid memory from 10 years ago tomorow when I was 6 or 7.

9 1/2 years on I still didn't know what it was all about until I started getting interested in flight simming etc when I heard about a lot of videos from this "kai tak" airport of which i'd never heard of before. Recently I started to look up more about it as I noticed on so many of these videos that there was so many British controllers and pilots (suppose a lot of them are/were expats). After a while I connected this memory with it and found that it was coming up to 10 years, tomorow.

Here's a video on youtube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=os4p8MfAqQY Must have been the same stuff I was watched all those years ago.. really sad to watch it now

Anyone else remember this? Did they want us to go or what? Great shame :mad:

RandomTom · 30 Jun 2007 at 14:31

I remember the countdown to this, just watching the video now

neocon · 30 Jun 2007 at 15:33

Did they want us to go or what?

Yes they did. Understandable I suppose. There are restaurants in HK that don't allow non-chinese in them.

Anyway, i'm sure in the end that Shanghai will totally overwhelm HK as the financial capital of china.

oddjob62 · 1 Jul 2007 at 11:15

neocon said:
Anyway, i'm sure in the end that Shanghai will totally overwhelm HK as the financial capital of china.

Yeah... i visited both last year. The expansion of Shanghai over the last 10 years, and the plans for the next 10 are amazing!!

Deluxe1 · 1 Jul 2007 at 11:25

We took out a 100 year lease on HK then when the lease was up it was time to give it back.

I very much doubt HK would have been what it is today without us taking it on.

The_Dark_Side · 1 Jul 2007 at 12:48

Deluxe1 said:
We took out a 100 year lease on HK then when the lease was up it was time to give it back.

99

Defcon5 · 1 Jul 2007 at 12:51

We, as a country, leased a city from another country? Did they have any choice in the matter?

Vtec9k · 1 Jul 2007 at 13:01

oddjob62 said:
Yeah... i visited both last year. The expansion of Shanghai over the last 10 years, and the plans for the next 10 are amazing!!

I just came back from Nantong yesterday, flying though shanghai and even having never been the China before the changes are pretty obvious and impressive as hell.

I think handing HK back was probably a good thing inthe long term. Hopfully it will let all the best bits of UK\West rub off on China yet they'll be sensible enough to not bother with the crappy bits we seem to be stuck with.

Give it another 25-50 years and (assuming no pointless world wars or diplomatic idiocy happens) any of the area's surrounding hk\shanghai\etc will be fantasic places to live.

MikeTimbers · 1 Jul 2007 at 22:48

Deluxe1 said:
We took out a 100 year lease on HK then when the lease was up it was time to give it back.

I very much doubt HK would have been what it is today without us taking it on.

No we were ceded Hong Kong itself for ever but leased the New Territories for 99 years when it became clear HK was simply not going to be viable without additional living space. China played the long game and got the whole lot back as it was impossible for the UK to continue to run HK without the NT.