The General Post Office: a history of, and eulogy to, a Hong Kong landmark as it faces the wrecking ball
- A writer addresses what the GPO came to represent, both to her personally and the wider world, as it sent and received tidings, be they bad, sad or glad
Hong Kong residents like to tell newcomers about magnificent buildings that have been demolished, the ones you will never see because, foolishly, you have arrived too late.
The universal human impulse to crow over those who have missed the best bit was particularly pronounced in a city churning through uncertain times in the 1990s. No one, fresh off a 747 at Kai Tak airport as I was, could ever know the true glories of the past.
People tended to sigh especially over three vanished edifices: the Repulse Bay Hotel, the Hong Kong Club and the General Post Office. If I mentioned I had had tea in the Repulse Bay hotel, I was always told I had not. The real hotel had been torn down in 1982 to create flats but the lobby had been rebuilt to pretend the hotel was still there; also, the huge gap in the complex above provided ease of dragon-access to the sea.
Years later, I interviewed a Miami architect who hit this feng shui myth briskly on the head by saying the Repulse Bay was based on a building with exactly the same hole in dragon-free Florida. Perhaps that is the Hong Kong way: a retrospective fable always lends enchantment.
As for the old Hong Kong Club – it had been demolished in 1981. The new incarnation, however, still did not allow female members. By 1996, the Equal Opportunities Commission had set out to rectify this. The members’ baying distress in public put me in mind of P.G. Wodehouse’s mastodon aunts bellowing across primeval swamps. I could not mourn their lost world.
Sometimes I wondered if it was a coincidence that the year Hong Kong was claimed by the British Empire – 1841 – was also the year the word dinosaur was coined.