Rethinking Hong Kong

St Joseph's Cathedral completed in 1886.

A visit to Hanoi, termed the ‘city in the bend of the river’ by Emperor Tu Duc in 1831, has somehow brought Hong Kong, also flanking a neat curve of water in the South China Sea, into perspective.

Hong Kong and Hanoi have been settled since the Neolithic era. But Hong Kong, in a remote part of China and far from the centre of Imperial power has  seen intermittent settlement till the arrival of the small farmers and fishermen that were here before1841 when the British took over the terrain. The makers of the Neolithic rock engravings on large granite boulders that dot the coastline have long since become a mere speculation in the history of Hong Kong.

Today, Hanoi is a large, continuous urban sprawl with most of the architecture still modeled on the French colonial style. The street density is high, but there are few tall buildings. Similar to Macau’s colonial architecture that was a Portuguese translation of European styles tempered by local temperament and skills, the buildings in Hanoi have undergone similar translations to become a local vernacular. They strongly evoke French architecture but have a decorative quirkiness that obviously derives from a local sensibility. Most of the buildings have inviting, deep verandas with ceiling fans to shade from the summer sun and heat.

Hanoi has not adopted modernism or modern lofty architecture in the same way that Hong Kong has. Land is a scarce commodity in Hong Kong, not only because of its limited size, but also as it is the source of its wealth. The low-rise character of Hanoi is not however what was most intriguing, but the organized chaos of the traffic in the city and its street life on pavements.

After-school traffic in the street opposite the cathedral.

Thousands of Honda motorcycles and scooters travel in every direction of the compass. They fill the streets, pavements, markets and alleyways. When there is no oncoming traffic, they swarm across into the free lane, only to contract back into semblances of two-way traffic flow when there is opposite flow. Everyone wears helmets and a family of four on a bike is not an unusual sight. The saving grace though is that they all travel very slowly. By contrast, the flow of traffic in Hong Kong is very ordered, disciplined and law-abiding. But sometimes it gets precarious as taxi drivers neither exceed, nor travel at speeds less than the speed limit around the reinforced concrete faces along the hair-raisingly, narrow roads that curve around the Peak.

The people of Hong Kong regularly take control of the streets for orderly protests and on Sundays house helpers from Indonesia and the Philippines spill into every possible safe public space on walkways, parks and piazzas. Here they sit on cardboard sheets and decamp for the day chattering, eating, playing games, giving one anther pedicures and often using their phones to talk to other friends and family at home. This decampment is tolerated, but every now and then an angry letter to the newspapers makes its voice heard.

Street cafe on the cathedral square.

This is in stark contrast to Hanoi where the streets belong to the people who travel, sit, eat and drink on any sidewalk. The pavements are not well tended and narrow and widen as the old footprint of the city, trees and parked motorcycles allow. Brick pavers are often missing and there is grey dirt across all the road and pavement surfaces. This seems not to be a concern, as many little pop-up restaurants and bars just appear on random-looking places (locals must have a greater sense of place concerning these than we as visitors had). The little stools used in street cafes in Hong Kong are small, but in Hanoi they seem like miniature versions.

Hong Kong has built an amazing skyline and adopted verticality as a massing principle. This has left me curious about the way of building in Hanoi and what it says about the Vietnamese that overcame the military power of both France and America.