Hong Kong prizes beauty, embodied by an actress at the Chinese Opera. Photograph by Steve McCurry

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When China’s flag was raised over Hong Kong, a century and a half of benign colonial rule came to an end. Many people were worried; I was not. The Chinese are too smart, I thought, to mess up a good thing. Anyway, in my loving eyes, my beautiful Suzie Wong city would never grow old, never be ruined just by putting on a new red dress with yellow stars. But to find out for sure, I would have to go back, so I did.

Political control has passed to communist China, but capitalism still drives Hong Kong’s economy. Photograph by Steve McCurry

“There are big changes,” I was warned. “Brace yourself.” Yeah, okay, I thought, but I already knew where I would have my first dinner, the restaurant ornamented with dried shark fins, where Chinese families sit at big round tables clattering away in Cantonese. I could already taste my first sip of that dynamite aperitif called mao-tai. Later I would walk familiar streets under the same old banyan trees and then take the Star Ferry across the harbor to my hotel. What could possibly go wrong with that?

A Hong Kong travel agent I know says, “We tell visitors, ‘In Hong Kong, you will see something every day that you’ve never in your life seen before.’” Is that as true as ever now, I hoped? Yes, it is, I discovered. Today the British flag is gone, and China’s new, prodigal city is now called a Special Administrative Region of China—but I’m glad to say that the token rickshaws are still here, and Hong Kong is still very much the place it has always been.

—Charles N. Barnard

Read Barnard’s complete article, “Hong Kong: The World’s Greatest Chinatown,” in the January/February 2000 issue of TRAVELER.