T H I S+W E E K Stormy weather Paul Theroux on Hong Kong's troubled times to come By Don George, Editor > The party's over The decadent charm of Hong Kong past By Simon Winchester - Books on China D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer The Queen's favorite cocktail Mondo Weirdo On grilled house rat and crude urinals Postmark | Prague: Slacker Central By Melissa Morrison Affordable Bohemia in the land of the Velvet Revolution - Books on Prague Passages "Yak Butter and Black Tea" By Wade Brackenbury Looking for a village untouched by time in forbidden Chinese territory Readers' Tips and Tales R.I.P. in Disneyworld? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, June 17 Gonzo Congo Redmond O'Hanlon hunts dinosaurs in the African jungle PLUS: Fetishes and fossils A talk with Redmond O'Hanlon A full list of all Wanderlust articles

the empire steps down - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A British expat reflects on the Hong Kong he loved and the Xianggang to come. BY SIMON WINCHESTER | in just a few days' time the remaining jewel in the crown of what remains of the British Empire -- the tiny but unimaginably wealthy Crown Colony of Hong Kong -- passes back into the hands of the Chinese from whom Britain wrested it, by force of arms and treaty, a century and a half ago. It is a moment of some poignancy for many Britons, of whom I am one; a time of cocksure pleasure and relief for most mainland Chinese and for all their politicians; and a period of perplexity and concern for the 6 million people who live in what will become, at the stroke of midnight on June 30, the Special Administrative Region of China, Xianggang. My work as a travel writer and editor takes me back to Hong Kong -- where I lived for nearly a decade in the 1980s and '90s -- at least four or five times a year. Normally I use the city as just a place to change planes, somewhere to get a night's sleep in the Mandarin Hotel and to have some laundry done before pressing on to some other Asian city. But last month I decided, on a sentimental whim, that I would stay a while -- and in particular go back home to the old village in the New Territories where my family and I had lived for three of our Hong Kong years, and where we had been so very happy. It's always a risk, going back to somewhere you loved. But to my surprise and delight I found that, in almost all respects, our village hadn't altered a bit. Of course, it has only been three years since I left, but since Hong Kong is a place where, in the blink of an eye, a meadow can turn into a housing estate of half a million people, I confess I had been expecting the very worst. I had driven more than 20 miles north from Hong Kong itself -- past Causeway Bay and Happy Valley, through one of the new harbor tunnels into eastern Kowloon, up past the ever-busy airport, through the long tunnel under the mountain called Tate's Cairn, along eight-lane expressways that sliced between the new housing estates at Sha Tin and Ma On Shan, and then, finally, into the peace of the countryside, below the ranges of green hills, above the sea and the little oyster farms and the gently dipping junks from China. I parked the car on Sai Sha Road, beside the corroded sign that gave the village name, O Tau, and started down into the valley. There is no real road -- one of the reasons I chose to live and write in O Tau was its dreamy isolation -- and the only access is by a flight of 99 greasy stairs and then a narrow jungle path winding beside a brook fussing deep among the hills. It is rather engagingly wild country, feral, faintly menacing. Once going home I had been confronted by a giant wild pig flashing its tusks in the evening sun. On some steaming days there would be cobras in the grass, and always in the water-meadow a herd of Brahmin cattle being grazed by sturdy country women wearing the black-draped bonnets of the Hakka people, the Chinese gypsies. In the very high summer the trees were festooned with black spiders, harmless but huge, the size of dinner-plates. I was pleased to see that the old scarlet letter box that my wife had nailed to a walnut tree was still there, and still looking rather smarter than the others. The satellite dish that an outfit called Perfection Technologies had installed was still visible too, up on my old roof: I had bought it because I wanted to see the BBC, and for a few months I could -- until Rupert Murdoch did his deal with the Chinese, and in deference to their demands, dropped it from his satellite network. But it was the view of the countryside I wanted most to see. The woman who now lived in our old house -- she was Chinese, brought up in England, and taught swimming at a local school -- was happy to let me in. And so I climbed the stairs, opened the French windows and stepped out onto the balcony -- and gazed out onto the view that had greeted me for all of the thousand Chinese mornings that I had lived in O Tau, a view that had convinced me that Hong Kong possessed, tucked away among its mountains, some of the most beautiful countryside it was possible to see. N E X T+P A G E | An island of slow permanence, in a territory for which evolution was otherwise hectic

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