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SCMP Reporter

Time slipped quickly beneath our feet in 1997. This was the year when Britain returned Hong Kong to mainland rule, but all many now recall is the rain, money still tied up in the stock market, and empty hotel rooms.

 The change of sovereignty only six months ago seems more a historical than historic event with much of the handover euphoria long evaporated.

 Hong Kong weathered more economic than political storms this year, but was left exhausted by a series of public health scares.

 Coupled with the usual local-style scandals and bizarre happenings, events in the past 12 months turned over almost as fast as a tampered taxi meter.

 So hold on tight. Here is a quick recap.

 In main news events, Hong Kong ceased to be a colony on July 1 after 156 years of British rule.

 The handover - the biggest news of the year, and also the biggest media hype and anti-climax in recent history - went without a hitch.

 The Royal Yacht Britannia that carried Governor Chris Patten, his family and the Prince of Wales, did not sink, and the plane that flew Jiang Zemin back to Beijing did not crash.

 And despite the atrocious weather, the new extension of the Convention and Exhibition Centre, where many ceremonies were held, was not flooded by the rain.

 Nor did its curved rooftop collapse on to the 4,000 overseas dignitaries.

 And post-handover Hong Kong? It was business as usual.

 So it is ironic that many of the year's surprises took place during normally quiet months.

 Local journalist Xi Yang was released on parole on January 25 after serving three years in a mainland prison. The 39-year-old Ming Pao reporter was jailed for 12 years after being found guilty of acquiring state secrets about internal policies on interest rates and gold.

 News of Deng Xiaoping's death on February 19, however, did not come as a shock or send the Hang Seng Index tumbling as some had feared.

 Scores of illegal immigrant children were surrendered to government offices in late March after rumours of an amnesty for mainland youngsters smuggled in on boats by their Hong Kong resident parents.

 The issue boiled over the following month after an eight-year-old girl and her handcuffed mother were dragged from their flat and deported to the mainland.

 Critics accused the Immigration Department of using strong-arm tactics on schoolgirl Chung Yeuk-lam and 35-year-old Chung Chau Chuk-ngan as a warning to other families harbouring illegal immigrants.

 A warning of a different kind came on April 3 when the Health Department alerted parents that children with persistent coughs should undergo immediate chest screening after the discovery of four cases of tuberculosis in a kindergarten.

 Of the school's 239 students, 62 were found to be carrying the tuberculosis virus. Three had developed the disease.

 Close on the heels of that was a cholera outbreak in May caused by the consumption of chicken and ducks' feet contaminated with human excrement.

 Water used to defrost meat and to wash utensils at a Yuen Long food processing business became a breeding ground for the deadly bacteria after sewage from staff toilets seeped into the factory well.

 Within the same month, a boy died after developing a strain of influenza never before seen in humans. In August, after samples were sent to the United States' Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta and a Dutch laboratory, the virus was confirmed to be influenza A virus (H5N1), or what is now known as 'bird flu'.

 The strain had previously been found only in birds and poultry.

 There have been 19 confirmed or suspected cases of the disease since May.

 Three confirmed H5N1 sufferers and one suspected victim died of complications caused by the virus.

 As a result, chickens became the latest item that the local population was anxious to avoid.

 Enough about food.

 The Lantau Link, comprising the $7.1 billion Tsing Ma suspension bridge and the $1.6 billion cable-stayed Kap Shui Mun Bridge, was opened by former British prime minister Baroness Thatcher on April 27.

 In September, Premier Li Peng and Vice Premier Zhu Rongji came to Hong Kong for the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meeting. The occasion was relatively trouble-free, with only minor scuffles between the police and marchers from the multi-national Solidarity Against the World Bank and IMF.

 The 46.4 millimetres of rain recorded on October 12 pushed the year's total to the highest since records began in 1884.

 Climatologists blamed the deluge on rising sea temperatures in the Eastern Pacific, known as the El Nino effect, which led to particularly heavy showers at the beginning of the year.

 In the same month, a plumber who was turned into a 'living head' by a three-storey fall from scaffolding was awarded $25.7 million - the largest sum in a personal injury case in Hong Kong.

 Ta Xoung, 37 and a father of two, was paralysed from the neck down in 1991 when the scaffolding he was standing on collapsed as he was inspecting a leak at the derelict Sun Hing Building on Nathan Road.

 In another court case, hundreds of boat people poured out of the gates of High Island detention centre on October 14 after the Chief Judge ruled that the Government had no right to hold them captive.

 Patrick Chan Siu-oi rejected government arguments that the interests of good administration demanded the continued detention of 278 ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese migrants pending the outcome of an appeal.

 On the economic front, all was not well on October 23 when Hong Kong stocks were caught in a wave of panic selling which sent share markets reeling around the world.

 Brokers said more than $325 billion was wiped off values in one of the blackest days in the Hong Kong market's history, sparked by uncertainty over the currency.

 Death, as ever, made its mark on 1997.

 On January 26, an arsonist, believed to be linked to a triad turf war, fire-bombed a karaoke bar in Tsim Sha Tsui, killing 15 people.

 An accident during the Lunar New Year celebrations, when a float in a parade careered into a Tsim Sha Tsui crowd, killed a tourist and injured 31 people.

 In March, prominent pro-China politician Dorothy Liu Yiu-chu died after an illness. She was followed by another politician, legislator Samuel Wong Ping-wai who died in Queen Mary Hospital on June 4, two days after suffering a heart attack.

 Local showbiz mourned one of Hong Kong's best-known entertainers, opera singer and actor Tang Wing-cheung, in April. He died aged 81.

 Tang, known to audiences under the stage names Sun Ma Sze Tsang and Sun Ma Chai, was admitted to Canossa Hospital just before Lunar New Year after developing breathing problems.

 A heroic rescue went horribly wrong when a 44-year-old Stanley man died while trying to save two men who were swept into the sea at the height of Typhoon Victor's direct hit on the SAR in August.

 Briton Tom Larmour, married and living in Stanley Beach Road, was certified dead at Eastern Hospital after fire services officers pulled his body from the stormy sea off Stanley Main Street.

 On August 15, four Hong Kong tourists died and three were among the missing after a pleasure boat overturned in Manila Bay. There were 46 tourists on board.

 In another freak accident a couple of weeks later, a police car driven by plain-clothes detective Ngai Wai-kwong, 37, ploughed into lunchtime crowds in Central, killing three people and injuring 10.

 Within the next week, a man was killed and 12 were injured when a bus careered over a crowded Mongkok pavement and ploughed into a snack shop.

 There were, of course, scandals to remember in 1997.

 Most serious perhaps were the notorious series of medical blunders in government hospitals.

 In August, a 'communication error' resulted in road crash victim Tsui Wai-ming, 20, being given four packs of the wrong blood. He died hours later after the transfusion.

 Weeks later, it was revealed a surgeon at Queen Mary Hospital had removed a section of a young girl's reproductive organs because he thought it was her appendix.

 That surgical blunder had been preceded by another incident, in late March, in which doctors severed a woman's right fallopian tube during an appendectomy.

 Within the same month, a near-lethal injection of milk by a student nurse had unleashed further criticisms that patients were being cared for by poorly trained and overworked staff. In this case the victim was a man in his 40s whose veins were accidentally pumped with 320 milligrams of milk.

 A controversy brewed and then exploded in July in the Provisional District Council.

 A bizarre row over the new Central Library designs turned into a public war of words when a top government official was effectively accused of lying during a radio phone-in programme.

 Director of Urban Services, Elaine Chung Lai-kwok, claimed on air that her controversial revamp of the library design had been approved by Provisional Urban Council chairman Ronald Leung Ding-bong.

 But within minutes an angry Dr Leung had called to put his side of the story, claiming he had not even seen Ms Chung's proposal, let alone approved it.

 The row over the new design for the 12-storey library in Moreton Terrace, Causeway Bay, flared after it emerged that it would cost taxpayers $100 million more than the project's $700 million budget.

 Tears flowed after the Miss Asia beauty pageant, organised by ATV, as Janice Chu Yin-chun was stripped of her title in October for concealing her marriage.

 Again at ATV, its chairman Lim Por-yen landed in hot water this month, when he was detained in Taipei in connection with an alleged $23.7 million bribery scandal. Mr Lim, also Lai Sun Group chairman, was questioned about the re-zoning of farmland he owned near the proposed site of the National Taipei University at Sanhsia, Taipei County.

 And, finally, the bizarre side of 1997.

 A teenager was drawn into a cult and had sex with 30 men a day so she could be protected when the world came to an end, a court was told in May.

 The 19-year-old woman said it was not until August last year, four months after she had been working as a prostitute, that she realised the cult was a sham. The young woman claimed she earned $200,000 for the cult during her four months' service.

 A toy craze from Japan was breeding discontent in local classrooms in the same month.

 Teachers complained that Tamagotchi - an electronic 'virtual pet' that must be fed, cleaned and played with - disrupted lessons. If students did not pay attention to their pets, they 'died'. But teachers, more worried about them not paying attention to lessons, banned the toy.

 In June, an undercover policewoman posing as a Japanese tourist was charged $1,500 for a taxi trip from Kai Tak airport to Wan Chai. Police said the fare to the Grand Hyatt Hotel set a record for overcharging and was at least 10 times the usual amount for the 10-to-15-minute journey.

 However, the top prize for the most bizarre event of the year goes to the woman who wreaked havoc at a government land auction on October 14 when she successfully bid $890 million for a Kowloon Bay site, then revealed she had no money. The woman, who claimed to represent tycoon Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa conglomerate, bought the 57,114-square-foot commercial site after beating off competition from three of Hong Kong's top property concerns.

 But come time to pay, Wong Yuet-ngan, 53, caused pandemonium when she failed to produce the $90 million deposit.



The big, bad and bizarre