OFFICIALS of the former colony of Hong Kong often retire to tend roses in English cottage gardens. Ron and Veronica Clibborn-Dyer are different: after 30 years of police service here, they have retired to tend orchids and ancestral bone jars (gam tap or golden pagodas) in a New Territories nunnery garden.
There they have goats and pigeons, Muscovy ducks (the Aylesbury ducks were eaten by a leopard cat), three dogs and a pond full of rare paradise fish that have been swept down from the mountains by summer rains. The garden is full of interesting plants, native birds, fresh herbs and fruit trees. It is life as far from the ultimate vertical city stereotype of Hong Kong as one can imagine. It all began about five years ago, on a walk with their dogs, when they found a British phone number in a deserted temple building.
'We had seen the nunnery before from a distance,' Ron says. 'But one Sunday we noticed there was a hole in the tiled roof and the next week we found the padlock on the door had been broken.' His illegal-immigrant antennae, honed by years in the police, started picking up signals, and they went in to investigate.
The temple had indeed been broken into and there was evidence that IIs had been living there. As they looked around they found the phone number scribbled on a piece of paper - and when they called it later they found themselves talking to a young member of the Lee family who had gone to Britain many years before to start a fast food restaurant.
By coincidence Lee was due to visit Hong Kong a few weeks later, and over several conversations he came to a unique arrangement with Ron and Veronica.
They were invited to be the guardians of the temple, to maintain the buildings and look after the shrines and the ancestors.