You know it has been a slow week when the discovery of coral in Victoria Harbour makes the South China Morning Post's front page and is hailed as a sign of environmental recovery. As someone who regularly scuba dives in local waters, I can tell you that Hong Kong's marine environment is not only resilient, but lush, varied and beautiful. It is unremarkable that coral would be found even in the most challenging conditions, given the right water temperatures and proximity of large, healthy coral colonies.
True, it is a bit difficult to see more than a few metres in the waters around Hong Kong. The sea is laden not only with silt from the Pearl River and pollution, but with microscopic plant and animal life. The richness of life in Hong Kong's waters produces their marvellous jade colour. At night, the water flashes with phosphorescence from the same tiny creatures.
To me, the fact that coral is growing in the harbour is less a symbol of revival or urban clean-up - of which there is little evidence - than of Hong Kong's unheralded assets. Among these is a physical beauty and wealth of recreational resources that few cities can rival. Its human occupants have created some dreadful eyesores and other offences against the landscape, and yet from the water - I am often in various sorts of craft offshore - or from the hillsides, Hong Kong has a miraculous, dream-like quality, like one of those panoramic Chinese paintings of mountains with palaces and drifting clouds.
What if history could be erased, and these few islands and the Kowloon Peninsula returned to their state prior to 1842, when Britain began its territorial acquisitions after its defeat of China in the first Opium War? Let's say we started Hong Kong from scratch in 2004. What sort of place would it be?
Let us say that by some accident of history, this imaginary city still ended up as a special administrative region (SAR) of China. Perhaps, in 1979, when China created the special economic zones in nearby Shenzhen and Zhuhai, it decided to create an international free port, downriver, in the great natural harbour between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.
After some discussion and false starts, it gave the new SAR China's first timetable for political reform, under the strict supervision of the central government. It provided an advantageous tax system, a welcome mat for foreign investors and generous sovereign loans for infrastructure development.
The downtown of our imaginary Hong Kong would more likely be on the Kowloon Peninsula than Hong Kong Island. Lantau, Lamma, and Hong Kong Island would be places for second homes, resorts and universities. Gone would be the charming bits and pieces of Victorian architecture but so, too, would be the densely packed towers of public housing and new towns.
