''In any society, the arts always have to battle for survival, they are always the first to have their funds cut, which I think is unhealthy and short-sighted. It's like being on the frontline all the time,'' reflected Mr Chia.

Of course, the frontline is where Benny Chia has spent most of his adult life - not really in the firing line, but more at the vanguard of alternative live entertainment in the territory.

Last month the softly spoken and erudite thespian was rewarded for his devotion to all things cutting edge in the theatrical world when he was awarded the Badge of Honour in Queen's Birthday Honours List.

It was 12 years ago that Mr Chia was handed the chance of a lifetime - his own fringe festival. With a promise of funding for two years from the Arts Festival coffers and a donation from the Hong Kong Tourist Association, he embarked on a career that he didn't know he actually had until years later.

''It was like being given provisions and being put on a boat - there was a lot of sailing on uncharted sea. The odds against setting up a Fringe Festival in Hong Kong with the financial constraints were high. But the high wire act was an attraction to me.

''Then there was no talk about a club or anything permanent. Each year we started with no money and a clean slate and asking, how are we going to put on a festival?'' But then, as now, a fringe philosophy kept the festival going from year to year. ''We believe that by providing an environment which is largely non-critical and informal and free and by giving support, not necessarily with money, you can encourage art to grow.'' In the early days, to make sure it flourished, he decided that the Fringe Festival had to cut its Arts Centre apron strings, starting a long process which ended at the dilapidated and boarded up Dairy Farm building on Central's Lower Albert Road. An area that is today affectionately referred to as Fringe Central.

In the early days even he didn't really know what was expected of a fringe festival, admits Mr Chia. To get people to perform it took a lot of pleading for them to get up on stage and do anything. He also had to use a lot of contacts he had developed in his time at the Arts Centre, where he worked in the programme department during the Arts Centre's early days when it was the only building for miles and people refused to go there because it was inaccessible.

By 1982, he had decided that what the Fringe Festival needed was a permanent home, somewhere artists and their audience could gather, somewhere the contact could be kept alive, and also to give the Fringe Festival a clear identity, as well as a permanent performance and exhibition space.

It started in what was then a quiet area called Lan Kwai Fong where one of the first theme restaurants, Post 97, had just opened. Soon after he began some wily negotiations to secure the Dairy Farm building, where The Fringe is to this day.

It was, reflects Mr Chia, a vital time of survival for the Fringe.

''It was a transition period of having no future to worry about in the true Bohemian spirit to that of having to work for a sort of future, to having a structure. That was difficult, but it was tremendously exciting. People started saying, 'Why don't we keep it going'.'' Suddenly the bohemians had to start worrying about turning off the lights to conserve money and protecting their one valuable possession, a baby grand piano, from cigarette burns and performance artists who wanted to pluck its strings with wire cutters in the name of art.

''Looking for sponsorship was almost impossible because people hadn't heard of The Fringe and those that had thought they would just be giving money to university graduates to make fools of themselves,'' recalls Mr Chia.

Some might have argued that was exactly what they were in conservative, early 80s Hong Kong with their experimental performance art which left shoppers at locations such as Cityplaza very perplexed.

But all-night French film runs, complete with morning coffee and croissants, and visiting jugglers and London street performers began an evolution process that has turned an invitation to the Hong Kong Fringe Festival into a compliment.

Mr Chia traces his commitment to the arts back to primary school. Hong Kong was then truly a cultural void, he remembers. But at his small Western school, a music and arts teacher taught his pupils the recorder, took them on concert tours around the territory, for performances at local radio stations and entered their art work in international competitions.

But his culturally enlightened world entered a bleak period in secondary school where there were no art classes and music lessons consisted of sing-alongs and the teacher trying desperately to control an unruly class, and so Benny retreated into a world of books.

After attending Hong Kong University, he worked for a while to save for a trip to Europe, where he spent three years in France and Belgium. It was a journey of exploration of the things he liked most - books and ancient scholars, languages and libraries and he has strong, wistful memories of winter Sunday afternoons spent in the Louvre.

''Going from Hong Kong to Paris was a huge cultural shock,'' he recalls. But despite struggling with his imperfect French, it was a shock he enjoyed.

''Hong Kong in those days, in the second half of the 70s, had hardly anything. To see a film that wasn't the usual commercial release you had to join one of the three film societies. It was light years away from what is available today.'' Although he was a rare Chinese presence among the European student art world, he never felt out of place and, oddly enough he says, it is something he has never felt.

''It's funny because for the past 12 years I have lived a very marginal existence, all the years I spent in Europe and in Hong Kong, I have never felt like an outsider.'' Today he is an accepted figure, almost part of the mainstream, and he will keep pushing for what he sees as the arts' rightful place in money-obsessed Hong Kong.

''Society owes people who are creating literature and theatre a living,'' is his opinion, and more so now than ever in Hong Kong's history.

''We need the arts in many ways, even if it is just to chronicle what is happening in Hong Kong. This is an exciting time for people in Hong Kong, but tall buildings will not stand there for ever, they are not monuments to our achievements.

''Who is going to document everything for the future - will there only be an epilogue? That is the question that has to be asked at this stage.''