Then & now: Rubble rousing

Well, the inevitable has finally happened - after a delay of a couple of years, Lady Clara Hotung's Peak residence (built for her by her husband, Sir Robert Hotung) has been completely demolished by her granddaughter, Ho Min-kwan. There's something very depressing about the serious study of history, as a logical reading of the available evidence tends to point one in prophetic directions. In the case of Ho Tung Gardens - now rubble in a landfill somewhere - everything I predicted in these pages over the past couple of years has come to pass. And no one involved in this sorry tale - no one - comes out of it very well.

Where to begin? What passes for heritage legislation in Hong Kong has been - yet again - exposed as completely toothless. The Antiquities Advisory Board has for years been composed of such breathtaking mediocrities that it is hard not to suspect they were selected for exactly that reason. The heritage activists, through their consistently inaccurate representation of the building's history - "home of the first Chinese to be allowed to live on The Peak", etc - have undermined their own credibility.

On the other side, any meaningful compensation or conservation agreement proved impossible to achieve with a septuagenarian owner who refused to compromise (and, it must be stated, she was entirely within her rights to do so).

As ever in these cases, the fate of the house depended on the amount of money it would have cost to save it. Given current stratospheric property prices, combined with a palpable anti-tycoon sentiment that has only become more poisonous over time, it would have been politically impossible to compensate an already well-off private owner to the tune of several billion dollars from the public purse.

Despite the smokescreen utterances about the rights of private property owners, this political reality was what drove the government's decision to abandon temporary monument status for the mansion while a compromise solution was sought.

But no compromise was ever possible anyway; the owner only wanted redevelopment. Among Hong Kong's Eurasian community of that generation, any sense of cultural "Chinese-ness" was (or is) a convenient bolt-on, to be embraced (or ignored) as personal and economic expediency dictates. Filial piety - the honouring of one's immediate ancestors and their various legacies, including their homes - can perhaps be seen in this context.