Then & NowHong Kong diamonds: essential shopping for celebrities and money launderers
Territory’s lack of a sales tax was long a lure for big jewellery buyers such as Elizabeth Taylor. These days the city’s diamond shops attract not just the well heeled, but money launderers
A diamond is forever – or so one of the leading South African mining companies has been proclaiming as an enormously profitable advertising strapline since 1947.
Shrewd marketing campaigns have been colossally successful in persuading otherwise rational people that lumps of super-compressed carbon make fitting symbols of undying love and devotion. Helping to feed Hong Kong’s enormous appetite for diamonds, the pages of glossy local society magazines glitter with sparkly advertisements for these extravagantly priced, closely coveted baubles.
From the colony’s 19th-century beginnings, flashy public displays of wealth were commonplace, and in the upper echelons of society, little has changed. Merchants’ wives – and mistresses – needed a constantly changing external pageant to demonstrate their own status as the kept women of a successful man. The crude fact that these women were sitting down firmly on the ultimate source of their personal fortunes was beside the point; material evidence of their feminine charms had to be ostentatiously worn around their necks and draped up their arms for their painstakingly obtained rank to enjoy any validity.
Commodification and monetisation of personal relationships through the giving and getting of gewgaws is, of course, not unique to Hong Kong society; but somehow, such staggering outward display does jar more here than it might in larger, less closely interconnected societies.
