A trip back in time: when a one-hour ride to Guangzhou seemed a world away

With the opening of the new Futian railway station yesterday, it now takes less than an hour to travel to Guangzhou, a hub city connected to the national network, even faster than travelling to some remote areas of Hong Kong.

It’s the kind of convenience that was once unimaginable for Paul Lee Siu-nam, a professor in his 60s at Chinese University’s School of Journalism and Communication.

Lee recalls how it used to take the best part of a day to reach his hometown of Huizhou (惠州) in Guangdong in the 1970s, while hauling heavy bags full of gifts for relatives.

He and his family would line up at Hung Hom station as early as 6am to catch the train to Shenzhen, and then change to a small van near the border before finally arriving in Huizhou at around 3 to 4pm.

“I remember I wore multiple layers of clothes when heading for Huizhou, but only one layer was left on the way back to Hong Kong,” Lee says. All the extra clothes were given to his mainland relatives.

That was a common tactic used by Hong Kong travellers back then, as they tried to take as many things as possible to relatives struggling with poverty and desperately short of bare necessities in the storm of the Cultural Revolution.

“We left whatever we could leave,” says Lee.