Wrapped in a black canvas hold-all is no way to return to the country of your birth, especially if you're approaching 100 years old. But 12 hours in an overhead locker had to be preferable to roughing it in cargo, even with bubble wrap.
That's just how an artefact from the colonial era - a rosewood and silver box presented to the 16th governor of Hong Kong, Sir Reginald Edward Stubbs - has returned to Hong Kong. A farewell gift, the box had been presented by the Chinese community on the governor's departure from the colony in June 1925.
When his grandson, John Stubbs, 64, a retired teacher who divides his time between London and Greece, decided to donate
the piece to the Museum of History, a friend in Hong Kong arranged the transport (and the hold-all) for its return.
Governor Stubbs has a somewhat tarnished reputation, owing to his heavy-handed crackdown on strikers in the 1920s. But his grandson remembers Sir Edward, as he was known, as a man with a good sense of humour, although he was sometimes aloof.
Stubbs said: 'I believe he was a capable administrator, perhaps more reliable than imaginative, but a fair man.'
Another colonial memento - a ceramic plaque that Sir Edward's wife, Marjory, hated - came to an ignominious end when she decided to throw it into the Thames, taking her grandson along as an accomplice. But the piece wasn't easy to get rid of. They had wrapped it in paper, trapping air that kept the package afloat. Stubbs recalled that he and his grandmother had frantically thrown stones to sink the parcel as it was carried downriver.