Umbrellas now and then: 20 years since Hong Kong handover, have things really changed?
The sun may have set on Britain’s last major colony two decades ago, but today it is largely business as usual in the Chinese SAR of Hong Kong
I had moved from New York to Hong Kong the previous year with Time magazine, so seduced by the prospect that I accepted the job as the magazine’s regional business writer without even asking on what terms. My first assignment on June 30 was interviewing Jan Morris, the author of the finest book on Hong Kong in the run-up to 1997 because she sought to capture its energy and resilience in a series of snapshots and steered clear of apocalyptic predictions. When we met, Morris likened Governor Chris Patten, about to take a break in France to write a book, to the great orator Cicero biding his time in exile from Rome a couple of millennia earlier. It seemed only a matter of months before the Conservative Party, then as now short of leaders with Lord Patten’s charisma, would summon him to greater things. I would see Patten twice that day, first as his car drove by in the morning to loud cheers from the crowds and then at the departure of the Royal Yacht Britannia.

On the night of June 30 and in the days after, the city witnessed downpours like something out of a myth. It rained non-stop through the handover ceremonies. The soldiers were drenched, the grandees attending had to have umbrellas hoisted above them. As Prince Charles mingled with guests invited to the departure of the Britannia a couple of hours later, he made light of it: “I have never given a speech before completely under water.” Conscious the occasion was also a public-private farewell for Patten and his family, Prince Charles kept a low profile.
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Even the relentless rain could not hide that Patten and his daughters were weeping as the Britannia pulled away from the docks on its last journey home before it was decommissioned. Two curious coincidences marked the event: The handover that night of this gleaming jewel-box of a city was 100 years since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on June 22, 1897. And, the first royal passengers on the Britannia in 1954 had been Prince Charles, then 5, and his sister Anne.