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New Career On a clear Monday morning in early December 1961, I took a two-hour leave from my job at the American Consulate General and walked down Garden Road to Queen’s Road Central for an interview with Lee Quo Wei, manager of Hang Seng Bank. Wearing my best dark-grey suit with a red tie and buoyed by the cool morning breeze, I was in a good mood and felt quite confident about my chances. The consulate compound was on “Government Hill” and on stepping outside I was in the heart of the colonial government. Behind the consulate was the Government House, the office and residence of the Hong Kong governor. Down the road to my left were the two grey office blocks of the Central Government Offices, the former Colonial Secretariat. Adjoining the offices and surrounded by trees and shrubs was the neo-Gothic St. John’s Cathedral, the cathedral of the Anglican diocese of Hong Kong since 1849 and the venue where the colonial government held all its official religious services. Across the street on a small hill overlooking the harbour was Flagstaff House, a Victorian mansion built in 1846 which was the official residence and office of the Commander of the British Forces. (In 1978 the headquarters moved to a new building at the former site of HMS Tamar on the harbour front, and Flagstaff House became the Museum of Tea Ware for the display of antique Chinese teapots.) As I walked further down the road, however, I started to notice significant signs of the changes taking place in the colony’s political and economic landscape. Down the slope from St. John’s Cathedral was the site of the new twenty-six-storey Hilton Hotel, the first truly modern international hotel in Hong Kong and a major US investment. The hotel site was the former Murray Parade Ground where the British Empire used to show off its military might with pomp and circumstances. Turning left into Queen’s Road Central, I passed the three tall granite buildings which housed the key financial powers in the 4 Hang Seng Bank 102 The Dragon and the Crown colony. The first was Bank of China’s soaring tower-like structure, completed in 1952 as a show of strength by the new PRC government and designed to be slightly taller than the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Building next door. The massive Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Building was built in 1934 and had previously dominated the Central District. Further down the road was the tall, narrow headquarters of Chartered Bank (Hongkong Bank’s colonial rival) which was completed several years after the Bank of China Building and, in turn, was designed to be the tallest of the three bank buildings. Along Queen’s Road Central I passed a mixture of Victorian and prewar buildings with arches and columns, and the tall, new multi-storey office buildings with plain facades and large windows which housed the offices of British and international companies. Up-market retail shops, restaurants and cinemas lined both sides of the street. However, once I passed the four-storey Central Market — the colony’s main retail wet market — the scenery suddenly changed. The road narrowed markedly, and low-rise Chinese tenement houses stretched down both sides of the street as far as I could see. As I rubbed shoulders with the shoppers and workers along the street I became increasingly anxious as I realized that I really wanted the job with Hang Seng Bank. All my previous jobs had been associated with war and politics: interpreting for US forces during World War II, selling vehicles which I knew were smuggled to China during the Korean War, processing refugees for the American Consulate General, and most recently “China watching” — a euphemism for intelligence gathering — for the Americans. I longed for a change that would free me from war and political intrigues, and thought that this was my best opportunity to escape from it all. Little did I realize then that politics would continue to follow me in one form or another for the next twenty-two years of my career. Hang Seng Bank was located at 163–165 Queen’s Road Central, in a white five-storey Western-style building with aluminium windows and an elevator. The tall modern building stood out from the three- and four-storey pre-war Chinese tenement houses in the neighbourhood. Shops selling garments, leather goods, pharmaceuticals, watches and clocks, jewellery and stationery lined...

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