Fragrant Harbour

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Did you know that Hong Kong is sometimes called "Fragrant Harbor"? The city of Hong Kong has a rich history that spans over 6,000 years. It is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and one of the most advanced cities in Asia. Hong Kong boasts one of the largest collections of skyscrapers in the world. It began as a fishing, salt mining, and farming village and later developed into an important seaport in China. Today, residents of Hong Kong enjoy a high quality of life and a long life expectancy. Naming Of The City A big, ambitious novel that doesn’t read like one. There are no pretensions here. Lanchester’s prose is so clean and his style seems so effortless that one begins to underestimate the real achievement: In four personal narratives from four engaging characters, Lanchester chronicles the history of Hong Kong in the 20th century. Wow. He makes it look so easy. a 2015 oil. majorly chinese with that feral, animalic, pheromonal and rustic opening. super intense like china sayang and chinese exclusive. that boozy, bitter root veg opening. sobering and isntantly gets ones mind focused and fully alert. opening is too much for me, but after 30-45 minutes or so, a liquer of damp wood and a very oudy base gets formed. some sweetness comes in to balance the bitter and feral qualities. this is not for me, but i can comfortably recommend it to folks who enjoy oils like ensar's china sayang, chinese exclusive and even (not fully) the hainan 05. More than this, I cannot say…John Lanchester knows exactly how much to say, and how much to leave unsaid... and so he leaves much for us to imagine.

a lovely and majorly complex oil. super enjoyable and big vertical complexity. its sheer youth is not fully showing. it comes across as more settled and aged for a year or two. This came as little surprise to Lord Patten, as he later became. He told the Guardian ahead of the 10th anniversary of the handover: "I always believed that it was absurd to think that the Chinese leadership, which was rational and increasingly sophisticated, would want to pull the roof down on Hong Kong, because it's such a successful part of China's economy. Lanchester was brought up in Hong Kong; his knowledge of the place is impressive. And what better setting to explore his fascination with money and its effect, good and bad, on those who pursue it? Ms. Stone describes Hong Kong as the "purest free-market economy in the world;" another character, more descriptively, call it a "money typhoon." (The image of plate-glass-window-as-urinal in the men's room of the swank club atop a harbor high-rise, where gentlemen can imagine the thrill of peeing on the peons below, is a perfect emblem of Lanchester's wry view of capitalist economy.) Money and the human response to it also appear to be key to Lanchester’s latest book, Capital, which I am eager to start as soon as I finish this review! In Hong Kong, the Japanese established a concentration camp, the Stanley, in which civilians of both sexes were interned - a severe place, naturally, though despite the privations, something like 50 children were born there. Lanchester has to imagine what Hong Kong and the Stanley camp were like in those years. It’s not that he's trying to deceive us, his audience, the readers, it’s just that his coyness and sense of etiquette lead him to think he shouldn’t tell us. To some extent, he's like his father, "a bookish and private man." He's not normally one for gossip, which is one of the chief preoccupations of the expatriate community in Hong Kong. He's better known for his discretion, which endears him to expatriates, refugees, locals and Chinese alike. On the boat out, he recognises that "there was something regal about my isolation." It wasn’t just the fact that he was an expatriate:

West Kowloon

Again and again, the key events of his life happen offstage. On first surrendering to the Japanese, he reports that: 'The soldiers subjected me to certain indignities.' We are never told what these certain indignities were. Later, after he has abruptly broken off his engagement with a high-spirited young Englishwoman, Stewart says: 'It is a conversation that I prefer not to recall.' While the exact number of trees remaining in the wild may be in dispute, it’s clear that serious poaching is taking place. How (well) the juxtaposed stories gel together at the end is hidden in "that unique Hong Kong style in which the most significant information is present in the gaps, omissions and implications." But where did this beautiful city get its name and how did it come to be called the “Fragrant Harbor?” Well, the territory that is now present-day Hong Kong was first referred to as “He-Ong-Kong” in reference to the small inland between Hong Kong Island and Aberdeen Island. The name was later Romanized and the pronunciation changed to “heung gong” which translates to “incense harbor” or “fragrant harbor.” There are speculations that Hong Kong was initially the name of a small village on the island that exported trees. The village, which is now known as Aberdeen, was famous for exporting incense trees. The Europeans, who were seeking for fragrant trees and tree parts, assumed that the name “Hong Kong” referred to the entire island. Origin Of The Name When he surrenders to the Japanese, he reveals only that "the soldiers subjected me to certain indignities." We don’t need to know a bit more. Of his beatings, he says, "I will not describe what happened in detail, other than to say we were subjected to three sessions each, over about three days". When he breaks off an engagement to an English woman, he says "it is a conversation I prefer not to recall." When he parts company with Sister Maria, he reveals, "There might have been something more to say, but if there was, I couldn’t think of it."

Here I have an advantage over him, having been there in August 1945, trying to attend to released internees, and I can pit my memory against his imagination. This is a fortuitous advantage that a reviewer ought not to take. Still, Hong Kong was a more awful place in 1945 than this account of it makes clear. After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality. Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice.even off the vial i knew what i have in front of me and ready to give out my impressions, but i decided to try them all a couple of times at least and explore their evolution all the way to dry down. some lessons were learned from doing so.

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Riya Chandiramani, Ling Muki, Mizuki Nishiyama, Tyler Jackson Pritchard, Ross Turpin, Louise Solloway Chan, Rain Chan, Benson Koo, Mooncasket & OBSRVR

lots of stuffing in this oud. major major drydown. not an oud for the faint of heart. brilliant though. this stuff is going to be a legend. there is so much more going on that i need to study further and cant put to words now. Margaret Thatcher's government began talks with China in 1982. Two years later came the Joint Declaration, setting out the terms for handover, guaranteeing Hong Kong's capitalism and limited democracy for 50 years. When the hotel is agreed to be sold and he learns that he will be given a loyalty bonus, he asks Masterson’s executor how much. He discloses only that "He told me": Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in.