Then & Now | Expert guest lecturers enliven group tours in many places. Good luck finding any who’d dare to explain Hong Kong nowadays
- One of the few benefits of Hong Kong schools’ reliance on rote learning is the preparation they offer people who, as adults, work as tour guides
- These guides parrot a clichéd history of the city. Elsewhere, guest lecturers’ expertise and honest answers enliven tours. That won’t work in today’s Hong Kong
According to a succession of chief executives, tourism is vitally important to the local economy. But like much else in contemporary Hong Kong, this allegedly key industry continues to wallow in the doldrums.
Presentation of local “attractions” remains problematic. Preferred tour-bus-style excursion routes were originally designed – back in the 1970s – to give readily digestible, “on the right you can see …” scenic overviews to overseas punters with a presumedly sketchy grasp of exactly where they were in the world.
Orientalist twists were essential to these cliché-raddled scripts; exotic East tropes, such as contrived feng shui explanations for local architectural design quirks, allowed complex – and inherently more interesting – explanations to be reduced to a few easily remembered, readily regurgitated sentences.
Better yet, these “Pearl of the Orient” infused traveller’s tales offered no mental challenge to passive listeners; tour-bus passengers could tune in (or out) from the guide’s buttery commentary as overall subject interest, personal stamina and residual jet-lag levels permitted.
In the minds of their originators, these colourful snippets, accompanied by randomly snapped photos taken from the tour bus window, also provided a repertoire of ready-made, presumably memorable stories to tell the folks back home in Buttcrack Falls.
Becoming a tour guide back then required few skills beyond reasonable English (or, by the 1980s, Japanese) and a copious memory for rote-learned regurgitation – the Hong Kong education system, at its worst, produces superb exemplars of this sorry skill set – and enabled tour operator margins to be kept low; staff wages inevitably reflected these factors.
