Then & Now | Hong Kong for 1930s tourists: shopping, sedan chair rides, a side trip to southern China recommended in guidebook

The Pearl of the Orient, a city of myriad lights – the Chinese Nationalist government’s guide to 1930s Hong Kong for visitors used tropes familiar decades later

Its shopping tips were a bit different back then – ivories, blackwood, camphor trunks – and its suggestions about feeding the monkeys wouldn’t wash today

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Hong Kong as seen from Smuggler’s Pass above Kam Shan, in an undated photograph. Early tourist guides to the city encouraged visitors to go out into the countryside. Photo: Getty Images

Jason Wordie

Published: 7:45am, 6 May 2024

What did visitors to Hong Kong experience in the mid-1930s? International leisure travel, then, was only for the affluent; almost anyone else who ventured beyond their home countries did so for work opportunities; tourist activities encountered en route were just a welcome bonus.

After the free-spending, worldwide economic boom that characterised the Roaring Twenties abruptly ended with the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression years, leisure travellers became a relatively scarce commodity.

Slim guidebooks such as an (unfortunately undated) Tourist’s Guide: The Colony of Hong Kong And Vicinity, interestingly produced by the Nationalist Government’s Publicity and Information Bureau, offered insights and suggestions for a brief local stay. From passing mentions that the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Bank of East Asia each had soon-to-be-completed buildings under construction (both opened in 1935), publication should have been in 1934 or early 1935.

“Picturesque Hongkong is quaint and charming as all seasoned travellers know …” and “ … a city of myriad lights, the Pearl of the Orient.” As this guidebook makes plain, this latter cliché has been regularly redeployed for the better part of a century by those unable to conjure anything more original, and currently shows no sign of abatement, however much the pearl in question may have lost its lustre – at least to some beholders – in recent years.

The cover of the Chinese Nationalist government’s publication Tourists Guide: The Colony of Hong Kong and Vicinity. Photo: courtesy of Jason Wordie.

Shopping was a key attraction; full- or half-page advertisements detailed then-popular visitor purchases such as “ivories, amber, lacquer and pewter, blackwood, teakwood furniture and camphor trunks” along with “All kinds of linen embroidered dinner sets, luncheon sets, bridge sets, tray cloths, napkins, table runners, etc.”; in short, characteristic Oriental curio items that – then – were hard to source in Adelaide, Dunedin or Durban.

“If you care for the unusual, stop at the Chinese Shanghai Street … Here you will enjoy the picturesque quaint shops with goods of every kind and description.