The giant rock that defines Hong Kong

Many of Hong Kong’s 7.4 million residents remain proud of their “Lion Rock Spirit”: a collective determination to better their lives against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Many societies flatter themselves with tales of a core value supposedly in their DNA. The British have their so-called “Blitz Spirit”, a teeth-gritted resolve said to have been shared by people during Germany’s intensive bombing campaign of World War II. Americans, meanwhile, are always keen for personal improvement, as promised by the “American Dream”.

On the other side of the planet, many of Hong Kong’s 7.4 million people also take pride in an intangible quality that they claim as their own. The “Lion Rock Spirit” – which describes their collective determination to better their lives against seemingly insurmountable odds – is, believers say, hardwired in the Asian city.

After all, many older Hong Kongers arrived in the tiny territory on China’s southern coast as refugees with nothing, fleeing from turmoil in mainland China between the 1930s and ‘60s when Hong Kong was still a British colony. It was their resilience and hard work, they insist, that transformed their city into a global financial centre in just one generation.

“We all had to work hard back then,” said Chan, an elderly man I met outside a sprawling Hong Kong public housing estate. “If you did not, you would go hungry, your children would be hungry. Everyone was working hard for their future.”

“The Lion Rock Spirit was a common belief in my parent’s generation,” said Bryony Hardy-Wong, whose mother and father arrived from China in the 1960s, and who was brought up on a similar housing estate. “Most of them were coming from humble backgrounds. What they believed was to work hard, and then they could win the opportunities to climb up the social ladder.”

Hardy-Wong, who works as a communications manager in the city, cited the much-celebrated case of Li Ka-shing, who arrived with his family in the 1940s, fleeing war and living in extremely humble circumstances in their exile. The death of Li’s father from tuberculosis meant Li was forced to leave school at 15, working 16 hours a day in a plastics trading company.

Now retired, Li is believed to be the wealthiest person in Hong Kong, a go-getting metropolis with a GDP per capita on par with that of Germany. Li’s assets, according to Forbes magazine, top US$35bn. “Li Ka-shing is always a role model for the older generation,” Hardy-Wong said.

A special administrative region of China since 1997, hilly Hong Kong comprises three distinct areas: Hong Kong Island; the Kowloon Peninsula, just across the busy waters of Victoria Harbour; and the largely rural New Territories that mainly stretch between Kowloon and China proper.

Kowloon means “nine dragons” in Cantonese, denoting a 13th-Century Chinese emperor and a procession of eight hills cutting between the peninsula and the New Territories. Lion Rock is one of those hills, its 495m peak topped by a huge and distinctive granite outcrop that, in silhouette from Kowloon, really does resemble a crouching lion.

The lives of refugees from mainland China in Hong Kong had always been tough, but between 1945 and 1951 – firstly with China’s civil war raging and eventually with the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s Red Army – the city’s population more than tripled, from about 600,000 to more than two million.

BBC