Behind the scenes a thousand less obtrusive electronics media are humming and stirring and bleeping through the hours. Important office blocks in Hong Kong nowadays are built, as it were, around their electronics. The territory has borrowed an idiom from the Americans as it borrows so many, and calls them not merely ‘high-tech,’ but actually ‘intelligent’ buildings, able to think. They can think through the circuits that are laid between their storeys, through the aerials and dishes on their roofs, through laser beams and TV systems. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank thinks constantly about the state of the Hang Seng financial index, displaying its conclusions on VDU screens all over the place. The Exchange Building will think also, if you pay it a fat enough subscription, about the day’s races at Shatin and Happy Valley, and present the runners’ names, the odds and the form through display units on your executive desk. It also talks: its elevators announce their progress in a sepulchral, very English male voice, like a butler’s. At night, however late, there are always lights burning in such office blocks of Central, and when I see them it gives me a not unpleasant tremor of the uncanny, as though they are lights from another world. I do not imagine people at their desks in there, only banks of computers, walls of flickering screens, tapes electronically whirring, cursors moving up and down, all bathed in the pale green light of the computer age. Nowhere is more inextricably enmeshed in electronics than is Hong Kong, and if we could see its myriad lines of inner communication, as one sees laser beams, the skies would be criss-crossed, the streets would be festooned, and we would be tripping over percentages wherever we went.

Jan Morris on Hong Kong in the 1980s