A day of two-halves. This morning we went to Lantau Island to see the Big Buddha. Lantau is probably as close to rural idyll as one can get in Hong Kong. It is a largely undeveloped island that must be much as Hong Kong was when it was first settled by Westerners - covered in semi-tropical forest. The Big Buddha is exactly that. The largest seated Buddha in the world, it was erected in the late 1980s at the Po Lin Monastery. This being Hong Kong it's not exactl...

Wham! We're in Hong Kong and it's a real shock to the senses. Superficially it can appear quite familiar. They drive on the left, the buses are double deckers and the signs are in English. But they're also in Chinese and that tells you something. This is not like any Western city. It has more skyscrapers, apparently, than New York. When we were last here in 1984, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, designed by Richard Rogers, was just being finished and tow...