HONG KONG, June 5 — Queen’s Pier is a simple building, a few short columns and a low roof next to Hong Kong’s harbor, designed and built after World War II for official events like the arrival and departure of colonial governors.
The government’s Antiquities and Monuments Office classified the pier this spring in the highest category of historic buildings, as the scene of important events in the city’s colonial history. But the government planning office and an important legislative committee agreed on May 23 that the pier should be dismantled to make room for a harborside highway and a shopping mall.
As Hong Kong prepares for the 10th anniversary on July 1 of its return to Chinese rule, Queen’s Pier has emerged as one of several symbols of Britain’s disappearing influence here.
While Prince Charles came for the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government has pointedly not invited leaders from Britain or any other country to the 10th anniversary celebrations. President Hu Jintao of China is expected to preside, and the ceremony will emphasize Hong Kong’s Chinese heritage and permanence as part of what Chinese officials call the motherland.
The closing of the pier to boats to make way for landfill barges, on April 26, attracted little notice. Several Hong Kong officials were at the airport greeting two pandas donated by mainland China to live at an amusement park here. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, was at a trade show in central China.
In a speech a few blocks away the same day, Stephen Bradley, the British consul general, put distance between Britain and its former colony.
“The colonial relationship is far behind us,” he said “For us, Hong Kong is just another foreign relationship now, just as for Hong Kong we are another country, though of course we retain a special affection for and a special interest in Hong Kong, which I like to think is reciprocated, at least by some.”
There is no shortage of reminders of Britain’s 156-year rule of Hong Kong, which it won during the opium wars and controlled — to its great economic and political benefit — through treaties it forced on China. It remains home to 265,000 holders of full British citizenship. Annual trade between Hong Kong and Britain has quadrupled in the past two decades, to $13.5 billion. British companies still control the dominant airline here, Cathay Pacific, and much of the expensive downtown real estate is occupied by shops bearing international brands like Tiffany. Mr. Bradley listed British cultural events to be held here this year, including an exhibition of British Museum treasures. But except for the release of a commemorative book, all are set for August or later; government-run museums and concert halls here are booked solid with shows of Chinese art, Chinese archaeological finds and Chinese music in the weeks before and after July 1.
The changes ripple throughout the city. Hong Kong once shut down every year to celebrate the queen’s birthday, reserved most of the best jobs for new arrivals from the British Isles and took pride in honoring distant monarchs with statues in quaintly named parks. Cantonese-speaking residents now run the territory, and the queen’s birthday has been replaced by holidays like China’s National Day, although the parks still have regal statues and colonial names.
The downtown Star Ferry terminal was demolished in December, to make way for the same land reclamation project affecting Queen’s Pier; that, at least, set off scuffles pitting the police against protesters who saw the building as part of Hong Kong’s own heritage. Queen’s Pier, more a symbol of the colonial era, has drawn less interest.
Hong Kong’s economy is now closely intertwined with mainland China’s, not Britain’s. Investment banks and shipping lines that used to see Hong Kong as a base for doing business across southeast Asia now use it as their headquarters for operations focused on China.
The project that will replace Queen’s Pier — the pier is to be rebuilt at an undetermined location as a reminder of the past — will partly block harbor views of another British institution, the Asian headquarters of HSBC, which has already been literally overshadowed by a much taller Bank of China tower, designed by I.M. Pei.
Some residents are still nostalgic for British rule. A retired Hong Kong Chinese couple came to Queen’s Pier recently and spoke fondly of the days when British governors still used it.
“I miss the British very much,” said the husband, a retired building manager. “The British government contributed a lot to the development of Hong Kong.” He gave his name but later asked that it not be used, an increasingly common occurrence in Hong Kong as many grow nervous about the extent to which mainland China may someday tighten control.
Near the end of the speech in which Mr. Bradley spoke of Hong Kong as “just another foreign relationship,” he held up a small white porcelain pot adorned with a blue drawing of a pavilion with weeping willows. He said that it was made in China around 1790, filled with tea leaves and sent to Britain, where a later owner had an English artist apply a layer of gilding to the corners.
British influence in Hong Kong might prove like the gilding, wearing off with time, Mr. Bradley said. But he said he hoped that “Hong Kong is not like this container at all, but is a real amalgam from which the non-Chinese elements simply cannot be extracted but are integral, and have become part of the Chinese clay from which the pot is made.”
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