I expected less of a contrast between Bangkok and Hong Kong than between my earlier destinations. It takes under two hours to fly here from Bangkok and, in Thailand, I had already crossed the frontier into the world of slanting eyes, tonally indistinguishable syllables and impenetrable smiles.

But differences are relative: for a Hong Kong Chinese, Bangkok must be a city as exotic as Rio for a New Yorker or Naples for a native of Düsseldorf: a place of sunshine and dolce far niente, the gateway to another universe, where faces are smoother, women more sensual and where gods are portrayed dancing.

In Hong Kong people don't dance: even whiskey-bar hostesses save themselves for more profitable pursuits. Here, time is money, as in Düsseldorf or New York. The pagodas, junks and smiling Chinese girls pictured in tourist brochures belong to the same kind of folklore as the painters of Montmartre and the guardsmen of Buckingham Palace. The reality of Hong Kong is the soaring skyscrapers: on Victoria Island, these are commercial buildings as imposing as those of New York, except that the first four floors-accessible by escalator-are taken up by luxury shops; on Kowloon, the high-rises are residential, built for refugees from mainland China. Their 15 or 20 storey-high facades are completely covered by washing-lines which bring to mind waves in a vertical sea. Each family is housed in a space measuring nine feet by nine, every floor is equipped with communal showers and toilets, there's a school on every rooftop and every building shelters an average of five thousand people-the equivalent of a small town.

The Colony-as it is called here-enjoys a peculiar geo-political status. During the course of my stay, I learnt certain facts which I think are worth summarising.

Hong Kong is more of a country than a city and it extends beyond the built-up area to a peninsula known as the New Territories, with a surface area corresponding to a small French département. It encompasses paddy-fields as well as fishing villages, chains of mountains and even areas of desert. Victoria Island and Kowloon belong to the British Empire whilst the New Territories are on temporary loan under the terms of a treaty which is due to expire at the end of the century. Hong Kong would not be viable without the New Territories. Even so, most of the food and water consumed here has to be bought from the People's Republic of China (the volume of water supplied is actually so inadequate that running water is only available one hour a day).

Despite the precariousness of her position, Hong Kong manifests all the characteristics of "imperialist capitalism". The Colony is administered by British civil servants to apparently general satisfaction. There are no political parties, no official opposition, no elected assembly. The governor is assisted by a consultative council nominated by him, on which are represented the five or six most powerful Chinese families of Hong Kong, whose fortunes are comparable to those of Saudi princes or Texan petrol magnates.

On the other hand, one of Victoria's most imposing buildings stands just beside the new Chase Manhattan Bank skyscraper and bears the logo of the Bank of the Popular Socialist Republic of China. Communist newspapers are published in Hong Kong and films from the mainland are shown. Every day, trains crammed with frontier workers shuttle between Kowloon and Canton.

The "bamboo curtain" does not look at all like the "iron curtain"-except in the minds of American tourists disgorged in their hundreds from coaches onto a small esplanade, where they may hire binoculars and watch a few "communist" peasants working in a paddy-field beyond a small stream. For the modest price of 20 cents, they can also photograph an elderly couple with suitcases claiming to be refugees. And, for a slightly larger sum, these old people are ready to recount in garbled English all that the tourists want to hear.

All over the Colony, the sale of stories about Communist China, tailored to listeners' expectations, is a flourishing trade, especially with the border closed to all foreigners and to journalists in particular. However, Hong Kong Chinese are free to come and go, and some even send their children to school in mainland China. On their side, the British authorities limit the flow of refugees, but only insofar as Hong Kong has no more room for them. The policy of the Chinese authorities varies: it seems that they have sometimes even encouraged outward migration.

In short, Hong Kong is the product of a symbiosis between British interests and those of Communist China. Water and food are paid for in the foreign currency which China needs and in which Hong Kong abounds thanks to her export industries and her duty-free status (a Leica is cheaper here than in Germany and a Sony radio costs much less than in Japan).
It is as if Communist China had sold a small piece of its territory and four million inhabitants to the "class enemy" in return for hard currency. A logical transaction for a country rich in territory and people, but poor in dollars -even if in ideological terms it may seem strange.

By tacit convention these subjects are not touched on in Hong Kong. Even political conversations in general are avoided: if you mention Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Kai-Shek, the Great Leap Forward or People's Communes, your interlocutor will change the subject. It's not good manners to talk of the pre-communist past, and the ultimate in tactlessness is to refer to the famous deadline at the end of the century, when Hong Kong reverts to rule from Peking.

Seen from the plane, Hong Kong is an archipelago of rocky islands and peninsulas. Like other strategic bases in the Empire, it is a place chosen by men come from the sea and concerned above all for the safety of their ships. They could not have foreseen that four million people would one day be crammed into buildings clinging to the hillsides; and that, when there was no room left on the slopes, the hilltops would be sheared off in slices like slabs of butter. (The salvaged stone is then tipped into the sea and a few more acres are gained: thus the new runway is a tongue of artificial land stretching into the bay like a springboard skimming the surface of the water.)

As the plane was landing, I peered out through the portholes at the first ranks of residential tower blocks with their facades covered in Chinese calligraphy and washing lines. And, being unaccustomed to landing amidst buildings, I easily mistook the cluttered shapes of the lettering for a milling crowd in a sea of flags.

From the first, Hong Kong made me want to take photographs. Everything here is arranged vertically, not just the buildings but also the letters on the hoardings, the two-level tramways, the stepped lanes mounting to the top of Victoria Island: this yields images which are filled from top to bottom and which create a type of composition that I like. Some of the older houses look as if they had been built one on top of the other, with shanty-like structures on their rooftops and, on top of these shanties, yet more washing lines. On some facades, the residents have hooked up covered balconies which look as if they are about to collapse and on which yet more families are packed along with their furniture and their washing. I took some photographs inside one of these buildings. The ceilings are just over six foot high but, for the Chinese, this still leaves usable space. In one, they had so arranged themselves as to create a mezzanine full of furniture through which I spied a squatting man at work on his sewing machine.

Unlike Indians, the Chinese are attached to objects. Except that, due to lack of space, they are forced to pile their belongings one on top of the other. In so doing, they create architectural structures of suitcases and shoeboxes which are continually displaced and reconstituted according to whether the owners have to work, cook or sleep in the midst of their possessions.

Are they obsessed by a dread of emptiness? (Like me, with my photographic compositions...) Their time is just as packed as their space: they work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, 362 days a year, without a weekly day of rest or public holidays outside three days off for the Chinese New Year. The main concern of the Hong Kong police is to stop illegal work: by day, policemen destroy shacks built without permission high in the hills, as well as illegal terraced allotments created by squatters over the rocks using earth bought by the load and carried from afar on men's backs. By night, the offenders rebuild what the policemen have destroyed during the day, and so it goes on until the officials lose heart.

(In fact these conflicts arise out of the excessive scrupulousness of the authorities: not only do they re-house the refugees in new tower blocks as and when they are built, but they also compensate them for the shacks, allotments and mini-factories which they are forced to abandon-thus triggering further costs, which the administration would rather avoid.)

The Chinese are so busy filling their time that they barely allow themselves the leisure to look up. I ventured out into some shanties in the suburbs where tourists never go. In India or in Egypt I would immediately have been surrounded by a crowd. Here the women carry on with their washing, apparently indifferent to my presence. Even the children don't have time to lose. I photographed one-who could not have been more than two years old-bearing an even smaller baby on his shoulders, as he walked behind his mother, herself carrying some heavier load.

Besides work, the two things which matter in their lives are food and gambling. In the evening, certain streets resonate to a sound like machine-gun fire which turns out to be nothing but mah jong pieces being slapped onto tavern tables. At the ice-cream seller's, the children don't just buy an ice: as a bonus, they are allowed to turn the arrow on a roulette wheel which may win them a second serving. And always, whether it's roulette, mah jong or slot machines, they apply themselves to the game just as methodically as to their work.

They eat their food with the same determination for that matter: glued to their bowls, their chopsticks creating an uninterrupted alimentary flow between receptacle and mouth. They eat wherever they happen to be, in the course of any occupation, at any hour, alone or with family, in the workplace, at their stalls or in street taverns.
Food is on display everywhere but it is often difficult to make out what it is: some shops present walls of plucked and flattened ducks, like overlapping scales, while others sell carcasses of iguanas or snakes, shark jaws, swallows' nests, dried mushrooms, duck gizzards, eggs of all kinds and of every dimension, spotted, streaked, black or covered in mould (which, I am told, is the ultimate in gastronomic refinement). The dominant idea in Chinese cuisine is that every substance of animal or vegetable origin can be transformed into a delicious dish as long as it is prepared in the right way. It is doubtless significant that, for the Chinese, personality is not centred in the head or the heart, but in the belly.

I don't think I saw anybody starving in Hong Kong. I surely saw poverty, but it looks completely different to poverty in India. Here, squallor takes on the appearance of an excess of material objects, all more or less filthy, rotten or smelly, as if over-abundance were a form of wretchedness.

The other-and doubtless more fundamental-contrast with India lies in the quality of the human presence. In India of an evening, you see motionless people sitting for hours at a time on the seashore as if absorbed by the motion of the waves. Or it may happen that some total stranger shows up in your hotel room, sits on the floor and watches you with the same concentration, without saying a word or asking for anything, yet with such intensity that he seems to float outside his material shell.

Whereas the Chinese never lose sight of their mundane concerns. They never stop asking, "How many pounds, how many inches, how many dollars? What's the exact time?" They always pick up the lost thread of dialogue-but don't ever let you hold their gaze. If they feel hard-pressed, they produce this laugh which is nothing but a barrier: as their eyes screw up, they become even smaller and more impenetrable.

Tenderness seems unknown to them: I don't think I saw any couples holding hands. And when I reached out my own hand to stroke a child's head, he flinched as if to avoid a slap. I believe these children must remember their mothers as a back: it's the part of the body she turns to them most in the first years of their lives. (In Japan, mothers also carry their children on their backs, but they are hitched higher up, so that the child can lean its face against the nape of its mother's neck. And she turns round at every moment to smile at her baby.)

Should their tendency to deform be interpreted as an inclination to cruelty? (For instance, the atrophied feet of the women, the dwarf trees, these living forms which are bent or forced against their natural direction.) Even some of their ideograms-which originally represented a woman, a child, an elephant or a tiger-have been so distorted through use that they don't retain the slightest resemblance to their original models. Yet the Chinese claim to be sensitive to nature: perhaps they only appreciate it when refashioned to their taste in forms which correspond with their own mental structures.

On the subject of cruelty, one of the places which struck me most was "Tiger Balm Garden", a private park belonging to an extremely rich industrialist, inventor of the allegedly miraculous pomade named "Tiger Balm". This park is full of perfectly kitsch polychrome sculptures, meant to represent the great myths of different civilizations: Chinese, Indian, Greek and of course Hollywoodian. The park is open to the general public during the New Year festivities and families come here for outings with their children. The sculptures which most attract them and where they like to be photographed with the last little tot on their shoulders, are those which show examples from the repertory of Chinese torture in very realistic and brightly-coloured detail: from the simple gouging of eyes, to quartering by four horses, to yet more imaginative procedures like that of cutting open a woman's belly and sewing it up again after the insertion of a live cat. Children point their fingers, ask questions and follow the explanations with interest. What could be more beneficial to their education?

I must admit that I felt daily more irritated by this city and its inhabitants, with their unending pursuit of money, gambling and food. In this metropolis of four million people overflowing with material riches, there is not one good film to be seen, not one play, concert or art exhibition. People in the street pass me without looking up. They don't wish me ill: it is as if I didn't exist for them, as if each of them was surrounded by his own Great Wall of China.

Even when it is in their own interest to come up to me, like the shopkeeper wanting to sell me gadgets or the hooker trying to inveigle me into her bar, they do it clumsily, pursuing me so insistently that they put me off. I wondered whether what seems incomprehensible about Chinese foreign policy, and which we often attribute to "oriental" subtlety, is simply the product of some psychological handicap, of this mental Great Wall which stops them from seeing us as their kind.

But my frustration comes above all from the feeling that, in Hong Kong, I have discovered only a very partial aspect of China, and certainly not her best. Had I been allowed to cross the "bamboo curtain", I would perhaps have encountered people who do not only pursue material goals. I don't know if I would have felt any closer to them than to the inhabitants of Hong Kong, but I regret not having been given the chance.