Memories of The Sea Palace

The Sea Palace lights up Aberdeen Harbour in the 1960s. Hong Kong.

I’ve had two visits to Hong Kong this year, 2019, promoting the local edition of my memoir, The Hong Kong Letters, published by Hong Kong’s own Blacksmith Books.

I sank back into Hong Kong with a familiarity and an affection that really took me by surprise. Hong Kong has changed enormously as we all know and the pace of that change has accelerated with the current volatility. While its spectacular harbour and the march of high-rise up Victoria Peak is so iconic, Hong Kong’s real essence rests with the people. Polite and solicitous, Hongkongers have defined themselves as a brand. Over the course of its history, Chinese from the mainland arrived to join those already in the territory, and have adopted an unusual lineage as part of their own.

Aberdeen - the original ‘Fragrant Harbour’

There were many places that I wanted to get back to and one of those was Aberdeen. It was such an extraordinary place in the 1960s, I might have hesitated fearing the change. But on my visits this year I realised that I could not complain that the Hong Kong that I rememered was not the same for neither am I. And I found I could treasure my memories without sacrificing my curiosity for the present. I didn’t visit Aberdeen in the end because I simply ran out of time.

Aberdeen harbour, fishing port and home to the Tanka boat people, was one of the most colourful places to visit in the 1960s. The Tanka had perfected a long established and elaborate tradition of living well afloat.

Aberdeen Harbour scene from Love is a Many-Splendored Thing

The famous floating restaurants

Like many foreigners, my initial visit to Aberdeen was to dine on one of two famous floating restaurants. Film directors too could rarely resist that scene, where prosperity and paucity coincided with such picturesque charm. And that’s wonderful because unusually for the time, they shot the Aberdeen scenes on location and we can be transported back to visit the extraordinary lifestyle of the people who lived among the sprawling maze of planks and ropes that joined small junks and sampans moored in the shadow of the magnificent fishing fleet which swung at anchor in the deeper water.

It was October 1968 when I had my first dinner at The Sea Palace. The floating hulk had been built in the 1950s and was a restaurant for fifty years. It had been designed with the famous Marble Boat, at the Summer Palace in Peking*, in mind. My boss, Patrick O’Neil-Dunne, (known as P-O-D) insisted that The Sea Palace had better food as demonstrated by the greater number of Chinese patrons and fewer tourists than frequented its competitor, the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant.

The journey to The Sea Palace was part of the experience

It was early evening when a woman in black wearing her traditional straw Hakka hat, propelled us across Aberdeen harbour using a bamboo steering pole. The tiny sampan was home to her whole family. A small girl ignored us, concentrating on her homework, while washing hung on lines strung round the craft. When we reached The Sea Palace, completely covered in lights, its bulk dwarfed our sampan and its tiny lantern.  I watched while the sampan turned and soon was swallowed up in the busy harbour.

POD took my arm, “Come on, we’ll get another sampan ride home,” and ushered me toward the waiters, impatient for us to start make the selection for our meal. There was no menu, they simply hauled battered rattan baskets up over the side from the sea below. We had to select from fish, crabs, rainbow lobster, octopus, eels and crayfish. I was overwhelmed by that idea, so POD took charge and ordered our party an enormous quantity of seafood. His choices were tossed into a basket with our table number.

The whole meal was accompanied by warm rice wine. And afterwards POD, keen to make my first visit memorable, insisted that the restaurant’s time-honoured photos were taken, escorting me to the ‘throne’.

I put these up recently on a Hong Kong in the 60s Facebook page and received some wonderful comments including one where it was recommended never to wear the beard which never got washed!

I will go back to Hong Kong and next time I will visit Aberdeen. I’m not sure I will go to the new JUMBO Kingdom Floating Restaurant with it's seating for 700 diners. I might find somewhere a little less flamboyant without POD to call the shots.

* At the time The Sea Palace was designed, Beijing was still more commonly referred to by the old name Peking.

David and Apollo

Fifty years ago at the time of the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, I had a job with an advertising agency in Hong Kong.

None of my friends had a TV, so we gathered on the roof garden terrace of the YMCA in Kowloon to watch the launch of Apollo 11 on an old cathode-ray black and white TV.  We were close pressed, cricking our necks and sweating in the heat through the build-up and count-down. You couldn’t see much on the fuzzy screen especially once Apollo had lifted-off nevertheless it felt important to be in the company of others at such a historic moment.

Apollo 11 Launch - broadcast live on 16 July, 1969

Four days later when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps, I was at huddled with most of the ad agency staff around a transistor radio to hear the epic live broadcast of the touchdown followed hours later by the news of the moonwalks.

We had a particular interest as one of our advertising accounts was the Swiss watchmaker, Omega.

When Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface, he was wearing an Omega Speedmaster Professional - a timepiece that has been known as the Moonwatch ever since.

For weeks, our agency had been booking space and working on scripts preparing for Omega’s print and TV advertising. The ad was to be simple, a picture of the moon from the space ship with an Omega watch superimposed. The film and photos were to be rushed to us by air courier.

 Everything was under control until a late call from Omega days before the Mission - to ensure there was no delay in getting advertising out, they wanted us to create a model of the moon to photograph for the advertisements.

Moon Modeller Required Immediately

That sent our little agency into a flat spin but David Dunlop who was in charge of TV commercials was nothing if not resourceful. After several telephone calls, he rushed off and came back to the office manoeuvring a large half-dome plaster cast left over from some hotel renovation. He set a blown-up map of the moon on an easel, covered the art studio in white sheets and started mixing buckets of white Plaster of Paris. All over the weekend and late into the night he measured the map, moulded and sculpted, modelling the volcanoes, craters and lava flows of the moon’s surface. David, dressed only in a pair of old shorts, for July is horribly hot and humid in Hong Kong, was soon covered head to toe in plaster. David was an artist and he touched up his finished work with a meticulous hand - highlighting crater tops and creating shadows. Once he’d hung a black cloth behind his moon and lit it with a floodlight, he called us all in to for a viewing. We all clapped. It really was a triumph and David, who spent a lot of time hating both Hong Kong and his job, was terribly proud.

My friend David was sometimes a force to be reckoned with…

The Telegram

An urgent telegram arrived from Switzerland: “SCRAP MODEL STOP FILM ARRIVING BY AIR STOP”

David had a legendary temper and so he did scrap the moon. He smashed his handiwork with a hammer until it lay in pieces. Once he was satisfied, he emerged from the art studio with flecks of white plaster sticking to the sweat on his face and stormed off to find a cold beer at the Cricket Club and some patrons to commiserate.

The final Omega ad… But not David’s Moon - this one belongs to Apollo…

 While David remained in the doldrums for days, the safe splash-down of the three astronauts, put most everyone else in a great mood. There were thousands of Americans in Hong Kong at that time – many on Rest and Recreation from the Vietnam War. They were terribly pleased with themselves.

And yet there was really was a genuine feeling not just that a Yankee had landed on the moon, but that one of us had stepped out there and that it was indeed a ‘giant leap for mankind.’

My generation all remember where we were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

And for me, I have my own folklore from the Apollo saga and it is of my friend David - a misplaced immortal fury smashing the moon to smithereens.