In the fall of 2023 I was invited by Professor Zaikun Zhang of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) to visit for a few weeks. We had been working together on a software package for mathematical optimization and we were trying to merge in into another software package called SciPy. The visit would include an “honorarium” to cover costs, and it was quite generous. Someone was offering to pay me to travel to Hong Kong, how could I say no??
I'd never been to Hong Kong. I knew it had been a British colony and that it had been handed back to the Chinese in the late 90's. I knew that Jackie Chan was from there, and I'd heard fascinating stories about the old airport with the harrowing approach (more on that later, and no, I did not fly into that one, it doesn't exist anymore) and even more fascinating stories about a place called Kowloon Walled City, which we will also discuss later.
I was excited to go - HK was somehow calling to me with these stories of strange places that exist nowhere else.
I would end up spending 6 weeks there across two trips. In these pages I've tried to document as much of my trip as possible, but of course it falls short. This is a different world, a different culture, a different context, in more ways than one. This place was endlessly fascinating, and I hope I can convey that to you.
I've split up the trip into various chapters. They are roughly in chronological order, but I think only the first two chapters really need to be read in order and then the rest more or less stand by themselves.