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You thought that by posting presentations about extremely expensive items and royalty that I wouldn’t be able to make one of my patented boring comments. Wrong! The 80th floor penthouse in Hong Kong was said to have a “jaw-dropping view of Victoria Harbour”.

I too have had a jaw-dropping view of Victoria Harbor. On the first day of our visit to Hong Kong during our West Pac cruise in 1959, I had to climb the mast and work on the radar antenna. The view of the harbor was not only great but there were water-taxis filled with jaw-dropping bar-girls zooming around the ship tossing items on deck that advertised their respective bars.

Can you imagine that being allowed today? You would be more likely to get a bomb tossed on deck rather than a plastic cigarette pack holder with “Wing’s Bar on Lockhart Street” printed on it. By the way, the cigarettes that went inside that holder only cost us nine cents a pack or ten cents a pack for filtered.

I have been wanting to answer your post about your time in Hong Kong, I too was there several times in the early 1950´s. Of course it was not like it is today the Bank of China was the biggest building then. I always remember the sampan girls who got contracts to service the ships. They would do cleaning and painting for the privilege of removing all the garbage. The Mama sans would produce carefully preserved recommendations of theirs and their grandmothers and great grandmothers from previous ship’s captains going back to the days of sailing ships.

The girls were very pretty and the crew treated them better than their sisters. Absolutely no hanky panky they could not be safer even if they were in a convent. At meal times they would fill their pails with the left over food and of course lots of other things that the sailors gave them. They have been a tradition in the Royal navy ever since the British leased Hong Kong.

They lived on the sampans and depending on the size there were half a dozen to a dozen girls on each sampan.