I meet the people I dubbed Victor and Margaret in the hotel elevator, where he is shouting at her.

“For God’s sake, woman. You have to tap the card on the thingy or it won’t go anywhere.”

She fumbles in her purse and he stares, fuming, at me, as if to say I don’t believe it.

“It’s all right,” I say. “If you’re heading down, the lift is already going that way, so you don’t need to tap your card.”

“How about that, dear?” says Margaret. “He speaks Chinese.” And she finished with a little smirk that I translate as: And he knows how the fecking elevator works.

The 260 express bus goes straight from Central, Hong Kong’s version of Liverpool Street, through the Aberdeen tunnel to the south side of the island. Where there were once skyscrapers and teeming millions, there are suddenly winding mountain roads and secluded beaches. The bus goes past Deepwater Bay, where the beach is protected by a shark net, and two superyachts lurk ominously in the roadstead, and then Repulse Bay, where what first appear to be bungalows turn out to be the tops of twenty-storey towers, reaching up the steep slopes from a tiny bit of flat land at sea level.

This is where the smarter bankers and brokers live, in little villas on the hill-tops. And there, at the end of the bus line, is Hong Kong’s Leigh on Sea, the seaside town of Stanley. A little shaded pier juts into the bay – it is ten o’clock in the morning and it is already crowded with half a dozen fishermen. There’s an old colonial government building now converted into a seafood restaurant, and – surprise, surprise – a pub called the Smuggler’s Rest that offers fish and chips.

I’m here because the internet makes it sound like a shopper’s paradise, “the place to buy all your souvenirs.” But it isn’t. There are exactly none of the souvenirs I want, nor is there the promised calligraphy master, as someone on the internet has confused “calligraphy master” with “guy who will write your name on a grain of rice.” There are polyester cheongsams and Bruce Lee T-shirts, and I want exactly none of it.

I share the bus on the way back with a soft-spoken broker from Edinburgh and his half-Chinese son, whose name I don’t catch, but I presume to be But Why, because it’s all he ever says. They’re off to Specsavers for But Why’s first ever eye test, and his Dad is explaining why there are men cutting down trees, and why there are cars in the road, and why the bus has stopped at traffic lights. What a life it must be, living by the sea but being able to be in Bank of China building 40 minutes away… except that is surely true of anyone who lives in Leigh as well.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.