A mandarin collar in the China Club

Jonny bought me a gorgeous dress for my birthday a few months back. It is a cream and black silk dress with a self-tie sash on the back and a mandarin collar. I never owned an item of clothing so beautiful and I feel special when wearing it.

Such a special dress deserves to be worn on special occasions. And sometimes those occasions deserve to be created. So as per my request (a place worth my dress), Robert and Maria took us to the China Club on our last night in Hong Kong.

Hong kong has very few traces of the past. The old Bank of China building, which was built in 1950, is one of the few pre 1960 buildings left standing. The Art Deco building once was a skyscraper. Now, sandwiched between the mirrored Bank of China tower and the glass Hong Kong Bank building, it is a dwarf.

The China Club is on the top floor, or rather, the three top floors. The labyrinthine halls lead to high-ceilinged dining rooms and bars, reading rooms and secluded libraries. The Long March bar resembles the bar of an ocean liner. It looks like a gentleman's club of the 1930s. Apart from the art that adorns the walls: the China Club has one of the best collections of contemporary Chinese art anywhere in the world.

Sat in the bar, you can easily imagine that this is what the colonial past was like, elegant and magical, with a sense of fun. At the same time you know that this is a Hong Kong that probably never existed. And indeed, what feels like a remnant of a colonial past, is in fact brand new. The club was actually built over the past five years. But some sense of a past is worth recreating in a city that is always rushing forward.