ADVANTAGE ZHUHAI
‘When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city, very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of high buildings... Now it’s quite different’
On the 42nd floor of the 330-metre-high Zhuhai Tower, in the reception of the opulent St Regis Zhuhai hotel, an enormous mural occupies an entire wall opposite the reception desks. The mural depicts part of Zhuhai in the early 1900s, showing a beautiful village at the bottom of a verdant hillside. Rong Hong, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale), is strolling away from the town and towards the viewer of the painting. Not far behind him, two children can be seen playing. Behind the town, the ocean is filled with sailboats.
This, one of the hotel staff tells me, is what the area surrounding Zhuhai Tower used to look like, but now it’s unrecognisable when compared with the painting. All traces of the village seem to have disappeared, and
