The handover to China, an economic slump, SARS . . . It's been tough, but the reports of HK's death, argues Simon Winchester, are greatly exaggerated

The dawn of my last morning in what was, until recently, the liveliest and most energetic place on the planet broke gray and windy and as silent as the grave. The harbor was entirely empty—not even the little green-and-white double-decked boats of the Star Ferry were making their customary five-minute voyage between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, and all the other hundreds of vessels that usually crisscross the waterway had scuttled for cover. The streets were well-nigh deserted, the skyscrapers loomed wetly in the mist, and in the distance the high peaks of the New Territories, normally the greenish blue of celadon, were wreathed in cloud. Everything looked like an up-to-date version of a Tang dynasty painting: mannered, precise, monochromatic—and lifeless and silent besides.

There was a reason for all this mysterious quiet: An enormous typhoon named Imbudo was roaring in from the Pacific, and under government orders laid down decades ago by the Royal Observatory of colonial days, when what is locally known as Signal Number 8 is raised to indicate a fast-approaching storm, everything—offices, stores, ferry services—must shut down until the danger has passed. And for a few hours on my final day here, that indeed was what happened. Hong Kong was closed, its energies temporarily turned off as if by a giant hand on a brass spigot, screwed firmly shut.

Except that this, in essence, was how Hong Kong had been not just for the one day of the typhoon but for all of the two weeks that I had been here—my first prolonged sojourn since I last lived in the territory six years ago. Morning, lunchtime (when by tradition it used to be nearly impossible to cross against the sardine crush of pedestrians at the junction of, for example, Pedder Street and Queen's Road), or at happy hour, the place had been strangely quiet, the streets half-empty, the shops shuttered, the subways uncrowded, the restaurants an ocean of starched napery and glittering cutlery with scores upon scores of unoccupied chairs.

People talk idly of the territory looking like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, or the Marie Celeste, or the plague-racked Oran of Albert Camus. You hear passing references to all the suffering that this tiny but unforgettable place has had to put up with since the British were obliged to hand it back to Chinese rule at the end of June 1997. Some people even go so far as to talk about an unthinkable eventuality that they title the Death of Hong Kong.

Of course, it is not nearly so dire, and I am relieved to report that Hong Kong is still very much alive. Having endured worse fates in the past and come up smiling its famous gold-toothed smile so many times, it will no doubt survive all of these latest misfortunes as well. But there is an undeniable melancholy about the place, much more so than when I lived so very happily here. It has many causes: the war, the economy, the politics, the glowering presence of the Communists running things a thousand miles to the north in Beijing.