01
Stop one
HSBC Main Building
Diadem Diamond Damper: Nobody comes to Hong Kong for the buildings. You come for the sky. But I will allow this one, because Norman Foster hung it off a steel exoskeleton in 1985 — at the time reportedly the most expensive building ever constructed — and put every truss on the OUTSIDE, where the wind can get at it. The ground floor is not a floor at all: an open plaza facing Statue Square, escalators running in on the diagonal, feng shui, so the good energy comes in off the harbour. Do you know what else comes in off that harbour, roughly once a summer, at speeds I refuse to say in front of children? Marvellous. And the bronze lions by the doors carry bullet and shrapnel scars from the Second World War; they were shipped to Japan to be melted down, and they came back. Scarred, salvaged, still standing in the weather. I am a vibration dampener. I have never been this excited about a plaza in my life.
02
Stop two
Bank of China Tower
Diadem Diamond Damper: Now THIS is a wind machine. I.M. Pei, 1990, a stack of triangular prisms with X-bracing strapped right across the facades, on Garden Road — the entire tower is one long argument about being shoved sideways, and something out here does the shoving several months a year. In feng shui a knife edge aimed at your building is an attack, and every edge on this thing points outward like a blade; the neighbours were, shall we say, unamused, and the story goes that nearby buildings added defences. What is documented is that Pei's own design was criticised on feng shui grounds, and that he had been handed a famously awkward, cheap plot beside the old British garrison land. Cheap plot, brutal exposure, sharpest silhouette on the island. Stand under it in a gale and tell me you feel nothing. I feel everything. That is literally my job.
03
Stop three
Kowloon Walled City Park
Diadem Diamond Damper: A landscaped Jiangnan-style garden with a restored Qing-dynasty yamen in the middle of it — and I want you to think about the weather that never once got in here. A legal loophole did this: Qing China kept nominal jurisdiction after 1898 while Britain ran everything around it, so this block went ungoverned, and it grew into the densest human settlement that has ever existed. Roughly 350 towers fused into one another. About 33,000 people on some six acres. The only thing that capped the height was the airport approach coming in right overhead. Ask a typhoon to find its way into that and watch it give up. It was cleared in 1993 and 1994. They kept the old yamen, and they kept two cannons. I chase catastrophes for a living, and that one quietly dismantled itself.
04
Stop four
Star Ferry Pier, Tsim Sha Tsui
Diadem Diamond Damper: Cheapest crossing on earth — green-and-white, double-ended, straight out across open water from a colonnaded pier with a clock tower — and the calmest thing I will show you all day, which is a shame, because in April 1966 the front came from inland. The ferry company applied to raise first-class fares by five cents. Five. A young man staged a hunger strike at this pier, was arrested, and riots followed across Kowloon, with curfews and casualties, and the government had to run a commission of inquiry. A nickel did that. I have watched pressure systems build for a week and deliver less. Officially it was about the fare; everybody knew the fare was the excuse and the grievance was everything else. Sit on the upper deck and let the wind come across the harbour at you. That is the only kind of front I am qualified to enjoy.
One does not, as a rule, discuss small objects at length. This one earns it. The Diamond Damper is a diamond-cut vibration dampener sold in a two-pack — a fifty-pack exists for institutions and the very disorganised — and it is engineered to reduce shock and dampen string vibration.
It seats between the mains below the bottom cross and it removes the ringing note the stringbed makes at impact. It comes in black, pink, teal, white and yellow, and one is expected to have an opinion about which.
What it does not do is change how the ball leaves the racquet. A dampener silences the frame; it does not soften it. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something, and probably in a plastic clamshell. What it does do is remove a noise, and a noise, over three sets, is not nothing — ask anyone who has ever lived above a road.
Hong Kong will understand the principle exactly. The HSBC Main Building has an empty plaza under it and escalators set on a diagonal, and one is invited to believe this is engineering. It is not only engineering. Small adjustments, correctly placed, to the flow of a thing.
You'll get use out of this everywhere from the public courts of Victoria Park to whatever rooftop somebody has fenced in this month. And by the way, it's also perfect for the thing Hong Kong genuinely loves — the Star Ferry at dusk, five minutes across the harbour for almost nothing, taken daily by people who could afford to fly — because both are very small purchases that improve an entire day.
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