EVERY day, 460 incoming aircraft bank low over the Kowloon tenements, brush the traffic flyovers with their wheels, and make a breathstopping touchdown on a peninsula jutting out into Victoria Harbour, otherwise known as Kai Tak airport.
This week the planes are all full. They will bring 600,000 people, 20 per cent more than normal, to the British territory. They are mostly Hong Kong Chinese returning from north America, Europe, Australia and other parts of Asia, just to see Hong Kong go back to China at midnight on June 30th and to party with relatives at night, find visitors a city of glass towers draped with illuminated vines of multi coloured neon, curving into the shape of the bauhinia flower, the new symbol for Chinese Hong Kong.
People who have been away for more than a year are startled to see the new £400 million Convention Centre extension rising from the choppy green waters of the harbour like a mammoth Darth Vadar helmet.
With a glistening curved roof containing 40,000 square metres of aluminum designed to look like the wings of a soaring seabird, the just finished structure is destined not only to house the handover ceremony, but to define Hong Kong in postcards as the Opera House defines Sydney.
At the Convention Centre entrance on Harbour Road, a major security operation is already under way. A guard with metal helmet and shotgun greets everyone join in. Hong Kong's VIP protection unit has been increased from 100 to 600 officers to protect the important handover guests, according to a Hong Kong newspaper.
The media are arriving in large numbers too, with 8,000 press, radio and television journalists expected for the last big setpiece story of the century. Each one is given a souvenir shoulder bag laden with books, leaflets, a tee shirt, baseball cap, rolls of film, a handover watch and a CD Rom of Hong Kong images. Photo journalists get a free multi pocket vest from a wellknown film supplier.
Film crews and photographers patrol the streets, some looking for symbols of a colonial period which have already gone. A defining picture of the end of an era may have been taken however by Hubert van Es, the photographer who captured the end of the Vietnam War in his picture of Americans filing on to a rooftop helicopter. He took a photograph of Chris Patten's dogs, Whisky and Soda, having sex on the governor's carpet, and sent one to the governor, who apparently was so pleased he asked for two more.
The government, the Foreign Correspondents' Club and the Better Hong Kong Foundation have arranged dozens of briefings and events for the media, but tours organised by the Society of Community Organisations, which wants to show the poverty hidden behind the bright lights of prosperity, are proving most popular.
"We want cagemen, not officials, demands foreign press pack," said a headline in the South China Morning Post yesterday over a story of how some four TV crews a day are accepting invitations to tour rat infested temporary housing. Mr Au Hung (53), an odd job worker who lives in a three tier cubicle fenced like a cage in a Tai Kok Tsui bedspace apartment, has become something of a celebrity after giving a number of interviews.
A reporter asked him if he thought he had a role to play in the handover. The cageman - Mr Au says it is the correct term for people like him - replied that he didn't until recently, but he now feels the publicity he is getting might help to pressurise the government to improve their living conditions. "I can't understand their language but from their facial expressions I know they are astounded," he said of the reporters.
The week will see a few more "lasts of British rule, including the final British wedding in British Hong Kong. The first was that of Sarah Hamilton and John Holliday in 1842. The last will be between Jeanette Hegarty and Simon Vallance, both from southern England, who work behind the bar in Delaney's Irish Pub in Wan Chai. They will be married with 173 couples of other nationalities, mainly Chinese, on Sunday, after which the register office closes until Hong Kong becomes part of China.
They will be back at work next day, however. Delaney's general manager, Mr Mike O'Neill from Dublin, can't do without all his 30 staff during Hong Kong's biggest ever art time, which Delaneys will be celebrating Irishstyle, with music and drink on handover night, when it will be possible to start a pint in a British colony and finish it in China - without leaving the bar stool.