Noël Coward would be amused to know that they still fire off a noonday gun on the harbour front near the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, nearby some of the excellent Hong Kong sea property. With precision timing, a stiffly uniformed man from Jardine’s, the most famous of the territory’s old hongs, or trading houses, proudly drops the shot into the barrel at the appointed time each day and, as the tourists muffle their ears, the harbour rings for an instant to a solitary echo of Britain’s imperial past.

Most of the other vestiges of Hong Kong’s colonial heritage have been removed. The last time I was here was a few months before the sun set on Britannia’s last Chinese outpost. In those recessional days of empire the letter boxes were still bright red, you paid for your tea with bank notes that carried pictures of the Queen, and a small detachment of Royal Marines ran the Union Flag up and down the flagpole each day in front of the Prince of Wales Building.

A decade on, the letter boxes have been painted green and purple; the bank notes feature the geometric shapes of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, and the Prince of Wales Building announces itself, behind the fluttering five-starred flag of Red China, as the Hong Kong Building of the Forces of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

In three months the former colony will mark the tenth anniversary of its happy reversion to the motherland, as it calls it, with a big Chinese birthday party. For many British, the date will be an opportunity for different emotions — for regret, perhaps, or even shame. It was the only time Britain had handed a colony over not to its people but to a totalitarian power. Most scoffed at the idea that Beijing would make good on its treaty promise of 1984 that Hong Kong’s vibrant capitalist way of life and cherished political freedoms would be protected by Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” formula for 50 years.