Glittering History

A Cartier ring with interesting provenance

Sotheby's is already promoting its October 7 jewellery sale, and while we can't even begin to afford any of these ultra luxury items, there was one that caught our eye.

It is a 13.19-carat emerald-cut light pink diamond ring by Cartier that is estimated to bring in HK$4.7 million-HK$6.3 million ($600,000-$800,000).

While a diamond like that is quite rare, it is its provenance that is very interesting. It was previously owned by Ji Ing Soong, the wife of banker TA Soong, sixth brother of the famous Soong sisters.

Ji Ing's grandmother gave her the ring. Ji Ing lived a colourful life, born in Shanghai in 1920 and had her early education there. She spent some time in Hong Kong, as she graduated from high school at the Hong Kong French Convent in 1940 and then went abroad to UC Berkeley to receive a BA in History in 1944, and then much later went back for a Masters in Asian Studies in 1972.

She married TA Soong in San Francisco in 1941 and had two sons, Ronald and Leo.

In her time in California, Soong worked with a lot of charitable organizations, such as the Red Cross and Special Olympics. She also established the TA and Ji Ing Soong Gallery at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

The ring of course is stunning, but it also carries with it a lot of history. If diamonds could speak..

The Odd Man Out

Does Paul Chan Mo-po know country parks are off limits for development?

We wonder if Secretary for Development Paul Chan Mo-po got the memo that as a senior member of the Leung Chun-ying government, he should be a team player and issue the same messages as everyone else?

Yesterday on his blog, Chan floated the idea of developing land on country parks to solve the housing crisis.

He wrote that during the various seminars he attended on this issue, "someone mentioned that 70 percent of Hong Kong's land is country parks, [and] in face of a shortage of land supply and a big housing demand... can they not be developed at all?"

Today his colleague Environment Secretary Wong Kam-sing stated the city had no plans to do this.

Wong is reiterating a pledge his boss Leung made almost two years ago when he was running for chief executive, saying, "I attach great importance to green belt zones. They should be protected from development as far as possible".

When asked to comment about Chan's suggestion, Wong replied that Chan was only putting forward ideas from the community and that the government was open to new ideas.

We really have to wonder what planet Chan is from.

Environment Secretary Wong Kam-sing sets the record straight

He doesn't seem to have done his homework on looking into how many disused government sites there are, including abandoned schools and hospitals. What about confiscating empty plots of purchased land that have not been developed after a certain period of time? Can he not do an extensive survey of these places around the city and figure out how they can be developed properly and in a cost-effective way?

Why does development have to equal disturbing the existing eco-system?

Chan seems to be the odd man out on this one -- but the real question is -- has his boss noticed?

Japan's Win, China's Blunder

Tokyo wins the bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games, but China doesn't seem happy...

We are pleased to see Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympic Games, as it gives a huge morale boost to the Japanese who have been depressed by the ongoing leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The latest is that radiation readings there have spiked to its highest yet at 2,200 millisieverts, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority. That reading so high in fact that an unprotected person can die within hours.

Meanwhile, water from the contaminated tanks is leaking into the ocean and heading towards the west coast of the United States and Canada. By the time the radiation arrives there in about 10 to 14 days, it is believed the amounts will be low that it won't affect the water supply, but still...

And so Tokyo's winning bid was a much needed psychological boost for Japan, and hopefully this will motivate the country to get things back on track.

However, we have to wonder about the motivations of Chinese state media because Xinhua News Agency wrongly reported that Istanbul won the Olympic bid, while state television ran a headline during a live broadcast saying "Tokyo eliminated".

While both reports were later withdrawn, it was too late to tell China's largest news portals, sina.com and sohu.com of the blunder.

The mistake happened when Xinhua mistook a vote by the International Olympic Committee on whether either Istanbul or Madrid should advance to the next round as the final vote in which Istanbul won.

"Xinhua's blooper, which mistakes Tokyo with Istanbul, is killing newspapers across the nation," moaned Li Wanyin, deputy editor of Changsha Evening News on Sina Weibo.

He claimed the newspaper had already printed the false result and had to urgently retract hundreds of thousands of copies in the early morning and suffered a "severe loss".

"As a news provider, Xinhua owes its clients an explanation and a self-reflection," he added. He later took down this microblog post without an explanation.

Usually state media is the last to report "breaking news", so jumping the gun is amusing.

Nevertheless it's not the only time it's done this.

The latest hilarious blunder was when state media mistook The Onion as a credible news source and reported North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as last year's "Sexiest Man Alive". More recently state media thought spaceship designs on the sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica were aircraft carrier plans.

We are wondering though if China was secretly hoping Tokyo wouldn't win because of its long standing campaign against the Japanese for its wartime atrocities that Japan has never apologized for.

There are young people in China who continue to refuse to buy Japanese cars or eat Japanese food because of how their parents and grandparents were treated. It's an effective campaign, but is it really constructive?

This time though, Japan gets the last laugh... for now...

Security Paradox

A cartoon about the July incident in which Alpais Lam Wai-sze swore at police

In an ironic twist, the teacher who swore at the police is now asking them for protection.

Alpais Lam Wai-sze went to the Tai Po police station yesterday accompanied by her lawyer because she has received a threatening letter with a box cutter blade attached to it.

She said she would write a letter to Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and police commissioner Andy Tsang Wai-hung requesting police protection.

The handwritten letter in simplified Chinese was signed "underground Communist Party member". Dated August 6, the letter criticized Lam for supporting the Falun Gong and threatened to kill her. "We have to kill you... You should call the police, you must call the police," it said.

The letter writer claimed to be part of the Patriotic Youths Association, with "tens of millions of supporters". The author also accused Lam of being "an anti-Communist element" who taught students to oppose the doctrine.

"I was quite scared as any woman would be in a situation like this, but I did what any citizen would do and sought police help," Lam said outside the Tai Po police station where she filed the report. Her lawyer, lawmaker Andrew Cheng Kar-foo said this was the third death threat she had reported to police since July.

Lam is currently on sick leave from Pui Ling School of the Precious Blood in Fanling. "I hope this is the last time I have to report a letter like this," she said. "I still think Hong Kong is a place with the rule of law and I trust the police will help me get to the bottom of this."

The teacher made headlines in July when she swore a police because she was upset at how they handled an anti-Falun Gong group that was obstructing a Falun Gong group.

There was a huge debate over whether a teacher should be swearing, and the police themselves, including former colleagues banded in a protest against her.

Since then the chief executive has called for the education minister to write a report about Lam's incident, which many fear echoes the Cultural Revolution.

There was nothing illegal about what Lam did -- she happened to be filmed in a video that was put online without her consent. She was not on duty as a teacher at the time, but an ordinary citizen who was voicing her opinion; nor is it an offense to shout obscenities at the police.

Which is why we've now come to this ironic twist where the police have to protect the very person they don't care much for because she's receiving death threats.

However we do believe the authorities will do their duty. For their first clue is that the author of the threatening letter is from the mainland...