Crossing the southern half of Statue Square and the busy Des Voeux Road puts you right underneath Sir Norman Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) headquarters, which opened in 1986. The whole battleship-grey building is supported on eight groups of giant pillars and it’s possible to walk right under the bank and come out on the other side - a necessity stipulated by the feng shui belief that the old centre of power on the island, Government House, should be accessible in a straight line by foot from the Star Ferry.

You look up through the glass underbelly into a sixtymetre-high atrium, with floors suspended from coathanger-like structures and linked by long escalators that ride through each storey, and open offices ranged around the central atrium. The public banking facilities are on the first two floors, so you can ride the first couple of escalators from street level to have a look.

The bronze lions at the front were saved from the bank’s previous incarnation - one is still scarred from World War II shrapnel wounds.

Next door to the HSBC is the headquarters of the Standard Chartered Bank, a curiously stepped tower squeezed between opposing blocks that - by design - just overtop the HSBC’s building. A more serious conceptual rival to HSBC is I.M. Pei’s 315m-high Bank of China, across Garden Road to the east. Completed in 1990, Pei’s angular, dark-glass building is visually striking and overtowers the HSBC building by 145m, though the knifelike profi le pointing skywards off ends feng shui sensitivities (see above) and the building is disliked by many locals. The Old Bank of China, which the new Bank of China Tower superseded, still stands next to the HSBC. A solid stone structure dating from 1950, it’s now occupied by another bank and, at the top, the China Club, a wealthy members-only haven, reputedly home to some very risque artworks.