Hong Kong’s Stanley, once packed with tourists, is now dead. What happened?

With summer’s heat dissipating in Hong Kong, I decided to do a country walk last weekend and ended up in Stanley, a coastal neighbourhood in the south of Hong Kong Island. What we found there shocked us. It had been a few years since I visited the area, mostly because it was always packed with tourists. In all previous Stanley outings, hordes of visitors, whether from mainland China or Western countries, packed the side-street market and the main beach promenade. On this recent hike, a trail led...