Hong Kong is well known as a concrete jungle of magnificent towers. But long before the concrete arrived, there was another kind of jungle—the bamboo groves that have for millennia colonized the hillsides of southern China, their hollow stems rustling in the wind like a thousand quiet conversations, captured in Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It is one of the most beautiful ironies in the built history of our city: that the jungle of steel and glass rising from Victoria Harbour was erected, storey by storey, decade by decade, by a forest of bamboo.