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‘Does home have to be a country or a city?… Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate. … We seemed always to have been home.’

Recent studies on Chinese investment in Africa have particularly focused on the hardware of development – infrastructure – and its impact. China's vision to forge a new global order was made explicit when Xi declared his ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy in 2013. Underlying the grand infrastructural schemes and political posturing are hidden financial manoeuvres, the soft side of power, unspoken sociality and value contestations. This article focuses on the variegated landscape of China–Africa trade/finance infrastructure centring on Hong Kong. It highlights top-down state orchestration but also explores historical contingencies that have shaped the strategies of those whose footprints unexpectedly straddle continental divides.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir:Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong's reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.