The first time David Bellis left Hong Kong was in June 1990. He had spent eight months in the city, a Welsh computer programmer who had stopped off on his way to Australia and dallied longer than he had intended. When he got to Sydney, he found he missed Hong Kong so much he signed up for a Cantonese night class at Macquarie University.
By early 1992, he was back. He settled down, married a Hongkonger called Grace and had two daughters. In 2009, he founded a website called Gwulo.
You may have heard of it. Now he is about to leave Hong Kong again. On July 21, a few weeks after his 60th birthday, he and Grace will depart for Milford Haven, in West Wales, where he grew up and where his mother, aged 92, still lives.
His daughters are already studying in England. He will then become one of the thousands of British residents who, since 1841, have come, stayed a while, eventually left and whose photographs fill Gwulo’s pages. Bellis, a modest man with a frequent smile, is determined not to be sentimental about his place in this history.
“People say, ‘Oh, you must really love Hong Kong to have built this website’. And I try and explain that I do love Hong Kong but all of this happens out of curiosity, a meandering here and there. “It was never done to celebrate Hong Kong.
There has never been a grand plan.” He agrees that if he had moved to, say, Uzbekistan, he would probably have created exactly the same thing. For the foreseeable future, he is going to continue as Gwulo.
