Mainland

HONG KONG -- When Chinese customs officials opened 35 crates bound for Hong Kong earlier this month, they saw a cache of treasure worth far more than the drugs that they thought they had found.Carelessly packed in the wooden boxes was a museum's worth of Chinese artifacts: incense burners, 92 rare silk paintings, 1,000 pieces of jade, even a dozen dinosaur eggs.Authorities proudly chalked up a victory for law and order -- but hardly dented the trade in smuggled Chinese antiques, a multibillion-dollar business stripping China of thousands of valuable artifacts each year.

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- People used to take notice of Hans Chien after he opened Caveman Restaurant in Beijing last year; doing business in China was all the rage, and the restaurant was a great topic of conversation when he returned home to Taiwan on vacation.Now, however, many of his friends think he's nuts for wanting to live "over there." Not that business in Beijing is bad -- it's booming -- but Taiwanese have started to look at mainland China a bit differently."All my friends have changed their opinion over the past year," the 33-year-old entrepreneur said.

CASCO BAY, Maine -- The day-trippers wheel their bikes off the ferry and ask for directions. I answer the way we do on an island without street signs. Go up past the boatyard, beyond the store, and take your next left. They thank me and head off. Then, at the last minute, one turns to offer me a cheerful salute: "Congratulations on your independence." I've been fielding such good wishes from strangers and friends ever since the media outed the small island where my husband and I have had a summer home for more than 25 years.

BEIJING - Two years ago, China's prime minister warned the people of Taiwan that if they voted for the island's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, China would be furious. Vote for the DPP, he said, and "you won't get another opportunity to regret." Last week, in an about-face, one of China's vice premiers invited members of the DPP to tour China as informal guests. What a difference a couple of elections make. In 2000, the leader of the DPP, Chen Shui-bian, won election as Taiwan's president.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Mari Carmen Aponte still remembers the woman who came to her, tears in her eyes. "You validate me," the stranger told Aponte, "because you call me a Puerto Rican." For the director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, the woman has come to symbolize the yearning of Puerto Ricans from the U.S. mainland to be accepted by those on the island. "She wasn't talking about me," Aponte said. "She was talking about herself, and her search for dignity. ... That's all they're asking for."

NO ONE SHOULD DOUBT that China will stick to its formula of "one country, two systems," for Hong Kong. What must be doubted is the slogan's meaning as the years unfold.Hong Kong was the entrepot by which Chinese manufactures entered world trade and remains a huge port. It is the window by which overseas Chinese capital and management skills pour into China to employ its labor. And while Hong Kong's symbiosis with neighboring Guangdong Province is famous, it generates most foreign investment in all of China.

A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO, the demand for India's opium existed in China, whose insolent rulers forbade its use. So the narco-terrorists of that day made war to open China's market for addiction. In 1841, the British seized the nearly uninhabited Hong Kong island as a haven for British merchants forced down the Pearl River from Canton. The next year, a supine China agreed Britain could keep it.This is the colonialism that dies Monday evening, when the last of the great imperial handovers that Britain perfected in Africa in the 1960s takes place.

HOW would Atlantic City function under a Communist takeover? Ten to one says without much change.Macao, Portugal's colony on the coast of China since 1557, was taken over by Beijing on Monday in a relaxed ceremony. It brought none of the portentous comment marking the handover of Hong Kong, Britain's newer colony, in 1997.Macao, an 18-minute helicopter ride from Hong Kong, is a haven of capitalist commerce on a smaller scale. It's not so much colony or port as gambling den, the Monaco of the south China coast.

BY ITS LIGHTS, China is keeping its 1984 pledge to Britain to maintain Hong Kong's political and economic institutions for 50 years after absorbing it next July 1. It has just named a thoroughly docile, un-elected bunch of Hong Kong vested interests to serve on a legislative council. That's what Britain was doing in 1984, long before its last governor, Chris Patten, attempted to introduce democracy in 1995.The Democratic Party, first in the 1995 elections, is shut out of the new hand-picked chamber.

It came ashore without warning. Driven by a mammoth undersea earthquake, a speeding wall of water rushed inland, decimating everything in its path. The date: Jan. 26, 1700. The place: the west coast of North America. The tsunami devastated a stretch of coastline from California to northern British Columbia, and was so powerful that it wreaked havoc on the other side of the Pacific as well. Scientists say it will almost certainly happen again. The only question is when. "None of us would be too surprised if it occurred tomorrow," said Alan Nelson, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey.