I chose this year to see it because the through train is about to open to traffic. As mentioned earlier, the Kowloon-Canton Railway was originally connected to Guangzhou, but later stopped at Luohu due to the political turmoil in China. With the end of the clipping path service Cultural Revolution, the 1997 issue was put on the political agenda, and the resumption of exchanges between China and Hong Kong became important, and the restart of the Kowloon-Guangzhou through train also had important symbolic significance. The so-called through train is to go out of Hong Kong Customs before boarding the train at Kowloon Terminal.
After getting on the train, the train does not stop when it crosses the Luohu Bridge, and only after getting off the train in Guangzhou does it pass the China Customs. Although such an arrangement brings certain convenience, it also requires certain political trust between China and Hong Kong. In my memory, I did not take the Kowloon-Canton through train many times. After all, I lived in Shatin at the time. It didn’t make much sense to take the through train to Hung Hom and then take the back train to Shatin. It was not until the emergence of Beijing-Hong Kong and Shanghai-
Hong Kong through trains in 1997 that intercity services to Hung Hom Station were more commonly used. The three words "through train" have another, more important meaning in contemporary Hong Kong: the smooth transition of 1997. At that time, the ideal imagination of many Hong Kong people for 1997 was that everything would remain the same. This idea seems problematic now, because Hong Kong's free society cannot be defended by the half-bucket of democracy that existed before 1997, but the imagination of the future at that time was highly simplified as "unchanged". "