That’s how many people live on Hong Kong Island, 1.26 million.

And about 1.16 million of them live on a strip of land about a half-mile deep along the north edge of the island. In one of the thousands of high-rises that crowd together in what is, mostly, a concrete and asphalt world. And a smoggy one at that. Oh, and one that is almost unbearably hot and humid seven months a year.

People live on top of people. Who live on top of even more people.

An apartment with 500 square feet is considered big. An, often, two generations will be in that room, sharing two little bedrooms, one toilet and one common room.

These are conditions ripe for some serious anti-social behavior. Acting out. Violence. Crime. Substance abuse. Outbursts of rage. Anything to relieve some of the constant pressure the overcrowding would seem to engender.

And yet …

And yet … after nearly a month here, I have been astonished by how polite, how under-control, how disciplined and, even how nice almost everyone has been.

It is amazing, actually.

You take 1.26 million Americans (or just about anyone else) and put them on a strip of land not even as long as the beach from Santa Monica Pier to Palos Verdes … and, well, we would be at each other’s throats.

Some of us would be drinking ourselves silly. Others would seek refuge from the crowds by ingesting opium derivatives … which no doubt would lead to crime of all sorts when we needed to get loaded but didn’t have anything left to sell.

We would be barking at each other, rude 24/7 and angry just about all the time. (Hello, Manhattan.)

Yet Hongkongers avoid it. How do they do it?

I’m sure I don’t know the whole answer yet. Maybe it will come to me the longer I am here.

This is what I’m thinking, so far.

1. Conditioning. If you live in a tiny space, a tiny crowded space, but that is all you’ve ever known … you have fewer issues with those conditions. Your earliest memories are about four people in 500 square feet, and living on the 58th floor and going to school without seeing a single tree or blade of grass and sitting there with 5,000 other kids in a building with multiple floors but precious little playground space …

If that has been your life, the fact that you live in a phone booth in a world of phone booths,  well, so what? That’s how it is.

2. Something Chinese and maybe something British. It’s tricky to start slinging around ethnic stereotypes, but both China and Britain seem (to Americans) to be societies that prize politeness and social order. Hongkongers mostly are Chinese, and they live in a region where the British ran things for 155 years, right up till 1997.

Maybe it’s just good form to keep your cool, follow the rules, line up quietly and wait your turn.

3. This is a sort of odd one, but one of my co-workers suggested it, and he’s been here longer than I have, and here it is: Throughout Hong Kong is a sense of “we’re lucky to be here.” And that leads to a sort of universal urge among everyone to, at all costs, do whatever it takes to keep from getting deported — or perhaps sent back to (gulp) China.

A significant number of people here were born in China China. As opposed to Hong Kong, a “special administrative region” of China since 1997, and British before that. Many more are expats (a tiny minority of them Western) who are here on work visas. They are not full-time residents. Malays, Indonesians, Filipinos …

Anyway, this line of thinking goes, if you are convinced you live in the closest approximation to paradise within hundreds of miles in any direction, where almost no one is hungry, very few people do manual labor and basically nobody is working on a farm … well, you’re going to stay in line because you don’t want to screw up this gig.

4. Very little booze and not many recreational drugs. I may be naive about this, and I just haven’t visited the right neighborhoods … but the Chinese don’t appear to drink much. If you hear somebody loud out on a street late at night, slurring the words to a loud song … odds are it’s a Western expat. I’m not sure I have seen five obviously inebriated Chinese since I got here.

And that includes people who clearly are stoned or high or so sleepy that they must have just stepped out of an opium den. I just don’t see them.

Avoiding those mood-altering, behaving-changing, limits-stretching substances also strikes me as something particularly important to the impressive social discipline of the place.

Now, I may walk back from work tomorrow night and get jumped on the street by drug-addled thugs. Or perhaps I will trip over a drunk on the street or pass some guys furtively shooting up in an alley.

But I doubt it.

People here have all sorts of really good reasons to be insane, and acting out. They live in conditions I’m not sure humans were meant to live in … yet they function day after day in a methodical, almost cheerful way.

It’s mind-boggling. And always will be, to a suburban kid from SoCal. I will be thinking more about this as we go along.