History in a Chair
It’s 1905 in one of Shau Tau Kok’s small Hakka villages. A young couple has just been married. Now, the bride, wearing a veil, is being carried away to her new family-in-law’s house in an elaborately-carved wooden sedan chair—co kiau in Hakka—that been draped in a red sash to keep out evil spirits. Firecrackers greet her when she arrives, the insistence of their explosions signalling the start of a week-long celebration of the union of two families.
The beautiful Hakka sedan chair you see below, now housed in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum’s New Territories Heritage Hall, is over a century old but it still evokes the bittersweet feelings a young woman must have experienced on the day of her wedding, a mix of exhilaration and trepidation. It’s almost a shame that it is kept behind a plastic shield — we’ll never get to know what it feels like to sit inside.
Tags: Hong Kong, Museums, New Territories
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