Old Hong Kong Lives Online
Pottinger Street, Central, 1955
Then: a row of ornate stone houses graced by balconies and verandas. Now: a parking garage. It’s a sharp contrast typical of the then-and-now images posted by Lee Chi-man on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. For two years, under the alias HK Man, he has taken old photos of Hong Kong street scenes and paired them with new photos shot at the same locations and angles.
Lee’s simple juxtapositions highlight the city’s drastic pace of change over the last century. They reveal enormous differences between Hong Kong’s past and present, including the near-total disappearance of the shantytowns, colonial villas and low-rise shophouses that once dominated the city’s landscape. Plenty of interesting minor changes are also evident. Over the past few decades, sidewalks have been hemmed in by grey metal railings; open, cluttered shopfronts have been glassed-in and tidied up; and flyovers and pedestrian footbridges, once rare, have become ubiquitous.
“Old Hong Kong had such a special feel,” says Lee, a computer animator born in the 1970s. “I can’t understand how change has come so quickly. It actually makes me upset. The old Hong Kong you see in photos has been destroyed.”
Seymour Road, Mid-Levels
Lee has been fascinated by Hong Kong since he was a kid growing up in Hung Hom. Now, he is one of many Hongkongers who are taking their interest in local history and heritage online with blogs, photo-sharing websites and social media. In doing so, they are not only sharing their personal interest with others, they are taking heritage resources into their own hands, contributing new histories, memories and insights. So far, though, heritage activists and heritage-focused institutions have been slow to join them in their embrace of online media.
Last month, computer programmer David Bellis launched Gwulo, a spinoff from the popular expat website Batgung that he hopes will become a hub for history-related discussion online. It combines regular blog posts with user-submitted photos and information about Hong Kong’s past. Every place mentioned on the site is cross-referenced and marked on customized Google Maps. Flickr users can easily cross-post their photos on Gwulo; Bellis also hopes to make the site compatible with Facebook.
“It’s not just about bringing out the content, it’s about revealing the links between it,” he says. “A lot of services will let you know when and where a photo was taken, but that’s not what interests people — they want to know what’s inside the photo. Our idea is to link everything so that if you see people or a place in a photo, you can easily find out more about that content.”
By way of example, Bellis points to an old map of Hong Kong. Uploading it to the internet isn’t enough, he says: it should be encoded with information about the buildings, streets and places it depicts. Much of that information is available in books, library archives and newspaper clippings, but not in a user-friendly online format.
Along with official resources, though, Bellis draws much of his information from heritage enthusiasts. One of his recent blog posts links to an amateur 16mm film, made in 1949 and posted to YouTube last year, that depicts a walk down from the Central Mid-Levels to Des Voeux Road. In another post, he asked his readers to help compile a Google Map of tunnels built by the Japanese during their wartime occupation of Hong Kong. At first, only four were listed. Now there are 25, thanks to the flood of exhaustively detailed recollations, photos, maps and reports he got in response.
“There’s so much stuff locked away inside people’s heads,” says Bellis. “Inside of keeping it in there, let’s open it up and let Google get into it.”
Jack Tam Wai-kai, raised in a Wong Tai Sin squatter settlement in the 1960s and 70s, echoes that message. He swaps stories and photos of old Hong Kong on Flickr and discuss.com.hk, an online discussion forum. In the past, he says, most Hongkongers were too poor to be concerned about the city around them, so they focused single-mindedly on building better lives for themselves. Now that the city has grown and prospered — often at the expense of its physical and cultural heritage — “we can only find the old Hong Kong in memories.”
His own memories are poignant reminders of the tough conditions faced by many Hongkongers in the decades after World War II.
“It was tough growing up in a shantytown. We didn’t have two major amenities — toilets and fresh water supply,” he recalls. “The public toilets and fresh-water faucets were hundreds of meters away from our dwellings. For kids, everywhere was a toilet. You can imagine that. [But] we young kids could also enjoy near-rural lives as we lived near the hills and mountains. We would climb the mountain when the weather was good, went swimming after a heavy downpour, went catching insects, beetles and all kinds of wild stuff in the hillside.”
Even the squalor had its uses: with no sex education in schools, young men in the squatter camps learned about sex from porn magazines dumped in the rubbish heaps outside their houses. Kids would scour filthy nullahs for trinkets dropped by passers-by, “ranging from coins to wedding rings and toy cars,” says Tam.
Like Tam, many others use discussion boards and online groups to share their memories of the past. In a Yahoo! group dedicated to wartime Hong Kong, one woman posted her 86-year-old brother’s vivid account of finding a live mine on the beach near his house on Cheung Chau. Another contributor, Barbara Anslow, recalls the water shortages faced by prisoners in the Japanese internship camp at Stanley Prison.
“[Our] four-roomed flat was occupied by 25 internees, including a young couple with infant who lived in the tiny kitchen, and a mother with toddler who lived on the little landing between the first and second floors, whose only privacy was courtesy of an eye-high piece of curtain suspended from the walls,” she writes. “[Cold] chlorinated drinking water was available from a tap in the courtyard. There was a constant queue all day long in the courtyard for hot water for tea, etc. from a couple of small domestic boilers, but you could only get enough for that purpose — never enough for a wash.”
But online discussion about Hong Kong’s past is not limited to nostalgia and old memories. Philip Kenny, a stay-at-home dad in Tai Po, uses his blog Hong Kong Stuff as a way to explore the history and urban landscape of Hong Kong’s more overlooked corners. On Hong Kong War Diary, war historian Tony Banham posts detailed accounts of his research, including copies of old photos and letters he has found.
Putting resources within reach of as many people as possible is a goal shared by many heritage enthusiasts. Tam, for instance, often takes photos from government sources like the websites of the Government Records Service or Hong Kong Public Libraries, which do not allow users to tag them or post comments, and puts them on Flickr.
Tam and Bellis criticize many of the city’s online heritage resources for failing to embrace so-called Web 2.0 tools like commenting and social media functions. While many digital museum, library and government collections around the world allow their users to share and redistribute their content, most of Hong Kong’s online archives feature outdated designs that make it hard to even link to an object. The Government Records Service’s online image catalogue, for instance, hasn’t been revised since 2005.
A spokesperson for Hong Kong Public Libraries says that the library system is planning to employ more “interactive functionalities” in the next upgrade of its web services. But the problem seems to extend beyond government organizations. Even many heritage activists and advocacy organizations have little web presence. The Conservancy Association’s Peter Li Siu-man admits that the association’s website needs work, but says that revamping it is not a priority, given time and budget constraints.
“Hong Kong is actually fairly backward about social activism online,” says Diane Stormont, who teaches online media courses at the University of Hong Kong and Baptist University. The only recent heritage campaign that made use of blogs and social media, she notes, was the fight to save the Central street market from redevelopment. But that campaign’s website, savethestreetmarket.com, has been inaccessible for months.
Still, if the growing online interest in heritage is a reflection of greater public awareness, it may only be a matter of time before heritage activism makes itself felt on the web. Concern is mounting on discussion boards over the plan to relocate the bus terminal at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry pier. 1881 Heritage, a nearby luxury shopping mall that was carved out of the old Marine Police Headquarters, is also the subject of angry discussion.
“I was shocked and disappointed when I saw the hill being flattened and trees [placed] on top of huge columns,” writes one Gwulo user. “This project not only destroyed a rather unusual locality of tranquility in urban Hong Kong, but also razed a place of historical significance. A fort existed on the hill during the First Opium War and I believe it was the scene of the first battle of the war. I wonder why the government allowed the environs of a declared monument to be modified in such a drastic way.”
“I quite like the renovation and the idea of using the place as a hotel, but they’ve filled the grounds with the sort of high end shopping that HK already has more than enough of,” adds another.
Bellis is still making tentative steps towards a more activist approach. Recently, he urged Gwulo readers to email the Antiquities and Monuments Office to comment on changes it had proposed to the official list of historic buildings. He sent a message urging them to include military pillboxes and air raid tunnels in their list. (The office responded by saying that it did not currently have the manpower or resources to assess them.)
“Collective memory is something very popular these days as those landmarks which marked the success of Hong Kong, and wherein the success of Hong Kong lies, have been vanishing rapidly,” says Tam. “That’s why young people are coming out and crying for the conservation of old buildings [like] the Queen’s Pier, the Tsim Sha Tsui pier, King Yin Lane, Bruce Lee’s old residence.”
Although Lee is only in his 30s, he has seen much of the city of his youth disappear. Reclamation has left the waterfront, once his favourite spot to meet friends, a tangle of disjointed development, he says.
“I used to enjoy the wideness of the water,” he recalls. “I grew up in Hung Hom and I would go to the old pier to ride my bicycle while my dad fished. Now the pier is gone and it takes a long time just to walk to the new one. The harbour is narrow and there’s highways all along the shore. All of the recent controversies about heritage are upsetting — I don’t see why we are trading our old streetlife for new development.”
This article was originally published in the South China Morning Post on August 3, 2009.
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Tags: Activism, Hong Kong, Kowloon, Then and Now
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