Why Is Hong Kong So Green?
Hong Kong’s market booths are typically painted green
Why is Hong Kong so green?
The question came up a couple of months ago when I was having afternoon tea with my girlfriend, Laine, at Mido Café.
“If you had to pick a color to associate with Hong Kong, what would it be?” she asked, looking out the window at Temple Street hawkers setting up for the night.
“I dunno,” I said. “Red?”
“That’s what most people would say, right? But I think it’s green. Not just because of the hills or the trees, but because so many things in the city are painted green, like the street market stalls.”
It was an interesting observation. A few weeks later, I brought it up when I met Hulu Culture co-founder and old Hong Kong expert Simon Go for coffee — also, coincidentally, at Mido Café. He immediately perked up.
“I call this color ‘grassroots green,’” he said, gazing up at Mido’s 1950s-era metal window frames which were, of course, painted green. “The windows, the market stalls, the trams, the Star Ferry. It’s everywhere, in all of the most famous Hong Kong things.”
But why? Go didn’t know for sure. He speculated that the government required market stalls to be painted green as a measure of consistency. I got the same answer from the owner of a paint shop on Wellington Street, in the middle of Hong Kong’s oldest street market.
“The hawkers come here to buy their paint and they choose from a few different shades of green,” he said. “I think it has to do with government policy.”
When I emailed a spokeswoman for the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, though, she told me the government didn’t regulate the color that market vendors used.
“In constructing a hawker stall at the allocated pitch, the licensee is required to comply with the permitted dimensions on size and height for the stall,” she replied. “There is no colour requirement for the hawker stalls, but they are traditionally painted in green.”
So much for that theory. I kept asking around.
Newly-built green market booths
“Green is popular because it hides dirt really well,” said Lam King-wing, the owner of a dai pai dong on Gutzlaff Street that specializes in beef innards. Incidentally, his dai pai dong was recently rebuilt as part of a controversial government renovation project. Its traditional green wood and metal walls have been replaced by unpainted stainless steel.
That brings up another reason why green has always been so popular.
“Market booths use a lot of mild steel sections, and mild steel tends to rust, unlike stainless steel, so it needs protection,” says architect Daniel Patzold. “In the past, there weren’t so many colors available, and some had particular chemical qualities that made them good to use. Green might have been one of those.”
Two years ago, Patzold and his partners, Syren Johnstone and Kingsley Ng, removed a decades-old market booth from Gutzlaff Street and replaced it with a new replica. They now use the old booth, nicknamed Hung Bak, for performances and art installations.
It was recently on display at ART HK, where Patzold looked at its weatherworn surface and pointed out several layers of paint: yellow primer, a vivid green and a darker, more recent shade of green.
“The original green was very bold because it used a lot of chemicals that aren’t used in paint anymore,” he said.
Which raises an important point: not all greens are the same. Even in a single street market, different booths are painted different shades, from the lighter Apple Green to the darker Larch Green, which is most popular. A creamier shade of green has traditionally been used to paint concrete and interior walls.
That kind of dark green is used on the trams and Star Ferry, at least those that are not wrapped in advertising. Chinese University cultural studies professor Oscar Ho suggests it might be related to the early 20th century popularity of British Racing Green, the color used to represent Britain in car racing tournaments.
“It is pretty much a upper middle class British colour — who else could afford to join international car racing? If you like to interpret it that way, then the deep green is very much a British colonial byproduct,” he says.
Still, none of this was very conclusive, so I arranged to meet Simon Go again, this time in Shek Kip Mei. He arrived bearing an iPad loaded with historical photos of Hong Kong.
When Hong Kong boomed after World War II, he explained, few paint colours were available, partly because of lingering wartime shortages. Just about everything was painted with the same three commonly-available colors: vanilla white, candy red and bright green. You can still see this color scheme in many old shop signs and even the white, red and green neon signs used by pawnshops.
Green was popular because it didn’t easily appear dirty and other readily-available colors had cultural associations that made them unpalatable for everyday use. Blue was associated with funerals, for instance, and red with celebrations.
“Green was the most common until the 1960s,” Go said. “It was everywhere. I remember when I was a kid in the 60s, everyone had the same green color at home. The walls were painted green, the floor tiles were green and white. I asked my parents why and they said, ‘Everyone else has it, so why not us?’”
Go suggested, with a touch of romance, that green’s popularity stemmed in part from nostalgia for the mainland Chinese farms that many people left when they came to Hong Kong.
“My grandmother used to say, ‘When I dream of the motherland, I always dream of green,’” he said. “That’s when I first found out she lived on a farm.”
Hong Kong’s trams are painted green under the advertising
Classic combo: red, white and green
Creamy interior green in an old-style café
Green’s popularity began to fade in the 1970s, when Hong Kong became increasingly wealthy and more sophisticated paint colors emerged on the market.
But old habits die hard. When a portion of the Fa Yuen Street market burned down last winter, hawkers rebuilt their stalls and dutifully painted them green.
“It’s been green for as long as I can remember,” said one. “I don’t know why. It’s like how the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That’s just the way it is.”
Tags: Colour, Hong Kong, Street Markets
Emilie says:
I always assumed the green colour was a strategy against cockroaches. I’ve heard some older residential buildings are painted in bands of white and green because it’s offputting to the insects and so they won’t climb up the walls!
July 29th, 2011 at 8:02 pm