“There is Nothing Here”

Then-and-now impresario Lee Chi-man uploaded this compilation the other day. It depicts Shin Wong Street as seen from Hollywood Road, in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district, in 1969 and 2011. Lee accompanied the image with a short, poignant inscription, in Chinese, which Laine Tam took the liberty of translating:

When I was taking this picture, people passing by kept giving me weird looks. They peeked at me and then looked at where I was pointing my lens.

It’s true, this road is empty, a charmless building on the side. There are no worthy reasons to press the shutter at this spot, yet I’m here crouching. Passers-by are probably thinking, “What is this man photographing?”

What I really want to show them is the scenery from 1969, to let them know that the scene really was worth capturing then, not only for photography, but for sketching, or as a background of a movie, an art film…

But today, there is nothing here. I’m crouching on the sidewalk, framing my shot. I knew everyone thought I was a low taste long yau. I… understand.

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A Walk Around Luen Wo Market

Hong Kong’s gloomy winter chill has set in, and with no indoor heating, the best thing to do on a cold day is to set off for a brisk walk. That’s what I did two weeks ago when I took the train up to Fanling, the last major suburb before the border with Shenzhen, where I wandered over to the market town of Luen Wo Hui.

Though it seems old in comparison to what surrounds it, Luen Wo was actually a modern development master-minded by a group of wealthy Fanling property owners in the 1940s. A market was built in 1951 to serve the surrounding farms and villages. Over the course of the 1950s, the surrounding area was developed with shophouses into a regional commercial centre meant to compete with the nearby market town of Shek Wu Hui, about 20 minutes away by foot.

(The story behind Luen Wo’s development is actually quite fascinating, with inter-family rivalries, accusations of price-gouging, rural politics and the influx of Chinese refugees after 1949, many of whom were farmers from around Guangzhou and who resumed their agricultural practices in Hong Kong. It’s all covered in sociologist Chan Kwok-shing’s essay on Luen Wo Hui.)

Luen Wo quickly became economic and political centre for the surrounding area. There were rice shops, dry goods stores, travel agents, barbershops and a cinema, as well as bars that served British troops stationed in nearby military bases. In the 1980s, Fanling was designated as a New Town — a focal point for new population growth — and intense development followed.

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Hong Kong’s Dai Pai Dong: Uncertain Future

This is the second part of a two-part series on the future of Hong Kong’s dai pai dong street eateries. Read the first part here.

Steaming hot chicken in Yiu Tung Street, Sham Shui Po

While the dai pai dong in Central have been given a new lease on life, it’s another story in Sham Shui Po, where the survival of 14 dai pai dong remains uncertain.

In 2009, the Central and Western District Council accepted the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department’s proposal to loosen dai pai dong licence restrictions, but the Sham Shui Po District Council rejected the offer.

“The current mode of operation of dai pai dong in the district had given rise to environmental nuisances such as street obstruction, noise, littering, waste water and greasy fumes, resulting in a number of complaints from nearby residents,” said a spokesman for the FEHD.

As a result, the spokesman said, the district council refused to support any change to the status quo until these hygiene problems were dealt with.

But the district council’s vice-chairman, Tam Kwok-kiu, said that the council’s position on dai pai dong was actually more nuanced. “Some types of dai pai dong just provide breakfast, night meals, coffee or toast, and they’re quite welcomed by the residents of the district,” he said. “On the other hand, there are some that operate like restaurants with fried food and Chinese dishes, and they really cause much nuisance.”

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Hong Kong’s Dai Pai Dong: A Bitter Taste

Toy dai pai dong model in the G.O.D. Street Culture Gallery

When six dai pai dong vanished from Hong Kong’s Central district last year, fans of wok hei street food were worried that the street food stalls had disappeared for good.

Now they’re back, shiner than ever after five months of renovations. New gas lines, sewers and electric cables have been installed, and the old green dai pai dong stalls have given way to custom-built stainless steel booths.

Dai pai dong are an emblem of Hong Kong street food; their names literally mean “big plate stall,” referring to the special licence plates issued for the stalls in the 1950s. New change of rules by the government allows dai pai dong licences to be passed down to the owner’s offspring, meaning that, for the first time since the 1970s, dai pai dong can outlive their licence holders.

But dai pai dong owners are far from happy. They say the renovation process was hampered by red tape and bureaucratic indifference, leaving them penniless and seething with anger.

“I’m very frustrated,” said the owner of Yue Hing, a Stanley Street tea stall, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Ah Fei. “The government dropped the ball and now we’re suffering because of it. It shouldn’t have had to be like this.”

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Bringing a River Back to Life

The Kai Tak River near Nga Tsin Wai Village

Wallace Chang still remembers how disgusting the Kai Tak River was when he was a child living near its banks in the 1970s. “The water was in between grey and black and it flowed very slowly, almost stagnant,” he recalls.

That didn’t stop him and his friends from going near. “We didn’t have a playground nearby so we played on the pipes that ran across the river and tried not to fall in. It was a challenge.”

It wasn’t always that way. Originally, the Kai Tak River, which runs from the Kowloon Hills to Victoria Harbour, by way of the old Kai Tak Airport, was a country stream known as the Long Jin River. During World War II, however, the Japanese Army converted it into a 2.4-kilometre drainage canal. As fields gave way to factories and squatter villages in the 1960s and 70s, the river became an open-air sewer as waste was illegally dumped into its water.

By the 1980s, the river was so polluted that passengers arriving at the airport often remarked on the foul smell. According to an old story, the comedian Bob Hope once arrived, stepped off the plane and asked what the horrible stench was. A friend informed him it was sewage. “Yes I know, but what have they done to it?” Hope replied.

Chang never did fall in the river’s foul water. He grew up to become an associate professor of architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The river changed, too. After the factories along its banks closed in the 1990s and the government cracked down on illegal dumping, the water became significantly cleaner. Fish returned and so did the birds that eat them.

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What’s Left of the Kowloon Walled City

Earlier this week, the urban issues magazine Next American City tweeted a link to an illustrated cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City, the world’s greatest informal settlement. It gives you a good idea of just how intense the level of human activity within the city was: one room a factory, the next a bedroom, the next a restaurant, all of it linked by an unplanned panoply of staircases, bridges and alleyways.

It has been nearly 18 years since the last piece of the Walled City was torn down by the Hong Kong government. Interest in the city has only magnified since then; there are books, documentaries, websites and discussion forum threads about its architecture, how it came to be and what it was like living inside. (This forum thread in particular is worth looking at — with 330 posts since 2004, it’s as complete a repository of information as you’ll find online.)

By the time it met its demise, the Walled City was an interconnected group of buildings, some up to 16 stories in height, that was home to 33,000 people. It covered an area of just 6.5 acres, making it the most densely-populated place on earth. Long notorious for its brothels and drug dens, it was also home to unlicenced dental clinics, small factories, restaurants and hundreds of ordinary working-class families, most of them recent migrants from mainland China. The entire city was built by hand, without a master plan: a shantytown in highrise form.

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Fighting Food Inflation in Shanghai

While their boats were moored along the Huangpu River, southwest of the Bund, Shanghai’s Shangchuan Huiguan (商船会馆), or Merchant Shipping Hall, accommodated traders both wheeling and dealing and seeking to rest for the night.

While the Hall itself is authorized for preservation, all the surrounding living quarters have fallen to the wrecking ball. A family from Anhui currently lives on the site, responsible for organizing the razing. On my last trip, I noticed many plots of vegetables surrounding the Hall, on what had been rubble only months ago. Any leftover vegetables were laid out to dry in various parts of the house.

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History Hidden in Corporate Archives

Hung Hom and Whampoa in the 1970s.
Photo courtesy Hong Kong Heritage Project

If Hong Kong’s businesses don’t stop throwing away their records, a vital part of the city’s history will be lost forever, a group of archivists and historians warn.

Every day, millions of documents are produced by Hong Kong’s companies, but only a few have set up archives to catalogue and process important material. By failing to do so, they could be costing themselves dearly in lost corporate knowledge — and doing untold damage to the study of Hong Kong history, which already struggles with a lack of well-preserved material.

“Corporations have played such an important role in Hong Kong’s development that, in a way, corporate records are even more important to social and business history than the government’s archives,” said Lingnan University historian Lau Chi-pang.

“The Hong Kong of 2010 isn’t do different from the Hong Kong of 1890, because it’s still ruled by corporate oligarchies,” said University of Hong Kong head archivist Stacy Gould. “That’s why it’s so important for businesses to establish archives.”

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Modernism Debauched

Villa Besnus in 1922 and 2010.
Photo compilation by Laurent David Ruamps

In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.

As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.

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Judaism with a Hong Kong Flavour

Rabbi Asher Oser opens the heavy doors to Ohel Leah and steps inside, pausing for a moment to consider its vaulted ceiling, intricate woodwork and marble floors. As the door closes behind him, the sound of traffic fades, replaced by the quietude of Hong Kong’s oldest synagogue.

“It’s a building of such history and gravitas, but if you walk in here on a Saturday morning, there are kids running around and it’s full of life,” he says. “It’s the kind of contradiction that I love. And I think what Judaism does is it tries to make sense of those contradictions.”

Less than two months ago, Oser arrived in Hong Kong to lead Ohel Leah, a Jewish Modern Orthodox congregation that is nearly as old as Hong Kong itself. He is still finding his feet. Walking towards the Torah ark, where the synagogue’s sacred scrolls are kept, he finds it padlocked. “I don’t actually have the key,” he says with a chuckle.

But Oser, who was born in Australia, educated in Canada and most recently served as the rabbi for a congregation in Providence, Rhode Island, is already enraptured by his new community in Hong Kong. “There are few Jews here, and it’s a transient place, yet there are deep roots,” he says.

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Saint-Sauveur Needs a Saviour

“Sauvons l’église Saint-Sauveur!” I wrote three years ago on Spacing Montreal. And for three years, it seemed vaguely possible that the 145-year-old church on lower Saint-Denis Street wouldn’t be demolished. The huge hospital for which it was supposed to make way, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montreal (CHUM), has been stalled for years, and for awhile it would have been reasonable to guess that it would eventually crawl into the back room where tired, abandoned Montreal megaprojects go to die.

Alas, that wasn’t the case. Kristian Gravenor broke the news in yesterday’s Gazette that Montreal’s city council has issued a demolition permit for the church, which has sat empty and abandoned for years. It isn’t in the best shape — its prized stained glass windows, designed by the renowned Guido Nincheri, were stolen in 2006 — but its bones are strong. More importantly, it remains a testament to the city’s history.

Saint-Sauveur was built thirteen years after a fire swept through the Faubourg Saint-Laurent in 1852, its greystone façade, neo-Gothic architecture and tin steeple a testament to the fashion of the era. In the beginning, it was actually an Anglican church named Holy Trinity. It didn’t become Catholic until the 1920s, when Holy Trinity moved west to NDG and the church was sold to a Syrian congregation.

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The Cheonggyecheon Experience

What amazed me most about Cheonggyecheon was its freedom. Here was a stream running through the middle of Seoul, one of the world’s largest cities, and it gurgled as contentedly as any country creek. You can walk next to the water, sit next to it, wade in and feel its sharp chill on your calves.

It becomes all the more remarkable when you realize that, ten years ago, it was little more than a sewer running beneath a traffic-clogged highway. For decades, Cheonggyecheon was buried under an expressway; it was famously restored in the early 2000s. (David Maloney wrote an exhaustive account of its history a few years ago.) When I visited Seoul last year, it was one of the things I was most eager to see, and luckily enough, I happened to be staying a short walk from it.

After the expressway was demolished, a six-kilometre linear park was built along the stream, from the business district near Gwanghwamun in the west to another river, Jungnangcheon, in the east. The stream runs several metres below street level, and descending towards the stream is a liberation from the noise and exhaust above it. Late at night, I sat next to the water and watched two couples wade into the stream, pants rolled up, giggling as they splashed around. During the day, kids played on stepping stones that traverse the water.

Cheonggyecheon is one of the best-designed examples of urban nature I have encountered. Its impact has been fare-reaching. Fewer cars enter central Seoul now and public transit use is up. Summer temperatures around the stream have been reduced by several degrees since the stream was restored.

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Good Morning, Hutong

Beijing is not a good walking city. Its roads are too wide, its blocks too long — this is a city meant to be experienced on wheels, whether those of a bicycle or (increasingly) a compact sedan.

But as Christopher Szabla reminded us earlier this year, “Beijing is at least two cities”: the city beyond the Second Ring Road, with its new office blocks and apartment complexes, and the older city within it, made up of hutong alleyways and old, low-rise courtyard houses.

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Two Sides of Sinan Lu

The contrast on both sides of the street is only as jarring as you make it out to be, if you notice it at all.

You can see it while standing in the middle of Sinan Lu (思南路), facing Fuxing West Lu (复兴西路) in Shanghai’s French Concession. A noted commercial development of ostentatious luxury sits face to face with the ghosts of past riches. Both Shanghai past and Shanghai present are embodied in the traditional, old, European-style villas. But those on one side of the street have had their layouts redesigned, their foundations tilted sideways, their innards replaced with modern amenities (lifts!), and their courtyards beautified with plenty of commercial landscaping. On the other side of the street stand facsimiles of the original, unmodified versions of these structures: tired, broken down and devoid of occupants.

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