On a pleasantly warm evening last November, my thoughts wandered over to the nighttime activity at the Sai Wan pier and I wondered if the same sort of thing happened at the nearest bit of waterfront to my apartment, the New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter. I grabbed my camera, stepped out of the door, and twenty-five minutes later — after walking through the crowded streets of Mongkok, over a series of footbridges and past the gigantic housing estates near Olympic MTR station — I reached the water.
A couple of dozen people milled about. There were teenagers sitting by the water’s edge, legs dangling off the concrete seawall. Middle-aged couples strolled hand-in-hand down the waterfront promenade. A few elderly people swung their arms, walking backwards, doing strange old-people exercises. Next to the water’s edge were a few small boats, their engines running, operators sitting onboard, killing time. Every so often, one of the boats would leave the typhoon shelter and return with a single passenger.
The New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter seems a poor heir to the sensational legacy of its predecessor. First opened in 1916, the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter was designed to protect Kowloon’s fishing boats from heavy summer waves, but it also sheltered a thriving community of Tanka people, who had made their livings in the coastal seas of South China for generations. They had their own language, their own food and their own wedding rituals, all of which, naturally enough, were centred around the sea. For centuries, they were considered non-Chinese barbarians by land-dwellers, and it wasn’t until 1731 that the Chinese emperor emancipated them from this status. But they still suffered discrimination whenever they set foot on land, so they continued to live most of their lives at sea.
Mongkok might be one of the world’s most crowded places, but sometimes all you need to do to escape is to make a right turn down a quiet alleyway. That’s what I discovered when I was walking from home to the Flower Market the other day. Instead of taking the usual route along Sai Yee Street, I ducked into the laneway that runs behind it and discovered a kind of parallel university of greenery, graffiti and informal living space.
One of the first things I encountered was a lean-to with a mattress, some newspaper and various other objects inside. It seems to have been built by a homeless person but I’m not sure if it’s still occupied. Taggers have been using its wood walls as a canvas.
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.”
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.
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.
Last summer I wrote about the Plumber King, who writes advertisements for his plumbing services in unusual corners of Hong Kong. Contractors usually promote themselves by scrawling their name, number and occupation on utility boxes or lampposts. But Kui Wong, as the King is known in Cantonese, carefully paints his ads in back alleys, street markets, bollards and on retaining walls.
I liked the idea of a mysterious, eccentric plumber who painted the city at night, but curiosity got the best of me. Earlier this month, I called the Plumber King — whose name is actually Mr. Tong — and asked him to come to my apartment to fix a broken toilet. Truth be told, he tried to overcharge me, so I ended up paying a consultation fee and sent him on his way. But he was a genuinely nice guy and we chatted a bit about his graffiti.
Here, in his own words, is Kui Wong, the Plumber King.
Last month, I paid a visit to Hong Kong Reader, a great independent bookstore on the seventh floor of a building in Mongkok. Before I entered the shop, though, I gazed up the stairwell and wondered whether there was an interesting view from the roof. I climbed an extra few floors and emerged onto a rubbish-filled rooftop with a view of only the surrounding buildings and billboards.
On the roof next door, somebody had left a pile of rose petals to dry in the sun. (A romantic gesture?) I took a few photos, gazed at my reflection in the mirrored windows of an office tower across the street — and noticed, out of the corner of my eye, two men staring at me from an even higher rooftop a few buildings away.
Startled, I looked up. One man took a drag on his cigarette. They continued to stare. I wondered what they were doing up there and my mind flashed to the climax from Infernal Affairs when Tony Leung sneaks up on Andy Lau with a gun. A bit unnerved, I ducked back into the stairwell and went down to the bookstore.
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.”
The Internet meets the MTR: trying on a jacket bought online.
Photos by Oliver Tsang for the South China Morning Post
Nobody seemed alarmed by the sight of two 17-year-old boys playing with guns in the Hong Kong MTR. It was early Wednesday evening at Prince Edward Station and Kelvin Cheung was inspecting a pistol he had arranged to buy from Simon Lee.
“It’s for war games,” Cheung explained as he pulled the trigger on an empty semi-automatic air-powered handgun. He has been playing war games for six months, he said, and he found Lee on Uwants, an online marketplace. After confirming the sale online, they arranged to meet at Prince Edward to finish the transaction. Cheung paid HK$300 for the gun, which he said would have cost HK$570 in a retail store.
“This is my first time buying from Simon, but I actually have two other purchases I’m going to pick up in the station tonight,” said Cheung.
As the rush hour crowds thickened, about fifty other people milled around the edges of the station’s fare-paid zone, most of them waiting to pick up goods they had ordered online. Cash changed hands; so did makeup kits, concert tickets, cameras and bags full of clothing.
In most parts of the world, online shopping is a straightforward process: find what you want, enter your credit card information and have it shipped to your home. Not so in Hong Kong, where analysts describe the online retail market as “underdeveloped” and consumers have long been sceptical of buying things online.
It’s rare to come across any unorthodox street art in Hong Kong — it’s mostly stencils, paste-ups and graffiti. So I was pleased to see these vinyl footprints glued to the pavement at the nearest crosswalk to my apartment. They remind me of a couple of things: the footprints placed rather whimsically on metal grates in the sidewalks of Calgary; and the early work of Roadsworth, which subverted the lines, arrows and stripes that regulate our behaviour in the street.
There’s something undeniably creepy about Nam Koo Terrace, an abandoned red-brick mansion on Ship Street in Wan Chai. Nearly seventy years ago, the house was used as a military brothel during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and the ghosts of so-called “comfort women” are said to haunt the house today.
In 2003, a group of teenagers made headlines when they snuck into the mansion and became so distraught they had to be hospitalized.
But when Wong Sau-ping takes ghost-seekers on a tour of Wan Chai, it’s not Nam Koo Terrace that scares them the most — it’s the hill behind it.
“There’s a place in the woods where people say a woman hanged herself,” she said. “When we went to investigate, we found a big urn, and nearby is a shrine where people perform rituals to chase ghosts away.”
Sometimes people become so scared they feel ill and leave the tour, she said. “Ghost stories let you imagine what happened — we can’t actually show you the ghost, so you have to fill in the blanks yourself.”
Two and a half years ago, my girlfriend and I were walking through a housing estate near Kowloon City when we happened upon something completely unexpected: a walled village. At first glance, we actually thought it was an old shantytown, surrounded as it was by street hawkers, outdoor barbers and houses made of sheet metal. But as we walked around its periphery, we came across a gatehouse, beyond which was an alley lined by small, tile-roofed houses. At the end was a temple.
“This whole place is going to be gone soon,” warned a village resident as we walked through the gate, towards the temple. In turned out we were standing in Nga Tsin Wai, the last walled village in Kowloon. In 2007, the Urban Renewal Authority decided to tear most of it down and replace it with two apartment towers and a heritage-themed park which will incorporate the temple, an ancestral hall and a few village houses.
Old buildings bought for redevelopment are displayed in the window of an acquisition company office on Victory Avenue in Ho Man Tin
There goes the neighbourhood. A new government policy on compulsory sales in old buildings has led to a property gold rush in Hong Kong’s older districts, putting homeowners on guard and worrying many that well-established communities will be uprooted and destroyed.
Before April, acquisition companies working for developers had to buy 90 percent of a building’s units before they could force the remaining owners to sell. Now the government has lowered that threshold to 80 percent for buildings more than 50 years old.
The impact can be felt in places like Ho Man Tin, where up to 20 buildings in the few blocks just east of the MTR’s East Rail Line are now targeted for redevelopment. About half are being acquired by Richfield Realty, a company whose controversial acquisition methods include the hanging of large red banners over targeted buildings, a tactic that many homeowners say creates an atmosphere of intimidation.
“We’re very angry and upset to see those banners all over the place — it’s like a cancer that’s spreading throughout the city,” said Kobe Ho, a bookstore manager who lives on Waterloo Road in Ho Man Tin. Some of her friends in the neighbourhood have already been displaced by Richfield’s acquisitions.
“The new legislation has really sped up the process of urban renewal in Hong Kong,” said Wong Ho-yin, a member of the Minority Owners’ Alliance Against Compulsory Sales, which works with homeowners who do not want to leave their homes. “But urban renewal has so many negative effects, in terms of urban planning, social networks and protecting the rights of homeowners. It’s bad enough with the Urban Renewal Authority, but when the private sector gets involved, things are even worse.”
worst anti-bike lane arguments ever: pretending cyclists don't pay taxes, cost of "wide stripes of paint", rain erosion http://t.co/i723dTGKabout 7 hours agofrom web
fans of jason hawkes' gorgeous night aerials of london: here's more of his work, in large format, from across the UK http://t.co/Z0RGSCQSabout 12 hours agofrom web
after the whole shipping container architecture trend, shipping pallet street furniture was probably inevitable http://t.co/fHlgChBoabout 15 hours agofrom web
