A Hong Kong Lament

A long-lost Hong Kong (pictures from A Century of Hong Kong Roads and Streets and Early Hong Kong Eateries). 

I’m catching up on the news rather late, but it seems that some of the last remaining obstacles to Hong Kong becoming a completely soul-less city are soon to be overcome. The legislature of the Special Administration Region of the People’s Republic of China has approved a redevelopment plan for the Central Street Market that effectively will eliminate the historic collection of wet-market hawker stalls.
The redevelopment in Graham, Gage and Peel Streets will apparently include four new towers and a mix of retail shops. Out: the seafood hawkers and their haul — prawns, razor clams, live fish, crayfish, snails, frogs; the fruit and vegetable vendors and their lychees and mangosteens, the finest sweet corn, little egg tomatoes and Dou Miao (pea shoots), a bewildering array of choy-ish greens; the stinky meat and chicken shops, gruesome, but transfixing with their cages of live chickens and hanging carcasses and organs.
In: apparently a few sanitised, Disney-fied “hawker” shops and probably many more expensive designer fashion and electronics shops.
When I lived in Hong Kong, the ladder of streets running off Queens Road Central up towards Hollywood Road — Graham Street, Peel Street — were some of my favourite on the island. A hub of colour, activity, people, character and life. There were even a few remaining architecturally interesting buildings, in a city that, over the past three decades, has ripped out its architectural heart with ruthless abandon. (The day I heard that the old Star Ferry terminal in Central, immortalised in a dozen or more movies, was to be knocked down, I nearly cried.)

Chaotic, but Captivating
I’ve been flicking through a couple of small-press books that I tracked down when I lived in HK — A Century of Hong Kong Roads and Streets and Early Hong Kong Eateries by Cheng Po Hung (the University Museum and Gallery, University of Hong Kong). It was a captivating city, chaotic to be sure, but a timeline of architectural styles, a city of balustrades and fine wrought-iron and French windows and terraces and shutters and fancy-façaded colonial buildings. The city’s few remaining characterful streets have two things in common — they have remnants of that architectural past, and they have wet markets. Among those streets, there is Graham Street and surrounds, and there is the wet-market-rich cluster of laneways in the Wan Chai block bounded by Johnston Road, Queen’s Road East, Spring Garden Lane and Triangle Street.
I’d often dash to the Wan Chai wet markets at lunch from my office tower — sometimes to grab fruit, sometimes to wander, sometimes to grab a Thai lunch in the dim back room of one of the food stores catering for Thai maids. On the rare occasions I got out of work before the stall holders packed up (14-hour days in the office were common), I’d pick up ingredients for dinner there on the way home. In summer, lychees and mangosteen, in winter, Dou Miao. Sometimes little quail eggs for a salad. Sometimes some live prawns that would jiggle in my bag all the way back to my Happy Valley apartment. In winter, I’d take visitors past the snake soup shops, where caged live snakes become curative soups.
Yes, a measure of brutality marks some of the activity in these places (a friend and I once turned away in horror as a Wan Chai fish-stall-holder skinned a frog alive for a customer) and, given the revelations about the safety of Chinese food exports, I might be a little more suspicious these days about what I might be inadvertently consuming with my wet-market lychees and prawns, but these are separate issues that won’t be solved by razing buildings and shutting down wet markets.
Activist Hong Kong photographer Bendick Leung writes on the website Street Market Concern: “A street market” is not equal to the hawkers, stalls, stories and images of it nor the sum of all these. It is a collective space that brings different lives together and let connections grow, forming a community and a neighborhood.” My dear Hong Kong friend Bruce Foreman writes: "The fact that you must squeeze your way down narrow lanes in the soupy humidity of summertime Hong Kong is testament to their popularity, because nearby Park 'n Shop is an air-conditioned morgue. The food inside is dead. The food on the streets is alive — fish flipping out of overflowing tanks, chickens squawking, fruit and the most unusual vegetables leaping off stalls. It is a place where secret kitchens spring up in the Harry Potteresque warrens behind the stalls, creating much-needed mystery and a culinary magic that Muggle developers just do not get."
Funny, isn’t it, that while other countries are realising the value of markets for those reasons and more, Hong Kong is turning its back on them. If the markets go, if the curious, quirky little streets with their interesting architecture go, I can’t imagine why any tourist would ever bother to visit the city. If I need a Prada or a Chanel store, or a computer or a camera shop, or a multi-level shopping centre, I don’t need to leave Melbourne.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that when I Googled “Hong Kong” and “markets” this morning, the first results that came up were about Asian share markets.

Please, can you take the time to click through to the Save the Street Market website here and fill in the petition form directed at the HK Government (a 30-second task). Perhaps if there’s enough clamour, the government might listen and, if you haven’t been to Hong Kong yet, these amazing hubs of life will still be there when you get there.

Colour photographs of Wan Chai and Causeway Bay wet markets (2004).