A Gate of China

Hong Kong
1927
Silent
9m

Staggering views of 1920s Hong Kong capture the contradictory cocktail of East meets West on this outpost island.

Hong Kong is a land of extreme contrasts: its geography and architecture, its business and demographics. This British Instructional documentary captures these contrasts beautifully, with its jaw-dropping photography (if not its rather colonialist intertitles). The view down the teeming hillside street, flanked by high-rise balconies glimpsing the domestic lives within, is simply stunning.

The film offers a brief history of the colonisation of Hong Kong from the perspective of 1920s Britain, focusing on the various developments made to the island under British control - the building of dwellings, business-houses, law courts, municipal buildings, churches and roads. It also describes the constant struggle to reclaim the land from the encroaching China Sea, and protect the island from formidable typhoons.

Hong Kong - Fragrant Harbour

Discover a Hong Kong before the tide of modernity swept all before it, a land of striking contrasts where old and new, European and Chinese shared a crowded island.

Hong Kong before the skyscraper: it's barely possible to imagine today. But this collection of films shows island life before the steel-and-glass towers and the elevated expressways, when Hong Kong and the neighbouring New Territories were still parts of a rugged but rapidly developing outpost of the British Empire.

Visit the genteel colonial centre, including the long-gone Hong Kong Club; explore the waterfront streets around Wan Chai and Causeway Bay, before the major land reclamations of the 60s and 70s pushed them inland. A few select landmarks in the footage can still be seen today, notably Aberdeen Bay, the Peak Tram and Victoria Harbour. But what these films preserve is a largely lost Hong Kong, a city whose recent past is vanishing and whose ever-shifting landscape is fading from recognition.

The films are rich in contrasts. Traditional Duanwu Festival dragon-boat racing share the waters with Royal Navy warships enjoying the interwar calm. While peasant farmers bend their backs in the New Territories paddy fields, expat Brits tour the colony in motorcars. As today's Hong Kong faces yet more uncertainty and change, these films highlight a very different time on the crowded island where East met West.