Hong Kong Happenings

Hong Kong
1935
Silent
13m

Striking snapshots of life in a colonial outpost in the 1930s.

This rare amateur footage conjures a vibrant and confident Hong Kong when it was still under British colonial rule in the 1930s. Many of the people featured would be forced to flee the region when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong a couple of years later in 1941. One of the more colourful events documented is a Romany Fair - look out for the ‘Curio Caravan'.

The newly reconstructed HSBC Bank, then known as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company Limited, shown at the beginning of the film, was regarded as an Art Deco masterpiece and a symbol of the city's prosperity and modernity. The lion statues became the bank's motif and were retained along with other architectural features when Norman Foster famously transformed the site into a minimalist glass skyscraper in 1985.

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.