So the best festival of the year (sorry Chinese New Year) has now been and gone. All those lanterns; all those lights. Tai Hang turned into a smoky vision of hell as the Fire Dragon wound around its streets. Victoria Park turned into a spectacle of burning candles, glowing ninjas, and … a massive yellow hedgehog thing. It was a rowdy, colourful and potentially flammable joy to behold.
Performed for well over 100 years in the Tai Hang area of Causeway Bay, the Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance has grown from a village ritual into one of the most popular events of Hong Kong’s mid-autumn festival celebrations. It is hard to imagine when you visit the area now, but Tai Hang was once no more than a small Hakka village. Situated much closer to the waterfront than present day Tai Hang, the village was home to farmers and fishermen which, it is said, suffered first a typhoon and then a plague in the autumn of 1880.
So Typhoon Vicente came and went. It whipped it up a little but all in good fun. Then it was back on with the real business of work and the disappointment of relatively sedate weather.
Following on from Thursday’s Dead Umbrellas Part I, here, as promised, is the second installment. There were so many casualties lying around that I could have had 100 or more different photographs to show you here. At times, it almost resembled a brolly Passchendaele such was the horror of it all. But in true war photographer style, I’ve not only tried to document the suffering, but also give a sense of place and context to what I witnessed. The photographs that follow contain images some visitors may find disturbing.
<p style=”text-align: justify;”>The damage was more than I’d expected as I crawled out of bed and went to take a look at what Typhoon Vicente had left Hong Kong to remember it by. There were trees blown over and branches everywhere. Dustbins had been overturned and road signs knocked down. Hong Kong’s most powerful storm since 1999 certainly seemed to have done enough to warrant the first T10 warning issued in the territory for 13 years. But though Vicente may have won on points, Hong Kong had put up a decent resistance, and by the time daybreak came round, the city was still standing and slowly beginning to clear its head.</p> Read More →
So Typhoon Vicente made a flying visit to Hong Kong last night. The first category 10 storm to hit the city in 13 years and, after three years of waiting, my first real taste of what this much-hyped typhoon business is all about. The fireworks only started around midnight. The T8 signal went up around 6pm, and as the storm intensified as it drew closer to Hong Kong, the rumours of a T10 were confirmed as the branches started flying.
Imagine a place perched on a hill. A mystical place where ten thousand buddhas, all golden and praying for hair transplants, overlook the town below. A place of pavilions and pagodas four hundred steps up, where incense swirls and life-sized statues, each one unique, welcome you to their sleepy retreat. Travel to Sha Tin in Hong Kong’s New Territories on any given day, and you can see for yourself just that.
Monkey Mountain, known more formally as Kam Shan, is located in Kam Shan Country Park in the northern reaches of Kowloon. It is known as Monkey Mountain because as soon as you step off the bus upon arrival, you will most likely be attacked, eaten and have your remains dragged back to a mountaintop lair to be presented to the Monkey King that lives there. But this is what happens when people ignore the warnings not to feed the animals and instead come bearing tasty treats in the hope that they will be spared the same gory fate as those that came before, such is the undying ignorance of mankind
12km south west of Hong Kong island and at only 2.5km in length, Cheung Chau is relatively small when compared to its more amply proportioned neighbours, but this has by no means left it floating in obscurity. The island has seen human settlement for longer than most other parts of the territory and has a potted history that includes pirates, illegal immigrants and more recently, a spate of holiday home suicides that earned it the family-friendly moniker Death Island. Not exactly a tag the Hong Kong tourist board will be killing themselves to promote.
Bowrington Road market in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, gives a glimpse of a city that still manages to resist the modernising influences and development of the urban mess around it, offering a taste, smell, sight and sound of Hong Kong as it has been since its early days.
Located just off Canal Road on the border between Causeway Bay and Wan Chai, it is one of many such wet markets across Hong Kong, each one similar in its devotion to freshness. There are bucher shops with their red wares hanging; carcases strewn over wooden chopping blocks ready for the knife. There are seafood stalls with a variety of fish, crabs and shellfish that your average supermarket shopper would barely think possible, all of it as fresh as you can get without catching it yourself and eating it live off your line.