C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 13 HO-YIN LEE and LYNNE D DISTEFANO The Hong Kong shophouse Some 110 years of development of the Hong Kong shophouse, from the 1840s to the 1950s, has left a legacy of distinctive buildings that continue to resonate with Hongkongers. The Hong Kong shophouse, known locally as tong lau (literally Chinese building), is a variation of the generic urban architectural type found in predominantly Chinese cities in southern China and south-east Asia. As its name implies, it usually combines the functions of shop (on the ground floor) and house (on the upper floors). Until the 1950s, shophouses were the main form of housing for the vast majority of the Chinese in British Hong Kong. For a variety reasons, including ethnic restrictions, available housing was disproportionate to the number of Chinese immigrants. As a result, shophouses became severely overcrowded and were referred to as tenements by the British. The problem was compounded with the establishment of Communist China in 1949. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived, worsening the tenement situation. Relief came with the launch of a mass public housing programme in the mid-1950s, followed by a more substantial 10-year public housing programme introduced by Governor Sir Murray MacLehose in 1972. From the mid-1980s, with a property boom spurred by the successful conclusion of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that determined the fate of Hong Kong at the end of its colonial rule in 1997, shophouses in Hong Kong were demolished en masse to make way for larger-scaled and higher-valued development. In the 19th century, as foreign powers aggressively pried open China for trade and other economic gains through treaty ports, shophouses provided a politically stable and economically vibrant environment to thousands of Chinese desperately seeking a way out of poverty and lack of opportunity.Those fromGuangdong province were especially drawn to the nearby colony of Hong Kong, and the British authorities welcomed the immigrants as they provided needed services and skills as well as business resources. By 1843, just two years after the British hoisted the Union Jack on Hong Kong Island, emigrant Chinese began to settle in an area to the west of the business district of Central and the military cantonment of Admiralty. By the early 1880s this Chinese settlement area would become known as theTaipingshan district. It occupied an area of about three square kilometres and housed an estimated population of 210,000 people (Pryor 1975: 65). Its rudimentary shophouses lacked adequate daylight, ventilation and drainage.To compound matters, there was no effective separation between the kitchen and the toilet. Given these conditions, it is not surprising that, in May 1894, an overpopulatedTaipingshan became the epicentre of an outbreak of bubonic plague.The plague cost the lives of thousands, and triggered a fundamental shift in the design of Hong Kong’s shophouses. Taipingshan and the firstgeneration shophouses in the 1870s (Photo: copyrightfree image courtesy of the National Archives, UK)
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