There's a particular kind of listener who has a city in their head before they've ever set foot in it. They've assembled it from films and photographs and stray paragraphs in books, and they carry it around like a private map. Hannah sent us one of those maps this week. She's been carrying Hong Kong around for years — not the skyline, not the towers, but the older city. The dense, layered, cinematic version. Art Deco bones, neon arteries, wet streets, ferries, markets, balconies with laundry and birdcages, that specific Hong Kong atmosphere that feels like a speakeasy you're always about to find. And she's asking three things. One, how much of that city is still standing and how much was always partly a fantasy. Two, has she missed her chance — did the political crackdown after the Umbrella Movement, the National Security Law, the closing of Apple Daily, did all of that take something irreplaceable with it. And three, if she went now, where would she actually go to understand the real city rather than just see the tourist sights.
So we're testing a romantic image against what's actually on the ground. And the first thing to say is that the romantic image isn't a lie. It's a collage of genuine fragments — real things that exist or existed — assembled into something that never quite existed as a whole. The neon was real. The tong lau tenements with their balconies and ground-floor markets were real. The Star Ferry is real, it's still running, it's been running since eighteen eighty-eight and carries millions of passengers a year. But the image of Hong Kong as this coherent lost city of atmosphere — that was always a selective edit.
A salvage operation dressed as a postcard.
And to answer Hannah's question properly, we need to disentangle three forces that have been reshaping the city simultaneously. One is Beijing's political crackdown — real, severe, post-twenty-nineteen, the National Security Law, the protest culture erased from public space, the media shut down. Two is market-driven redevelopment, which has been demolishing and rebuilding Hong Kong for decades — that's not new, it's the city's operating system. Three is organic cultural change — an aging population, shifting tastes, the same forces that turn every city over generation by generation. If you blame all the loss on politics, you miss two-thirds of the story. If you ignore the politics, you miss what's new and grim.
So let's take the romantic image piece by piece. What's actually in it?
The neon first, because it's the most visually iconic and the most misunderstood. The famous neon signs — the ones that made Hong Kong look like the inside of a Wong Kar-wai film — have been disappearing fast. But not primarily because of Beijing. In twenty-ten, a Hong Kong court ruling made unregistered outdoor signs illegal, and that kicked off a wave of removals. The government introduced a formal sign registration scheme in twenty-twenty-three, but by then the economics had already shifted. LEDs are cheaper, building safety regulations are tighter, and the old sign makers — there was a wonderful Guardian piece about this in twenty-nineteen — were fighting to save a fading art. The main drivers were local courts and market forces, not a political directive from the mainland.
So the neon died by bureaucracy and LED pricing, not by edict.
Mostly. Though there's a subtler point. The twenty-twenty-three registration scheme does give the government a tool to remove signs it doesn't like, and in the current political climate, a sign that's too expressive or too independent-minded might find itself unregistered for reasons that aren't purely about building safety. But the mass disappearance was already underway. The political angle is a recent overlay on a much older story.
What about the buildings themselves? The tong lau, the mixed-use tenements with the shop on the ground floor, the residences above, the balconies, the laundry, the birdcages.
Still everywhere.. Go to Sham Shui Po, go to Mong Kok, go to Wan Chai — the tong lau are the urban fabric. The balcony is real, the density is real, the ground-floor market with someone's grandmother living two floors up is real. What's been aestheticized is the idea that this is timeless. These buildings were always being torn down and rebuilt — just slower than today. The tong lau you see now are mostly post-war, nineteen-fifties and sixties. They replaced earlier buildings. The cycle has been running for a century.
So the form is genuine but the freeze-frame is the fantasy.
Right. And that matters because it changes what you're looking at. If you think the tong lau are a fragile relic, you see every construction fence as a tragedy. If you understand they've always been provisional, you see the ones that survive as remarkably stubborn rather than tragically doomed.
The Star Ferry and the trams.
Not romantic fantasies. Working transit. Millions of people use them every day. The Star Ferry costs about two Hong Kong dollars on the upper deck — that's, what, twenty-five US cents — and it's been running since eighteen eighty-eight. It survives because it's cheap and because it's culturally protected in a way that's hard to formalize but very real. Hong Kongers would riot if someone tried to kill the Star Ferry. The trams on Hong Kong Island are the same — they're slow, they're a hundred and twenty years old, they're completely impractical by modern transit standards, and they're still running because the city has decided, without ever quite saying so, that they belong.
The speakeasy layer. The Art Deco, the clandestine, the cocktail bar hidden behind an unmarked door.
This is where the fantasy gets thickest. Hong Kong had real Art Deco buildings — the old Bank of China building, the Central Market, the Wan Chai Market from nineteen thirty-seven, which is still standing. But the speakeasy vibe is largely a twenty-tens cocktail-bar marketing invention projected backward. The city was never particularly clandestine. It was brash and commercial and in-your-face. The hidden bar behind the false shopfront — that's a Shanghai thing, or a New York thing during Prohibition, and Hong Kong bars borrowed the aesthetic because it sold expensive drinks. The actual historical Hong Kong was a port city where business was done loudly and in public.
So the image is a real collage. The ingredients are genuine. But the composition — the moody, secretive, cinematic whole — that was assembled by film directors and bar owners and travel photographers, not by the city itself.
And that's not a criticism. Collages are how we fall in love with places. But it means Hannah's question — how much was always fantasy — has a specific answer. The ingredients were real. The dish was prepared by someone else.
Which brings us to the harder question. What's been lost to politics, and what was already on its way out?
Let me draw the line clearly. The National Security Law was imposed in June twenty-twenty. It criminalized secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces — defined broadly enough that almost any organized dissent qualifies. Apple Daily, the pro-democracy newspaper, was shut down in June twenty-twenty-one under the law. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, is in prison. The protest culture that defined Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement in twenty-fourteen and the twenty-nineteen protests — that has been erased from public space. The BBC reported in twenty-twenty-three on what they called the new normal — self-censorship, the quiet departure of international businesses and talent, a public sphere where people measure their words.
That's not redevelopment. That's not organic cultural change. That's the state dismantling civil society.
Yes. And it's real, and it's profound, and it has changed the atmosphere of the city in ways that are hard to quantify but impossible to miss. The Hong Kong of the Umbrella Movement — the sense that the city was a place where political possibility was still open — that is gone as a live proposition. If Hannah's romantic image included the idea of Hong Kong as a bastion of free expression pushing back against authoritarianism, that part of the image has been foreclosed.
But that's not the whole story of loss. Some of what's disappeared was already going.
Right. The Kowloon Walled City — the most extreme version of the dense, layered, ungoverned Hong Kong — was demolished between nineteen ninety-three and nineteen ninety-four. That was under British rule, years before the handover. The Kai Tak Airport closed in nineteen ninety-eight, and the redevelopment of the old airport area changed Kowloon City's character long before twenty-nineteen. The hawker culture, the street food stalls, the open-air markets — those have been formalized and regulated for decades. The original tong lau stock has been replaced by modern residential towers since the nineteen eighties.
So the political crackdown landed on a city that was already being reshaped by money and time.
And that's the thing people get wrong when they talk about Hong Kong's loss. They collapse three different timelines into one — the political, the economic, the demographic — and then attribute everything to the most visible villain. But if you're trying to understand what you'd actually find if you went tomorrow, you need to know which parts of the old city were taken by the state and which parts were simply outbid.
Let's talk about what's still there. What still feels distinctly Hong Kong in a way that isn't a tourist reproduction.
The Cha Chaan Teng. The tea restaurant. This is the most cross-class social space in the city. Breakfast is pantry toast — that's toast with condensed milk and peanut butter — and milk tea and macaroni soup with ham. It sounds absurd if you didn't grow up with it, but it's completely serious, completely unpretentious, and it's still everywhere. Office workers next to construction workers next to elderly couples who've been coming to the same booth for forty years. The food hasn't changed. The formica tables haven't changed. The speed hasn't changed — you're in and out in twenty minutes, and if you linger someone will give you a look.
The wet markets.
Still operating. Graham Street Market in Central, Reclamation Street Market in Mong Kok — these are under pressure from supermarkets, and the stallholders are aging, and the next generation often doesn't want the business. But they're still there. The smell of dried seafood and incense, the live fish in tanks, the butcher with the cleaver and the wooden block, the vegetable seller who knows exactly which customers want the greens trimmed and which don't. This is not a tourist experience — tourists walk through taking photos and the stallholders ignore them. It's the city's operating system.
The density of signage, the speed of walking, the MTR's efficiency, the Seven-Elevens on every corner.
None of that has changed. The MTR is still the best urban rail system in the world by most measures — on-time performance above ninety-nine percent, trains every two minutes at peak, air-conditioned platforms. The walking speed is still ferocious. The Seven-Elevens still sell fish balls and dim sum that are good. These are not sights. They're texture. And texture is what Hannah's romantic image is really about — the feel of the city, not the monuments.
So if she accepts that the city has always been in flux, the question becomes practical. If she went now, where should she go?
Not the Peak. Not the Avenue of Stars. Not Disneyland. Start with Sham Shui Po. This is the densest, least gentrified older district. The Golden Computer Arcade — a multi-story market of electronics stalls that feels like a bazaar from a cyberpunk novel. The Apliu Street flea market — old radios, vintage watches, tools, cables, things that fell off a truck in nineteen eighty-seven. The tong lau on Pei Ho Street. Eat at a Cha Chaan Teng — Kau Kee is famous for its beef brisket noodles, but any busy one will do. This is the closest thing to the older Hong Kong that still functions as a working-class neighborhood rather than a tourist set.
Wan Chai.
Specifically the area around Lee Tung Avenue — it used to be Wedding Card Street, now it's a pedestrian mall, but the old Wan Chai Market building is still there, Art Deco from nineteen thirty-seven. The blue houses on Stone Nullah Lane — a cluster of tong lau that were preserved and painted a startling blue. The Star Ferry pier. This is where old and new collide most visibly. You can stand on a street corner and see a hundred-year-old tenement, a glass tower from twenty-fifteen, and a dai pai dong — an open-air cooked food stall — all in the same eyeline.
Kowloon City.
The area around the old airport. Go for the Thai restaurants — that's a legacy of Thai workers who built the airport, and it's now one of the best concentrations of Thai food outside Thailand. Nga Tsin Wai Village is the last surviving walled village in Kowloon — a tiny cluster of low-rise houses surrounded by towers, completely surreal. And the Kowloon Walled City Park, on the site of the demolished Walled City, with a tiny fragment of the original yamen building still standing. The park is beautiful and completely misleading — it's a landscaped garden where the densest human settlement in history used to be. But that contrast is itself the story.
The escalator.
The Central-Mid-Levels escalator. Ride it early in the morning, before the bars open, when the old shopkeepers are opening their stalls. The contrast between the expat bar scene at night and the original neighborhood in the morning — that's the whole story of Hong Kong's transformation in one ride. You start in Central, in the financial district, and you rise through Soho, through the antique shops on Hollywood Road, through the wet market on Graham Street, past the mosque, up into the residential mid-evels. Twenty minutes, eight hundred meters, the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, and it cuts through every layer of the city.
Food as a way in.
Cha Chaan Teng for breakfast. Dai pai dong for lunch — fewer every year, but still findable in Central's Stanley Street and a few other pockets. Dim sum in an old-school tea house — Lin Heung Tea House in Central closed in twenty-twenty-two after more than ninety years, which was a genuine loss, but Luk Yu Tea House is still open and has been since nineteen thirty-three. The dim sum is served from trolleys, the tea is strong, the room is all dark wood and ceiling fans, and nobody speaks English. That's not a bug.
The ferries.
Take the Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central at sunset. It costs almost nothing, it takes seven minutes, and the view of the skyline from the water is the one that every photographer wants and can't quite get because the light is always changing. Then take a random kaito — a small ferry — to an outlying island. Peng Chau or Lamma. These are the version of Hong Kong that has no skyline at all. Fishing villages, seafood restaurants on stilts, no cars, paths through the jungle, old temples, the smell of the South China Sea. It's a completely different city, forty minutes from Central.
So the answer to have we missed our chance is yes and no. The political Hong Kong — the city of the Umbrella Movement, the city that believed it could negotiate its own future — that city is gone. The cinematic Hong Kong of the nineteen-nineties — Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love — that was already partly a construction. Wong Kar-wai was making myths out of fragments, same as anyone. But the physical city is still extraordinarily dense, layered, and walkable. What's changed most is the atmosphere of possibility, not the built fabric.
And I think that's the thing to sit with. If you go looking for the Hong Kong of twenty-fourteen, you'll be disappointed. If you go looking for the Hong Kong of nineteen-ninety-four, you'll be chasing a film set. But if you go looking for the city that's actually there — the one that still has wet markets and Cha Chaan Tengs and ferries and escalators and tong lau and the fastest walkers in the world and a specific quality of light through the bamboo scaffolding — that city is still there. It's just not posing for the camera anymore.
Which is almost better, in a way. A city that's stopped performing its own myth is a city you can actually see.
Hilbert: We were faking it in nineteen ninety-seven.
Go on.
Hilbert: I was a location scout for a production company. Right after the handover. My job was finding old buildings that looked authentically Hong Kong for period films set in the sixties and seventies. The directors wanted wet streets and neon and bamboo scaffolding. We'd find a block that still had it, and then we'd have to dress the rest of the street because the Seven-Eleven and the ATM and the fluorescent lighting would ruin the shot. The romantic image was already a salvage operation in nineteen ninety-seven. The city people imagine — the one from the movies — that city was already half-gone when the movies were made.
The fantasy was being constructed in real time, using fragments of a city that was already disappearing.
Hilbert: We had a tong lau on Wing Lok Street in Sheung Wan. Particular balcony configuration — deep, with the iron railings and the wooden shutters. We shot it three times in two years. It was famous in the location-scouting community. And then one day it was just gone. Demolished in two thousand four for a hotel. Nobody told us. We showed up for a fourth shoot and there was a construction pit.
Even the salvage operation was temporary.
Hilbert: What's different now is that the fantasy has become the only version people can access. Because the real city has become harder to romanticize. You can't make a Wong Kar-wai film about a city where everyone's measuring their words. But the city people were romanticizing in the nineties — that city was already being demolished while we were filming it. The difference is that back then, the demolition felt like progress. Now it feels like something else.
The same buildings, the same streets, but the story around them has changed.
Hilbert: The thing I keep wondering is whether it matters. If the image was always a collage, does it matter that the collage is harder to assemble now? You can still find the pieces. They're just not arranged for you anymore.
That might be the answer Hannah's actually looking for. The romantic image was always a collage of real fragments. The fragments are still there. But the act of assembly — that's on the visitor now. Nobody's going to hand you the cinematic version. You have to find your own fragments and make your own city.
Hilbert: Wing Lok Street's still there, by the way. The hotel they built is mediocre.
Of course you checked.
Hilbert: Three stars. Bad breakfast.
The open question is this. If the romantic image was always a collage of real fragments, does that make it less valuable? Or is the act of assembling a personal collage — choosing your own fragments, making your own Hong Kong — is that the real way to understand the city?
I think it's the latter. The pre-packaged version was never the real thing. The real thing is the one you assemble yourself, in the walking, in the eating, in the ferry ride you took because it was there, not because a guidebook told you to.
Hong Kong will keep changing. The forces of redevelopment and political control will keep reshaping it. But the city's core character — its density, its commercial energy, its specific texture — that's not a fragile thing. It survived the handover, the Asian financial crisis, SARS, the Umbrella Movement, the National Security Law. It will survive tourism too.
If you want to hear more episodes that test romantic images against reality, or that treat cities as texts to be read rather than sights to be seen, subscribe. And if you have a city in your head that you've never visited, send us your prompt. We're at show at my weird prompts dot com.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who apparently spent nineteen ninety-seven dismantling the very fantasy he was being paid to construct.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We'll be back soon.
