This is the third in a series of stories looking at the protagonists in Cha Guo, an upcoming documentary by Daphné Mandel and Guy Bertrand that focuses on the people of Kwu Tung North. Read the previous stories here.
It is not easy to see Chi Kee Mill from the street: the skyscrapers from the Shenzhen skyline are more easily spotted by peering over a bend in the road, where the vegetation is not so thick. This is the area where the new Northern Metropolis is being built and many cranes are already busy at work behind tall metal barriers. As the project of building a new city just adjacent to the Chinese border is going ahead, with the goal of creating greater integration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the workshops and inhabitants of Kwu Tung are having to make space for the new urban development.
The lumber mill sits in the northern end of Kwu Tung, in Ma Tsu Lung village, not that far from Lok Ma Chau and the border. The only road through the area hardly sees any traffic, and after walking up and down what remains of the industrial zone, you finally spot a handwritten sign, big Chinese characters traced with red paint on a white support, that announce that this is indeed the Chi Kee Wood Mill. The entrance is a repurposed metal container, with windows cut out from the sheet metal, and only by peeping behind it you can finally see the tell-tale signs of a mill. There are heaps of wood: old wooden lamp posts piled on one another, tidy eco-friendly sheets of wood imported from Canada, and old temple pillars, all stacked together in what looks like a wooden mountain, waiting for future use.
Inside, a smiling Wong Hung-kuen awaits clients and visitors, among pieces of wood, random old objects he has collected just in case they inspire him, and two stray dogs he takes care of. “How can I leave this place?” he asks. “Nobody would take care of these two anymore. I need to stay for them.” He and his sister, Wong Mee Kiu, spend their days here, but live on Hong Kong Island, in Chai Wan – where the wood mill used to be, before a government redevelopment forced them to change their location.
-
- Wong Hung-kuen in his mill
The history of the Chi Kee Mill tracks the history of Hong Kong’s urban development, with one relocation after another. Today, its future is a lot less clear than ever before, both for the changes in the construction industry, and for how much harder it has become to find large, usable industrial spaces in densely urbanised Hong Kong.
The mill’s adventures started in the early 1940s, in Wan Chai and then in North Point. “They were considered rather remote places at the time, half of those areas were still countryside,” he says. These were years when a sawmill had a lot of work, as Hong Kong Island was under heavy construction and wood was in high demand. Buildings required vast amounts of wood, and cheap, simple furniture — shelves, stools and tables — was also harder to come by than we are used to today.
Hong Kong was already changing quickly. After World War II, the last rural corners of Wan Chai were being developed, and in 1947 the government required Chi Kee Mill to move out of the area. In 1948 — the year Wong Hung-kuen was born his father received permission to open a sawmill in North Point. Business there was even better than in Wan Chai. The waves of refugees coming to Hong Kong from the mainland to escape the devastation of war all needed shelter. Many of them lived in squatter huts made of wood.
But the North Point sawmill, too, was short-lived. After the devastating fire in Shek Kip Mei in 1953, the government started building more and more resettlement estates for squatters, and in the mid-1960s the Chi Kee Mill had to pack its bags and wooden logs again, this time to move to Chai Wan. The mill began importing wood from Malaysia and Wong’s father invested in one of the few giant wood saws that were operational in Hong Kong in order to help build homes for a city increasingly hungry for accommodations.
Those were the years of maximum expansion. The whole Wong family — Wong’s father Yau-chi, his wife and their four boys and four girls — was helping out at the mill. For more than 20 years, the business became an established fixture of the area. But change was about to come once again, in step with urbanisation. In 1982, the MTR’s Island Line was extended to Chai Wan and the Chi Kee Mill was given compensation to move once again – first in a different spot in Chai Wan, but when it was redeveloped to build the Eastern Corridor just a few months later, then to Sheung Shui, not far from the current, temporary location in Kwu Tung. “It wasn’t just us, of course. So we got together with a number of smaller mills, in order to pool our resources together and buy some land where we could have a more stable business,” says Wong.
-
- Wong Hung-kuen in his mill
-
- Wong Hung-kuen in his mill
From this point onwards, things were more stable, location-wise, and yet also more fluid in terms of land rights — something typical in the New Territories. This was also the time when Wong Hung-kuen started to branch out more from his strictly construction-related activities, creating some charmingly informal tables, benches and chairs. He makes use of old wood, like the wooden lamp posts he collected as the government was replacing them with more durable iron ones, and slices them up into irregular rounds that could then become table tops. For the table legs, he often cuts unusual shapes, leaving behind a lifelong obligation to very straight and functional wooden planks. For example, some of his tables are propped up by three thick branches, left unfinished and packed close to each other. One of his benches, hidden among the tools and pieces of woods that crowd his working space, repurposes leftover, precisely cut planks and parallelepipeds; they are unvarnished and ready to change with the passing of time and the effects of the weather.
The future of the Chi Kee Mill is once again unclear due to the construction of the Northern Metropolis. Wong’s workshop has little time left in its current location: “I was told I had to move by September, but nobody came since then, so for now I am still here. And I have to take care of the dogs,” he says. After all the moves he and his family have had to make as Hong Kong became the city it is today, and as he gets on in years, he is no longer sure he wants to look for yet another place to establish a wood mill. The trend towards more ecologically-friendly plywood, made with layers of wood shavings, means that the solid wood he has been working with all his life is less in demand.
“I like making this kind of furniture, now,” he says, pointing with pride at a wonderfully naïve-looking chair with rounded legs, a repurposed piece of lamp post for the seat, and a thick, rounded back support. Some of these unique pieces have been sold to various independent cafés around town, where the unique and whimsical look of his furniture is fully appreciated. The temple poles he has collected also have a practical use, as he has contributed to the restoration of a few temples around Hong Kong – with the exact right type expertise and the proper material at hand. Three years ago, for example, he helped restore the Luk Wu Ching She temple on Lantau, acting as an expert wood consultant.
Wong doesn’t keep his expertise to himself: he has been holding workshops for students in order to teach them how to make furniture. The chair that sits right at that small, easy-to-miss entrance, for example, has a beautiful and rough table made by his students taking pride of place: a thick tabletop that follows the exact shape of the tree trunk from which it was cut, and an irregular, beautifully cracked support, in what could be defined as a stylised hourglass shape. Whatever happens to the mill, Wong’s talents and his lifelong relationship with wood will endure.
All photos are stills from Cha Guo, courtesy of Guy Bertrand and Daphne Mandel.