The Heritage Detective: Simpson Wong’s Hong Kong Lo Mei

How can such a small place contain so many mysteries? Hong Kong’s high density and mountainous topography mean its inhabitants pass through the same streets countless times, their lives arranged along narrow corridors of shops, offices and flats. You would think that every inch of this built environment would be familiar to the point of inspiring boredom. Instead, it’s the opposite. There are many surprises when you peel back Hong Kong’s urban layers. 

Sometimes you don’t even need to dig deep. Hong Kong Totem (香港圖騰), a new Chinese-language book by photographer and researcher Simpson Wong, is packed full of things hiding in plain sight. (Even non-Chinese readers will find plenty of interest in the book’s photos and illustrations.) Mosaic tiles, obscure pawn shop decals, safety notices: everyday elements of city life that most of us pass by without actually seeing. Like a detective of urban oddities, Wong has spent years documenting these elements and, crucially, digging into the stories behind these seemingly quotidian parts of Hong Kong that, when you stop to really consider them, are actually quite special.

Hong Kong Totem is actually Wong’s fourth book published as part of a project he calls Hong Kong Lo Mei (heong1 gong2 lou5 mei5, 香港老美, “Hong Kong old beauty”). “I don’t have any background in architecture or history – I majored in biology in my university studies,” he explains. “I do this simply because I love taking photographs. I started by taking photographs of old buildings and other old stuff. Then I found it interesting to write about the stories behind them.”

His first book came out in 2021, motivated in part by the surge of emigration prompted by the pandemic, political crackdown and struggling economy. “So many people migrated to other countries — Canada, the UK, Australia or wherever — and they are trying to keep a memory of Hong Kong. They bought my book for themselves or their families. So I continued to dig deeper and deeper into the stories.”

In Hong Kong Totem, Wong offers an eclectic mix of stories about some of the little bits of the cityscape that become so familiar they are taken for granted. One section takes notes of the stylised graphic of a woman’s eyes that often accompanies warnings about crime or misbehaviour. “These ‘angry eyes’ can make people shiver even if they are viewed from a few metres away,” writes Wong. They were first introduced in 1981 as the follow-up to the Hong Kong government’s first cleanliness campaign, which featured a litterbug named Lap Sap Chung designed by Hong Kong-based illustrator Arthur Hacker. “Hong Kong is Watching.” 

According to Wong, many once said that the eyes were those of Hacker’s wife – a joke, considering that Hacker never married. Whatever the inspiration, they were incredibly successful, with surveys in the 1980s showing that 90 percent of respondents recognised them as part of the Clean Hong Kong campaign. Today, their success can be measured by the way they have been appropriated in everyday settings like apartment building hallways to be used on notices of admonishment. 

In another section of the book, Wong turns his attention to another amusing graphic: the pictogram of a person slipping on a wet floor, usually found on a yellow warning sign. He introduces readers to Mayumi Fujimoto, a Japanese woman who first noticed how ubiquitous these signs were in Hong Kong after she first moved here – there are “two to three times more than in Japan,” she tells Wong. With little to occupy her time during the pandemic, she became obsessed with these warning signs, documenting their many variations and sharing them online. 

Not only did Fujimoto notice a remarkable variety in terms of the form of these signs — she was particularly impressed by a space-efficient version that hangs from a staircase handrail — she also began to notice linguistic quirks in their wording. Most signs contain an error in the Chinese character for “slip” (waat6 滑), with one of the uppermost strokes reversed for mysterious reasons. 

There’s no explanation for why that error has been so widely reproduced, but Wong offers plenty of other insights into the nuances of Hong Kong’s visual landscape. He breaks down the now-obsolete valve indicators that are painted on walls throughout the city, looking like nothing so much as little houses. He dissects all of the different components of the colourful bamboo flower plaques (faa1 paai4 花牌) that are built for celebratory occasions. 

In one memorable part of the book, Wong sheds light on the decorative mosaic tiles that grace many pre-war buildings in Hong Kong. His curiosity was piqued when he was given a pin based on the floor tiles of the University of Hong Kong’s Main Building, a handsome Edwardian structure completed in 1912. “They had a little leaflet printed at the back of the packaging that said it was an encaustic tile,” Wong recalls. “I had no idea what that meant. So I started to study encaustic tiles in Hong Kong.” 

He learned that encaustic tiles are made by firing different colours of clay together to make a pattern; originally popular in medieval Europe, they were revived during the Victorian era when they became particularly popular in England. Decorative but also extremely durable, the Hong Kong government mandated their use in opium dens in 1905 in an attempt to improve sanitation. By then, they had already become popular in Western-style buildings like the former Dairy Farm depot on Ice House Street, which was originally built as a cold storage warehouse in 1892 and is now home to the Fringe Club and Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC). When Wong visited the FCC, he learned that many of the building’s original floor tiles had long been covered up by cheaper ceramic tiles; it was only during a renovation in the 2000s that the encaustic tiles were rediscovered.

If Wong gives the impression of simply stumbling upon these bits of historical insight, it’s because that’s essentially what he is doing. “It’s quite a random process,” he says. But it always starts with a keen eye for detail. The most substantial part of the book deals with an unusual gourd-shaped metal ornament on the façade of the Chun On Pawn Shop, a century-old Wan Chai landmark that was shuttered last year. “I took a photo and tried to ask someone who is an expert on the pawn shop history, but he said he didn’t know anything about this metal plate – he said it was too rare and there were no written records,” says Wong. “So I tried my best to figure out what it was.” 

He began by examining 3,000 historical photos of Hong Kong, from which he was able to identify 40 pawn shops with similar gourd-shaped plates. That led him into a rabbit hole of ancient Chinese symbols that are still in use today, from the famous bat-and-coin pawn shop sign to the coin-shaped pattern etched in traditional Hong Kong letterboxes. As it turns out, gourd-shaped metal plates were common in old Beijing, but their use in pawn shops seems unique to Macau and Hong Kong, with variations in design between the two cities. 

As far as Wong can tell, the one in Wan Chai is the last remaining such plate in Hong Kong. If the pawn shop is redeveloped, he will try to save the ornament before it disappears. One mystery solved – but many more to investigate.