Hong Kong Collectors: 120 Years of Trams

Ding ding! Hong Kong’s trams have been trundling along the tracks of Hong Kong Island since July 1904. With the 120th anniversary of the first tram ride next Tuesday, July 30, the “ding ding” sound and the gentle whirring as the tram begins to pull away have been a part of our soundscape for generations. 

Hongkongers have a fondness for the tram, whether it’s their daily commute or because it’s part of their collective consciousness in children’s story books, movies or TV series. And it’s an experience. Once you board at the back and go up the steps to the upper deck, it’s an opportunity to gawp into hair salons on the second floor of Wan Chai buildings, circle round the racecourse at Happy Valley, gaze at the sea at Kennedy Town or enjoy the congested stalls at North Point, where the tram runs straight down the centre of the Chun Yeung Street market.

Some of Joseph Tse’s die-cast metal model trams – photo by On Sek

Trams are also beloved of collectors, in the form of stamps, books, old photographs, postcards, scale models or parts of the trams and stations themselves, old signage, advertising or even the destination roll. Hong Kong collector and writer Joseph Tse Yiu-hon is passionate about trams. He’s the president of the Hong Kong Trams Culture Preservation Society and is currently giving tours. Some of them take place on the iconic tram number 120, constructed in 1949 as part of the post-war rebuild, when there were only around 20 trams still running; it has been kept largely in its original form with wood and rattan seats and some modifications in 1991.

Tse has a variety of tram items at his flat which unsurprisingly is situated a stone’s throw from the tram track in Sheung Wan. Die-cast metal model trams at 1:76 scale line two shelves, along with two larger plastic tram toys from the 1960s. Some of the metal models are from the 80M Bus Model Shop founded by Peter Kwong Ping-wah more than 30 years ago. 

“It’s not only the 120th anniversary of the birth of the tramway, it’s also in Chinese tradition a double cycle of a dragon year, so it’s very powerful and positive,” says Tse. His interest in the tram goes back to childhood: “The tram ‘ding ding’ sound would wake me up when I was small in Shek Tong Tsui and the tram lines ran past my flat.” 

In the past, Tse would venture out of his flat in the early hours of the morning because in the darkness he could get a photograph — very occasionally — of a maintenance tram, which would follow the last tram out. While he’s now retired from his nocturnal pursuits, Tse still has managed to photograph pretty much all the trams on the tracks and is a regular tram traveller. It’s easy on the wallet: a tram fare today is an egalitarian HK$3 per passenger, with no third or first class as in years past; everyone gets on at the back and exits from the front. 

There are a total of 165 double decker trams in the fleet, more than anywhere else in the world; about 147 are running on the tracks at any one time. 13 kilometres of double track run along seven routes along the north shore of Hong Kong Island — a few blocks inland from the harbour, thanks to years of land reclamation — extending from Kennedy Town in the west to Shau Kei Wan in the east. About three kilometres of single track loop around Happy Valley.

At home, Tse rifles through his collection. He displays a page taken out of a family photograph album that shows the celebrations in Hong Kong for the coronation of King George V in 1911, with a tram heavily decorated. He then unfurls a long destination roll that would have appeared in the back of a tram decades ago. Interestingly, it not only has the regular names you might expect, such as Causeway Bay or Wan Chai, but also informs the pedestrian that there was no horse racing that day at Happy Valley; it also has storm warnings, useful in the days before smartphones or even television.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a collector,” says Tse, “but what I have is very meaningful to me. Sometimes I will take the tram and normally I don’t have a plan where I will get off. I see where my mood takes me and what I want to discover.  The longer route is to Shau Kei Wan, but I don’t normally ride as long – but if it’s the 120 tram then I’ll take it!”

Tse helped to put together a 120th anniversary tram exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Yuen Campus, in Pok Fu Lam, which is on until the end of August. He has also written a number of books about the tram, the most recent in collaboration with British tram enthusiast and model maker John Prentice. In 2017, Tse and Prentice also updated Hong Kong Tramways, a book originally written in 1970 by Alan Williams and Robert Peter Atkinson. 

Williams is now 83 and he lives in Blackpool in England. In the early 1960s, he was in the Royal Navy and based in Singapore, and he would come to Hong Kong for rest and recreation for three weeks at a time. As a boy he had loved trams but in the UK they were largely disappearing, so Williams was delighted to discover on his first visit in 1961 that Hong Kong had them in abundance. “Hong Kong’s got trams?” he recalls thinking when he first arrived. “I don’t think I slept that night.”

The tram depot in those days was at Sharp Street in Causeway Bay and Williams began documenting the archives. He copied much of it by hand, typing it up when he was back on board his ship. “There were the daily and monthly reports, the shareholder reports,” he says. He also photographed the workshop and trams. Collectors and transport historians can thank Williams for his documentation, photos and cine film. 

“Most of my stuff went back to the 1920s,” he says of the items he found in the depot. The tram photos he found included one of the so-called “toast rack” where passengers sat on long benches; the tram was open to the elements on both sides and the conductor would walk along the running boards on either side to check tickets, in all weathers. The original livery was a dark brownish red with canary yellow, which was later changed to green. 

Williams learned to drive trams on the Seaton Tramway in Devon, southwest England. He also cast his own tram models that would be mail ordered to enthusiasts around the country. He was last in Hong Kong in March, when Hong Kong Tramways invited him to the depot. Williams gave them his cine film collection of Hong Kong trams and walked around the workshops. Then, to his surprise, he found the company had arranged for him to drive a tram up and down the depot. “It was magic to me,” he says. “There’s been 120 years of trams in Hong Kong and I’ve known the trams for 60 of them.”

At the book fair this week, collector Alan Cheung Shun-kwong has been signing copies of his new book Ding Ding and I: Photo Album of the 120th Anniversary of the HK Tramways to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong’s trams. His passion for them came via philately.  In 1988, he was in a Hollywood Road antiques shop admiring a Queen Elizabeth II stamp on a postcard, then he turned the card over. “I had this very excited feeling – there was a tram in front of a very grand building and I thought it was in Europe,” he says. 

It was actually Hong Kong. The single-deck tram dated back to 1906 and the building was Alexandra House in Central. There were initially 26 single-deck trams built and the bodies for those were constructed in the UK. The tram construction would later be moved to Hong Kong. Cheung, a past president of the Hong Kong Collectors Society. has gone on to collect postcards, photographs, tickets, tram stamps, and also to create his own artwork. A retired surveyor, he worked for the MTR in the 1970s, the KCR and also the Castle Peak Power Station. 

Among his photographs is one depicting a tram, bus, taxi and private car on a road next to Victoria Park in vibrant 1960s colour. While looking at trams, of course, the viewer also sees the fast-changing architecture around them. Another 1960s shot with a tram in the foreground is of Yee Woo Street, where Sogo now stands.

When asked about his love for trams, Cheung shows how much the subject can invade the subconscious – even with anxiety dreams. “I had a dream,” he says.  “I was standing on a platform waiting for a tram. And there was nothing. I waited for an hour and no tram came.” He woke up in a sweat.

Near Victoria Park in the 1960s , Alan Cheung’s collection

Hong Kong Tramways have two trams, the 120 and the newly-built 300, trundling round to publicise the 120th anniversary festivities in a campaign featuring the beloved cartoon character McDull. Tse shows a photo of the 300 passing Western Market where the tram’s massive billboards have replaced the windows. “I’m looking forward to the 120th souvenirs,” he says – a whole new special collection, including a Hong Kong Tramways golden ticket and a specially produced 120th model tram with McDull illustrations. Naturally, made to scale, of course, just as the rest of the model trams in Tse’s collection.

The exhibition Tram Tales: 120 Years of Hong Kong Tramways runs until 31 August 2024. For more details visit here.