This is the third in a series of articles about the now-demolished mansions of Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels. Click here to read the previous stories.
For decades, a Gothic castle lorded over Bonham Road, and the story of how it came to be is a particularly Hong Kong one. It is a story of migration and transformation, of land and capital, of feng shui and age-old traditions. And it starts more than 200 years ago in Foshan, the heartland of Cantonese culture.
That’s where a man named Eu Hok-chung had moved from his family’s hometown in Jiangxi. He grew up to become a feng shui master and started a family of his own. Like so many other young men from the area, Eu’s son Kong-pui left to seek his fortune overseas. In 1879, he travelled to Malaysia — then known as British Malaya — where he settled in a town named Gopeng, where many Chinese migrants toiled in nearby tin mines.
Eu Kong-pui bought land to start tin mines of his own. He also opened a grocery store and traditional Chinese medicine dispensary to serve his workers, many of whom were in poor health from opium addiction. He named it Yan Sang (jan4 sang1 仁生), which translates to “benevolent life.” When he died suddenly at the age of 38, in 1891, Kong-pui left the tin mine and dispensary to his eldest son, Eu Tong-sen, who was just 13.
Life and business in the diaspora
Born in Penang, Eu Tong-sen had returned to Foshan with his mother. After his father’s death, Eu moved back to Malaysia to finish his schooling. He finally took over day-to-day operations of the family business when he turned 21. By then, after years of being managed by the family’s lawyer, the tin mines and dispensary were struggling and saddled with debt, but Eu turned out to be as much of a talented entrepreneur as his father. He bolstered his father’s original investments in tin mining and rubber plantations and expanded into property development, banking, insurance and entertainment, including several Cantonese opera troupes and theatres.
Eu added his family name (Jyu4 余) to the name of the dispensary, making it Eu Yan Sang, and set up locations across Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, where the first branch opened in Sheung Wan in 1909. (The company still operates today, with nearly 200 locations around Asia.) This was a business tailored to the needs of the Chinese diaspora: along with imported goods and Chinese medicine, each location of Eu Yan Sang provided remittance services so migrants could send money back home to their families in mainland China. This was an extremely lucrative business and by the second decade of the 20th century, Eu was one of the richest Chinese men in the world.
But all of that hard work was taking a toll on his health. Worried that he would suffer the same fate as his father, Eu retired in 1928 at the age of 51, leaving his Malaysian and Singaporean managers in charge of his tin and rubber interests; the eldest of his 13 sons took over the banking and property businesses.
Euston Castle as seen from Bonham Road. Photo by Andrew Tse
Eu moved to Hong Kong, which he believed had excellent feng shui. And he wanted to take full advantage of that geomantic blessing by building himself a castle. Not just one, but three. Euston Castle was completed on Bonham Road in 1932. Another mansion, Eucliffe, was built overlooking Repulse Bay in 1933, and a country estate named Sirmio was constructed on the shores of Tolo Harbour in Tai Po around the same time.
A castle in the Mid-Levels
At first glance, each home looked as though it could have been transplanted from Europe: Euston and Eucliffe from some medieval village in England and Sirmio from the mountains of Austria. But closer inspection would reveal some intriguing Chinese motifs and design decisions based on Eu’s interest in feng shui. “The monumental castle can be regarded as a symbolic manifestation of his life story,” writes historian Stephanie Chung Po-yin in an article for Modern Asian Studies. “The fusion of East-West architectural building elements, as symbolised by the Eu castle, was a significant achievement symbolising general social and cultural changes spanning more than a century.”
Chung traces a link between the colonial European architecture of Southeast Asia — including Portuguese-influenced shophouses and the baroque mansions of English merchants — and a transformative trip that Eu took to northern Europe, where he travelled for six months in 1911 after dropping off his eldest son at boarding school in Britain. “The Gothic castles and knight armour left him with a strong impression,” writes Chung. With turrets, pointed arches, a crenellated roofline and stained glass windows, the inspiration behind Euston Castle was unmistakable.
The four-storey, 40-room mansion was located on a 50,000-square-foot site where Bonham Road wraps around the curve of a particularly steep hillside, just above the steps leading down to High Street. More than a hundred skilled craftsmen and artists were brought from Shanghai to work on the building. The architects, a firm called Little, Adams and Woods, were advised by several feng shui masters who dictated the exact location and orientation of the house, insisting on an axial symmetry and a specific balance between the public, domestic and ceremonial portions of the manor. A notable example of this was the Eu family’s ancestral hall, which Eu moved from Foshan to Euston Castle.
Inside Euston Castle
In her paper, Chung offers a detailed account of what it was like to visit the castle, with its blend of Chinese and European features. “The exterior walls of the castle were made of Italian marble,” she writes. Entering through an “intricately carved bronze gate,” visitors encountered a covered entrance flanked by Chinese flowerpots and bronze statues. A spiral staircase led up to the ancestral hall, located in a tower reserved for Chinese religious functions; it was decorated with murals of Chinese gods and filled with books on feng shui. From this sacred place, one could look out the window onto a series of European-style gardens linked by Gothic archways and courtyards.
Back downstairs, the main entrance to the house led to a vestibule guarded by a knight in full armour perched atop a horse. Spears and shields hung on the walls, illuminated by two stained-glass windows, one depicting the Eu family’s coat of arms, another portraying what Chung describes as “a medieval scene of chivalry.” Above it all was a gold-leaf ceiling fresco decorated with nude figures and Cupids, “which gave a glittering illuminating effect in the darkness.” Beyond the vestibule lay a grand entrance hall flanked by a billiards room and formal dining room. “In this there was an echo of the English manner of the proper etiquette in receiving guests,” writes Chung.
From outside, Euston Castle must have looked like an eccentric folly, or perhaps a sign of nouveau riche ostentation. But it was also a symbol of the cultural transformation that families experienced as they migrated from southern China to the British colonies of Southeast Asia. From Guangdong to Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, the Eu family’s story reflects the transnational and intercultural ties that have always defined Hong Kong and continue to define it to this day.
-
- Eu Tong-sen
-
- Euston Castle. Photo by Andrew Tse
In Hong Kong, land is everything
It highlights something else about Hong Kong, too: the way property underpins every aspect of the city’s life. Eu was motivated to build his three mansions because of a prophecy offered by his grandfather, the feng shui master. Because his birthday coincided with that of Lo Pan, the god of construction, Eu’s grandfather advised him that he could attain longevity by building grand structures.
“As the Hong Kong economy took off, the Eu castles and properties also sharply appreciated in value,” writes Chung. This was not unique to Eu. “In many of the notable families in Hong Kong, there have been legends that their stories from rags to riches may have involved the acquisition and construction of properties to achieve longevity, following the directions given by feng shui masters,” she notes. “The irony is: these families later made big fortunes mainly because their ancestors had purchased a lot of cheap land in the name of good feng shui before land prices skyrocketed.”
The Hong Kong property market certainly did not hurt the Eu family’s longevity. In early 1941, as Japanese troops advanced across Asia, Eu Tong-sen made plans to evacuate his family to Australia. He planned to spend one final week in each of his castles before leaving Hong Kong. But he died suddenly of a heart attack in May 1941. By the end of the year, the Japanese military had commandeered Euston Castle; when Hong Kong returned to British rule, it and Eu’s other properties were handed to his 13 sons. When their mother Jenny died in 1978, they decided to sell both Euston and Eucliffe to developers.
Of the Eu family’s redoubt on Bonham Road, only the name survives; Euston Castle was demolished and replaced in 1989 by a pair of beehive-shaped apartment towers named Euston Court. But the castle’s legacy remains.