The MTR Turns 45: The Mystery of ⵣ

This is the second in a series of articles about the origins of the MTR. Click here to read more.

On a bright summer day, precisely 12,425 kilometres away from Hong Kong, a couple was walking through an African market in Montreal when they spotted something unexpected: a black jumper emblazoned with the red MTR logo. 

The logo can be seen in countless locations around Hong Kong, including in each of the city’s 99 heavy rail and 68 light rail stations. But it was entirely out of place in a colourful bazaar stocked with everything from West African dashikis to t-shirts for Maghrebi pop singers.

“Do you know what that symbol is?” one of the flabbergasted visitors asked the woman who was tending the market stall where the jumper was displayed. 

“Yes, of course,” she replied. “It’s yaz.” 

Yaz. The national symbol of the Berbers, an indigenous people whose homeland stretches across North Africa, and whose presence in countries like Algeria and Morocco predates the arrival of Arabs by more than 10,000 years. It appears on the blue, green and yellow striped Berber flag and is worn as a necklace by many Berber women. Ancient renditions of the symbol have been found in rock carvings dating back thousands of years.

More than a symbol, yaz is the second-to-last letter in the Tifinagh alphabet — ⵣ — and it’s also a word meaning “free man”; according to folk etymology, its appearance refers to that of a broken chain. It represents not only the Berber people but peace, harmony and the relationship between humans, the earth and the sky. So why does it also represent Hong Kong’s metro system?

“It’s hard to speculate,” says Andrew Mead, the MTR’s chief architect. “I certainly know one thing from my graphic design friends is that a great logo is one you can draw straight away. The London Underground is a circle with a line through it. The MTR logo is just three lines. It’s a great logo.”

Exactly what it is meant to represent is a bit of a mystery. If you search for “the meaning of the MTR logo” on Google, generative AI will give you a list of possible hypotheses. The semi-circles may represent the cross-harbour connection between Hong Kong and Kowloon. The logo might be an abstract human figure that represents the millions of people who use the MTR every day. A more elaborate explanation, repeated in a few corners of the internet, suggests the logo is a stylised rendition of the Chinese character for wood (muk6, 木), one of the five elements in Chinese philosophy, which states that “earth generates metal” and “metal overcomes wood, wood overcomes earth.” (MTR trains are, of course, metal vehicles running underneath the earth.) 

“Only one thing is certain,” notes Mead. “It was done by Misha Black. And he was a true master of graphic design.” 

Black was born as Moisei Tcherny into a wealthy Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1910. He arrived in the UK as a toddler in 1912, later adopted a more English-sounding name, and began work as a designer at the tender age of 17. Over the next 50 years, Black became one of the pioneers of modern British design, and his work had a particular impact on the public realm. With his studio Design Research Unit (DRU), he designed the iconic street signs for London’s City of Westminster — including the bilingual English-Chinese signs used in Chinatown — as well as the stylish London Underground trains that ran on the Victoria Line from 1967 to 2011; they were the first of the system’s trains to be conceived by a designer rather than an engineer. 

Black’s colleagues at DRU had no less of an impact on public transport, having designed the British Rail logo, which consists of two arrows that give the appearance of a railroad switch, which was unveiled by designer Gerry Barney in 1965. (DRU also pioneered the use of stick figures to represent public toilets in British Rail stations.) The success of that project caught the eye of Hong Kong’s nascent Mass Transit Railway Corporation, which hired DRU to come up with a logo after the MTR broke ground in 1975. 

“There is a rather strange tale that comes with its identity,” says Maurice Green, who joined DRU in 1965 and later became its chairman and managing director. “I don’t know how true it is, but it stuck in the office [lore] that Misha just did a doodle on the back of a fag packet and the MTR liked it: ‘That’s very Chinese, we’ll go with that.’ Then the team at DRU did the sizing and proportions and refinement so it could be used as an identity.” 

But where did Black get his inspiration? Some speculated that he had simply deconstructed the iconic London Underground roundel to create something new for Hong Kong. But the logo’s Berber doppelganger is impossible to ignore – and yet few seem to have made the connection in the MTR’s 45-year history. 

There are only a few mentions of their resemblance online. A now-deleted travel blog written in 2018 by a Hongkonger named Kathy recalled how she was astonished to see what appeared to be the MTR logo everywhere in Morocco. “I was flabbergasted to see the same symbol in such improbable places,” she wrote. “I wonder if the meaning of yaz was ever part of the inspiration behind the MTR design. Whether it was an inspiration or serendipity, it was brilliant!” 

Last year, journalist Carine Calendreau noted in Hong Kong’s francophone newspaper, Le Petit Journal, that ⵣ is “simply identical” to the MTR logo. “After all, [the designer] had to find his inspiration somewhere,” she wrote. 

Neither Andrew Mead nor Maurice Green were aware of the similarity between the MTR logo and yaz until they were asked about it by Zolima CityMag. “With logos there are a lot of stories [about their origins] that get credence but it’s only the originators that can answer those questions,” says Green. 

Unfortunately, Misha Black did not live long enough to see his logo put into practice: he died in 1977, two years before the MTR opened. It’s impossible to say whether he knew about yaz when he sketched the system’s logo on the back of that cigarette packet; perhaps he had seen it somewhere and it had stuck at the back of his mind. “Nothing is original at the end of the day,” says Mead.

Whatever its origin, it is by all accounts a very good graphic mark. In 1996, designer John Lloyd was hired to update DRU’s original work, introducing a more sedate shade of red and changing the proportions to make it look sturdier and less elongated. “The MTR symbol is abstract and is not meant to communicate an obvious meaning,” Lloyd said in a 2017 interview with designer Adam Charlton. “The symbol has a distinct and deliberate Chinese flavour but there is no literal Chinese meaning that I am aware of. The symbol is intended to look modern and to reflect the state of the art transportation technology evident in the MTR system.”

Charlton is a big fan of the logo, especially after Lloyd’s revamp. “When I first arrived in Hong Kong as a young branding designer, I was in awe of the MTR logomark. If you look for it, the logomark is everywhere, but it doesn’t shout and scream, and it is so wonderfully functional, that you can see it from hundreds of metres away and still recognise it. The dark red gives it importance, but it still manages to sit softly in the background until you need it. As a foreigner 12 years ago, it gave me a sense of safety, a route home.”

And for Berbers, ⵣ is not just a beacon home but the essence of life itself. “It’s magical that a logo can hold so much meaning for so many,” says Charlton. Whether the connection was deliberate or coincidental is something we may never know.