When Andrew Tse was growing up in the Mid-Levels in the 1960s, it was one of those places that could only have existed in the unique crosscurrents of a British colony on Chinese soil. In this hilly area on the northern slope of Victoria Peak, the stratification of colonial society took on a literal meaning. “All the coolies and workers lived below Caine Road,” recalls Tse. “People on Robinson Road thought of themselves as a higher class than those on Caine Road. And those living on Conduit Road and Po Shan Road were of course a little bit higher.”
If you climbed high enough, you got to the Peak, which until World War II was almost entirely reserved for people of European descent. The Mid-Levels were more mixed. There were British families, but also Chinese, Portuguese, South Asian and Eurasian – the full cultural spectrum of Hong Kong’s monied classes. Tse’s family, who lived in a bungalow at the corner of Castle Road and Robinson Road, were Eurasian. “Chinese, Jewish, Parsi and English,” Tse specifies.
Nearly all of Tse’s extended family lived in the Mid-Levels. “Our family has been in Hong Kong for several generations, so we have many relatives,” he says. “And during Chinese New Year we are culturally very Chinese, so we will go to other people’s homes to make greetings. We would stroll along Seymour Road, Robinson Road and then Conduit Road. They lived all along those places.” He estimates that he had about 100 relatives in the Mid-Levels when he was a child.
Tse moved to the UK for his studies and returned home several years later, in 1979. The neighbourhood he remembered from his youth was quickly disappearing. “It was a time of massive redevelopment,” he says. Many of the old houses, and especially the old mansions that occupied large properties with lush gardens, were being knocked down for apartment towers and high-rise housing estates.
The earliest of those houses had been built in the middle of the 19th century. Hong Kong’s population grew quickly after its establishment as a British colony, from 7,450 living on Hong Kong Island in 1841 to 23,817 just four years later. By 1861, the colony’s population had reached 119,320, thanks in part to large numbers of refugees fleeing the Taiping Rebellion, which plunged China into chaos between 1850 and 1864. Aside from a handful of small towns and villages across Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, the vast majority of those people were squeezed into the City of Victoria, which encompassed the present-day Central and Western District.
Precisely 2,985 of Hong Kong’s residents — 2.5 percent of the total population — were non-Chinese. Among them were colonial administrators but also a growing class of entrepreneurs from Europe, America and across the British empire, many of whom had come to Hong Kong to make a fortune in opium smuggling. When they needed a place to live, they looked up. In 1844, Caine Road marked the uppermost extent of Hong Kong’s urban development. By 1859, Robinson Road was “in formation,” according to a map from that year, which also noted that the land beyond this future thoroughfare was “the base of Victoria Peak here nearly vertical.” Engineers managed to create one last street, Conduit Road, before the slope became truly unbuildable.
These long, winding roads run like elevation lines on a map, each one marking a new strata of fresher air, cooler breezes and better views. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they attracted some of the most recognisable names in Hong Kong history. The “grand old man of Hong Kong,” Robert Ho Tung — patriarch of an extended clan that later included casino tycoon Stanley Ho and martial arts legend Bruce Lee — owned a mansion on the Mid-Levels. So did Parsee entrepreneur Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, instrumental in the founding of the University of Hong Kong, and Indo-Armenian businessman Catchick Paul Chater, responsible for the first major harbour reclamation project and co-founder of the real estate conglomerate now known as Hongkong Land.
Hong Kong’s absolute wealthiest families climbed even higher up the mountain when the Peak Tram opened in 1888, but the Peak Reservation Ordinance of 1904 prohibited non-white Europeans from settling in that rarefied air. And so the Mid-Levels became the bastion of a diverse range of families united by wealth if not ethnicity. Over the years, as Hong Kong continued to grow, it also attracted more middle-class people, who lived in elegant neoclassical terraces and bungalows tucked amidst the mansions. In a 2018 edition of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, retired librarian Bruce A. Chan recalled his childhood on the Mid-Levels, where in 1945 his family moved into a terrace built around 1880.
Basilea Terrace was a two-storey six-unit rowhouse erected on a hill cutting some 20 metres above Lyttelton Road. The building stood behind a driveway that stretched along the whole terrace. The frontage faced roughly north, with a row of verandahs on both floors, each framed by a Roman arch topped with a keystone. Every unit was a triplex: a large living area in front, a semi-open- air utility area in the middle, and in the back, a kitchen, a store room and servants’ quarters. On the other side of the driveway lay six garden lots, one for each residence. The gardens were fringed by shrubs that reached down the hillside. At the rear, a back lane edged with a gutter ran the whole length of the terrace. The steep face behind it was secured by a high retaining wall. Each end of the building bulged with an annex, with its own verandah, and its front door that opened onto a side porch, with steps going down to ground level. At the eastern end, along the side lane stood a low parapet wall separating the terrace from a sizeable piece of vacant land lower down that was overgrown with shrubs and tall grass. Located more than 100 metres above sea level, Basilea commanded a panoramic view of the Harbour, Kowloon and the New Territories.
In his article, Chan digs into the history of Basilea Terrace. Originally named Richmond Terrace, it was built by an Englishman named John David Humphreys who spent time in India and Australia before arriving in Hong Kong in 1867. He found a job with A.S. Watson & Co., eventually buying the company outright and expanding his business interests to include property development. When Richmond Terrace was completed, Humphreys moved in himself and rented out the other units to families on the upper echelons of Hong Kong’s middle class, mostly high-ranking civil servants and managers at the colony’s conglomerates. Over the next several decades, the terrace would be home to French and German missionaries, and various managers of English origin.
By the time Chan’s family moved in, the hardships of the Japanese occupation had taken its toll on the terrace, which by then had been renamed Basilea in reference to the German missionaries, who ran the Basel Mission. The terrace was run down, but its location and venerable architecture made it attractive to Eurasian families like Chan’s, as well as well-to-do Chinese families who were moving to Hong Kong from mainland China and overseas. Chan recalls that, during the time he lived in Basilea Terrace, there was only one European family, of either French or Belgian origin.
The Chan family’s stay in Basilea Terrace ended in 1953, when all of its residents were evicted. “We were too young to understand the rationale for the eviction, but in hindsight, it seems to signal the beginning of high-density apartment building in Hong Kong,” writes Chan. “Some months earlier, we had seen a couple of multi-storey apartment buildings under construction down the hill at the corner of Lyttelton Road and Babington Path.”
The pace of redevelopment accelerated with Hong Kong’s rising economic fortunes. By the end of the 1970s, increasingly large estates with skyscraping towers and multi-storey car parks were taking the place of the Mid-Levels’ old houses. Freshly returned from his studies overseas, Andrew Tse decided to document what was disappearing. “I was an amateur photographer so I started taking photographs of the buildings,” he says. He recorded his images on colour slides, which were high quality but expensive, limiting the number of images he could record. After years in storage, he eventually digitised them and began sharing them on social media, where they generated quite a bit of interest. “In our days nobody cared about old buildings, but about 10 years after the handover [in 1997], people started becoming more interested,” says Tse.
This surge of interest came far too late to save most of the Mid-Levels mansions: nearly all were gone by the end of the 1990s. But there are still traces, if you know where — and how — to look. In many cases, the names of the mansions are reflected in those of the apartment buildings that replaced them. They even bear some physical resemblance. “Lots of today’s buildings follow the outlines of the old buildings, but without the gardens,” notes David Bellis, founder of the Hong Kong history website Gwulo.
And there is at least one mansion that survives today: Kom Tong Hall, which we wrote about as part of our series on Hong Kong’s colonial heritage. Built by Robert Hotung’s half-brother, Ho Kom-tong, and completed in 1914, the massive redbrick pile is now a Declared Monument and home to the Sun Yat-sen Museum. But for Tse, it was something else: his great-grandmother’s house.
“Kom Tong Hall has many memories for me,” he says. “I actually stayed there for several nights during a typhoon in 1960 – I think it was Typhoon Mary. The bungalow we lived in on castle road was flooded. The lady living in Kom Tong Hall at the time was my father’s maternal grandmother, so we used to go there often. It’s one of the best buildings in the Mid-Levels.” And it’s a reminder of the history — and personal stories — that linger in every one of the neighbourhood’s properties.
This is the first part of a series that will explore the history of different mansions that once stood in the Mid-Levels.