Tile Tales: Exploring Hong Kong and Pakistan’s Culture of Mosaic Tiles

The tile traditions of both Hong Kong and Pakistan come together in a new zine, Tile Tales: The Lives and After Lives of Iconic Tiles. 35 colourful pages reveal unexpected threads connecting the ceramic traditions of these two different places. The zine is accompanied by a short documentary that launches on September 28, offering even more visual and historical insights into the fascinating but under-researched world of traditional tiles. 

Just about everyone in Hong Kong is familiar with the ubiquitous mosaic tiles found everywhere from MTR stations to cha chaan teng, known as zi2 pei4 sek6 (紙皮石 “paper tiles”) in Cantonese because they are sold affixed to adhesive paper. That’s what Tile Tales opens with, but it soon travels somewhere that Hong Kong people might be less familiar with: the southern Pakistan province of Sindh, which has its own tradition of colourful encaustic tiles used for domestic and commercial floorings. 

Why Pakistan? It’s the result of a collaboration between Fizza Qureshi, originally from the Sindhi town of Sukkur — and later Karachi — and Hongkongers Stefan Luk and Willie Siau. They discovered a shared passion for old tiles just four years ago while at the University of Hong Kong, and put together the zine and documentary after receiving a seed grant from Design Trust.

Pretty and nostalgic — but also practical

Tile Tales is imbued with a certain degree of nostalgia, as tiles are associated with older buildings that have a more handcrafted feel than those erected more recently. The historical connection runs even deeper for Qureshi, whose great-grandfather ran a tile factory. Opened in 1934, it shut down when she was a teenager. 

“For me, the nostalgia comes from having had access to a factory that wasn’t operational anymore,” she says. “My family home was built on top of the factory, so since I was a child I saw the factory, I played in it, and I was very mesmerised and fascinated by it. I grew up listening to all these stories about artisans, who were pouring colours, bringing materials, and then also seeing how those tiles looked inside homes.” 

Whereas “paper tiles” became common in Hong Kong after the 1950s, when they were mass produced in factories locally, in Japan and in mainland China, there was also an older tradition here of using the same kind of encaustic tiles that are common in Pakistan. Compared to paper tiles, encaustic tiles are larger — around 20 centimetres square — and individually made, with a concrete base decorated using stencils that are filled with powdered concrete and pigments, then pressed to create various patterns and motifs.

These intricately patterned tiles still decorate historic structures like the University of Hong Kong’s Main Building and the old Dairy Farm depot that now houses the Fringe Club and Foreign Correspondents’ Club. But the appeal of tiles is more than just aesthetic – or nostalgic. “In the case of Hong Kong, it is also very practical,” says Luk. They are affordable, they can be applied to curved surfaces, and they help protect concrete from wet weather, an important quality in a city as rainy and humid as Hong Kong. 

Vanishing tiles

Hong Kong and Karachi are both cities that change quickly, with old buildings torn down and replaced by new ones that often lack the artisanal touch of mosaic tiles. A number of conservation groups in both cities are documenting and trying to preserve some of these characteristic buildings.

Research for Tile Tales required some lateral thinking: as is the case for a lot of vernacular material culture, there is little research available in libraries or archives. But the trio found an alternative source. “We realised that quite often the information we were looking for was less available through academic sources than people who are in the business,” says Qureshi. “Luckily we could still find a lot of commercial letters, orders, receipts, in the Sukkur factory, and trace back part of the history from those, as my grandfather’s brother still has a lot of these records in his house.”

One source of information for Hong Kong turned out to be old architecture magazines and the advertisements for tiles they contained. “In the 50s and 60s these were branded as very modern and chic designs, and then you see a transformation through times, when they became more popularised in different government or private projects as well,” says Luk. 

Tiles in Sukkur, Pakistan – Photo courtesy Tile Tales: The Lives and Afterlives of Iconic Flooring

Global roots

Qureshi, Luk and Siau’s research also brought to light even deeper currents of exchanges. “We are now looking at migratory histories and trade routes and how they overlap with design cultures,” says Luk.

There is an intriguing Italian connection to tiles in both Pakistan and Hong Kong. The machinery used in the Sukkur factory was Italian-made, and many of the designs came from Italian templates. Qureshi recalls that in some cases Italian engineers would go to Sindh to install the machines and explain their functioning. 

Not that Pakistan was new to tiles. Many of its ancient monuments, gardens, royal tombs, mosques, mausoleums and palaces are decorated with tiles that carry a great variety of patterns, inspired by the natural world, by geometry, and even reproductions of flower vases and decorative gates. Known as kashikari, these particular tiles belong to a wider tradition spanning centuries, faiths and regions, becoming particularly relevant during the Persian, Central Asian, Mughal and Ottoman empires. 

In Hong Kong, the Italian connection is even stronger. Italian workers and artisans who left their home country in the 1930s in order to escape the rise of fascism, brought paper-clad mosaic tiling techniques with them. “As early as the late 1930s, vitreous paper-clad mosaics from Italy were introduced to Hong Kong as an alternative to the more expensive and labour-intensive Venetian mosaics” that were sometimes used for prestigious government buildings, according to text in Tile Tales. 

The evolution of tiles

Tiles were advertised as a luxury design element for interiors, and became a fixture in Guangdong and Taiwan, as well as in many Southeast Asian countries. But the mass production of tiles after World War II lowered costs to the point where mosaic tiles became a cheap and easily accessible material used in Hong Kong’s postwar construction boom.

Although many new buildings in Hong Kong are clad in tiles, they tend to lack the decorative elements that were common in previous decades. And with the redevelopment of older buildings from the golden years of mosaic tiles, the public seems to long for the aesthetic they created. In recent years, there has been a surge of souvenirs that feature the most common tile colours — like pale and dark green, or pink and rosewood red — and geometrical patterns. There’s even a resurgence of interest in using tiles for renovations. 

Meanwhile, Tile Tales is not over: Luk, Siau and Qureshi are now expanding their research to mainland China, Southeast Asia and other parts of South Asia, promising to show us even more unexpected links among peoples and their taste in decoration. 

The Tile Tales zine and documentary will launch from 16:00 to 18:00 on Sunday, September 28, 2025 at Heath in Chungking Mansions. Click here for more information.