Field Notes · 街坊筆記
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Kowloon's spine. Temple Street neon, paifang gates, bird markets, and the densest square kilometre on earth.
九龍脊樑。廟街霓虹、牌坊、雀仔街，地球上最密集的一平方公里。
This is the Hong Kong most people picture first, with signboards leaning over the street, old cafes with terrazzo floors, and markets that wake up just as the office towers go quiet. Fifteen minutes inland from the polished lawns of West Kowloon, past M+ and the Palace Museum and the joggers on the promenade, you're in Jordan, then Yau Ma Tei, then Mong Kok, and by Sham Shui Po the signage is running three languages deep over wet markets and pawnshops that haven't repainted since the 80s. The contrast is most of what keeps pulling me back.
Temple Street Night Market has been running since the 1920s, and the paifang gate at the entrance frames a corridor of stalls, fortune tellers, and open-air opera singers that stretches deep into the Yau Ma Tei night. If you want photographs, try to arrive by 9pm before the crowd fills the main drag, or come back after 11pm when the stalls are packing up and the whole street starts to feel a bit like the backstage of a film set.
Mong Kok holds the record for the most densely populated neighbourhood on earth, and the neon signs are its signature, part of the skyline since the 1950s. The government now classifies most of them as unauthorised structures, which means they come down a little more each year, so I photograph them every time I pass through.
At Yuen Po Street Bird Garden in Prince Edward, elderly men bring their songbirds for daily outings and hang the hand-carved cages up in the trees so that the birds can socialise. It's a remarkably quiet spot for this part of Mong Kok, and on most mornings the loudest thing you'll hear is the birds themselves. If you're there to photograph, it's worth going early and giving the owners plenty of room.
Mido Cafe opened in 1950 and hasn't changed very much since, with its terrazzo floors, old booth seating, and a neon sign that's become one of the most photographed in the city. The French toast and the condensed milk tea are the classics, and it's the kind of place that rewards you for sitting in and taking your time over both.
Tsim Sha Tsui faces the island from across the water, and when fog rolls in off the South China Sea it swallows the IFC tower floor by floor. Once the fog clears, the skyline goes all glass and gold in a way that doesn't quite happen anywhere else in the world. The easiest vantage point is the promenade by the Star Ferry, about an hour before sunset.
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See these streets as they happen on @gweiloprints.
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