Tiger Balm Gardens, or what's left of it. [1935-2002]

Submitted by tngan on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 12:57
Current condition
Demolished / No longer exists
Date completed
Date closed / demolished
(Day & Month are approximate.)

The original site had been [invaded] by the Legend Towers.  These towers had also been famous of emitting awfully greenish light pollution in the evenings.

Photos that show this Place

Comments

completed around 1935, sold in 1999 and demolished soon after:  A Century of Hong Kong Island Roads and Streets by Cheng Po Hung. 
the mansion is still there and I guess should be a separate place 

If it was LI Ka-shing who bought this place, chances are he saved everything and reassembled them elsewhere on his other holdings. I did try to poke my head into the Gardens while it was being redeveloped but there was a big security guy who shooed me away like I wanted to pinch something. I wonder how that mansion fit into his scheme of things? Have many happy memorie of the place. Thanks for the quick response.

I'm not sure that Li has ever had a reputation for preserving stuff. I guess it's not beyond possibility but I think the pagoda would have been painstakingly difficult to dismantle and preserve. He could easily have reconstructed it at his monastery in Taipo by now if he still had it.

Wiki does say that the AMO salvaged some of the statues and murals but doesn't say what plans they have for them. I suspect much of the Kuomintang/\Nationalist flavoured stuff ended up as landfill.

 

I wouldn't have a clue about dismantling large structures like that Pagoda other than it would have been a terrible loss to have it destroyed after it having stood there for ages. LI would have found some way to preserve it, no doubt. I'm surprised there was no write-up in the papers about where it ended up.

As for the stone statues depicting Chinese torture and punishment for the evildoers, I didn't expect LI to want to save all but a few. That's his business. I offhand can't recall the ones you mentioned as having political overtones but obviously they didn't sink in. Perhaps the AMO did rescue the lot I don't know.

1: No need to guess what's left, just join one of the captioned when it's re-opened after the temporary closure due to the plague, and see for yourselves.

I've been joining one of those, visiting the garden and different floors of the mansion.

http://www.hawparmusic.org/

2: Does anyone know the exact area that this TBG occupied before Rosedale Garden, Dragon Garden and the former building of Signature were built?

I'm wondering if the slope between Tai Hang Drive and 111 Mt Butler Rd also belonged to this Garden, or if it's part of the previous squatters area.

That slope is just facing Rosedale Garden and Tower 5 of the Legend.