Videos of Hong Kong in the 50s/60s on YouTube

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 11/12/2008 - 13:21

Michael Rogge has quite an amazing collection of video he took in and around Hong Kong in teh 50s and 60s!

Michael Rogge

That is brilliant footage of a bygone era.  So rare.  I remember seeing women wearing the cheongsam, everywhere. I remember the market, where the little old ladies would add a sprig or two of spring onions to the sale and puchases were wrapped in newspaper and then tied up with some sort of grass product instead of string.  Well before the day of the plastic bag.

I remember the temple and the smell of joss.  I remember the 'feel' being in that part of town produced.....the area west of Pottinger Street.  This little clip brings back so many memories.  One thing hasn't changed.....the trams!!  Though now the seats are fibreglass and they used to be wooden frames with rattan inserts on the sitting area (which were often bug-infested, many a time I ended up with huge bites across the backs of my thighs).

But happily, our streets are a lot cleaner than they used to be.  Thanks to the later Lap Sap Cheong campaign - remember that awful mascot the government came up with !!!

The 'awful' mascot Lap Sap Cheong was the creation of Arthur Hacker when employed by the Government Information Services Department. He still lives in Hong Kong and is a prolific vintage postcard collector and writer on things historical in Hong Kong.

Certainly before that campaign, rubbish in the form of discarded newspapers, food detritus, beer bottles and other junk used to rain down into the heavily littered streets. Even TV sets, plant pots and air conditioners occassionly came down from above. I have a newspaper article filed somewhere that a tortoise fell from a great height and dented a car's roof. A friend even had a package of human waste land splat on his car's roof in North Point. A good reason for not driving an open soft top convertable.

The shop house's ground level covered arcades certainly had some advantages for the pedestrian by sheltering them from falling rubbish.