Hopes of revival for dying trade of street hawking in Hong Kong

"What d'ya want, sir? Cup of yin yeung? Coooooomin' up!"

Tucked between high-rise offices of multinational companies in Central, the hawkers of Stanley Street serve steaming cups of Hong Kong-style milk tea to early rising workers. Business picks up at lunchtime, when their kitchens dish out plates of hot rice topped with wok-tossed meat. For dinner, beer glasses clink as Cantonese dishes are set on roadside tables.

There are just a handful of these stalls now, hawker Wily Chan Chiu-wah says. Decades ago, the street was filled with stalls and customers.

"It's almost all gone now ... We're the lucky ones already," says Chan, tossing rice and egg in a huge wok. He scoops the fried rice onto a plate and wipes his brow with a towel.

Hong Kong hawking - an age-old practice of selling cheap food and wares from stalls and street carts - is going the way of horse-drawn carts and century-old buildings. Worried about hygiene and street congestion, city officials took steps in the 1970s to limit the practice.

The rules - a ban on new licences and severe limits on their transfers - have shrunk the number of legal hawkers in Hong Kong from 50,000 in 1974 to just about 6,000 today. Last year, the city started a programme to buy back licences, further shrinking the numbers.