One of the many alleys which lie between Des Voeux Road Central and Queen's Road Central in Sheung Wan, Wing Kut Street is lined with retailers and stallholders specialising in costume jewellery and accessories, stamps and coins.
Built by private developers in the 1860s, it was a private road until the early 1900s. It is one of several alleys to the west of Central Market given lucky names beginning with 'Wing' (forever) - its neighbours include Wing Sing Street, Wing Wo Street and Wing On Street (formerly known as 'cloth alley'); Kut, Sing, Wo and On, mean 'lucky', 'win', 'peace' and 'content' respectively. The names were an attempt by the developers to rid the area of the bad luck that had plagued it. Once known as 'Chinatown', the area west of Central Market was first settled by the Chinese labourers who flooded into the new British colony.
By the 1840s, it was an overcrowded, unsanitary sprawl of squatter huts. In 1851, almost 500 homes were destroyed and 22 people killed by a disastrous fire.'It was bound to happen,' writes historian John Luff in the Hong Kong Story. 'On December 28, a Chinese, preparing a meal, allowed the fire to get out of control. In a moment the hut was in flames, and within minutes the fire, fanned by a vicious gale, had the whole area in flames.' It could have been a lot worse had the Sappers not created a firebreak by destroying an area.
Fame came to Wing Kut Street with the opening of the upmarket Luk Yu tea house in 1933. Named after a famous tea gourmet from the Tang Dynasty, more than a thousand years ago, its expensive dim sum, classy interior, good food and fragrant tea drew a respectable, wealthy clientele, including famous actors and actresses. Other restaurants and nightclubs, including Hong Kong's first ballroom, the Mye Lau (Fancy House), opened at the Des Voeux Road end of Wing Kut Street. It became a popular entertainment and dining district for middle-class Chinese in the 1950s. The crowds attracted food stalls and small factory outlet clothing shops. Redevelopment forced Luk Yu to move into Stanley Street in 1976, followed by the other large, fashionable restaurants. But the stalls remained.
The in 1980, the Shing Lee Commercial Centre opened, attracting a different kind of visitor. With its 150, tiny shop spaces spread over four storeys, it attracted small retail businesses, including costume jewellers, and shops selling antiques, coins and stamps. One of the biggest and best-known costumer jewellers is Lam Chan Kee, with branches in Sheung Wan, Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui. It started as a street stall in nearby Gilman's Bazaar in the early '80s and soon expanded into a ground-floor shop on Wing Kut Street. As costume jewellery grew in popularity during the '80s, more wholesalers moved to the street, first to small spaces in Shing Lee, then into bigger stores.
From the mid-1980s, stamp and coin collectors started taking their places in the Shing Lee, which had become known as 'stamp street' by the mid-'90s.
Cheng Bo-hung, owner of the Commonwealth Collections Company (Shop 5, 1/F Shing Lee Commercial Centre) is a respected historian and collector of stamps, coins, notes and postcards, and has written four books on the subjects. He is vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Stamp and Coin Dealers' Association and an honorary adviser of the Hong Kong Museum of History. 'By the end of 1996 Shing Lee's corridors were so packed with stamp collectors it was literally impossible to move!' recalls Cheng. With the handover approaching, people queued up to buy anything symbolic of the British era and stamps, especially those imprinted with the queen's head, became hot items for speculators.