Colonial Hong Kong buildings, most of them lost, celebrated in Another City, Another Age by Peter Moss

The next time you stroll through Statue Square in Central Hong Kong, imagine you are surrounded on three sides by neoclassical Victorian buildings, and the ornate entrance to Queen’s Pier as you look north to a Victoria Harbour swarming with traditional junks.

This is the era the reader is transported back to in the pages of Peter Moss’ Another City, Another Age, a gorgeous new photo book that captures the grandeur of old Hong Kong by cataloguing the former colony’s stand-out buildings constructed between 1846 and 1963.

Of the more than 60 buildings presented in the book, only 12 remain standing today (including The Peninsula hotel and St John’s Cathedral), and Moss writes that “their scarcity in itself testifies to the extent of all that is lost to us, except through the photographic record”.

“Hong Kong is an example of planned obsolescence carried out on a metropolitan scale,” Moss adds. “It is not that the buildings themselves are planned to fail. Quite the contrary, they look – and indeed structurally are – constructed to last several lifetimes.

“Yet the historical odds indicate that … they will be superseded within a few decades. For such is the nature of Hong Kong. There will always be compelling financial reasons to pull down and replace, to build bigger and bigger and maximise the potential of some of the world’s most costly real estate.”

Many readers will be struck by the quality of these images, many of which were taken more than 150 years ago.

Moss writes this astonishing detail was achieved by the large-plate camera typical of its time and the “clarity of Hong Kong’s pioneering plate-glass photography remains unmatched, except by the few large-format cameras that still survive in today’s photographic armoury”.