A history of Hong Kong’s love affair with Latin dance, from salsa to kizomba, the top instructors and where to strut your stuff

At a club in Causeway Bay on a recent Saturday night, a group of men and women have gathered to dance. And although they come from different countries and from all walks of life, they have learned to express themselves through the common languages of salsa, bachata and kizomba.

Welcome to Hong Kong’s thriving Latin dance community, whose members meet in different venues across the city every night of the week. Anyone can join in the fun.

During colonial times, a sanitised version of Latin dance was prevalent in Hong Kong. In her 2008 book, Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, Julie Malnig writes that the British codified and standardised Hispanic dance culture because it was easier to market and distance from its African origins. As a result, Hong Kong’s early exposure to Latin dance came mainly through the ballroom, and the essence of Latino culture was lost.

However, the city’s Latin dance scene was galvanised in 1997 by a ponytailed Chinese teacher named Bo Ko Si-lui. Bo, who hosted Salsomania nights and Cuban-style salsa classes at the Viceroy of India restaurant in Wan Chai, had spent 20 years in Spain, where he fell in love with the seductive moves. (Bo mysteriously receded from the scene several years ago.)

One of Bo’s students, Dekai Wu, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, recalls that before Bo came along, the city’s Latin dance community comprised only a handful of students who got together at the Fringe Club. “He was the only one who was really teaching salsa dance. He had a passion for it. Quality dance or not, nobody else was proselytising it,” Wu says.

“The British had this whole thing of making everything into a game, a sport. Here when people find out I’m a musician someone would say ‘What grade are you?’ There are certificates, exams, associations, societies, clubs … It’s the street form of this music and dance where the soul of it really is.”

Hong Kong salsa teacher Franky Wong says he was first exposed to authentic Latin dance when he attended university in Canada in the early 1990s, and realised it was very different to what he’d learned in Hong Kong. “My instructor had an idea, ‘Let’s go to the Latin club in Victoria’ [Canada]. We thought that were we going to kick ass.