Only in Hong Kong: underground wine cellar with a machine gun emplacement outside the door

Security is an important concern for any high-end wine storage facility, but Crown Wine Cellars in Deep Water Bay must be unique in having a second world war machine gun emplacement located near its entrance.

A simple concrete barricade is visible to the right of the reception area perched on the roof of one of 12 pairs of concrete bunkers used by the British Army for ammunition storage in what was the Central Ordnance Munitions Depot. Eighty years after its completion, the elevated position only offers a clear line of sight over the car park, but during the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941, Vickers machine guns were fired from here towards the advancing troops of the Imperial Japanese Army.

“Over 30,000 rounds were fired from here at Japanese troops over on Mount Nicholson,” says author and military historian Tony Banham, pointing across Deep Water Bay Drive towards what is now a large construction site

Banham has been involved with the heritage of the former munitions depot for decades. They were constructed in 1937 as part of the renewed fortification of Hong Kong in preparation for a Japanese attack. The depot was manned by some 60 soldiers of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and was a vast warehouse for weapons, ammunition and explosives. The location was carefully chosen for its remoteness, in a deep valley where bunkers could be dug deep into the hillside and any unplanned explosion could be contained. The site was commonly known among the troops as “Little Hong Kong”. Although this is the Chinese name for the nearby town of Aberdeen, the moniker has stuck.

Revealed: The former military bunker now being used to store Hong Kong’s finest wines

“When I first visited the site about 30 years ago it was just an overgrown habitat for snakes and lizards, but the government still used it to store geological coring samples from construction sites,” says Banham.