Murray House – in the affluent Hong Kong seaside town of Stanley – is a remarkable building and the tale of two civic projects. For some, its demolition and subsequent resurrection make it the jewel in the crown of the former British colony’s heritage. To others, it has become little more than a travesty. Unlike many other architectural treasures that have ended up as landfill, Murray House – a 19th century building dismantled piece by piece and placed in storage in the 1980s – was found a new role as seaside hang-out. Its resurrection 20 years ago was the culmination of a drawn-out process, and generated a chorus of protest from heritage purists. Rewind to 1982, when the building was in the middle of the rapidly expanding Central district, a mundane – albeit architecturally distinctive – government office building that could function practically anywhere and didn’t need to occupy a prime commercial site. The Bank of China was in need of a plot of land for its new headquarters, a tower later designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei. The Murray House site was sold for HK$120 million – widely regarded as a sugar-coated sweetheart deal – and the historic building was taken to pieces stone by stone, tile by tile and column by column, each numbered and placed in storage. Several years rolled by and discussions dragged on until 1988, when the Housing Authority, then undertaking a major building project at Ma Hang in Stanley, suggested resurrecting Murray House on the waterfront there as a dining and entertainment venue. Haunted Hong Kong: Murray House and its ghostly happenings Taking a Victorian building to pieces and putting it back together again some years later was never going to be a straightforward task, especially as it had never been attempted before in Hong Kong. As Housing Authority architect Kevin Yeung Chun-kit admitted after the project’s completion in 2000: “To put it in a nutshell, it was like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle”. Murray House had been stored in some 4,000 pieces, and despite these being catalogued, some had gone missing while others had been damaged. If it was going to be reassembled from a pile of near-rubble, a creative solution had to be found. To add to the complications, tradition-minded villagers in Stanley were anxious about the construction of anything that might affect their feng shui, and Murray House came with a spooky reputation. Murray House was built in the 1840s to accommodate the British garrison’s military officers, and took its name from an aristocratic Scottish general and politician, Sir George Murray, who had never visited Hong Kong. The building was designed by Major Edward Aldritch of the Royal Engineers with the climate uppermost in mind, at a time when manually operated fans offered the best respite from heat and humidity. A double layer of tiles formed the roof, and all the rooms had high ceilings to allow the air to circulate, while the two upper storeys were edged with wide verandas where officers could shelter from both blazing sun and torrential rain. Murray House – built with locally quarried granite in a Classical style relieved by Doric and Ionic columns – was a prominent structure at a time when Victoria, as Central was then called, was still fairly ramshackle. The most difficult part of this reconstruction project was to put the stones back in their original position … we designed and constructed an internal reinforced concrete frame to suit the fixed dimensions of the external building Kevin Yeung, Housing Authority architect For the first century of its existence, little disturbed Murray House’s role as a home far away from home for British officers. They ate their dinner to the strains of a regimental band, played rowdy games of billiards or indoor cricket, and ran up substantial bar bills for lack of other entertainment. In 1941 the Imperial Japanese Army launched a surprise attack on the colony, which surrendered on Christmas Day. Murray House was taken over by the kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, and hundreds of detainees were interrogated, tortured and executed on the premises. A sense of evil descended on the building, lingering long after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945. In the post-war years, Murray House was handed over to the government. Ratings and Valuations Department staff moved in, but it wasn’t long before they started to report unusual occurrences. An exorcism was arranged in 1963 after workers complained that malignant spirits were stalking them in the lavatories and muddling papers left on desks. This was partially successful, but in 1974 yet more ghostly goings-on necessitated a two-hour exorcism by a cohort of 70 Buddhist monks, who made headline news in all the local media. The decision to take Murray House down and move it south was greeted with relief on all sides, though the logistics were to throw up a number of problems for the Housing Authority’s planners and architects. Yeung was given overall responsibility for the new vision of Murray House. “The most difficult part of this reconstruction project was to put the stones back in their original position,” he recalled at the time. “To meet this requirement we designed and constructed an internal reinforced concrete frame to suit the fixed dimensions of the external building envelope,” said Yeung, who declined to be interviewed for this story. His solution earned him the enmity of the heritage lobby, but ensured Murray House could be put back together safely, as the original stones were stuck onto the new frame like so many Lego bricks. Yet there were further problems in store. “We made sure the project paid due attention to local culture, especially the Tin Hau temple,” he said. “The locals said that their temple needed a feng shui link with a clear line of sight down to the sea, so we built a special lane leading from the temple [past Murray House] down to the water’s edge, which terminates with a small stone relief.” Once complete, the building was touted as a tourist destination by numerous guidebooks and the Hong Kong Tourism Board, although its interiors offered little more than a chance to eat and shop in historic surroundings. Its advantages came to be appreciated by locals. “Murray House has been part of the Stanley landscape for the past 20 years and it has been a real benefit to the community, attracting more visitors and the money they spend,” says Alson Wong Kam-chuen, chairman of the Stanley Residents’ Association. In its current incarnation, Murray House is home to such disparate tenants as an outlet of the Swedish fast-fashion store chain H&M and a mock German bierkeller. Lee Ho-yin, associate professor in architectural conservation at University of Hong Kong, is not a fan. “Really, Murray House is a completely new modern building clad with about 80 per cent of the exterior stonework from the original building,” he says. “In fact, I would call it a new building that imitates the old, using recycled components from the old building to decorate and disguise the new building. “It’s slightly better than no conservation at all – at least some parts of the tangible historic fabric of the old building have been saved. But the context is lost, and the memory of the original building in its original context should have been interpreted at the new site to tell the full story.” Lee equates Murray House’s transformation to removing excavated artefacts from an archaeological site to a museum. “Interpretation labels need to be displayed with the artefacts to tell a more complete story,” he says. “In Hong Kong, the vast majority of built heritage are those originally designed for use by ordinary people, as opposed to monuments like palaces, cathedrals and grand public buildings designed to serve the social elites. “Typical examples are the tenement buildings known as tong lau, such as the Blue House in Wan Chai, which has been adapted as a base for social service programmes for the community. And there are also historical public buildings like old police stations, and infrastructural engineering structures like bridges and reservoirs.” The heritage value of such buildings and sites comes from being part of the day-to-day culture of their associated communities, Lee adds. “As such, the most appropriate conservation approach is to continue the use – either maintaining the use for which they were originally designed, or, if that is no longer relevant, adapting a new use for something that is needed by the community.”