Dear Mr Know-It-All,
A friend of mine keeps talking about this “tong lau” that she’s renting. What is a tong lau, exactly, and why are people obsessed with them?
– Longing for a Tong Lau
The name “tong lau” literally just means “Chinese building,” but it most often refers to the walk-up tenements that dot the older, more interesting bits of the city. Built in the earlier days of Hong Kong, they’re great if you like big flats with tall ceilings—and not so great if you don’t like walking up six flights of stairs with your shopping. (A side note: Taiwan has a name for its own Tudor-, neoclassical- and Gothic-style colonial buildings. They’re known as “yeung lau”—“Western buildings”).
Early tong laus looked quite a lot more like the shophouses of the rest of Asia, rather than the straightforward walk-ups we think of these days. That’s because shophouses are exactly what they were, of course: the store owner would sleep above his shop and the floors above would be subdivided for extra profit. The best example of this, with a touch of English neoclassicism thrown into the mix, is probably what’s now The Pawn (62 Johnston Rd., Wan Chai).
Some history: the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance of 1903 limited building height to a maximum of four stories. This defined the general size and shape of the tong lau, governed as it was by the Hong Kong construction ethos: build high, build fast. And in 1903, that was four floors high.
But by the middle of the century, a flood of refugees from the Chinese Revolution into Hong Kong meant that the territory was hurting for space. A 1953 Christmas Day fire destroyed the shantytown of Shek Kip Mei, leaving 53,000 mainland immigrants without homes. It finally pushed the government into developing a public housing scheme: by 1955 the height restrictions were lifted, and Hong Kong’s buildings stretched for the sky.
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