Dear Mr. Know-It-All,
I love roads. I love thoroughfares. I love alleys. What is the most interesting street in Hong Kong? – Streets Ahead
There are plenty of paths which could fall under that designation, Streets Ahead, but here’s one of the most rarely visited: Chung Ying Street in Sha Tau Kok, northeastern Hong Kong. The street sits at the edge of the Closed Area, the rural buffer zone which separates Hong Kong from Shenzhen. Chung Ying, literally “China-England,” is one country, two systems at its most literal. At one end of the road, Hong Kong; at the other, China.
In the 80s and the 90s, the street saw up to 70,000 Chinese tourists a day. As the only border in Hong Kong without any kind of checkpoint, mainlanders would flood in to buy luxury goods from the Hong Kong side of the road. At its peak, 47 of the street’s 50 stores sold gold. The road was rigorously patrolled by police, who had to distinguish between Sha Tau Kok locals, permitted to pass freely between the two countries, and others who wanted to smuggle merchandise—or themselves—into the territory. At the height of the 1997 bird flu outbreak, for example, the police were on continual watch for people smuggling banned live poultry into the city.
After the Handover, Hong Kong-China border restrictions were relaxed, and mainlanders began to favor Tsim Sha Tsui over Sha Tau Kok for their luxury shopping. The area was soon bled of its appeal.
These days Chung Ying Street is hard to visit: as part of the Closed Area, you need to be granted a permit to enter; a permit usually reserved for those who live or work there. But the street has lived on as a minor tourist attraction, and a site of small-scale smuggling: Closed Area permit-holders shuttle goods across the border and once in Shenzhen, couriers speed it farther inland.