Dear Mr. Know-It-All,
What exactly is a godown? I see them all around the industrial districts of Hong Kong. – Downtown Funk
It’s simple: “godown” is a Hong Kong word for warehouse.
The word conjures up an image: a colonial icon in a white suit and pith helmet ordering an opium-laden coolie to head down into the warehouse. He puts on his best pidgin English and gestures, irritably: “go down, go down!”
Sounds plausible enough. But “godown” actually has a more convoluted history than you’d expect. When the British floated over to the east, they appropriated the words which made sense to refer to what they found there: “shroff,” “nullah,” “chop,” “godown.” The word was introduced into English in the late 1500s, and it comes from the Malay word gudang, a store room—which in turn was appropriated from a similar word used in the southern Indian languages of Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. And so all across Asia, where there was trade, there is the godown. Trade spreads words and ideas faster than anything else. With plenty of godown companies still scattered all over Hong Kong, the word thrives half a millennium on.
There was one other Godown in Hong Kong: the legendary Godown bar and bistro. Back in the day it was the expat bar in town. Rather appropriately given the name, it spent much its life in the basements of Sutherland House and then the Furama Hotel in Central, where the AIA Central tower stands now. Founded just two days before the 1967 riots began, the Godown was a celebrity hotspot with weekly live jazz nights, and adverts boasted of its European wait staff. It had an iconic communal table where regulars would party into the early hours.
The Godown shut up shop in 1998, after more than 30 years of operation. But these days expats in search of a drink can still take up that cry in pidgin English, of a sort: go down, go down, go down to Lan Kwai Fong…
