Rooms with an ooh: the history of Hong Kong’s love motels

A perennial aspect of the local nightlife scene since Hong Kong’s earliest days, “hourly” or “shorttime” hotels have proliferated in recent years.

Historically, rooms rented by the hour were mostly utilised for sexual assignations with temporary and – for the most part – professional partners. Hourly hotels have always operated on a strictly bring-your-own basis in terms of companionship, which protects the proprietors from the charge of operating a brothel.

Before the Pacific war, shorttime hotels were mostly found around long-established “entertainment” districts, such as Wan Chai, Yau Ma Tei and Shek Tong Tsui. Old-style Chinese hotels were extremely basic, and the shorttime version was no exception.

Rooms contained a very hard double bed with a rattan or splitbamboo cover, a porcelain pillow, enamelled spittoons, thin cotton towels, bare light bulbs, a washstand or – depending on the availability of plumbed water – a cold-water sink in the corner and a ceiling fan. Patterned linoleum on the floor and perhaps a brightly coloured wall calendar provided the only decoration.

While these hotels were not – legally speaking – brothels, many prostitutes rented their rooms on a semi-permanent basis, which enabled them to circumvent legal loopholes regarding the sex industry.

The hotel proprietor was not running a brothel; he was also not knowingly living on the earnings of prostitution.