Then & Now | Remember the shrewd gold-toothed amahs? Dentistry in Hong Kong has come a long way since then
Japanese dentists were popular in pre-war Hong Kong for their workmanship, and refugee dentists from China thrived in the Kowloon Walled City in the post-war years, until a shortage of professionally qualified local ones eased
Throughout human history, one unavoidable fact of ageing has been the gradual loss of one’s teeth. While dietary, heredity and environmental factors all either hastened or delayed the inevitable, having a mouth with more gaps in it than teeth was eventually “just one of those things”.
By the mid-19th century, dentistry practices had evolved, bringing the manufacture of orally inserted plates of false teeth. Early dental plates held human teeth (mostly sourced from unclaimed corpses) but, as time went on, porcelain versions became available.
As good dentistry became widespread, the habit of filling carious teeth with gold grew popular. Period memoirs from across the Far East, including Hong Kong, have as a stock figure the gold-toothed domestic amah who shrewdly kept a portion of her savings tucked away in gold fillings.
Aesthetics aside, the reasons for this were eminently practical. If a person needed to flee from flood, famine, warlords, foreign invaders or some other calamity, then what could be more secure than an immediately realisable asset anchored in one’s mouth?
From the early 20th century onwards, Hong Kong’s more popular dentists were expatriate Japanese.
One reason for the influx of Japanese dentists, who established thriving practices in cities across the Far East, was the large number of Japanese sex workers then resident in port cities. An otherwise pretty prostitute with nasty rotting teeth, and correspondingly foul breath, would naturally lose customers and income.