Then & NowThe role of oral history in Hong Kong’s urban legends often goes unquestioned

For a small city with a relatively short municipal history, Hong Kong boasts an extraordinary array of colourful urban legends. Commonplace examples abound. Virtually every sealed-off hillside entrance must be a wartime tunnel; likewise, any pre-Pacific war building was definitely a Japanese torture chamber. The more lurid, bloodthirsty and ghost-haunted the “history” of a place is, the better.

End­lessly retold stories about the ancestors of Hong Kong’s lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo population being released from the Government House aviaries when the Pacific war broke out offer a plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable proliferation of an exotic species. But is the tale materially accurate? We don’t know.

The origins of various urban myths, and how they have evolved into received truth over time, offer revealing insights into local approaches to history. How do sometimes-fanciful tales gradually – through constant repetition – become “true” in the popular imagination? And why does evidence-based refutation of urban myths every so often cause serious upset to those who choose to believe them?

One reason for the wide­spread nature of Hong Kong’s urban legends is the uncritical acceptance to oral history. The credibility of an oral history rests on the assumption that the person telling the story is a reliable witness to actual events. Likewise, if they are retailing a second-hand account, it must be assumed that they received their original information from a credible source.

Accept­ance of an oral account also implicitly assumes that nothing substantial was “improved in the telling.” Misrepresent­ations produced by the judicious rearrange­ment of facts and the sequence of events, and the amplifi­cation or distortion of the roles of specific actors to offer a preferred narrative or advance a particular theoreti­cal perspec­tive, are often mistakenly assumed to be absent in an oral testimony.