These buildings form the heart of Hong Kong. Even as mega malls and tower blocks gain on the streets and skyline, the city, at its core, is an amalgamation of these gritty, weathered blocks – a tangle of pastel-coloured low-rises.

This week, City Weekend tells the story of Hong Kong’s development through its tong lau and composite buildings, edifices that put up no facade of pretension.

The pre-war tong lau

They’re small: squat narrow buildings of no more than eight storeys. Traditionally, living space is divided into small units in these walk-up structures, a sign Hong Kong has always known a shortage of habitable space.

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Intricately tied to Hong Kong’s political history, tong lau are symbols of a way of life that is slowly disappearing. In a city known for its opulence, bright lights, skyscrapers and frenetic pace of life, the everyday existence of these shophouses is a reminder of Hong Kong’s more ordinary honesty.

Often referred to as “tenement houses” in British colonial records, the literal meaning of the name tong lau is “Chinese house”. This style of collective, low-rise dwelling dates back to the mid-19th century, and is characteristic of pre-war colonial Hong Kong.

While tong lau are a critical part of Hong Kong’s urban history and aesthetic, they are not unique to the city. Pioneered by merchants across South China and Southeast Asia, these buildings responded to the needs of their original builders: accommodating commercial units on the ground level, and space for living above.

When Hong Kong Island became a British crown colony in 1843, many people from China’s southern coastal cities emigrated there. The need for manual labour to construct the newly established Victoria City created settlements in Sheung Wan, on the outskirts of the new colonial entrepôt located around Central.

The tong lau emerged as the most convenient and economical answer to the growing housing problem. The early tong lau were dark and narrow and lacked natural lighting and toilets, but were seen as suitable tenements for working-class Hongkongers.

Sociopolitical factors particular to Hong Kong made the local version of this Asian typology unique. Many of the first tong lau were designed in the regional vocabulary, but featured subtle European variations, such as colonnades and loggias, that hinted at their colonial origin.

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Most pre-World War II tong lau are three to four levels high, while those built after 1950 can have as many as eight. Post-war, a more utilitarian generation of tong lau emerged, which continues to dominate Hong Kong’s landscape.

Whole neighbourhoods, such as Tai Hang or On Wing Lee Street in Sheung Wan, built in this style survive.

These days, however, there aren’t many remaining examples of the earliest pre-war tong lau, which were first built in Hong Kong Island’s Chinese settlements, such as Tai Ping Shan.

Built in 1884, 120 Wellington Street in Central was saved from the demolition for redevelopment that razed the surrounding neighbourhood – it is one of the few 19th-century tong lau that remain. The Pawn in Wan Chai, which dates to 1888, is another example of these early tenements. Today, it has been renovated as a retail and upscale bar and restaurant complex that pays homage to Hong Kong’s heritage.

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In Mong Kok, the carefully restored rounded corner building Lui Seng Chun, built in 1931, stands serene amid the clamour of the markets nearby and houses Baptist University’s school of Chinese medicine.

While some attempts at tong lau restoration have been made, many have fallen victim of Hong Kong’s relentless pursuit of redevelopment.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to remodel dilapidated tong lau into new community spaces, such as the renovation of the Blue House in Wan Chai, or into upscale flats, as in the case of Kennedy Town’s Tung Fat Building. To date, these efforts have been mounted by smaller developers, funded by private companies or wealthy, often foreign, individuals.

Post-World War II: composite buildings

As World War II came to a chaotic end, the influx of refugees escaping first the conflict and then the 1949 communist takeover of mainland China meant that Hong Kong had to figure out how to meet the demands of an ever-growing population. The pre-war tong lau proved insufficient for new housing needs.

They were replaced by composite buildings in the 1950s and 60s, which, according to the Buildings Ordinance, are buildings that are “partly domestic and partly non-domestic”.

In other words, the buildings were, in essence, outsize tong lau, with ground-level retail space and living space overhead – although the presence of business signage on upper floors suggested the mixed nature of the buildings might have extended beyond the ground level.

Composite buildings are how Hong Kong, a city traditionally characterised by the low-slung tong lau, came to grow upwards.

In 1950, the outbreak of the Korean war fuelled a population increase, even though the embargoes imposed on communist China also led to a decline in the colony’s trade. Estimates from the 1954 Annual Report show that Hong Kong’s population was increasing by over 50,000 a year in the 1950s.

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The tong lau were not big enough to solve the housing crisis at the time, so when the Buildings’ Ordinance allowed constructions of up to nine storeys without a lift to be built in 1955, developers jumped at the opportunity.

This first wave of high rises had no restrictions on their internal use, and quickly developed into hectic worlds of their own. Two of the most famous examples of this are both in Tsim Sha Tsui: Chungking Mansions, built in 1961, and Mirador Mansion, built in 1959.

Many composite buildings grew to become mammoth structures subject to little or no regulations. Ultimately, concerns over the blocking of natural light led to a government policy that required the upper levels of composite buildings to be set back from the street, creating the undulating shape unique to Hong Kong.

Between 1959 and 1979, around 5,000 composite buildings were constructed. Ten per cent of these buildings each house more than 1,500 residents – earning composite buildings the moniker “city within a building”. Today, however, the existence of composite buildings is threatened: many have been knocked down due to the government’s policy of selling buildings more than 50 years old.

These doughty multicoloured structures have become ubiquitous in Hong Kong, defining block after block of city street. From them emerged the city’s tendency to build residential towers above air-conditioned shopping malls, which in turn, are placed over MTR stations. In this way, the city’s “new towns” designed around this mixed-use concept are a vestige of not only Hong Kong’s composite building heritage, but of the tong lau.