Summons to Death - Tang Ching (1967) - View from Fei Ngo Shan Road

Poon escapes the police at Shatin Inn and, all of a sudden, is above Kowloon near to Fei Ngo Shan Road. The large hill in the middle image is the "Diamond Hill" that the area is named after. The hill is long gone having been excavated and the area was turned into the Fung Tak Estate and adjacent Po Kong Village Road Park (there's a great bike track there for anyone interested). People always ask me where the hill is in Diamond Hill and, well, that's where it was.

Bill Lake - new autobiography just released.

Some of you may recall a video interview with Bill Lake that I helped arrange a few years back. The interview was conducted by Arnaud Lanuque for his House of Asian Cinema Youtube channel (and to add to his vast archive of Hong Kong and other Asian film actor interviews).

One of the upshots of this was that Bill felt it was time to put it all down into written form and the result has just been released on Amazon.com. So please go ahead and grab a copy if you are a fan of 70s and 80s cinema. The book details Bill's upbringing in the UK and his career as a gunner in the Royal Artillery - the very vocation that led him to settle in Hong Kong. These days Bill is one of the foremost military historians in Hong Kong and South China, and it was our shared interest in this that led us to first meet via Gwulo.com. Go buy his book!

Summons to Death - Tang Ching (1967) - Shatin Inn, Tai Po Road

Head pirate, Gin Te-biu (Lo Wei) meets up with his old pirate chums and arranges to meet one of them at the Shatin Inn the next day. However, he has been double-crossed and the police turn up to arrest him.

Shatin Inn was apparently used in quite a few films over the years - it opened in 1955 and only recently closed down in September 2024 for reasons I will get into below. However, I've only ever seen it once previously on the blog and that was for a scene with Chow Yun Fat and Sylvia Chang in All About Ah Long.

We see the venue in its heyday below, when the Tai Po Road was the only way into the Shatin Valley from Kowloon, and all traffic on the road went by the Inn. It was famous for its satay sticks, but by the time I last went (about 10 years ago) it was quite expensive and way past its sell-by-date. One of the contributors to its downfall was the reconstruction of the road system here back in the early 2000s. The changes turned that part of the old Tai Po Road into the singular access road for Shatin Heights up in the hills. This meant most traffic was rerouted away from the restaurant's location unless it was heading up into the Shatin Heights residential area. No doubt the Covid restrictions imposed between 2020 and 2024 also had a major impact on the place's footfall.

The top image below shows the view across the Shatin valley from Tai Po Road. Sadly, the New Territories hasn't looked like this for a long time. You can see the most recent Streetview from the same place here but the tree growth prevents you from seeing the hundreds of highrises that have sprung up.

View from the rear of the restaurant

Summons to Death - Tang Ching (1967) - Port Shelter, Sai Kung

Back to the late 60s and another Tang Ching film, Summons to Death, where he plays a very similar character to the 009 he played in Inter-Pol the same year. In this film he is some sort of secret agent who inadvertantly gets involved in the hunt for a treasure map when he is approached in a night club by Mei-Li (Tina Chin Fei) in a case of mistaken identity. This one is written a directed by Lo Wei who also makes a briefish appearance as the leader of a group of pirates who come across half of a treasure map. He is captured by the police and entrusts his old pirate buddies to track down his long lost sister (Chin Fei) and get her to find the other half of the map.

The film starts with the origin of the map - the property of another gang of pirates who live on a rather extravagantly pimped out fishing junk. The pirate leader's girlfriend double crosses him and makes off with half of the map with her boyfriend just before Lo Wei and his gang arrive and find the other half.

The pimped out junk is afloat in the middle of Port Shelter in Sai Kung.

Pimp My Ride, HK junk style

Godzilla vs. Destroyah - Takuro Tatsumi (1995) - Nga Tsin Long Road , Kowloon City

I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning on my increasingly creaky desktop and found a couple of images from Godzilla vs Destroyah that I never made into a post. I have no idea if I forgot at the time or just didn't know where the location was. Anyway, after a quick look I can see that this shot was taken at the junction of Nga Tsin Wai Road and Nga Tsin Long Road. The giveaway in this case is the corner of the market building that can be seen on the right of the upper image. The older buildings are still there for the time being.

Tai Po Market KCR Station - Now and Then

I recently took a trip back to Tai Po, my former home of six years when I first moved to Hong Kong, and coincidentally the very first place I ever stayed when I first visited Hong Kong back in November 1995. One of the best places of interest in Tai Po is the Railway Museum, based in what is the former Tai Po Market KCR station.

Sadly, the days of cows wandering around in the background are long gone, but it's a good example of how over-developed Hong Kong has become.

Ballad of a Small Player - Colin Farrell (2025) - Rio Hotel Casino, Macau

Another spot from TST Dave, this one is quite brief and I had totally missed it so hats off to Dave for persevering on this one. It's definitely a tricky one to spot. The top image shows Lord Doyle riding an escalator down to a lower floor during his initial boit of gambling. Dave was able to match the ceiling decoration in the background to confirm it was the Rio Hotel Casino. This is the same location that Doyle is first spotted by Dao-ming and the same place he returns to following his return to Macau after convalescing in Hong Kong, so it's a fairly major location I had missed out. Thanks Dave.

Ballad of a Small Player - Colin Farrell (2025) - Sands Casino Hotel, Macau

Here are a couple of extra locations for Ballad of a Small Player courtesy of TST Dave. So many thanks to Dave. The first one is a brief view of the Sands, identifiable by the crescent-shaped light fittings that cover the gaming floor. If you have a decent enough memory you may recall I had identified this a while back for Now You See Me 2, but I had neglected to include it this time around.

She Shoots Straight - Joyce Godenzi (1990) - Lam Tei Quarry

The film finale takes place in a quarry as Mina chases Yuen Hua and Yuen Ying away from the waterfront on a police motorcycle. The brother crashes and is killed so it's left to his sister to fight Mina mano a mano. This is actually quite a good fight and you can see Godenzi throwing down with some slick moves - no wonder Sammo made a move...Anyway, it looks as though this was filmed at Lam Tei quarry.

Yip Man's Grave, Fanling

Continuing the process of resurrecting my film- and Bruce Lee-related posts from my old, deleted history blog, here is a post I originally made back in 2011 about how to visit Yip Man's grave in Fanling. It's been a while since I made the effort to go (I think my last trip was around 2014?) but I don't believe very much has changed since then.

Yip Man has been very much in the public eye over the past decade or so thanks to the rather large number (relatively speaking) of films that have been made about him, including four with Donnie Yen, two with Dennis To, an effort from Wong Kar Wai starring Tony Leung, a mainland Chinese TV series, another film with Anthony Wong, and a plethora of cheap and quick cynical cash-ins from mainland China. First we had Brucesploitation and now we have Yip Mansploitation. If you're curious about whether the old master is spinning in his grave about all this, you can now go and check.

This photo is on Yip’s grave stone