Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Yellowthread Street (TV Series) - Bruce Payne (1990) - Kowloon Panorama

The problem I am finding with several episodes of Yellowthread Street is that they were filmed in often generic looking side streets that I simply don't recognise - it's compounded by the fact that, actually, my knowledge of streets on HK Island is fairly limited having spend all of my time here living on the other side of the harbour (i.e. New Territories and now Kowloon).

However, there are some nice aerial shots used in the program that give us a brief look at the colony circa 1989/90 (it had a 1990 broadcast in the UK). Here's a nice zooming shot from a Kowloon vantage pointy over to the Island. The angle makes me think this shot was taken from the pavilion on Fei Ngo Shan Road where the road curves north off the ridgeline and down towards the Sai Kung side of the mountain (see the location label at the bottom of the post.

 

3 comments:

gweilo8888 said...

Good guess on the filming location, but I'm thinking just a little off. I spent most of my life in HK living in Clearwater Bay, and we used to go up Fei Ngo Shan once or twice a year. (That was our traditional place for watching the Chinese New Year fireworks -- the road used to be stationary for most of its length, with cars parked and abandoned on and alongside the road at every potential viewing spot. But I digress.)

I'm thinking it was actually shot from Jat's Incline, specifically somewhere around the lookout pagoda that's a corner or two further up the road past Po Kau Temple, or perhaps the next big dogleg in the road about another 600 meters further up.

The reason being that if you look in the foreground of your second screenshot, right-to-left that's Fu Shan Estate (the two low, offset blocks), King Shan Court (the cluster of white buildings) and the just-completed King Lai Court (the leftmost two buildings, completed in 1989 and still greyish-looking, perhaps not having been tiled yet.)

That puts you almost directly behind Diamond Hill on the west face of Kowloon Peak, and Fei Ngo Shan Road would be on the east side, behind the peak.

There's really nowhere else it could've been shot from with that perspective than Jat's Incline, unless they hiked their camera gear up the trail to the top of the peak itself, which seems more than a little unlikely. :-)

Phil said...

Hi gweilo8888. You could be right, but there is an angle on the Fei Ngo Shan Rd that almost exactly matches the angle on screen:

https://www.google.com.hk/maps/@22.353172,114.220929,3a,75y,222h,85.8t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1snVDbho5jyaKWhx_8kuiTVg!2e0?hl=en

See the closer ridge with the pylon on it? It lines up almost perfectly - the only difference is, in fact, the elevation. It looks as though the film crew managed to get a higher elevation so I am thinking they either got the camera up on the hill above the road or they built a platform to perhaps look over some tree coverage.

Cheers
Phil

gweilo8888 said...

You know what, you're right! The foreground ridge does seem to match, so I was off. Could have sworn the rear building of Fu Shan Estate was too far visible for it to be shot from there, but there are too many distinctive shapes in that ridge which are mirrored in the Street View imagery.

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