Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Das Mädchen von Hongkong - Joachim Fuchsberger (1973) - Hing Fong Road, Kwai Chung

I was having difficulty reconciling the following image with modern Kwai Chung even though I had a fairly good idea of what I was looking at - Tsing Yi in the background is a bit of a giveaway. The problem was the buildings in the foreground and mid distance. Nothing today matches up, and there's a good reason for it as I have recently discovered. This is also my excuse for not posting it earlier :)


This still is from a sequence in Das Mädchen von Hongkong when Fuchsberger is being attacked in his friend's office. As he dangles from the balcony he looks back and this is one of the views he gets. Now, in reality I'm not sure this was taken from that place (i.e. the Wader studio) but it was certainly nearby as it shows two old Government Housing Estates that have since been rebuilt. In the foreground is the original Kwai Hing Estate built between 1970 and 1972. According to wiki, structural defects were found in the concrete and the whole place had to be ripped down in the late 1980s and the current Kwai Hing Estate is what replaced it.

The estate at the back left is the original Kwai Fong Estate, built between 1971 and 1972, and it too was found to have structural problems leading to its eventual replacement by the current estate. So there you go, two shoddily built 1970's estates. It looks as though shoddy building practices are a long established tradition in HK. Anyway, the road you can see running from the bottom is therefore Hing Fong Road.

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