Monday, December 30, 2019

Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Lai Chi Kok Prison, Lai Chi Kok

My stalwart followers will perhaps remember that I have posted once before about the old prison at Lai Chi Kok. The exterior was used in one of the scenes in the 1965 French film Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine and involved a gunfight from several trucks carrying Coca-Cola bottles. It took some tracking down because the old prison was replaced (at some unknown date) by the newer, euphemistically named, Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre. It sounds very inviting doesn't it?

Anyway, in The Woman in Gray (Ep: 23) it is the location of a jailed female Japanese prisoner who was wrongly accused and convicted of murder and the episode is another one of those 99% studio based ones where Glenn Evans must investigate and find a key witness to the crime - the so-called "Woman in Gray". This is the only location from the episode.

The opening shot of the episode, as well as a later establishing shot shows the old prison so I finally get to see what the rest of it looked like. Note the buildings in the background of the first image. This is the old Lai Chi Kok hospital that has since been turned into the Jao Tsung-I Academy, a sort of cultural experience centre founded by (or dedicated to) local Chinese Cultural Historian Mr Yiu Chung-yee (aka Jao Tsung-I).

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