An Orphan's Tragedy - Bruce Lee (1955) - Tai Po KCR Station, Tai Po Kau

Continuing with some local films, here is one I actually posted about many years ago but removed when I decided to concentrate of foreign productions. Anyway, here it is again.

This is one of Bruce Lee's childhood movies (he was 14 when it was made) loosely based on Dickens' Great Expectations. Lee plays the childhood version of the main characters, whose father has been framed and wrongly convicted of a crime but escapes and then helps his son study to become a doctor. Apart from a rather anonymous hilltop where the young Frank (Bruce Lee) runs into his (unbeknownst to him) biological father - an impossible place to find even for me - there are two scenes filmed on location at the old Tai Po KCR station at Tai Po Kau. The first scene is when Frank (Bruce) departs to go to study medicine. The second scene is when Frank returns after his studies and has morphed into the rather drastically much older, Cheung Wood-yau (father of Chor Yuen in case you didn't know).

Yes, prior to electrification in 1983, there used to be two Tai Po KCR stations. One of them, Tai Po Market station, was decommissioned in 1983 and subsequently became the Hong Kong Railway Museum*. The other was originally called Tai Po station and was located next to the ferry pier at Tai Po Kau. This station was also decommisoned in 1983, but was also subsequently demolished and redeveloped into a KCR staff quarters called Trackside Villas.

The name of this latter station appears to have caused some confusion when it operated, and so the name of the station was later changed to Tai Po Kau to reflect the fact that it wasn't really in Tai Po town. The station was really located here because it was a dropping off point for the nearby ferry pier that provided ferry services all over Tolo Harbour - once a very convenient way for outlying villagers to access the market at Tai Po.

Anyway, in 1955, as you can see from the screen caps below, the station was still called just "Tai Po".

Train approaching from Shatin direction

The view towards the north/Tai Po proper

The little girl is a 7 year old Josephine Siao

*It was at the museum that I first discovered this film because a short clip from it - showing the two scenes I have mentioned - is included in a visual display inside the old station building. For those interested, I did actually venture over that way once and took some photos of where the station used to be. Click here.