Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine - Jean-Paul Belmondo (1965) - Museum of Coastal Defence, Shau Kei Wan

This post has been several years in the making. Back in 2016, I was doing a deep dive into the filming locations for the 1965 Jean-Paul Belmondo classic, Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (aka Up to his Ears), and hit upon a place that I was finding it difficult to identify - so I put a picture upon my (now defunct) "help me"page. The location in question appears during the Lai Chi Kok prison sequence (see here) and is supposed to be the interior of the prison/police station.

Common sense told me that the prison interiors were probbaly not the real interiors because the prison was in full-time use at the time, so I wondered where these interior shots might have been filmed. A regular reader at the time, Arthur Yau, suggested that the interiors might be at the old Lei Yue Mun Fort - now more commonly known as the Museum of Coastal Defence in Shau Kei Wan. This made sense given the amount of filming that took place at the nearby former battery.

Here are the screen captures of the interior shots.

Anyway, lots has happened since then. I was fully intending to go and checkout Arthur's hunch and was just mustering the motivation to go when the museum closed for refurbishment (in fact a complete re-fit) late in 2018. Of course then Covid came along and everything in Hong Kong was shut down (you name it - restaurants, malls, sports centres and even peoples' common sense). I also got stranded in the UK (twice) and couldn't get back anyway even if it had reopened.

Anyway, I finally made it there this month (August 2023). It's been open now for nearly a year and the refurb looks pretty good (although in one of the displays there is a rather dubious claim that implies China single-handedly defeated Japan in World War 2 - but this might just be a poor English translation).

One of the best displays (for me at least) is an array of before/after images that show various parts of the complex before and after the initial creation of the museum. One of the images is below and it basically helped me to confirm Arthur's rather astute guess.

In case you can't see it, this corner of the redoubt - now the main section of the museum - was the same one seen in the screen shots above. The police office is the room on the left with the two small rectangular windows (in the top part of the comparison) and to the right is the arched casemate entrance where Belmondo and co and being kept behind bars.They are then ushered through the small arched doorway between those two places. My own photo below shows how they look now with galleries inside the rooms. The small rectangular windows on the left have been covered up and these rooms now contain galleries dedicated to the East River Column and the Japanese invasion.

Anyway, it's only taken me nearly 6 years but it's nice to have another location finally identified, and a big thanks to Arthur. Feel free to visit the museum, it's free of charge but is closed on Thursdays.