Foxbat - Henry Silva (1977) - Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

Immediately after Garden Road we see the vehicles - in a rare show of movie geographical accuracy - pull out onto Queen's Road Central. This was before the right turn (towards Wanchai) was replaced by a flyover.

This shot actually captures the former Hong Kong cricket ground (closed in 1975) undergoing its transformation into the now rather bleak and overly-concreted Chater Garden, which I believe opened the following year in 1978. Sorry, but in my Western-oriented foreign-deviled mind I am forever destined to associate the word "garden" with things like grass and the colour green rather than a drab grey and a proliferation of concrete. In Hong Kong, as long as it was built using Li Ka-shing's "Green Island" cement than that is about as green as it needs to be.

Anyway, note the very elegant and still standing Hong Kong club in the background. That was to stick around fora few more years before its eventual redevelopment. You can also spot the lower floors of the Furama Hotel at the back. And a little further along the road (see below) we get to glance back and can see the Hilton Hotel as well as what looks like a newly constructed Murray Road car park on the right.

The Yin and Yang of Mr Go - James Mason (1970) - Hong Kong Cricket Club, Central

So just a few short weeks after seeing the old cricket club featured in Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine it pops up again (around 4 years later) in a more blurry version of itself. In this film though we get a quick glimpse of the scoreboard (how exciting...).

Behind Jeff Bridges in the second picture is the old Hong Kong Club, but by then its annex building had been knocked down and replaced by Sutherland House. This was the building that had the large green neon advert for Bayer for all those years. You can just see the corner of it at the right hand side.

Finally, in the lower picture with James Mason you can make out the Murray Barracks building at the background sitting on the site now occupied by the I.M Pei Bank of China Building.

Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine - Jean-Paul Belmondo (1965) - Hong Kong Cricket Club, Central

The large open concrete Chater Garden (if you can call something covered in concrete a "garden") was once the grassy pitch for the Hong Kong Cricket Club. For over a hundred years it operated as a sports ground (from 1851 until 1975) and I guess the French film makers caught it on film in the last few years of its existence before the Cricket Club moved to its current location up at Wong Nai Chung Gap. Call me old fashioned but I prefer the site of green grass to drab grey concrete any day of the week. Sadly it's the latter that prevails in HK these days.

The first photo shows the camera pointing almost directly west and we can see The Hongkong Hilton Hotel, the Peak, Bank of China/HSBC/Standard Chartered as well as the former LegCo building (originally the Law Courts and now returned to the legal world as the Court of Final Appeal). Interestingly, the building behind the Courts is what looks to be the 2nd generation Prince's Building under the final stages of construction. There looks to be scaffolding and catch nets installed around the exterior.

The next picture is looking NW and you can see a corner of the Mandarin Oriental at the extreme left as well as the cricket club's clubhouse below it (was it the club house or just a viewing pavilion?). You can also see the former Hong Kong Club building and City Hall poking up just behind it. The building with the metal spikes on the top (behind the scaffolding) is the former Cable and Wireless Building. The building in scaffolding looks to me to be the old Hong Kong Club annex that was actually in  the process of being demolished (Gwulo puts the demolition year as 1966, so that ties in nicely).

The next picture below shows a closer view of the buildings already mentioned but the final one below is a view looking NE and shows what I believe to be the Naval dockyard power station chimney.

Last, but not least is this brief shot over to the old Murray Barracks building. The new(er) Bank of China building now occupies that location and while the HK Govt likes to trumpet a heritage preservation success concerning how the old barrack building was carefully taken apart and then reassembled brick-by-brick in Stanley, the reality is something slightly less romantic.What really happened was that no one knew how to put the thing back together so they simply poured a huge concrete rectangle to serve as the centre of the building and then reattached the balconies like hanging baubles on a Christmas tree. HK-style heritage preservation indeed.

Men of the Dragon - Jared Martin (1974) - HK Cricket Club, Central

Not many modern visitors, or even residents for that matter, realise that Chater Garden in Central (and the term 'garden' is applied in the liberal HK sense of the word here i.e. no grass, just concrete) was once actually a nice wide open cricket ground (with real grass!!) used by the HK Cricket Club. It's quite ironic that a large piece of grassy land should be need to be concreted over in order to get the name 'garden' bestowed on it, but I guess care of all things natural and green weren't (and still aren't) of great concern to those in Govt.

The club moved up to its current location at Wong Nai Chung Gap Road ('The Gap') above Wanchai when its lease on the ground was not renewed by the Govt and the 'Gap' site was offered as an alternative. It moved pretty much around the time this film was made (circa 1974/75) so it is quite possible that the producers of Men of the Dragon caught one of the last few games of cricket being played on this pitch.

Anyway, once again the grabs are not the greatest of quality but if you would like to see some better pictures of the ground, Gwulo.com has a decent selection here.

In the first picture below you can see Garden Road in the background where it hooks up with Queens Road Central. The building on the corner right there was the old Hilton Hotel - demolished around 1994 to make way for the Li Ka-shing monolith that is the Cheung Kong Centre. When I first visited HK back in 1995, I had just missed the hotel by a few months and the workers had started to do the pile driving for the new building.

As the camera pans from left to right across the pitch, the last screen grab shows the side of the old Bank of China, and look carefully you can see a little bit of the decoration that adorned the front of the Hilton. Chater Garden was officially opened in 1978 and these days seems to be a focal point for protest march gatherings. It's named for the road it sits next to, Chater Road, which is itself named after Sir Paul Chater who was a central figure in HK development. Some of the businesses he founded or helped found are still around including Hongkong Land (now controlled by Jardines) and Hongkong Electric.