Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - King's Road, Quarry Bay

This episode, The Dragon Cup, actually has a location in it that took a long time to track down, simply because the area has changed so much over the last 30 years that I was having a hard time reconciling the screen captures with how it looks today. Again, the mapping office aerial pictures were crucial to identifying where this was.

What you are seeing is how the section of King's Road in Quarry Bay used to look when it was largely filled with Swire/Tai Koo-related infrastructure. In the top two images we are looking west back along King's Road. The steep slope with the building at the top was located where Westland Gardens now sits. The building was one of the Tai Koo buildings but I'm not sure what it's role was.

as the car passes the location of the camera, although the background is blurred from the camera motion, it's possible to make out a flat area with a wall and gate. This open area corresponds with today's Fortis Centre/Eastern Centre and Shipyard Lane that runs in a loop around these two office buildings.

These final two images show the view looking east towards the curve in King's Road that existed prior to the road being straightened and becoming Kornhill Road. If you look at modern maps, you'll see that King's Road actually still follows its original route here, turning north where Kornhill Road begins. The tree covered hillside seen at the road bend below was excavated at some point. The road was straightened and the massive Kornhill development (including the north and south developments as well as the plaza) were built in the location. It is completely unrecognisable today. The excavation/removal of the hill and subsequent creation of Kornhill Road et al occurred sometime around the mid 1980s.

This same clip was also used in the later episodes Double Jeopardy, Lady Godiva.

Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon

The Dragon Cup episode is about a visiting photojournalist who goes around Hong Kong with her camera before she is suddenly attacked and robbed by an assailant (played by a very young James Hong). Her coming and going from Hong Kong is marked by a couple of establishing shots of the airport. The first is a plane taxiing to its gate after landing and the second is a shot of the old 'temporary' terminal building (colour image here) that was in existence for a short time while the airport operations were being moved from the old airport site to the south next to the new runway. The new terminal building at Kai Tak didn't open until 1962. Both these sequences were used several times again in the remaining episodes of the series including Lesson in Fear (Ep: 15) and Lady Godiva (Ep: 19).

Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Causeway Road, Causeway Bay

This quick sequence showing Evans' car driving in the westbound lane of Causeway Road is used for the first time in this episode, To Catch a Star. The large monolithic building in the left background is the former Causeway Bay magistracy, built in a very similar style to the North Kowloon Magistracy on Tai Po Road that now houses the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), with its long vertical window openings. This isn't surprising given that both buildings were built around the same time, the only difference is that this one was demolished sometime in the late 1980s and "Park Towers" built on the site.

This snippet was used again in future episodes 12, 18, and 19 - The Dragon Cup, Double Jeopardy and Lady Godiva, respectively.