Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Waterloo Road, Kowloon

Just before the car gets to Ede Road and Beacon Hill Road, we see him driving along Waterloo Road (okay, so I'm not doing these in the order I should be). First we see a shot through the windscreen that shows us Kilowatt Court.

A strange name for a place but I suspect either due to its proximity to the CLP HQ (that's China Light & Power, the Kadoorie owned monopoly utility company that provides the electricity to Kowloon and NT), or it may even have been developed by one of the Kadoorie companies. Either way, it's still around as you can see from the next Streetview picture.

Look past Kilowatt Court on both the film grab and Streetview picture and you will see the red brick tower of the Mary Knoll Convent School. This is one of the so-called 'Band 1' local schools that sees parents so desperate for their daughters (it's a Catholic girls school) to get into that they become Catholics just for the purpose of getting some extra points on their entry forms. I know, this goes on everywhere in the world but for some reason it seems more common here. There was even an instance a few months ago of a mother who got her son baptized so that he could get into the nearby LaSalle Catholic Primary school (yes, the one Brandon Lee attended) only to find out he had been baptized as a Protestant rather than Catholic!

Anyway, here is the quick shot of the school further on in the sequence, followed by the current Streetview.

Notice anything different? Well, the most obvious difference to me is the missing pine tree in the later picture. A few years ago this tree caused a bit of a local kerfuffle. It's a Norfolk Island Pine tree and, as you can see, had been in the school grounds for a considerable amount of time. This film was made in the mid-70's and there it is in all its glory.

The school decided in 2009 that it didn't want the tree any more and was going to cut it down, causing a huge uproar from students and public alike so the school backed down. Then about a year later it disappeared completely! It turns out that the school had authorised some 'drainage' works to be carried out that resulted in the roots of the tree being severed - in essence killing the tree. This despite the fact that as a declared monument, the school should have requested authority from the Govt to carry out any works on site (in case they damaged the school), which of course they hadn't.

Anyway, you can read a much better summary of the controversy on wikipedia here.

Sunset - Paul Chin Pei (1971) - Waterloo Road, Kowloon Tong

Just after Zhongkang departs Ocean Terminal with his mother following behind we are treated to various shots of roads around the territory as they drive towards their destination. Here is one that is easy to identify thanks to the brown building that can be seen in the background on the left.

There are various elements in this screen grab that remain intact even today, despite other radical changes. Let's start off by naming the brown building I just mentioned, it's the Mary Knoll Convent School that sits on the block of land where Waterloo Road intersects with Boundary Street. The school is one of the so-called HK 'elite' schools that sees local parents climbing over each other to send their kids to - many converting to Catholicism just to improve their chances! Anyway, here is a grab from Google's excellent Streetview.

As you can see the school's low wall on the left can also still be seen, as can the white building at the far end of the wall. What has changed is that Waterloo Rd now has a flyover as it crosses Boundary Street. I don't know when it was built but you can see the slight slope on the more recent shot as we go further into the background. In 1971 it seems that traffic for straight on still had to stop at whatever traffic lights were at the intersection.