Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Queen's Garden, Midlevels

I haven't looked at Noble House for a while but was recently contacted by a friendly chap, called Sean, who was living in Hong Kong at the time of filming. I can't post a link to the video he showed me but it was some home movie footage he took of the collapsed building set from the final episode.

Anyway, it turns out that the set was in fact a real slope up in the Midlevels.The film makers took advantage of the recently demolished Queen's Garden building at 9 Old Peak Road and used the slope behind the empty plot to stage the disaster scenes.

Before you get too excited, the slope no longer exists. Just after filming finished work began on construction of not just the new Queen's Garden but also another development behind it called Dynasty Court. The slope was removed and a podium was constructed on which Dynasty Court now stands. The driveway of Queen's garden covers the area where the cars are in the above screengrabs.

Anyway, a big thanks to Sean for letting me watch his excellent home movies and helping identify a location which I had never really considered possible to find. You can click on the location link below to see the exact spot.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Old Peak Road, Central

I guess this is a fairly insignificant location in the general scheme of things, but it provides a good example of how much HK has changed for those people who haven't been here for a while. The scene is when Four Finger Wu and his son are driving around when they come across a landslip preventing them from proceeding. The small road is Old Peak Road and at the time you can see how open the view was.

Here's what the same view looks like today. 

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Starling Inlet, Sha Tau Kok

This location had me stumped several years ago when I first did the Noble House series, however, these days I am a bit more familiar with the out of the way places and have discovered it to be the bridge crossing right next to the stores at the entrance to Luk Keng village. The angle is difficult to reproduce because of the tree coverage along the edge of the road, but if you look at this picture you can see the crossing from the vantage point of the nearby temple.

Given the location, I would expect these scenes to have been filmed at the same time as this one.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Nam Chung, New Territories

Many thanks to Angus for getting this location that had originally caused me some trouble. This is actually Luk Keng Road way up in the sticks next to Starling Inlet. In the series it is supposed to be rural China as Dunross heads to Beijing to strike a deal with the powers that be.

The village you can see in the background of the first picture is called Nam Chung Yeung Uk and looks pretty much as it did back when the series was made. The relative difficulty of getting to this location means it has escaped the worst of the village house development that has run rampant in more popular parts of the New Territories (I'm sure that will change though). Here is an approximate Streetview.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Government House, Central

Here we see a nice bit of HK real estate that should be familiar to pretty much everybody, it's the ex-Governer's Mansion in Central: Government House. Of course this place was famously shunned by the post-handover Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, but little good it did him because he didn't last very long. Once a year this place is thrown open to the public so they can wander through the gardens and a little bit of the interior of the house. I did go one year and it was a nice day out and very, very popular. We went later in the day when the crowds had died down, but if you are over you should find out when this happens.

The top picture shows us looking east along Upper Albert Road, you can see the rather funky St Joseph's Church where the road splits. The camera must have been positioned on the terrace in the Botanical Gardens to get this view, because it gives a great view through the main gates of the house (second picture).

This final shot is fairly long distance and the angle means it is quite possible it was taken from The Peak. It gives a hazy but wide-angle view of the building with its Japanese Occupation added tower. It's hard to imagine the house once had unfettered views over the harbour - a view now completely obscured by buildings.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Harbourfront Promenade, Tsim Sha Tsui

The Avenue of Stars is currently shut undergoing some sort of half-hearted renovation, but here is a quick picture of what it used to looks like before the nonsense ensued. Not much difference other than there is a clear lack of Mainland tourists and the view isn't obscured by some naff plastic photo-op construction.

Anyway, here we see the place as it was - just a normal waterfront promenade. This is where Bartlett and Ramos go for a little walk. Thankfully they picked a day when the opposite wasn't obscured by the more usual blanket of thick smog that has descended on the place over the past few years. Look carefully and you will be able to make out the area around Central: the Tamar building, the old Furama Hotel, City Hall, Hutchison House, Mandarin Oriental, HSBC etc.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Repulse Bay, Hong Kong

We return to Repulse Bay (we visited it in this earlier post) again at a time when Quillan Gornt is trying desperately to win over KC. The rock we can see behind is a small nameless pinnacle that sits between the mainland and a larger islet known as Tau Chau (latter would be off-screen to the right). Strictly speaking I suppose this is really South Bay rather than Repulse Bay, but I guess it is near enough to include with the latter.

The second picture shows the view looking back in the opposite direction towards Middle Island (behind their heads) and beyond. The high rises on the right hand side are a couple of blocks known as Somerset and Pinecrest, both still going strong on the headland above Repulse Bay Road.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Pearl Island, Tuen Mun

Heading back to Noble House for a moment to the scene of the prisoner release at the HK/Chinese "border". The mid- to late-80's was probably not a great time to try filming at the real border in Lo Wu so the production team used another location as a stand-in. It just so happened to be the causeway leading over to Pearl Island off what is now known locally as the Gold Coast (named after the resort hotel and residential development built there) but is actually part of So Kwun Wat. The scenes were actually filmed on the island, looking back towards the mainland. The chimneys at the back were part of a desalination plant further down the coast, now gone.

Check out the ridiculously fake fortress on the opposite side

Note the second screen grab. The film makers had to hide the various developments on the mainland coastline and did this by superimposing a rather grim-looking fortress on top of it.

Unfortunately for us, because Pearl Island contains private residential developments, the Google Streetview car didn't make it to the island side of the road, all we have is this view below looking over towards the island from Tsing Lung Road. At the other end of the causeway is where the filming took place in reality. We just have to use our imaginations a bit :-)

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Tao Fung Shan, Sha Tin

Instead of going through all the hassle of arranging filming permits and the like and forking out all that money to take actors and film crew up to Beijing, the producers of Noble House decided instead to make use of some closer locales to stand in for Beijing. So, when Dunross heads over to the Motherland to do some brokering with the Chinese, all he is really doing is heading into the hills next to Sha Tin train station. The elegant venue is Tao Fung Shan and it's a Christian Seminary built in the style of traditional Chinese temples.

Brosnan's oposite number in China was played by acting stalwart Ric Young who has been popping up in films all over the place since the 1960's. If you've seen Lord Jim you may not have realised that the young native spy who mans the boat up the river with Peter O'Toole was non other than Rick. He also played a machine gun toting gangster in the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as well as Bruce Lee's dad in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (and many more, but these three I have covered on this blog).