Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Hong Kong Island view

One of the most frequently occurring establishing shots for this series is a nighttime view across the harbour towards the business centre of Hong Kong Island with Victoria Peak in the background. In fact the following shot was used in the first official episode Clear for Action but I have left it out all the way until episode 20, The Hunted, simply because this episode has no other proper Hong Kong locations, it was almost 99.99% shot on studio sets. As well as Clear for Action, this shot can also be seen in The Turncoat (Ep: 9), The Dragon Cup (Ep: 12), Murder by Proxy (Ep: 22) and Love Honor and Perish (Ep: 24)

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) - Tiger Balm Gardens, Tai Hang

Another of the locations revisited to recapture her lost images is Tiger Balm Gardens. Sadly we don't really get to see much other than a couple of quick frames as the character recaptures her photographs, and black and white film has never been the best way to capture this place.

Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - The Peninsula Hotel, Tsim Sha Tsui

One of the sites visited in The Dragon Cup by our intrepid photo journalist is the Peninsula Hotel, so in an effort to retrace her steps, Evans takes her back to all the sites she visited earlier to recapture the lost images and to find out if there is any link between the sites and the robbery.

This image of the Peninsula Hotel appears for the first time in this episode, although as you can see, it is made to look like it is being seen through the aperture of a camera. The same image pops up again in several later episodes (Ep.21 With Deadly Sorrow, Ep.22 Murder by Proxy and Ep.24 Love, Honor and Perish). The second image is what the un-doctored shot should look like and how it appears in the later episodes mentioned above.

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) - Central Police Compound, Central

Moving on to episode 12, The Dragon Cup, and already there are a few changes being done to the Hong Kong series, perhaps in response to the fact that it wasn't getting quite as many views as was hoped (according to the fan page it was competing with Wagon Train for viewers at the time and losing badly). So it seems that the change in year from 1960 to 1961 also saw some changes in the show.

One thing to note is that this episode is the very last one featuring Jack Kruschen's character 'Tully'. After this episode he just disappears and is never mentioned again. It seems that the dive bar he owns was no longer considered to be a place that Glen Evans and Neil Campbell could hang out in and so from episode 14 onward (an episode called Suitable for Framing which has disappeared online making it impossible for me to watch) their new hangout is a nightclub called the Golden Dragon run by a lady called Ching Mei (played by Mai Tai Sing). This gave the producers a chance to introduce a sort of musical interlude in the show to fill up some airtime. The change also saw a significant amount of reuse of the footage already seen in earlier episodes as well as more studio based scenes and stories. Overall the quality of locations dropped in number and originality for the second half of the season.

With that said, the first proper location is footage from the Central Police Station compound that uses some previously unused footage of Rod Taylor driving his car around the central carpark coupled with some older footage (last image) of him getting out of the car (the first use of this footage can be seen in Colonel Cat).

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.