Hong Kong: Heritage preservation

Hot on everyone's lips, ears and eyes recently is the topic of heritage preservation, mostly in the domain of architecture.

I was therefore glad, though surprised, to hear that the Monocle team had their finger on this too.

Interviewed in The Monocle Weekly was Dr. Ho Yin Lee (who funnily enough, seems to have a slight Singaporean accent), Assistant professor and director, Architectural Conservation Programme, The University of Hong Kong, who proposed that this interest in heritage preservation arose post-1997, when people started to really think about Hong Kong's identity and basically realised that the remnants of history are meaningful and not just slabs of crumbling concrete waiting to be demolished to make way for shiny new malls.

Examples of this are a boom of projects like The Pawn and JCCAC. The former was, to my knowledge, mostly a privately funded project. Projects funded by the Hong Kong Government itself have been heavily criticised by both the public as well as architects and historians for preserving nothing but a facade and basically pumping concrete into old structures.

edit: April 1 2010 [1]
Recently, the hottest area in question is Wing Lee St. in Sheung Wan, said to have been 'saved' from redevelopment by the highly successful movie Echoes of the Rainbow.

Read more about it here.

edit: April 1 2010 [2]
I was just told about this website, Hong Kong Place, which is a great resource for anyone wishing to learn more about Hong Kong architecture through history, as well as government policy with regards to preservation. It seems to have been set up voluntarily and unfortunately is all in Chinese. Anyone want to volunteer translation services?!

How it all began

The Monocle Weekly, Edition 08

It's been more than a week since this edition came out, but was only tempted to download it when I saw that they interviewed Jimmy Lai, Asian businessman, media mogul and founder of both Next Media and Giordano.

The Lai interview itself was a bit of a letdown - I think Tyler Brûlé spoke more than Lai did - but the issues covered in the program - namely Taipei, pop/idol culture in South Korea and heritage preservation in Hong Kong, were spot on. I was extremely impressed by the relevance of the content and the authority with which this international magazine spoke about my region. So much so that I realised there seems to be a gap in the market and the blogosphere for indigenous English-language reportage from an international perspective.

The last sentence there might have appeared self-contradictory, but it's not. We need to look at ourselves in a mirror, through an outsider's lenses.