The legacy of Hong Kong's signature curio shops

South China Morning Post

06-06-2025

Since the mid-19th century, Hong Kong has been famed for the extensive array of (mostly, but not exclusively, Chinese) curios available in speciality shops. A mainstay of the local tourism industry, generations of visitors have departed these shores with some appealingly 'oriental' item tucked away in their baggage as a memento of their stay. While some are genuine antiques, most curios are recently manufactured. Porcelain items, jade and intricately carved netsuke remain popular, along with Swatow embroideries, Mandarin coats and scroll paintings.
Despite the wholesale decimation of African elephant populations in recent years,
carved ivory curios remain popular purchases for the less environmentally conscious, and Hong Kong's numerous ivory shops have insisted, for the past few decades, that items are all made from 'old stocks'.
Tourists browse among the second-hand and curio stalls at Upper Lascar Row. Photo: Winson Wong
From the 1920s, open-air second-hand stalls along Upper and Lower
Lascar Rows , just below the
Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road, were regularly referenced in contemporary guidebooks and thus became popular tourist hunting grounds for curiosities. More credulous visitors still hope for hidden treasure among the random bric-a-brac, mostly caked in dust, found jumbled together. For some bargain hunters, this fusty atmosphere is a large part of the appeal. Until well into the 60s, these lanes also had a well-deserved reputation among local residents as a thief's market, where newly burgled householders surreptitiously checked out stalls to see whether their stolen property was being fenced.
During the worldwide tourism boom that characterised the
Roaring Twenties , wealthy passengers who travelled on round-the-world ocean liners typically staged through Hong Kong on their journeys. In the interwar years, upmarket shopping arcades located within popular hotels, such as
The Peninsula in Kowloon or between the Gloucester and the Hongkong Hotel in Central, each had at least one curio dealer to meet demand from passing tourists. Surrounding backstreets had many more to choose from.
Interwar Hong Kong was an excellent place to buy high-quality Japanese curios, such as netsuke, unusual as their widespread availability here may appear today.
A hawker selling used goods on Upper Lascar Row in 1972. Photo: SCMP Archives
Hong Kong in those years had a sizeable resident Japanese community, many of whom had made their homes in the British colony for decades, and who spoke English and Cantonese, as well as Japanese. As a free port, curio items, like almost everything else on offer in that long-ago 'shopping paradise', were imported and sold unburdened by export and import tariffs and local sales taxes. Consequently, purchases made in Hong Kong were frequently cheaper than in their country of origin. And unlike Japan, where curio items varied throughout the country, Hong Kong's speciality shops that sold such wares were within pleasant strolling distance of each other and stocked a wide variety.