But overnight his words would be back again.Īfter Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997, Tsang’s messaging continued. His messages were almost always immediately washed away or painted over by an army of government cleaners with thin hand towels hanging from the backs of their hats for makeshift sunscreens. His denunciations took the form of tottering towers of crooked Chinese calligraphy in which he painstakingly wrote out his entire lineage, all 21 generations of it, pairing names with the places they had lost, and occasionally topping it all off with expletives like “Fuck the Queen!” He was careful in his choice of canvas, only writing on government property – walls, flyovers, electricity boxes, postboxes. It was in the 1950s that he started his graffiti protest against the loss of his land to the British. He later extended his claims to the whole of Hong Kong. Tsang had since become convinced that Kowloon peninsula, the southernmost point of what is now mainland China, had belonged to his family and had been stolen from them by the British in the 19th century. His given name was Tsang Tsou-choi, and he had crossed the border to Hong Kong from mainland China at the age of 16. As he passed, parents would shield their kids’ eyes from him and mutter, “ Chi-sin a!” Crazy! He even became a playground taunt – “You’re the King of Kowloon!” – levelled at the slow kids, the weird ones, the poor ones, the outcasts. Hopping on his crutches, with plastic bags swinging from the handles, his crablike, bow-legged silhouette was so distinctive that, if people saw him in the distance, they would cross the road to avoid him. Their author was a fixture of the landscape as well: a filthy, toothless, often shirtless, rubbish collector with mental health issues. They were everywhere when I was growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 80s, a feature of our city just as much as the bottle-green snub-nosed Star Ferry and the noisy trams. I can’t remember the first time I saw characters like these. The writing, in clumsy, off-balance characters about 20cm high, was instantly recognisable for its lack of grace, elegance or learning. Suddenly it was possible to see spots where the dove-grey paint had flaked off, revealing traces of Chinese calligraphy. The words were only revealed when the wall had been soaked in this case after a downpour in July 2015, which left the wall darkened and damp. It was an unremarkable yellow-grey stone wall in the middle of Central, Hong Kong’s political and economic heart. For weeks, I had been scouring Hong Kong for these misshapen Chinese characters, but the way they materialised out of nowhere was a shock. ![]() T he secret message only appeared when the wall was drenched with rain.
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