Temple Street

Peter Wu

15 July 2011

My recollections of Temple Street are rather interesting. I remember:

a. The fortune tellers, how they train a bird to come out of the cage, pick a card and hand it over to the fortune teller to interpret what it says in the card.

b. The chess players. These are not the general public who play chess players at the Banyan Tree Head, but ‘professionals’ who play for money. Various sets of chess games are laid out, all at closing stages of the game 殘局. You can play for 20 cents, 50 cents, one dollar or any amount agreed upon. My father played with them once and was ‘slaughtered’ in five minutes flat. However, the damage to his wallet was limited. It was a loss of pride more than anything else as I had expected him to win.

c. The ladies of the night. Who could avoid not noticing them? Temple Street is possibly the first and only real red light district in HK. Wanchai was another but only when the battleships were in town.

d. The metal polishers. They made quite a din because their polishing machines were driven by a petrol-driven generator. They did a fantastic job in rejuvenating your watches, or brass, or stainless. They were sparkling. Polishing watches was their specialty. Old watches become new, almost. I had mined done there and I was impressed.

e. The tailors. For 12 bucks (I think), I had my very first pair of school uniform trousers made. They did a good job, it was stylish, it was cheap. However, the fabric started losing its dye with every wash and they literally became a different colour trousers altogether in about a year.

f. The condom sellers. They congregated near the back end of the public toilet which was pretty dim and dark. I had no idea what they were selling as it is not something readily discernible by their appearance and by the un-initiated. However, judging by the giggles of my primary school friends, the ‘piss-off or I cut your head off’ look of the sellers, I sensed that it was something ‘naughty’. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized these old men were selling balloons! I should have brought along a few to the Christmas Dance at NMC, for dual purposes – initially as a party decoration but later for….???

g. There were the opera singers, the Kung Fu and Chi Kung demonstrators, the guy who lied on top of a bed of nails and had somebody smashed a piece of concrete on his chest. I can’t say I can recall the greasy man who put heaps of Brylcreem to his head. May be I was too busy watching something else.