Cracked stones at Kowloon Walled City Park, repurposed ghost signs for new shops in the area, half-wiped Chinese calligraphy behind air conditioners—these are just some of the characteristics you can find in Kowloon City. As one of the oldest neighbourhoods, remnants of Kai Tak Airport are still visible behind the bustling siu mei restaurants and grocery stores.

Two friends, Billy Potts and Ben Marans, started their Hong Kong Ghost Signs tour this year. Since January, they have hosted three walking tours in Kowloon City. Each time, they discover something different or notice something disappearing from the map.

Half-wiped sign of a jewellery shop that does not exist anymore.

Company signage cut short by a balcony and repainted in beige.

“This concept (of ghost signs) is international,” says Billy. “They are defunct signs that don’t have any purpose anymore.” But then, with the Urban Renewal Authority, things can change rapidly and so does the definition of ghost signs in Hong Kong.

Four months ago, when Billy and Ben began mapping out the tour, the Long San Pawnshop was still open on Kai Tak Road. It is now dismantled and boarded up with Urban Renewal billboards. In such a short time, the photographs they took of the shop are considered a record of the past.

“These signs will soon disintegrate,” he says. “That’s why we spend a lot of time studying them. The best kind of preservation is to take photos.”

A pawnshop logo in Kowloon City.

To Billy, these pawnshops have significant signages. With their characteristic bat and coin logos from the 1930s to the 1960s, they are placed around the shops and at high elevations. “They are attracting pedestrians from all angles,” he says. But mostly importantly, these signs tell us about the community and the urban environment around, such as how people go about their lives around pawnshops, jewellery businesses and centuries-old fortresses.

These signs often come in different fonts, and Billy has studied each of them. Behind every literate phrase hung on the wall is the work of a skilled calligrapher. “There would be two or three of them operating in one neighbourhood. So, their handwriting, if you think about it, really defined the character of the neighbourhood,” he says.

The choice of calligraphy script matters. There are five main scripts in traditional Chinese: Oracle Bone, Seal Script, Clerical Script, Cursive Script, Running Script and Regular Script. But to Billy, finding ghost signs is like opening “a time capsule” and discovering lost holographic scripts. Once, he discovered the Bei-wei Script, which features thick strokes. “I've talked to calligraphers who said, ‘I did not dare attempt the Bei-wei script until I had at least 30 years of experience,’” he recites.

Billy introduces an overhead ghost sign on tour.

The extended ghost sign comes with red calligraphy.

The way people wrote these ghost signs has a direct correlation with the nature of the community, highlighting how important calligraphy is to Hong Kong’s sign making tradition. During the tour, Billy also questioned whether these signs could coexist with the present.

Next to Sung Wong Toi station, the Nam Kok café is situated inside a tenement building. The top of the gate is labelled with the name of a previous hardware store. This ghost sign now coexists with the modern café, which sells caviar scrambled egg toast and tofu ice-cream drinks instead of machinery parts for planes. Inside the café, walls have not been repainted, and the preserved interiors seem to peel away from the ceiling with age.

The entrance to the Nam Kok café. 

With renovating projects on the rise and Hong Kong adapting to increasing demands, it is not always possible to coexist with ghost signs in this environment. “It’s not practical to preserve all signs,” Billy says. “Our long-term goal is to raise awareness of these artefacts.”

Picture credits: Orange News

For more information, follow HKeye social media handles:

YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@HKeye2023.

X:https://twitter.com/HKeye_.

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/HKeye.hk/.

TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@hkeye_.