Where have all the neon lights from Hong Kong gone?

It was never just about neon, that cubist, consumerist dazzle that floated over the streets of Hong Kong, heralding pawn shops and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark fin soup shops.

It was never just about the signs that shine on teahouses offering the Iron Goddess of Mercy’s finest brew and on hotels that charge by the hour, or on Chinese medicine emporiums filled with seahorse wooden drawers and on mahjong parlors that click and clacking with manicured nails hitting each other. hard tiles.

For while the government’s crackdown on neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the sad allegory for the decline of an electric city, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.

Nights in Hong Kong these days feel like you’re still in the grip of a plague, or a deep political malaise.

Many tourists and foreigners have disappeared, the old party spots are unspoiled by their beer-guzzling excess.

Hong Kongers have also left. More than 110,000 permanent residents left last year, and the city’s population worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.

Their departure, a quarter of a century after the area returned from British to Chinese rule, was fueled by the area’s economic decline and an acute reduction in political rights.

Those who remain in Hong Kong are polarized between those who fear that the communist leadership in Beijing is destroying what made this place so special – including a free press and an independent judiciary – and those who think that the people here will always bend to the whims of those in Hong Kong have resisted. attack.

These whims lack any whimsy.

A national security law, introduced in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former lawmakers and a former media mogul are in jail therefore. The CEO, as the top leader is known in business-first Hong Kong, has been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury Department for undermining the territory’s autonomy. Expressing public support for such sanctions could itself be a crime.

Hong Kong today can feel like a city of shadows and metaphors, where an innocuous subject like neon takes on shades of meaning.

Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family dealing with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s entry for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something greater.

“People in Hong Kong have a very strong sense of loss,” Ms Tsang said. “Every day you have a friend or family member who is emigrating. Every day you feel like part of your flesh is being removed from your skeleton.”

Since 2021, when she shot the film, many of the neon signs she used as backdrops have disappeared.

“The change was so drastic and rapid,” she said. “There was no way to save them.”

Cardin Chan runs Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to the preservation of convict signs. She estimates that tens of thousands of signs, mostly neon, have been removed over the past decade, since the Department of Buildings began cracking down on unauthorized construction. In addition, some companies have voluntarily replaced neon with cheaper LED displays.

Ms Chan talks to those who have received takedown notices and documents the visual history of their trade. Pawn shops advertised outlines of bats holding coins because the word for the winged mammal sounds like “fortune.” Symbols – teeth, glasses, tea leaves – were once important to customers who could not read.

“Neon is a kind of city emblem, an embodiment of Hong Kong stories,” Ms Chan said. “But it’s not just neon that’s undergoing a transformation. It’s the whole city, right?”

Some Hong Kong defenders, who praise the city’s current incarnation, or at least its talent for reinvention, say the neon cityscape has never really defined the territory. It was a kitschy tourist field, they say, from a movie set with kung fu kicks or cheongsam-clad women walking through rainy streets with only the song of a cello to accompany them. Most Hong Kong residents lived far from the lugubrious glow reflected in puddles, packed into Tetris blocks of tiled buildings stretching to the border with China.

The art of neon – the bending of glass tubes filled with neon and other inert gases – came to Hong Kong in part from Shanghai. When communists gained the upper hand on the continent in 1949, and during successive decades of unrest, captains of industry and millions of other refugees fled to the British crown colony. In the 1970s, the streets of Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Yau Ma Tei were buzzing with neon-colored commerce and electric signs hung in abundance like Picassos on LSD.

It seemed fitting that in the 1980s the world’s largest neon sign, for Marlboro cigarettes, was located in Hong Kong. Some of the neon signs were in English, some in Arabic, some in Japanese. Most were in the traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong, but not in mainland China. Creating such intricate calligraphy from glass tubes – it takes sixteen strokes to write the word “dragon” – required a painterly skill.

By the time Jive Lau became interested in the craft, there were only a few neon masters working, down from about 400 at its peak. He learned the art in Taiwan.

“I know neon is dying here,” he said, “but it is the icon of Hong Kong, so I want to keep it alive somehow.”

Mr. Lau shapes glass tubes melted by flames at a government-funded arts center. Even as some of Hong Kong’s other virtues have eroded, its rulers, led by Beijing, have seized on the culture as worth preserving.

A new cultural precinct has been built on land reclaimed from Victoria Harbour, and includes a visual arts museum called M+. The museum has collected drawings of neon designs, as well as some well-known signs, including a huge Angus cow in front of a steakhouse.

“We were very interested in signs that are landmarks,” said Tina Pang, curator of the museum. “But it’s not ideal for a museum to collect them because they have really become disconnected from the whole context that makes them alive.”

Ms Pang said that as much as safety regulations have doomed Hong Kong’s neon, the global trend towards homogeneity, where cities all have the same shops, is also endangering the area’s unique streetscape.

In September, the government unveiled a campaign called Night Vibes Hong Kong “to attract citizens to go out and revitalize the city’s nightlife.” The campaign logo naturally featured neon.

For Peter Tse, a nearly six-meter-tall neon sign symbolized the longevity of his Tai Tung bakery, which survived the Japanese occupation during World War II, when the hungry took their pastries from customers.

During Hong Kong’s boom, Tai Tung filled mooncakes – made for the Mid-Autumn Festival – with honeyed oysters or ten egg yolks, although Tse admitted that ten nine was too many.

Mr Tse, now 90, survived the bakery’s neon sign, which was dismantled last year. It was too big and old, and not in compliance with regulations, Mr Tse was told.

“It lasted more than 50 years, through typhoons, no problem,” he said.

He still comes to the bakery every day. He misses his neon sign.

Mr Tse plans to install a smaller one, even if it will cost up to $80,000 to meet government requirements. His son has returned from Australia to lead the bakery into its fourth generation.

“I want Hong Kong to be vibrant,” Mr Tse said. “I want it to feel like Hong Kong.”