Christopher DeWolf

Hong Kong, Montreal

Cities, beer, stuff. Always too 心急. 🇭🇰🇨🇦Author of 'Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong'. Avatar by Colette Holstein.

Articles

What’s Behind the Rise of Specialty Coffee in Hong Kong

2 weeks ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

Shek Wu Hui is a bustling old market town, an old-fashioned kind of place where goods of all kinds spill out from vintage walkup buildings: lively but far from trendy. It’s certainly not the kind of place where you’d expect to find specialty coffee. And yet, there it is, in a white-walled shop with local art on the walls, French electropop group playing on the stereo and a crowd of twentysomething regulars chatting with the barista as he pulls shots of espresso from a Marzocco machine.
Happy Valley Cemeteries: 470 Graves Tell the Story of Japanese Hong Kong

3 weeks ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

There is not a living soul in sight at the Hong Kong Cemetery on a cool March afternoon. Birdsong pierces the dull roar of traffic heading to the nearby Aberdeen Tunnel. Towards the back of the graveyard, past monuments to fallen British soldiers and seemingly countless people who died of malaria in the 1850s, there is an unusual cluster of tall, narrow tombstones: Japanese graves.
The Lost Mansions of the Mid-Levels, Part V: Paul Chater’s Marble Hall

4 weeks ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

Sir Catchick Paul Chater was a tycoon like none other. Not only did he have a hand in many of colonial Hong Kong’s most pivotal enterprises, from Jardines to Dairy Farm to Hongkong Electric to The Wharf, he literally reshaped the city. In 1889, a few decades after arriving in Hong Kong from his native Calcutta, where he was born into a family of Armenian origin, he founded Hongkong Land and laid the groundwork for Hong Kong’s first major land reclamation project.
How a rubbish dump became an eco-haven in Hong Kong

1 month ago | scmp.com | Christopher DeWolf

“I have always been interested in unusual projects,” says architect Corrin Chan. And what could be more unusual than a campground in an old rubbish tip? E-Co Village, which opened last year near Lohas Park in Tseung Kwan O, is an initiative by the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals (TWGH) charity to provide a fun space for families and school groups to connect with the great outdoors while learning about environmental sustainability.
How Tai On Coffee and Tea Revived a Vintage Bing Sutt

1 month ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

It’s late on a Monday morning and a low buzz of conversation fills Tai On Coffee and Tea. Customers are seated in vintage wood booths, munching on egg tarts and breakfast sets of luncheon meat noodles, as a ballad by Cantopop star Hacken Lee plays over the stereo. On the surface, it’s the picture of a classic Hong Kong-style café, and indeed, Tai On has stood at 830 Canton Road in Yau Ma Tei since 1969. But a closer look reveals this is anything but a typical bing sutt or cha chaan teng.
How the Oil Street Artists' Village Sparked a Creative Awakening

1 month ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

Sometimes the toughest times are the most rewarding. In the final years of the 20th century, Hong Kong was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The economy was in stubborn recession. The Hang Seng Index had lost nearly two thirds of its value. In the spring of 1999, the city’s unemployment rate hit an all-time high of 6.3 percent. Faced with a downturn in the property market, the government had suspended all sales of its own property.
George Bernard Shaw Visited Robert Ho Tung's Mansion Idlewild

2 months ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

At the end of 1932, renowned Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw embarked on a round-the-world cruise with his wife, political activist Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend. They made it to Hong Kong in February 1933. Their reception was effusive.
Happy Valley's Racecourse Cradle of Sport in Hong Kong

2 months ago | zolimacitymag.com | Christopher DeWolf

In 1857, British journalist George Wingrove Cooke had only recently returned from documenting the Crimean War when his editors at The Times of London gave him a new assignment: travel all the way to China. Britain and France were in the midst of fighting the Second Opium War against the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), so he embarked on the long voyage from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other, eventually reaching Victoria Harbour and the nascent British colony on its shores.
How a Hong Kong film set in the 1960s inspired the revival of 9 post-war buildings

2 months ago | scmp.com | Christopher DeWolf

Just south of PMQ is a neighbourhood that almost disappeared. A little more than 15 years ago, the cluster of post-war tenements along Staunton, Wing Lee and Shing Wong streets was slated for redevelopment by the Urban Renewal Authority (URA). Neighbourhood activists had been fighting the project for years, but as is often the case, there seemed to be little hope that this historic corner of Sheung Wan would be spared the wrecking ball. Then Echoes of the Rainbow was released.
Review | In Art in Hong Kong, Enid Tsui gives brisk account of city’s cultural power and challenges

2 months ago | scmp.com | Christopher DeWolf

“Hong Kong is a cultural desert.” How many times have you heard this old chestnut? It’s not true, and as Enid Tsui notes in her illuminating new book Art in Hong Kong, it never has been. The axiom is attributed to Chinese writer Lu Xun, who wrote in the 1920s that “Hong Kong is not a cultural desert”, inadvertently setting off a century of haughty dismissals of the art and culture that have always thrived there.