For most of the second half of the 20th century, if a Hollywood director wanted to shoot a scene that looked like the future, they aimed a camera at Hong Kong at night. (The city's other visual signatures — the bat-and-coin pawn shop sign and the 1904 ding ding trams — grew up in the same streets.) The neon signs stacked over Nathan Road, hanging ten metres off the pavement in red, pink, green and electric blue, became visual shorthand for an entire genre. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Chungking Express — all of them borrowed from the same real-world set, built one glass tube at a time by Cantonese craftsmen whose names most people never knew.
Today, that skyline is quietly going dark. Thousands of signs have been removed under building safety regulations, the craftsmen who hand-bend the glass are retiring faster than apprentices are being trained, and the sign-making workshops that once filled Kowloon back streets are down to a handful. Neon in Hong Kong isn't gone yet — but what remains is being tracked, catalogued, and in some cases rescued, as a city realises what it's about to lose.
How Hong Kong Became a Neon City
Neon arrived in Hong Kong in the pre-war decades and exploded alongside the city's economic boom in the second half of the 20th century. Pawn shops, bars, bakeries, restaurants, bridal shops and medical clinics all commissioned signs — the bigger and more cantilevered the better. By the 1980s Nathan Road, Mong Kok, Causeway Bay and Wan Chai were lined with signs stacked three and four deep, each shop trying to project further over the road than its neighbour. For a visiting photographer, the ambient light alone was enough to shoot by.
The craft itself is physical and slow. A neon master draws the Chinese characters at full size, bends a length of hollow glass tube over an open flame to match the shape, pumps the air out and fills it with neon or argon gas, then seals and ages the tube before mounting. A single large sign can take weeks. The red glow is pure neon; most other colours use argon plus a phosphor coating inside the tube. If you want to carry that street-level Hong Kong identity on you, our 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized T-shirt says it plainly in the two characters hand-painters have been drawing for generations.
The Regulations That Changed Everything
In 2010 the Hong Kong government introduced tighter rules on unauthorised signboards. Owners of overhanging signs — which include almost every traditional neon piece — had to either remove them or apply to the Buildings Department's Signboard Validation Scheme, which requires regular inspections by a government-recognised contractor every five years. Between 2013 and 2022 the department received 932 validation applications and approved fewer than half, according to figures reported in the local press. Annual removal orders for overhanging signboards climbed to more than a thousand.
Famous casualties include Tai Ping Koon Restaurant, which took down its heritage Tsim Sha Tsui sign in 2023 (a smaller replacement went up with the same design), the Koon Nam Wah Bridal sign in Yau Ma Tei, and the Tak Cheong Noodle Shop sign. Many of these had been part of the street scene for decades.
💡 A Craft Down to Single Digits
Veteran neon craftsman Wu Chi-kai, who has worked in the trade for close to four decades, told reporters in 2023 that there may be only eight or nine active neon masters left in Hong Kong. He himself had not fabricated a new sign in over 20 years at that point — the orders simply stopped coming as businesses switched to LED. Each master who retires takes a specific muscle memory with them: the exact tilt of the glass over the flame, the breath that cools it, the handwriting of their shop's old sign painters.
The People Trying to Save It
Not all of this is loss. In 2020 the non-profit Tetra Neon Exchange was founded to document, collect and store neon signs as they are removed. By 2023 the group had rescued close to 60 signs, storing them in a Yuen Long warehouse raised on planks above potential flood lines. Their unfinished street survey put the number of surviving neon signs in Hong Kong at roughly 400 — down from an estimated tens of thousands at the peak.
M+ museum in West Kowloon has run neon signboard exhibitions, and researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's School of Design have documented sign painting as a traditional craft worth preserving. Local media and photographers have mounted their own private campaigns, racing to shoot the signs that still exist before the next removal order arrives.
Why This Matters Beyond the Streets
Neon signs weren't just advertising. They were a shared visual language that said "Hong Kong" in a way no other city claimed. They told you what time it was — restaurant signs flipped on at dusk, pawn shops glowed later — and they told you what was open. They were a working piece of Cantonese typography, often featuring hand-drawn characters by local sign painters who treated each stroke as a design decision. When a sign comes down, so does a specific piece of handwriting that will not come back.
If the look and feel of a Hong Kong street — layered, loud, lit, unapologetically Cantonese — is the identity you want to wear, we built the whole brand around it. The Cotton Tree Flower hoodie 木棉花 leans on another traditional Guangdong motif that Hong Kongers would recognise instantly from the sides of trams and tenement walls.
What You Can Still See
If you have a trip to Hong Kong booked, go walking at dusk around Yau Ma Tei, Jordan, Sham Shui Po and the quieter back streets of Mong Kok. Pawn shops, mahjong parlours, old-style barbers and seafood restaurants still hold onto their signs more stubbornly than other trades. Take photos — the next regulatory update could land tomorrow. And when you spot the hand-painted Chinese characters wrapped in glowing glass, remember that somewhere in the New Territories a 70-year-old craftsman still remembers which flame temperature produced that exact shade of red.
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