Tong Lau (唐樓): The Pre-War Cantonese Shophouse-Tenement Hong Kong Built Itself Around for a Century

Before Hong Kong became a skyline, it was a shophouse. Long before glass towers went up on Nathan Road, the street belonged to a squat, tightly packed row of three-to-four-storey buildings with cantilevered balconies leaning out over the pavement, dried laundry snapping on bamboo poles, and a mahjong game audible through the shutters upstairs. That building is called a 唐樓 (tong4 lau4), literally “Chinese building”, and it is one of the truest records the city has kept of who it used to be.

If you’ve ever seen a Wong Kar-wai film and wondered what those endless, humid staircases were — the ones with the tiled steps and the metal gates and the shuttered flats stacked on top of each other — that’s a tong lau. And there are still enough of them left, if you know where to look, to walk half a day through the last century of the city.

Where the name comes from

“Tong” (唐) is short for the Tang dynasty and has long been used as a shorthand for “Chinese” — it’s the same 唐 in 唐人街 (tong4 jan4 gaai1), “Chinatown”. “Lau” (樓) is simply a building of more than one floor. Put together, “tong lau” means a Chinese-style, multi-storey building — the local answer to the colonial-era “yeung lau” (洋樓), the European or Westerner’s building. The two names described two different kinds of housing on either side of a class line.

Built for the shop below and the family above

Tong lau were built across Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Guangdong and much of Southeast Asia from the late 19th century through to the 1960s. The template hardly varied: the ground floor was a shop — a bakery, a herbalist, a tailor, a hawker’s stall, a siu mei counter — and the upper floors were where the family lived. A cantilevered balcony jutted over the pavement, shading the shopfront from rain and the summer sun, and doubling as a place to hang washing, argue, and watch the street.

If you grew up under one of those balconies, the smell of the ground floor was probably char siu, roasted goose, or a bakery drying trays of egg tarts. That’s the memory the 叉燒 Char Siu oversized tee was cut for — the ground floor you smelled before you saw it.

Early tong lau were kept to two-to-four storeys because building height was capped at roughly 1.25 times the street’s width, up to a 35-foot maximum. When those rules were relaxed in 1955, a taller variety appeared — up to nine floors, still walk-up, still no lifts — and that’s the version most Hong Kongers who grew up in the 60s and 70s remember: eight flights of stairs, one bag of groceries at a time.

The three generations

Look closely at a tong lau and you can date it roughly to one of three eras.

The 19th-century tong lau were mostly timber-framed with pitched Guangdong-style tiled roofs and sat back-to-back until an 1903 ordinance banned that layout for hygiene reasons. Almost none of these survive intact in Hong Kong; you’re more likely to see their surviving cousins in older neighbourhoods of Guangzhou and Penang.

The 1920s–30s versions were built in reinforced concrete, which allowed proper cantilevered balconies, French windows, granite balustrades and moulded Neoclassical detailing. This is the era of the Blue House on Stone Nullah Lane in Wan Chai and the Lui Seng Chun corner block in Mong Kok (built 1931) — buildings you can still walk past today, now protected.

The post-war tong lau, from the late 1940s through the 1960s, are the plainer, taller ones: flat roofs, concrete balconies later half-enclosed to make an extra bedroom, and stainless steel windows added over the decades. They’re the ones you’ll still see on Shanghai Street or in Sham Shui Po with a knot of air conditioners taped to their side and a hand-painted sign for a printing shop still hanging off the ground floor.

Why they started disappearing

After the 1960s, the tong lau began to vanish fast. Building ordinances changed, land prices climbed, and property developers realised a walk-up on a Kowloon block could be replaced by a 30-storey tower and multiply the sellable floor space. The demolition curve steepened through the 70s and 80s, and by the 2000s tong lau were the exception on any main road rather than the rule.

The city noticed too late what it had lost. The Blue House at Nos. 72–74A Stone Nullah Lane in Wan Chai (Grade I historic building) and the Shanghai Street shophouses at Nos. 600–626 in Mong Kok (also Grade I) are now protected. So is Lui Seng Chun in Mong Kok. Meanwhile the Urban Renewal Authority and community groups have been converting a handful of others into cultural centres. It’s good, careful work, but it’s a small fraction of what stood there thirty years ago.

The tong lau in the imagination

More than any single film location or postcard, the tong lau is the shape the Cantonese memory of Hong Kong is built on. It’s the staircase in In the Mood for Love. It’s the alleyway of Chungking Express. It’s the compact, humid interior of every family drama TVB has ever made. It’s the reason the diaspora recognises a specific tone of green paint on a metal gate — you’ve seen it in a hundred photographs before you’ve been there yourself.

That memory is also why streetwear pulled so heavily from tong lau block-print typography, hand-painted shop signs and old family recipe motifs. The Cotton Tree Flower printing hoodie pulls straight from the same Guangdong visual vocabulary as those buildings — the same 木棉花 that used to line those pre-war streets. If you liked the neon signs post or the Kowloon Walled City post, the tong lau is the third leg of that same disappearing city.

Where to find one still standing

If you’re in Hong Kong, the easiest afternoon walk is Shanghai Street from Yau Ma Tei up into Mong Kok — the Grade I shophouse row is still there, hand-restored, next to jade shops and tea vendors. In Wan Chai, the Blue House cluster is now a community heritage site you can walk into. In Sham Shui Po, half the side streets north of Apliu Street still have working post-war tong lau above ground-floor businesses. Bring a camera, look up rather than down, and read the paint colours: cobalt, cream, pistachio, ox-blood red. They date the building faster than any plaque.

Every disappearing city has a building that represented the way it lived. Paris has the Haussmann block. New York has the brownstone. Hong Kong has the tong lau — small, stacked, shop-fronted, generous of balcony, and increasingly rare. Wear it, walk it, or just point at it when you next go home.