Old Hong Kong-2 — Page 278

WYNDHAM STREET

THE ORIGIN OF "FLOWER" STREET

This being Chinese New Year's day, the flower stalls in D'Aguilar Street, at its junction with Wellington Street, will be gay with blooms - principally the traditional Narcissus. It is nearly five years since the flower sellers moved to their present site: for many years apparently since the Fifties they occupied the lower portion of Wyndham Street, which came to be known as "Flower Street", and as such was a show place and in due course attained something like world fame.

In 1928, when it was decided to pull down the old building which had originally accommodated the Hongkong Club (erected in 1846) in order to construct the King's Theatre, the stall-holders were told that they would have, ere long, to go elsewhere. The authorities, with a kindly view of tradition and the picturesque, made every effort, when the time came for the men to move, to provide them with an alternative site. By 1930, a shift of position having been enforced, the stalls were ranged along one side of On Lan Street - but only for a while. Householders and shopkeepers objected, owing to the partial obstruction of their frontage, and the flower vendors themselves complained that the new location, being out of sight of the main street (Queen's Road Central) was resulting in a diminution of sales and loss of revenue. The move to the present site was then made, and in a few weeks the business had picked up, and there seems to be no evidence now that sales have diminished compared with what they were up to the removal.

I publish to-day two photographs which are now of historic interest. One shows the stalls at their original site in Wyndham Street, alongside the old Club Building (then occupied by the Tee Sang Fat Company). The Morning Post Building is seen in the background, then newly erected (1925) also a streamer advertising one of the old silent films of that pre "talkie" period.

The other picture shows the flower stalls in On Lan Street during their temporary sojourn there - a photograph specially taken, and probably the only one of its kind.

Let us now trace the origin of the "Flower Street" business.

I find in a special article written for the Hongkong Telegraph in 1913, by an old resident, that the flower sales had their beginning in a small way in the making of buttonholes and the first sales must have occurred in the Fifties. The article states:

"At one time the Hongkong Club occupied the block in Queen's Road between Wyndham Street and D'Aguilar Street, (from 1846 to 1897) and, as men were continually passing in or out of the Club buildings, it occurred to a number of Chinese that, if these could be persuaded to buy buttonholes, the sale thereof would be a very profitable undertaking. Hence quite a number of hawkers began to hang about the doorway and soon found that their wares were in great demand. So popular, in fact, did the nosegays become that many business men, who liked to have their coats decorated, entered into little contracts by which, for so much a month, the hawkers agreed to leave flowers at their offices daily.

"When the Kowloon garden lots were opened up (in the Sixties) and flowers became cheaper and more plentiful, the little baskets of nosegays displayed at the corner of Wyndham Street became big ones; and the step from buttonholes to bunches of cut flowers, and thence to wreaths, crosses, etc., was but a short one. The sellers increased in number, and spread farther and farther along Wyndham Street, till that thoroughfare gained its present alias."

And thus arose the picturesque "alias" of Flower Street - no longer used, of course, and likely to become forgotten within a not very long period. Where flower stalls used to repose beneath spreading banyan trees (a few survivors of which are to be seen in the photograph reproduced to-day) we now have a double line of unadorned concrete pavement. The name Wyndham Street has come again into its own.