Old Hong Kong After Dark: Neon, Night Markets, and Clay-Pot Rice

There is a particular hour, just after the last light has drained from the harbour and before the dinner crowds thicken, when Kowloon stops being a place you pass through and becomes a place that looks back at you. The air goes warm and close. Shutters rattle up rather than down. Somewhere a wok catches fire for a half second over a gas ring, and the whole street briefly smells of caramelised sugar and soy. This is the hour to walk.

What follows is not a route so much as a drift, the kind of evening the city used to hand you for free and now, quietly, is taking back.

The neon was the first thing to go

Start by looking up. For most of the twentieth century, Hong Kong wrote itself in light. Mahjong parlours, pawnshops, herbal medicine halls, seafood restaurants and saunas all hung their names in the air on hand-bent glass tubes, filled with noble gas and coaxed into Cantonese characters by men who learned the trade by the heat of a flame. At its peak the city carried thousands of these signs, stacked one above another until the street below ran in pools of red and jade and electric blue. It is the Hong Kong of Wong Kar-wai, of rain on a window and a clock that never quite reaches the hour.

Most of it is gone now. A change to building safety rules over the past decade has seen tens of thousands of signs taken down as unauthorised structures, and the craftsmen who could repair them have dwindled to a handful. What remains is best hunted on foot over Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok, where a few survivors still lean out over the traffic: a pawnbroker's sign shaped like a bat clutching a coin, the glowing logogram of an old restaurant, the cool wash of a sauna two floors up. You learn to walk with your chin tilted. Photograph the ones you find. There is no guarantee they will be there next year, and that is precisely the point.

Temple Street, where the city performs itself

Drift north and the glow gathers into something denser. Temple Street night market runs through the heart of Yau Ma Tei, and for a few hours each evening it becomes the loudest, most theatrical stretch of pavement in Hong Kong. The stalls themselves are the least of it: jade of dubious provenance, phone cases, lighters, the usual flotsam of any night bazaar. You come for everything happening around them.

Near the temple end you will find the fortune tellers, a long row of them under canvas and bare bulbs. Some read palms, some read faces, and the famous ones keep a small finch that hops out of its cage to pick your fortune card from a fanned deck. Whether or not you believe a word, sitting on a low stool while a stranger studies the lines of your hand is a fine way to spend ten minutes and a little cash.

Further along, if the night is kind, you may catch a knot of people gathered around a singer working through Cantonese opera at full throat, accompanied by a fiddle and a clatter of percussion. This is street-side performance in its oldest form, half busking and half devotion, and the crowd is mostly elderly Hongkongers who know every line. Stand at the back and let it wash over you.

Clay-pot rice and the dai pai dong lamp

But the reason to come hungry is the food. Down the side lanes off Temple Street, the dai pai dong spill out from their kitchens onto the road: folding tables, plastic stools, a single naked bulb swinging over each, and a cook moving fast at a roaring stove. This is open-air Cantonese cooking at its most honest. Order clams in black bean sauce, a plate of stir-fried morning glory done in seconds over a flame, a whole steamed fish, salt-and-pepper squid.

Above all, order clay-pot rice, the dish that defines the season once the weather turns cool. Raw rice and a little water go into a small earthenware pot set directly over the fire, topped with whatever you have chosen: preserved waxed sausage and liver, sliced chicken with ginger, frog, salted fish and pork. It cooks covered until the rice is tender and the bottom layer has caught against the hot clay into a golden, crackling crust. You lift the lid, pour a dark sweet soy around the edge so it hisses, and dig down through the soft grains to fight, politely, over the scorched golden crust at the base. Eaten on a stool, under that one swinging lamp, with the market noise pressing in on all sides, it is one of the great cheap meals of the world.

Mong Kok, market upon market

If you still have legs, push north into Mong Kok, which by various reckonings is among the most densely populated patches of ground on earth and certainly feels it. Here the city sorts its appetites into streets, each given over almost entirely to a single trade.

There is a lane hung wall to wall with bags of goldfish, swaying in the light like little lanterns, sold to households who keep fish for luck. There is the flower market, busiest before a festival, where orchids and peonies and lucky bamboo are stacked head high and the pavement turns slick with petals and water. And there is the ladies' market on Tung Choi Street, a long covered run of stalls selling clothes, trinkets, watches and souvenirs, where the expected ritual is to haggle hard and walk away at least once before settling. None of it is essential and all of it is the point: this is a city that still does much of its living out loud, on the street, at night.

A last glass on the other side

When Kowloon has finally tired you out, cross back under the harbour and let the evening change register entirely. Hong Kong's gift is that the loud city and the quiet city sit a short ride apart.

In SoHo, on the slope above Central, the streets narrow and steepen into a warren of small bars and restaurants. The neighbourhood is stitched together by the Mid-Levels Escalator, the long covered series of moving walkways that climbs the hillside, and the easiest way to arrive is simply to step on and let it carry you up past Hollywood Road and Staunton Street. Step off where it looks promising. Behind an unmarked door or up an unlit stair you will find one of the speakeasy bars the district trades in, all low light and careful cocktails, where someone will make you something cold and bittersweet and you can finally sit still.

Hold the glass a moment and think about where you have just been. The neon thinning overhead, the opera singer who may not have a corner next year, the clay-pot cook whose lease the city keeps quietly reconsidering. Old Hong Kong after dark is not a museum. It is still warm, still loud, still cooking. But it is going, slowly and then sometimes all at once, and the only honest advice anyone can give you about it is to come now, look up, and stay out late.