If feels like the western chessboard in The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix having been moved to a much bigger screen, the Hong Kong society, where a relic was unearthed in Bishop Hill, Sham Shui Po. The bishop on the western chessboard is a little bit like “the elephant” on the Chinese chessboard. Then we have “the queen”, who feels to us more like a maid though. The queen is supposed to be unwaveringly combative, but she is just adept at smashing the antique world to bits, including the pier left behind by Britain.

Today, the queen has run into Bishop Hill. Will there be a good ending? Even a person without a single clue about what history is, a little affection for Hong Kong and a bit aesthetic conception, he is supposed to “wow”, being amazed at the spectacular and magnificent vaults, and the sturdy granite pillars. The remains of such a huge cistern in Bishop Hill, Sham Shui Po, don’t look like ordinary historical buildings, nor are they remnants of tong lau(tenement houses) common during the Second World War. They carry the architecture that architects crave to preserve most, but the inhabitants in the proximity are simply apathetic towards the exposed shabby walls. That’s where the dispute between “specialists and civilians” lie.

The cistern in Bishop Hill is “inarguably” a historical building. It takes only its “Roman architecture” to pull in the citizens. That’s why without any endorsement from experts and arrangement made by any organizations, the citizens were prompted to throng to the site by few online pictures of it in just few hours to stand guard over the historic monument. The citizens garnered a consensus for conservation in a fleeting moment.

Even though the public opinion is loud and clear, the authorities’ mind is hard to fathom. While they have been turning their backs on public opinion over the past year, the queen can of course take no notice of the bishop.

If we go further to praise the historical architecture for manifesting “the colonial contributions benefiting the people for centuries”, the queen would probably be displeased as it goes against the inexorable trend of political correctness. The official discourse on the British colonial governance is at most “a hundred-year-old humiliation to be cleansed” in which Hong Kong was a place on a long lease, and the British weren’t sincerely nice to the city, which they deemed just a colony, and so on.

Nonetheless, the cistern in Bishop Hill is certainly telling you that at the end of the Qing dynasty, when Hong Kong, a territory ceded for a war, was ruled by Britain as a colony, it was taken care of very well by the governors, as evidenced by the lives of the people who had used to live on water from wells having been improved. Will such period pieces stir up a sentiment of affection for the colonial times? As the ICAC and courts left behind by British colonialists have been torn apart, can Bishop Hill successfully escape the queen’s chase?

(Tsang Chi-ho, columnist)

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