Austin Coates and the Fuk Hing Bridge, Pak Tam Chung

Readers may recall that several years ago I was looking for a "lost" Bruce Lee filming location. It was for the Fist of the Unicorn movie starring his childhood friend, Unicorn Chan, and the film makers secretly filmed Bruce helping the various actors choreograph a fight scene. The footage was later incorporated into the film proper and it was marketed as a "Bruce Lee movie" (and still is...). Lee was actually in the process of suing the filmmakers when he died.

Anyway, you can read more about it in the post I made a while back and after an associated SCMP article was written about my small quest, the nearby bridge - Fuk Hing Bridge - is now often referred to as the "Bruce Lee" Bridge amongst various people living in Sai Kung. This is a bit of a shame. Not to take anything away from Bruce but his association with the bridge is fairly tenuous and there is someone else, seemingly forgotten about, associated with the bridge that has a more direct role in it being there.

Fuk Hing Bridge

Shatin Pass Road...on a motorbike

Okay, I know I am usually posting the odd walk and hike, but seeing as I have also been exploring Hong Kong on my motorbike I figured it would be nice to get an action camera up and running so I can film some of the places around the territory.

First up is the trip up Shatin Pass Road from Wong Tai Sin up to the junction near Tate's Ridge where Shatin Pass Road, Fei Ngo Shan Road and Jat Incline all join. Fans of the film Shatter may recognise one or two places (including the - blink and you'll miss it - pavilion where Ti Lung and Stuart Whitman take on Peter Cushing which makes a brief appearance at the 7:00 mark).

The fluffy dice is a nod to a former life in Chelmsford, Essex...

Walking up Jat Incline

Jat Incline is a former military road and named after the (then) British Army Regiment that built it. The Jat Regiment is an Indian Army Regiment that, prior to 1947, was part of the British Army and (according to the marker stone at the junction with Clearwater Bay Road) it was the 199th Jat Infantry responsible for the construction of the road in 1907. Sadly, I don't have a picture of the marker stone because I started my walk from Ngau Chi Wan Street - about 50 metres from the aforementioned junction - but Gwulo.com has a few pictures.

At some point the road name has become corrupted from "Jat Incline" to "Jat's Incline" and I can only assume that it may be due to the way the name was transliterated into Chinese. The Cantonese name for the road is Jat Saan Do (扎山道) where the first character 扎 is pronounced in a similar way to "Jat". This same character is also a Chinese surname so it's possible that when the road signs were being made, the sign makers assumed that "Jat" was a surname and gave the road its current possessive form.

Lomond Road Garden, Kowloon

On my recent wanderings around Kowloon, getting snaps and working out the route for the last Bruce Lee tour, I came across a small "rest garden" on Lomond Road. Hong Kong is full of these so-called rest gardens. Often they are just very small parcels of Govt land that are unsuitable for development and usually pretty drab places with concrete furniture and not much else. Sometimes you can be lucky enough to find one that actually looks nice but most are just an afterthought and demonstrate a real lack of imagination on the part of the city planners and contain little of interest.

Lomond Road Rest Garden is different because despite being tiny, it appears to contain several hundred years of history.

The Bruce Lee Guide to (the rest of) Kowloon

I had originally planned to add this walking tour several years ago, but as usual life got in the way somewhat and it wasn't until recently that I found the time to actually head over and walk the route. I tend to forget how long it takes me to put these things together.

There is a caveat (or two) in that the walk is much longer than the other two because the places I talk about are much further apart. Also, several locations really have only tenuous links to Bruce and, as always, redevelopment of older buildings mean the only commonality between now and Bruce's time is often just a place or building name. Still, I'm sure there are Lee fans out there that will still get some value from the places and having them put into an easy-to-follow route around an otherwise unfamiliar city.