Cultural mapping western Lockhart Road for insight into Hong Kong's drinking culture

Abstract

Cultural mapping is a technique in the field of conservation that is currently gaining popularity. Cultural maps provide a means to better understand an area and produce easily understood documentation of an area’s tangible and intangible cultural assets. These serve as an inventory for the local knowledge and resources of an area. As cities continue to grow and develop, it becomes ever more important to document local traditions and historical sites before they disappear and are forgotten. Cultural mapping provides the means to do this.

As the field of cultural heritage conservation has emerged and evolved in Hong Kong, numerous aspects of this city’s heritage and culture have been examined. These have included analyses of Hong Kong’s market culture, temples, food culture, architectural styles and local traditions. One aspect, however, that has been somewhat ignored is Hong Kong’s drinking culture. This is an unfortunate oversight since through the analysis of an area’s drinking culture, a greater understanding of an area as a whole can be achieved.

Lockhart Road has a history spanning eighty years and throughout this history it has had a reputation as an entertainment centre. A key feature of this entertainment has involved the consumption of alcohol. In a city such as Hong Kong that has witnessed much change over the last century, it is intriguing to find an area with such continuity in its tradition. It is on account of this that Lockhart Road is an appropriate study area in order to better understand Hong Kong’s drinking culture. This dissertation will focus on 20-86 Lockhart Road as its case study. The purpose is to analyse the area in order to understand its history and evolution, establish its tangible and intangible features, highlight the role and impact of drinking culture and thoroughly document the area to help in making decisions about its future and serve as a model for other similar studies.