Chong Yam-ming's factory canteen has seen better days. In the best years, thousands of workers per day called at his 4,400 sq ft canteen tucked inside a factory on Shing Yip Street, Kwun Tong.
In the mornings, it was busy with workers eating steamed buns and sipping milk tea; at lunchtime, people came for siu mei (barbecued meat) meals. The queues snaked from the counter around to the stairwell. Monthly revenue sometimes hit HK$2 million, a figure that even now would sound improbable to cha chaan teng owners.
'So many people were waiting outside that we eventually decided to hire someone to serve the queue specially,' recalls Chong, now 65.
That was in the late 1980s - the golden era of Hong Kong's factory canteens and Kwun Tong's industrial area, located at the south end of Kwun Tong Road. Nearly 200,000 workers packed the cluster of factories that churned out everything from garments and plastics to electronics and paper, all for export.
But all that is a distant memory. Many of these industries have moved to the mainland or Southeast Asia to capitalise on lower rents and cheaper labour. Gone are the busy assembly lines, buzzing machines, hard-working employees and chimneys emitting clouds of heavy smoke.
Factory buildings have given way to glass-and-steel office towers, as post-handover administrations envisioned turning Kwun Tong into a new central business district. That scheme took another step forward with The Link Reit's announcement on Wednesday of plans to convert industrial buildings into malls.
