Then & Now | Oh the irony: Scottish soldiers defending Hong Kong in 1941 used tunnels whose builders named them after roads in London

Oxford Street, Charing Cross and Regent Street were among the names given to the defensive tunnels of Hong Kong’s Shing Mun Redoubt by their builders

Yet, when the Japanese invasion came, London-area troops of the Middlesex Regiment defended Hong Kong Island, with Scots alien to the UK capital in the tunnels

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Tunnels labelled Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, part of Shing Mun Redoubt, a second world war defensive line in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Ironically given the tunnels’ London landmark nicknames, it was Scottish troops who occupied them in 1941. Photo: Handout

Jason Wordie

Published: 7:45am, 23 Apr 2024

Strung out along several ridges above and around the Upper and Lower Shing Mun reservoirs, in the central New Territories, the underground defensive complex known as the Shing Mun Redoubt is one of Hong Kong’s most extensive – yet sadly underused – heritage resources.

Built in 1936-37, and until now mostly well preserved, general public awareness of its existence – along with increased vandalism – has steadily developed, after several decades of benign neglect.

In particular, politically motivated graffiti has proliferated over the past decade – all sadly indicative of Hong Kong’s lobotomised civic realm, in the wake of “2019 And All That”.

First noticeable after 2014’s protests, slogans from various sides of the ideological spectrum are scrawled on walls, then blotted out by their political opponents with fresh paint or dissolved with solvents, and soon afterwards replaced by fresh epithets.

Ko Tim-keung, an expert on Hong Kong military history, in one of the tunnels of the Shing Mun Redoubt, its wall defaced by graffiti, in 2013. Anti-government protests in 2014 and 2019 made that problem worse. Photo: Dickson Lee

In the process, original paintwork and concrete rendering, or extant wartime evidence such as blast holes or shrapnel damage, are further compromised.