SOUTHSIDE SECRETS

from Southside March 2020

TRAVEL

Hong Kong’s White House

The unmarked set of buildings at the intersection of Victoria Road and Mount Davis Road might look like another crumbling colonial villa, but its walls hide a dark secret. Situated atop Mount Davis on the west of Hong Kong Island, the compound was built in the early 1950’s as the clubhouse of the Royal Engineers Regiment. So far, so innocuous. A few years on, however, the site was taken over by the Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force - responsible for matters of national security - and it was rumoured to have been used as a detention centre for Taiwanese spies caught smuggling explosives to the mainland across Taiwan Strait. Detention Centre, the facility has also been referred to as “the zoo”, “Mount Davis Concentration Camp’’ and “the White House”. From the mid 70’s, as the political atmosphere in Hong Kong eased, use of the White House as a detention centre declined. The last people to be housed here are thought to be political refugees fleeing the mainland after the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4, 1989. Special Branch was shut down shortly before the 1997 handover and the site was placed under the management of the Government Property Agency. Padlocked and Guarded by rolls of barbed wire, it has lain abandoned for years, the only visitors being the occasional film crew (Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s film Lust Caution, was filmed here) and, more recently HK URBEX - a team of urban explorers on a mission to film and document Hong Kong’s abandoned buildings. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business converted the site into a campus for its Executive MBA programme with construction beginning in 2016, despite objections from the heritage conservations. The building was completed in 2018 with many features preserved, including a former interrogation room. The building also houses an exhibition of the site’s history. Existing public trails within the site remain accessible to all during designated hours. Nicole Slater revisits the old Victoria Road Detention Centre

Later during the 1967 riots, when Hong Kong experienced large-scale public uprisings triggered by the Cultural Revolution taking place across the border, the compound was used to detain and interrogate political dissidents and supporters of the Chinese Communist Party. Detainees included highprofile figures such as actors She Wei and Fu Qi, and former Secretary of the Chinese Reform Association, Cho Wei-hung. In an interview with the SCMP, Cho Wei-hung described how he was held at the site for 18 months, the first six of which he spent in solitary confinement in a 1.8m x 1.2m cell. Officially known as the Victoria Road