Lyndhurst Terrace 1909 – A Bit More Interesting Than a Pizza Express and a Dymocks

Came across this image of Hong Kong’s Lyndhurst Terrace in 1909 the other day. These days Lyndhurst Terrace is a fairly ordinary Hong Kong street running from the market at the steps down to Queens Road in Central and running up to Hollywood Road. Over the years it’s changed a bit – many of the more interesting little shops along the street have been forced out thanks to Hong Kong’s notoriously rapacious and greedy landlords.

However, back around 1909 Lyndhurst Terrace was a great deal more interesting and had distinctly more arresting charms and attractions than a Pizza Express and a Dymocks. Lyndhurst Terrace was home to the offices of many foreign companies, flower sellers and was also a concentration of western prostitutes in foreign-run bordellos such as the well-patronised Vera’s which appears to be the closest bordello in Hong Kong to the standards of Gracie’s in Shanghai. Vera was apparently an American madam who was very well spoken woman, took extremely good care of her health, didn’t smoke and was teetotal and, if possible, didn’t hire diseased girls.

In general the better class of white prostitute in the colony (which included mostly British, French, Australian andAmerican girls) operated out of houses on Lan Kwai Fong street as well as Wellington, Gage and Peel Streets (what is now known as the Mid-Levels district) along with Hollywood Road and Lyndhurst Terrace while the lower class of white prostitutes – which the Hong Kong Telegraph in 1888 identified as ‘Austrian, Russian, Rumanian, Polish, Italian and Levantine’ (the latter being women from anywhere along the eastern Mediterranean coast from Turkey to Egypt though sometimes a way of referring to Jewish women too) mostly worked out of (what the Telegraph described as) the ‘disreputable rookery’ of Graham Street. One outraged English woman visiting the Colony in about 1906 noted that:

‘Gage Street, and other streets running off Gage Street, are full of bad houses. In Lyndhurst Terrace too are houses occupied by American “missuses.” Hundreds of American girls pass through Gage Street and Lyndhurst Terrace during the year, and, if they live, eventually find themselves, when their bloom is gone, and they become addicted to drink and drugs, in the Chinese quarter, where nearly three hundred brothels exist, each house containing from a dozen to twenty unfortunates of all colours, creeds, and castes.’