Hong Kong Junk (of a Different Kind)

The Hong Kong Tourism Board logo with its red-sailed junk is very familiar but my favourite Hong Kong junk is to be found in Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po, a working class area in the Kowloon Peninsula.

The whole area around the MTR station is a heaving mass of markets where all manner of things are sold, particularly fabrics, clothing and electronics.

Apliu Street market is officially referred to as either an electronic market or a flea market – and it is both. There are electronics a-plenty, whether your desire is for the latest technology or something used but still working, maybe a nice Olympia typewriter?  

Or maybe you need a replacement remote control or a cheap but working power drill, saw or hammer; you’ll find them here.

Maybe your tastes are for something more up to date?

There is a wealth of optics and electronics on display at more reasonable prices than elsewhere in the city. A couple of stalls specialise in film cameras of the 1950s to the 1980s, before all this digital stuff happened. Just across the street is the famous Golden Shopping Centre where, in the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of savvy customers hurried to buy pirated software. The Centre still majors in computer electronics, especially motherboards and computer ‘innards’, but software piracy has been pretty much eradicated in Hong Kong (although ‘copy watches’ and replica handbags are still readily available in central Hong Kong areas such as Tsim Sha Tsui, although I'm sure the watches below from Apliu Street are the genuine article!).

    

I love the idea that there is a place for ‘Mom and Pop’ sellers too, it’s like a car boot sale where people want to dispose of much-loved but no longer used items or things that they have collected themselves – sometimes very ordinary things, sometimes a mix of old and new - and you can part exchange too (an idea that is just catching on in the the Broadway or Fortress electronics chain stores!).

But if you are looking for jade, old coins, vases, paintings, copies of the original Little Red Book, statues of Mao or curios of various kinds, they are there too. But you do have to rummage!  

  

Aplui Street is just one of dozens of specialist Hong Kong markets. There are obviously a large number of fruit, vegetable, seafood and meat (wet) markets, but the most interesting are the specialist markets: jade, flowers, goldfish, antiques, clothing, electronics, toys, computers, costumes, dried seafood, birds, fashion, Chinese medicine, sneakers, souvenirs...a favourite one for tourists is the Night Market, principally clothing and souvenirs but also open air snacks, opera singers and fortune tellers. No place does markets like Hong Kong!