The first thing you notice in the alley behind Shanghai Street is not the jade. It’s the absence of light. The tarpaulins overhead have been there so long the original blue has faded to a milky grey, and what passes for daylight in Kowloon’s walled-city remnants comes filtered through decades of accumulated grime. I had come looking for the old stalls — the ones the guidebooks still mention but the Instagram maps have quietly dropped — and I found them, but only because a man selling preserved plums off a cardboard box pointed me past a row of shuttered hardware shops and said, in Cantonese that sounded more like a sigh than a direction, “Further in. Past the smell of drying fish.”
That smell was real. It hung in the air like a held note, salty and sweet and faintly sour, and it marked the boundary between the tourist zone — the cleaned-up, signposted section near the MTR exit — and whatever this place was. The stalls here were not designed for browsing. They were narrow slots cut into the building’s ground floor, each one maybe four feet wide, with a counter that doubled as a lockable shutter. The jade was displayed not on velvet but on sheets of newspaper, or in plastic takeaway containers, or simply held in the vendor’s palm until you showed interest. A woman in her sixties sat on a low stool outside one of the stalls, eating what looked like a steamed bun from a paper bag, and watched me approach with the expression of someone who has seen a thousand tourists walk past and buy nothing.
I asked if she had any old jade — “gou daai” in Cantonese, old big pieces, the term I’d learned from a collector in Mong Kok the day before. She didn’t answer immediately. She finished the bun, folded the paper bag into a neat square, and only then gestured with her chin toward the back of her stall. “Back there. In the box under the scale.” I crouched down, and there it was: a bangle so dark green it was almost black, carved with a pattern of clouds and bats so fine I had to hold it up to the streetlight to see. The price she named was a tenth of what it would fetch in a gallery in Central. I bought it, and she wrapped it in a scrap of old newspaper without comment. It was only later, back at the hotel, that I noticed the newspaper was from 1989.
That bangle became the anchor of my collection, but it also changed how I understood the market here. Most coverage of Hong Kong’s jade trade focuses on the Jade Market in Yau Ma Tei, where a hundred stalls sell polished pendants and mass-produced bracelets under a fluorescent canopy. That market is fine for what it is — a commercial experience, efficiently run, with prices that reflect the rent. But the real hunting ground, the place where the pieces with history still turn up, is in the handful of stalls that have been operating since before the walled city was demolished in the early 1990s, and that have resisted every effort to relocate them into cleaner, more photogenic spaces.
Finding those stalls requires a specific kind of patience. Most of them don’t open until well after noon — the vendors are often elderly, and many of them work alone, which means the stall stays shuttered until they’ve had their lunch and their nap. I made the mistake of arriving at 9:30 AM on my first day, thinking I’d beat the crowds, and found myself standing in an empty alley watching a stray cat groom itself on a stack of cardboard. By the second day, I had adjusted. I showed up around two, bought a coffee from a tiny shop that appeared to sell only coffee and batteries, and simply stood near the entrance of the alley, watching. The vendors arrived gradually, unlocking their shutters, arranging their wares with the slow deliberation of people who have been doing this for forty years and are not about to rush for anyone.
One of them, a man named Felix whose family has run a stall on the same spot since 1972, told me that the best pieces never make it to the counter. “People think they can walk up and see everything,” he said, wiping a jade pendant with a soft cloth. “But if I put out the really good stuff, it gets stolen, or someone offers me a ridiculous price and I have to argue. So I keep it in a drawer. You have to ask. You have to know what to ask for.” He demonstrated by pulling out a small drawer from under his display case — it was lined with red felt, and inside lay three pieces: a hairpin shaped like a lotus, a pendant in the shape of a stylised dragon, and a ring with a stone the colour of fresh grass. “These are all pre-war. The hairpin belonged to a woman who lived in the walled city until she died in 2005. Her grandson sold it to me last year.”
The question of authenticity is the one that trips up most buyers, and it’s the one the tourist guides handle poorly. They’ll tell you to look for a certain kind of translucency, or to tap the jade against your tooth to feel for a specific vibration, or to hold it up to the light and check for bubbles. None of this is wrong, exactly, but it misses the point. The stalls that sell fakes — glass or resin dyed to look like jade — are almost never the old ones. They’re the temporary stalls set up near the market’s entrance, the ones that will be gone by next season. The permanent vendors, the ones who have been in the same four-foot slot for decades, have no interest in selling you a fake. Their reputations are tied to their location, and their location is tied to a history that predates the handover. A vendor who sells you a fake in one of these stalls is not just cheating you; they’re jeopardising a lease that has been in the family since before the British left.
What the older vendors do instead is price things ambiguously. A piece that might be worth three thousand Hong Kong dollars in a proper shop could be offered to you for eight hundred, not because it’s fake, but because the vendor wants to move it quickly and doesn’t care to spend the time negotiating. Or it could be offered for three thousand, with a long story about its provenance — and the story might be true or might be embellished. The skill is not in spotting the fake; it’s in knowing which prices reflect genuine bargains and which are simply the cost of the story attached to them. I learned this the hard way when I bought a small carving of a water buffalo from a stall near the end of the alley. The vendor told me it was from the Qing dynasty. I paid a premium. Later, Felix looked at it and said, calmly, “It’s from the 1970s. A copy. But a good one.” He didn’t say it with malice. He said it as a statement of fact, the way you might tell someone their watch was five minutes fast.
The impending redevelopment is the subject everyone mentions and nobody wants to talk about in detail. The Hong Kong government has been buying up properties in this part of Kowloon for years, and several of the old tenement buildings that house these stalls have already been sold. The plan, as far as anyone can piece together from the notices posted on lamp posts and the occasional newspaper article, is to turn the area into something more presentable — a heritage precinct with interpretive signage and air-conditioned walkways and boutiques selling curated crafts. The vendors have been offered spaces in a new market complex about half a kilometre away. Some have accepted. Many have not. “I’m seventy-three,” one vendor told me, a woman named Saoirse who runs a stall that specialises in jade beads. “I’m not going to start again in a new place. I’ll lock the shutter and go home. Let them have their boutique.”
That tension — between preservation and gentrification, between the grimy reality and the polished future — is what gives these stalls their particular charge. Every piece of jade you buy here comes with an expiration date. Not on the jade itself, which will outlast everyone involved, but on the context in which it was found. The alley with the tarpaulins and the fish smell and the stray cat will not exist in its current form five years from now. The stalls that remain will be the ones that agreed to the relocation, and they will be cleaner and brighter and easier to find, and they will sell the same jade at higher prices to a clientele that doesn’t know any different. The bangle I bought from the woman who ate the steamed bun will be a story I tell, not a purchase I can repeat.
On my last afternoon in Hong Kong, I went back to say goodbye. The alley was quiet. A light drizzle had started, and the tarpaulins were dripping at the edges, creating a small waterfall onto the pavement. The plum seller was still there, now reading a newspaper under a plastic umbrella. I bought a bag of dried plums from him, and he asked me, in English, where I was from. When I told him Australia, he nodded and said, “Lot of people coming from there now. They hear about the shops closing.” He didn’t seem particularly invested. He went back to his newspaper, and I stood in the drizzle for a few more minutes, watching the last of the afternoon light fade from the alley’s mouth. The stall with the bangle was shuttered. Felix’s stall was closed too. Only Saoirse was still there, sitting behind her beads, sorting them into piles by colour under a single bare bulb.
I bought a string of beads from her — small, dark green ones, the kind that would go for a premium in a boutique. She gave me a price, I paid it, and she wrapped them in the same kind of newspaper the first vendor had used. This time the date was from two weeks ago. I put them in my pocket and walked back toward the MTR, past the shuttered hardware shops and the drying-fish smell and the plum seller’s umbrella. The rain had stopped by the time I reached the station, and the streetlights were coming on, casting the wet pavement in that particular shade of orange that only Kowloon seems to produce.
📷 Photos: Cecelia Chang (Unsplash), Pourya Gohari (Unsplash)
