Repulse Bay carries a literary landscape as well as a view across the water. Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City places part of its fictional world in the Repulse Bay Hotel. The Hong Kong Public Libraries literary series returns to the hotel site and the Southern District literary trail, inviting a reading of the coast through the story. The fictional setting gives an already striking place another kind of life in the reader’s imagination.
From the journal
Two Landscapes at Repulse Bay
Eileen Chang’s fictional scenes and Repulse Bay’s changing buildings open two connected ways of looking at the coast.
In this district · Southern ↗
A hotel in a story
The site changed after the novel
The old hotel opened on New Year’s Day in 1920. It closed in 1982 and was demolished for redevelopment. A University of Hong Kong Libraries catalogue describes the restaurant replica that opened on the same site in 1986. The familiar low building seen there today therefore belongs to a later architectural chapter.
This sequence makes the place more interesting to look at. A setting can retain its literary association while its buildings change. Memory may attach to a name, a view and an architectural form across several periods of physical rebuilding.
Another part of the hotel survived
Near the former hotel site, the staff quarters and adjacent garage survived the redevelopment. The Antiquities Advisory Board’s appraisal records the quarters’ completion in 1921 and their later use by hotel workers and a tailoring business. They reveal a working world behind the hotel’s public face.
The shore thus holds several related stories: the hotel imagined in fiction, the redevelopment of its site, and surviving buildings connected with the people who kept it running. Looking between them brings the literary scene into contact with a wider history of work and change.