The terraces above the fire dragon

Tai Hang's walk-up rows are the island's most convertible old stock — a village grid one block from Causeway Bay.

Tai Hang begins where the tram noise ends. One block south of Causeway Bay the streets narrow, the buildings drop to four storeys, and the trades turn honest: car workshops, a paper-offerings shop, coffee where the mechanics used to smoke. The village that stood here pre-dates the reclamation that built the district around it, and the grid still thinks like a village — short lanes, no through-traffic, everyone's laundry in the same sun.

The terraces are the point. Wang Fung, Shepherd, School Street — rows of walk-ups from the fifties and sixties, four floors, one stair, no lift, built plain and built well. Ceilings run higher than anything the seventies would allow, windows sit in steel frames a metre wide, and the floor plates are small enough that every flat gets two aspects. They are the island's most convertible old stock, and the market has noticed: a finished terrace flat now asks what a tower two streets east asks, and deserves it more.

What keeps Tai Hang itself is the calendar. In September the fire dragon comes out — three nights, ten thousand incense sticks, drummers on the same corners their grandfathers drummed on. It is not staged for anyone. The lanes smell of sandalwood for a week afterwards, and the village absorbs it the way it absorbs everything: quietly, and then back to the mechanics.

For a buyer the arithmetic is simple. Tai Hang trades the lift and the clubhouse for fabric and quiet, one block from the loudest retail in Asia. If that trade reads as a bargain to you, you are the buyer these lanes have been waiting for — and the terraces reward exactly that reader.

Folio keeps a close eye on the terraces. When one is done properly, it tends to pass through us.

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