Lugard Road Panorama

From this widened section of Lugard Road, you can see the island's northern shore, Victoria Harbour, and Kowloon. The officials who commissioned the road had assigned it the role of a panoramic walking route from the outset. But one of the most accurate portraits of this slope was left by a man who first had to decide whether Hong Kong would remain his temporary refuge or become his place of work.

The Chinese artist and connoisseur of Guangdong art Huang Bore moved here in nineteen forty-nine, leaving his post at an archive in Guangzhou. He earned a living through articles, exhibitions, and the sale of paintings: together with the artist Xu Dongbai, he rented a room at Cecil Hotel as a studio, while renting the adjacent hall to trade in paintings and calligraphy.

Three years later, Huang was invited back to Guangzhou to head its art and antiquities departments. He declined the permanent post and stayed in Hong Kong. In the early fifties, the artist joined Yun She, a hiking club. Its members went to remote parts of the New Territories and to the islands, and Huang brought back sketches from there. Instead of the imagined mountains familiar from old Chinese painting, he began to paint recognizable Hong Kong slopes, roads, fishing villages, and harbours.

In January nineteen fifty-eight, Huang painted the Victoria Peak Scroll on Victoria Peak. The artist's inscription gives the place and month of the work. At the bottom, he drew a white broken line with railings—the western section of Lugard Road. In the distance, he left Green Island with its tiny lighthouse. Huang did not need the skyscrapers that now bring people to these railings: the slope and the walking road above the water became the main subject.

These hikes shaped the final decade of his painting. In nineteen sixty, Huang held the only solo exhibition of his life and called it “Pictures of Hong Kong.” Later, he was invited to advise the newly established municipal museum: he helped select works and transferred items from his own collection there.

The artist's family kept the Victoria Peak Scroll after his death. In two thousand eight, it was shown at a museum exhibition, and two years later the Hong Kong Museum of Art acquired it. Two landmarks of this walk are still visible on the painting: the white strip of Lugard Road and the lighthouse on Green Island; the present-day wall of towers between them was not yet there.