For years, a mysterious street artist daubed his eccentric calligraphy all over Hong Kong faster than the authorities could cover it up. Louisa Lim spent eight years on his trail.
The words were ghostly, sun-bleached, written as if in reverse, like a photographic negative.
The Chinese characters were crooked, crammed up against each other.
They were written in a distinctive hand. The writing of someone almost illiterate, betraying a lack of education.
They were daubed on two round pillars, behind a barbed wire fence in Mongkok, Kowloon.
You could walk past them every day and not realise they were there. But I'd been looking for them for years.
Two characters loomed over them, larger than the rest. Together they read "Emperor" or "King".
These were the last public traces of a man who claimed to be the King of the Kowloon peninsula. An eccentric crank who became known as a street artist, then a Hong Kong icon, a symbol of a city.
He was so famous everyone knew him, but such an enigma no-one seemed to know anything about him. He became the object of my obsession.
When I was growing up in Hong Kong, the King of Kowloon's wonky calligraphy was everywhere. He painted on the lampposts and postboxes, flyovers and electricity boxes, the bits of street furniture that no-one ever noticed.
He always painted on government property, as his screeds were petitions calling for a historic wrong to be righted. It's estimated that he made more than 55,000 works in his lifetime.
Through his work, he transformed the cityscape and slowly became a legendary figure — an emblem of Hong Kong, celebrated in music, films and art.
His crooked calligraphic characters became a signifier of Hong Kongness, and his subjects wanted to own them. They adorn the walls of Starbucks and Facebook, like a shorthand for the city itself. They're imprinted on quilts and underwear, cushion covers and commemorative whisky bottles.
Now though, there are just a handful of his works left in the wild — less than six, according to one source.
At first, I just wanted answers to some basic questions about the author of these words. Who was he? How did he become a Hong Kong icon? What was his legacy?
That search would end up taking me eight years, a move across the world, and a PhD.
Along the way, I rediscovered the city that I called home, and then I lost it forever.
The search
This week, Hong Kong is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its 1997 return to Chinese rule.
It had been a British colony for the previous 155 years. But the King believed the land was rightfully his. His contention, painted all over public space, was that the peninsula of Kowloon had been stolen from his family when it was ceded to the British in the 19th century. That's why he called himself the Kowloon Emperor, though in English he was always the "King of Kowloon".
He spent half a century claiming his dominion with crooked calligraphy, the art of emperors.
His work meant different things to different people. Some saw it as the ravings of an unwell mind. For me, his preoccupations with territory, sovereignty and dispossession mirrored Hong Kong's own political situation. And he was talking about these issues decades before others.
Most people thought he was mentally incompetent; he'd been described in the newspapers as a crank and a nuisance, psychotic, deranged. "He was completely mad," the South China Morning Post's Alex Lo told me. "He was bonkers, he was incoherent, he was certifiable."
His words were almost always washed away or painted over by government cleaners. He was sometimes detained and fined by police for vandalism.
But he would return to the same spots, often on his favourite bus route, repainting his claims to the land on the newly whitewashed walls, as if the city was providing a clean canvas for him every day.
It was a living example — repeated day after day — of scholar Ackbar Abbas's view of Hong Kong as "a culture of disappearance, whose appearance is posited on the immanence of its disappearance".
That may be one reason why this artist of disappearance became "an icon, a legend, an incredible story of Hong Kong", as photojournalist Simon Go Man-ching put it.
Go was the first to discover the King's identity, in the mid-90s, after following clues in his calligraphy to the King's home.
There, he discovered that the King was a man named Tsang Tsou-choi.
He was born in China proper and had crossed the border when he was 16. He had worked in various menial jobs, including as a trash sorter at a waste station, where he had an accident that had crushed his legs.
He'd only had two years of schooling, as shown in his misshapen calligraphy. It was not the kind prized by the literati, which saw it as the apogee of all artforms. His was the writing of a child, uneven and crooked.
He always wrote the same thing — a genealogy of his family going back more than 20 generations — lists of names, sometimes the places they'd lost, sometimes lewd sexual suggestions about the Queen of England.
One story was that he had seen ancestral documents over the border in Guangdong claiming the land belonged to him, but no-one else had seen them.
These bare facts established, right from the very start, that I was on a fool's mission, a journalistic road to nowhere, but once I started, I couldn't stop.
Mysterious appearances
In my attempts to find the King, I made pilgrimages to some of his most famous remaining sites.
The best known is a pillar at the Tsim Sha Tsui ferry pier, which is protected with a plastic shield and even marked by a plaque. Commuters rush past it each day, oblivious.
Next, I went to see a lamppost covered with a plastic shield near a children's playground in Mongkok in Kowloon. I was exultant to see it, but I appeared to be the only one. "If you offered me $10 to take it home, I'd rather have the money," one passerby retorted. "However rich I was, I wouldn't buy this."
Then I heard of more surprising cases. There was a rumour about a secret message hidden on a stone wall in Central: the only time the words could be seen is after the wall had been drenched. I visited after heavy rainfall, and found the King's work was faintly visible, but only if you knew where to look.
It manifested as character-shaped holes in the grey paint, like a photographic negative. It was as if the wall itself had conjured this secret message to the surface.
Out looking for traces of the King with a friend, we stumbled across another hidden piece on a grey cement wall in Mongkok where the characters had been carefully sprayed over one by one.
Soon after, I started noticing a mysterious pattern whereby pieces the King's artwork that had previously been painted over seemed to be resurfacing. Back in 2019, the newspapers reported a piece had been discovered by the Peak Tram terminus.
When I visited, I could see the King's characters peeking out from beneath strips of paint that someone had peeled off — a reminder they had been there all along.
Then there was another big piece which reappeared opposite a police station; I'd visited the same wall years before, and seen nothing.
And then just a few weeks ago, yet another piece materialised under a railway bridge. This time, the unveiling appeared deliberate, with flakes of grey paint left on the street. People flocked to the site, drawn like I had been, to snap pictures of the magical calligraphy.
They were beginning to understand what I already knew: when you started looking for the King, it turned out he was more present than you ever imagined.
An unlikely celebrity
This old graffiti vandal became a most unlikely celebrity in 1997, the year of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule.
That was the year of his first exhibition, organised by curator Lau Kin-wai, who spent a year accompanying the King on his graffiti trips, even strapping the old man's sandals onto his stinky, unwashed feet.
The show was a scandal, a sensation, a circus, the most controversial show in Hong Kong history, with the establishment enraged. But the King never saw himself as an artist. He was simply the King.
"I don't care about money and fame," he said in one interview, "They should just give me back my throne."
So great was the confidence of this self-appointed King that he managed to persuade other people to buy into his vision.
That same year, he even became a fashion icon, the subject of a series of collections by Hong Kong fashion designer William Tang. Tang had recently returned to Hong Kong from Canada, and had been inspired when he saw how much of the King's work was still on the streets.
"I couldn't believe that after all these years, he was still so influential. He was everywhere!" Tang told me. "So I thought, 'Wow! That's really Hong Kong to me.'"
One of the questions I had hoped to answer during my search was whether there was any truth to the King's ancestral claim over Kowloon. Finally, this fashion designer had an answer for me — but it wasn't quite the one I was expecting.
Tsang Tsou-choi was not the King of Kowloon, he told me — his family, the Tang clan, were.
"Quite a bit of land in Hong Kong and Kowloon belonged to the Tangs originally," the fashion designer explained.
His family, the powerful Tang clan, had paid tax on this land, including Kowloon, for centuries. This made them, not the King, the original landowners of Kowloon.
"We should be the King of Kowloon," he said, laughing.
Regardless of his doubtful claims and lack of talent, Tsang Tsou-choi became Hong Kong's most valuable artist, described by superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as a "poet whose page was public space".
The record price for his work is almost $250,000 (HK$1.8m), for a calligraphy-daubed scooter sold at Sothebys. In 2003, he even became the first artist to represent Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale.
When he died in 2007 from a heart attack, the newspapers' commemorative front pages summed up popular sentiment: "The King is dead, his people are crying and wailing!"
As ad-man Alfred Hau told me, "For my generation, we all have a piece of him in our minds." Hau had met the King of Kowloon when he starred in a 1999 commercial for Swipe cleaner. The ad itself became so iconic it featured in an exhibition called Very Hong Kong Very Hong Kong.
Recently, the King is having a resurgence, featuring at the prestigious Art Basel show in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong's new multi-billion-dollar visual arts museum, M+, opened in November 2021, the King of Kowloon had pride of place, with a pair of doors covered in his calligraphy front and centre of the Hong Kong exhibition.
"He does play a very important role in Hong Kong's visual culture," lead curator Pauline Yao told me.
"It's like a meme or something that people keep borrowing and using and appropriating and it continues to have a life. And then, each time, it's morphing."
But while the King was being celebrated in global arts circles, I kept hearing that his relationship with his family was a different story.
His family had consistently refused to talk to the media.
Some said they had disowned him out of shame; left him to live alone in a filthy, fetid flat, all its walls daubed with characters.
In order to really understand the origin of the King's artistic obsession, I would have to track his family down.
Finding his family
One of the few known facts about the King was that he had been sent to a psychiatric hospital after smashing the window of a post office with a rock.
In a 1999 documentary shot by Joanne Shen, he described how being hospitalised affected his relationship with his family.
"I was taken to a hospital in Kwai Chung," he said.
"My wife visited and said I was crazy. They said I'd drag them down with me. They said I'd die in prison."
For years, I tried to track down his family. Finally, living in Belgium, I found his daughter, Tsang Lei-lan. Now in her 70s, she says that even when she was a child, her father was more interested in graffiti than in his own family.
"After I was born, he always went out and wrote on the streets. I rarely saw him. He wasn't at home often."
I wanted to hear from his own family members what the genesis of his obsession had been.
One of the legends was that Tsang Tsou-choi had been standing outside the Temple of the Three Mountain Kings in Ngau Chi Wan in the mid-1950s when he was struck by a car. He lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw were the lanterns hanging outside the temple, featuring thick, blocky calligraphy on them, including the two characters for "King".
Tsang Lei-lan's husband, Man Mok-lien, concurred with this telling of events.
"He became another person after the car accident, so you might think that he's mentally ill," he said.
"Before the accident, he owned his own body. But after the accident, he was haunted by an emperor.
"He became another person, so people think he has some mental health problems."
Tsang Lei-lan denied that the family had disowned the old man. Her attitude towards him was straightforward.
"He liked writing. He didn't care what you thought, he just wrote. So I didn't care either. As long as he didn't get arrested, that's fine."
She said that she had asked him not to use her name in his writing, and he never had.
She left to live in Belgium decades ago and had not even realised her father's obsession had made him famous, until she chanced upon a television segment introducing the King of Kowloon. To her astonishment, she recognised her own father.
As the conversation unfolds, it emerges that this is the first time the couple have ever publicly admitted they are related to the King.
Her husband, Man Mok-lien, says that even when the subject of the King of Kowloon came up in the restaurant where he was working in Belgium, he kept quiet.
"My boss was a classmate of [fashion designer William] Tang … and he brought some T-shirts printed with the [King of Kowloon's] calligraphy to the restaurant.
"My boss and colleagues didn't know my father-in-law was the King of Kowloon. And I never mentioned it."
And his wife says that she has never told their children about their famous grandfather.
"I won't tell them. He's not here any more, after all."
The couple do not own a single piece of his work. As the King's work had disappeared from the streets, the man himself had disappeared inside his own family.
His legacy
His works may have largely vanished from the streets of Hong Kong, but the King's legacy had already written itself into the city's bloodstream. And his influence was everywhere when protests broke out across the city.
Politics — like art — had come to the streets.
When protests for more democracy, known as the Umbrella Movement, broke out in 2015, a wall of protest calligraphy written on pastel Post-it notes appeared on a concrete staircase near the Government headquarters in Admiralty.
It was called the Lennon Wall, after a countercultural wall inspired by John Lennon in Prague. But I saw the King of Kowloon in the methods used by protesters; after all, he was the first to take politics to the street and to use the city's walls for political graffiti.
Then in 2019, when protests convulsed the city about a proposed extradition law which would undermine Hong Kong's judicial independence, the Lennon Wall spread across the whole city.
There were Lennon pavements and flyovers, Lennon walkways and even a Lennon Tunnel complex that sprang up. They were covered in messages like, "We are not China, not yet. We love Hong Kong! Home Kong."
Loading...In the months that followed, after two million people marched, the police began deploying tear gas, then rubber bullets, then live ammunition against protesters. There were arrests, and the protesters began fighting back, first with bricks, then Molotov cocktails.
As the violence spiralled, I visited the Lennon Tunnel, where I met a young woman who told me the calligraphy walls had a spiritual meaning for her.
"When I walk past here, I can feel the warmth and the strength. It's like I can regain some power."
One night at a protest, I met a 15-year-old called Hayley. She was drawing a picture of the scene in front of her: a stall staffed by youngsters giving out leaflets. I asked her why she thought art was important. "It can show history," she answered.
"In future, [when] Hong Kong people look at art, they will know what happened in Hong Kong before."
She knew what the King had long ago learned, that history books can be rewritten, but art might hold deeper truths that cannot be disguised.
'My city is dying'
In June 2020, Beijing imposed new National Security legislation on Hong Kong, outlawing secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers.
This remade the city. National security courts were set up, democratic activists and politicians were thrown into jail awaiting trial, and protests were no longer permitted.
The most popular protest slogans were banned and the Lennon Walls disappeared overnight.
"I think the aim is to turn Hong Kong into a normal Chinese city, or a city with no dissent," said Ted Hui, an exiled former legislator and Democratic party politician I met in Australia, where he now lives.
"It's physically still Hong Kong. But the core is not Hong Kong any more. It's like Hong Kongers have been deprived of their land."
I couldn't help thinking about the King of Kowloon — who so publicly trumpeted the loss of his land — so I asked Hui if he was still relevant.
"People realise [now] that he's not even crazy," he said.
"More like, he's a prophet, realising what would happen, and he was using his own art in expressing his ideas. And now it's actually happened. What he wrote about has turned into the truth."
The King's legacy is on the move, carried overseas by Hong Kongers who, fearing the new legislation, fled overseas.
One such exile is another of the King's disciples, artist Kacey Wong, who back in 1997 designed the King's first exhibition catalogue.
Wong knew his days in Hong Kong were numbered after his name appeared in a Communist party-backed newspaper which accused him of talking about Hong Kong independence overseas.
He told me, "When I saw that article, then I understood my script is already written by the Chinese Communist Party".
"My crime is already written. And my crime will be collusion with foreign forces.
"If I stay in Hong Kong, I will not have a chance to defend myself properly."
The speech the article referred to was a TEDx talk in Vienna on the Art of Protest, in August 2018, well before the national security legislation was imposed. When I watched it, I could hear him channelling the King.
He started with the words, "My city is dying," then he said, "What can I do? Use my art to fight the war? I want to join the resistance somewhere but I couldn't find them. So I become the resistance."
In August 2021, Wong announced his departure from Hong Kong with another artistic statement: a black-and-white video of himself at the Hong Kong waterfront, singing the World War II Vera Lynn song, We'll Meet Again.
He told me he'd chosen a wartime song on purpose: "She was saying ['We'll Meet Again'] to the soldiers heading to the frontline of World War II, and these soldiers probably would not come back.
"I see myself kind of like that. I will leave Hong Kong and I probably will not come back."
Then he hesitated.
"Of course, I didn't leave Hong Kong, Hong Kong left me. Hong Kong was captured and forcefully occupied by these foreigners.
"But of course, internally, I know deep down my Hong Kong no longer exists. It continues to live in my memory.
"So what am I fighting for? I'm fighting for the future of Hong Kong."
The King had taught us the art of resistance. But it was more than that. We created him. We'd turned a man into our King with our imaginations. And, in turn, he wrote us into being, as his subjects. A distinct people.
His texts became our collective memory. He modelled loss for us. Through his example, he showed us how to keep going when we'd lost everything.
A mystery solved
There was one final surprise in store for me. Back in 2019, I visited one of the King's most important friends in later life, collector and curator Joel Chung Yin-chai.
That day, Chung let me in on one secret after another. He was, he told me, partly responsible for the sun-bleached ghost characters I'd seen, since he'd mixed specially sticky ink for the King of Kowloon, which had led to these unusual acts of alchemy I'd seen there, and on the rain-drenched wall.
In fact, for years Chung has been running his own extraordinary, secret campaign to preserve the King's work. When I tried to understand why he'd kept it secret, he simply said, "I don't like to explain too much to outside people."
To show me what he was doing, he took me to a flyover pillar in San Po Kong. There, I saw a huge patch of the King of Kowloon's words — clear and distinct, not sun-bleached and ghostly.
Chung had been with the King when he painted the pillar and he'd marked its location down. After it was covered up by government workers using grey paint, he'd also marked that down.
Then, years later, after the King's death, Chung had come back and chipped off the uppermost layer of paint, exposing the King's words again. He was planning to cover them with varnish to protect them.
He'd already done that to a number of works, and he'd mostly covered them up again. When I asked him why he'd taken such steps, he said that he wanted to ensure that people still remembered the King, but he'd felt the time wasn't yet ripe to reveal all his works.
It was genius, madness, obsession from another of the King's disciples, held tight in his grasp.
I asked whether he was simply re-appearing words. In reply, he used a very specific Chinese term: it was, he said, a ghost making its presence felt.
Hear the full story of Louisa Lim's eight-year search for the King in the latest series of RN Presents, available on the ABC listen app.
Credits:
- Reporter: Louisa Lim
- Digital production and editing: Michael Dulaney and Annika Blau
- Motion designer: Teresa Tan
- Photography: Patrick Cummings and Mark Leong