Yue Hwa in 2005. Photo by choco_late

The Yue Hwa Chinese Products department store has stood at the corner of Jordan and Nathan roads for decades — and for decades, so did its big neon sign, a sentinel that marked the passage north into the seedy streets of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok.

Sometime in 2009, though, without fanfare or even the simplest of announcements, the sign was removed. So was a similar sign further down Nathan Road. Yue Hwa did not respond to inquiries about the signs’ fate. It is not clear why they were taken down or what happened to them.

Heritage activists were nonplussed about the sign’s disappearance. “We put our priority on conserving some historical buildings first due to limited resources,” says Roy Ng, policy officer at the Conservancy Association, which has fought to save numerous historic buildings from destruction.

Katty Law, a heritage activist who successfully lobbied against the redevelopment of the Central Market and Former Married Police Quarters, says she has “never thought about the issue, probably because many of us are upset with the light pollution problem.”

Although neon signs are some of the most characteristic elements of Hong Kong’s streetscape, there has been virtually no effort to research, document or preserve the city’s landmark them. In terms of heritage conservation, they simply aren’t on the radar.

“Neon signs are such a surprisingly under-researched subject,” says Lee Ho-yin, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Architectural Conservation Programme. “We see them every day and yet we don’t know much about them.”

With more and more businesses switching to cheaper, mass-produced forms of signage, neon is steadily disappearing from Hong Kong’s streets. The effect on Hong Kong’s visual identity could be profound. Neon is such an integral part of Hong Kong’s character that the mere mention of the city’s name conjures up images of glowing Chinese characters and streets bathed in a rainbow of light.

“It is neon above all else that seems to set Hong Kong apart from other international cities,” writes the photographer Keith Macgregor in the 2002 photo book Neon City, which pays homage to his decades-long fascination with Hong Kong’s neon signs.

Although neon gases were first used to illuminate signs in 1910, Macgregor says their use in Hong Kong did not become widespread until the boom years of the 1960s. As the streets became more and more crowded with signs, restaurants, department stores and other businesses tried to stand out from the pack by building ever larger and more memorable signs.

Many became landmarks, like the neon cow of Sammy’s Kitchen in Sai Ying Pun or the Emperor Watch & Jewellery in Tsim Sha Tsui. Others were memorable for their ubiquity: just about every pawn shop in Hong Kong is marked by a sign that resembles a bat holding a coin, a symbol meant to represent good fortune. The signs are usually lit by red, white and green neon, a traditional combination of colours that were commonly used on the painted wood signs of an earlier era.

Elaborate, hand-made neon signs were by no means cheap, and they required a significant investment — one that businesses were willing to make because they intended to remain open for generations, says popular historian Simon Go. “Shops would invest in signs made by master signmakers because they expected the business to be passed to the next generation, so they needed a sign that would last,” he says.

But with widespread redevelopment and volatile retail rents, many long-standing businesses have closed in recent years, taking their neon signs with them. Among the recently-vanished are Wan Chai’s Lung Moon Restaurant and Tai Lin Radio Service in Jordan, both of which had neon signs that were almost as iconic as the businesses themselves. Lung Moon’s sign was scrapped following the restaurant’s demolition last year; Tai Lin’s sign went dark after the shop closed in 2009.

Other prominent neon signs have been replaced with LED signs, which are brighter and cheaper to produce. One example is that of the Des Voeux Road location of the Tsui Wah restaurant chain, whose old neon sign, which resembled a giant glass of iced lemon tea, was recently replaced with a generic LED sign shared by all of the chain’s locations.

Hong Kong is certainly not the first city to see its neon signs disappear. Neon was common throughout North America and parts of Europe until its popularity waned in the 1970s. Some of the surviving signs have become so iconic that heritage activists now argue that they have transcended their original commercial purpose to become a part of their city’s cultural heritage. Such was the case in Madrid in 2006, when a plan to remove several famous neon signs was greeted with sharp opposition, and in New York, where a beloved Pepsi-Cola sign was saved from the scrapyard when the factory on which it originally sat was redeveloped into condominiums.

The city that has done the most to preserve its neon legacy is one that many Hong Kong people know well: Vancouver. In the 1950s, Vancouver was reported to have the highest per-capita concentration of neon signs in the world, but a shift in urban planning policy in the 1970s led to an outright ban on new neon, which was seen as gaudy and perhaps even immoral, after it became associated with vice and crime in American pop culture.

Granville Street, Vancouver, in the 1960s

The ban was not reversed until the late 1990s, thanks largely to the advocacy of historian John Atkins. “It took a few years after the biggest and most spectacular signs went down that people started to complain about how boring the city had become,” he says. In 1999, he began leading walking tours of the city’s remaining signs and lobbying the government to adopt a neon-friendly signage policy.

These days, not only have many vintage signs been restored, the city encourages the creation of new neon signs in districts like Chinatown, where a new generation of bars and restaurants have used neon to evoke a sense of history and nostalgia. In other areas, neon has been used as a way to rebrand popular shopping and entertainment streets that fell on hard times in the 1980s and 90s.

Perhaps most remarkably, a neon-lit “W” that stood on top of the long-defunct Woodwards department store was replaced after the department store was redeveloped last year. “It has been there for so long it has entered the public imagination,” says Atkin. “The city is now seeing the value of neon both as a part of our heritage and as a marketing tool.”

Part of the appeal, says Atkin, is not only the fanciful design of many neon signs, but the quality of neon light. “It washes the street and buildings in a full-spectrum light that doesn’t distort colours,” he says.

Finding a straightforward means to preserve old signs has been complicated, however; a sign alone cannot be protected by a heritage designation. Keeping old signs alive usually requires informal cooperation between the municipal government and the sign’s owner, as was the case with the Woodwards sign. Even in Vancouver, says Atkin, “the toolbox is limited.”

In Hong Kong, only very recently have commercial signs have been subject to any controls whatsoever, let alone heritage regulation. When the University of Hong Kong’s Lee Ho-yin was a young architect in the early 1990s, he was asked to design a large sign for a shopping mall development. He was surprised to learn that there were no formal rules governing the size or coverage of the sign. “Only then we found out that almost all of those giant signs that cantilevered to the middle of the road were technically illegal,” he says.

Over the past ten years, the government has cracked down on illegal and abandoned signs, removing more than 5,000 in 2009 alone. There is no data on how many of those signs were lit by neon.

And so neon continues to disappear. The Conservancy Association’s Roy Ng says that, given time, the discussion over heritage could expand to include such objects as commercial signs. “I’m indeed optimistic because [the Antiquities and Monuments Office] is going to grade some non-building heritage, like the Shek O bus terminus [and] the stone bridge in Kam Tin. Even some colonial postboxes had been re-considered for conservation,” he says.

But for now, it seems as though more and more neon will go the way of the Yue Hwa signs: lost and quickly forgotten.

The abandoned Tai Lin Radio Service sign, right.

Until 2009, the Yue Hwa sign was located on the left

This story originally appeared in the August 30, 2011 edition of China Daily.