Tai Po Theatre

Now I remember how my youth was spent. There were no television in the early to mid-fifties. I was seeing up to 4 different English speaking talkies a day (2 cinemas in Taipo with 2 main feature films and also each with an “afternoon leisure film show”. The earliest subtitles (interpreted from English) were hand written and projected by slides onto a small space on the side of the main screen! So you had to flip from one to the other just to get a gist of what was happening with the plot! I remember seeing Disney’s Pinocchio there.

Yes I do. The site of the theatre was at the corner of Sui On Street and Hey Yuen Street (Hey Yuen = Cantonese for theatre)
The site is now a block of apartments named Moon House. The property developers were actually family relations and I remember it was built around 1964. The year when I left Hong Kong.
Google maps: <http://maps.google.es/maps?hl=es&ie=UTF8&ll=22.448597,114.163755&spn=0.002231,0.004801&t=h&z=18>

I can also remember something extremely unusual about this theatre.
In front of the screen on the right corner, not far from the front row, was a well!! This could be the only theatre in the whole world with a watering hole inside it. When we were kids we used to wander inside when the cinema was empty during the day and look around or play about. There were no gates or locked doors to stop people going in. One day we lifted the concrete lid and found that it was a well. I think we only found that out when we dropped a small stone into it and heard the sound of water (it was quite dark inside the cinema even during the day). Talk about health and safety! But then we are talking about a small market town in 1950’s rural area of Hong Kong, the New Territories.

re ‘It re-opened after the war, and showed selected films until its closure in 1957 or 1958.’ This is not the case. The Tai Po couldn’t have closed in 1957, or even 1958 for that matter. I can remember going to watch movies in both the Golden Palace and Tai Po Cinemas on the same day. Since the Golden Palace was only opened in 1957, the Tai Po Cinema couldn’t have closed in 1957, or even 1958. Some days I remember seeing 4 different movies in one day (maybe during my school holidays). I remember one cinema had a different morning movie (早場), and the other cinema had an ‘after work movie’ (工餘場), which was different to the main feature. The other fact I know is that the Tai Po cinema was only knocked down around 1963 or 64 to make way for a block of flats called the Moon House. This is because the property developer was a family relation of ours.