An appeal for information – “The Rose Garden Hotel”

Bruce Lee fans (or anyone else for that matter) who have been reading my Lee snippets since last year may remember my quest (on behalf of John Little) to locate the location of the opening fight sequence from Enter the dragon. It was a long hard slog and took me two months (and I was too late as it turned out) but I did eventually find it in Sheung Shui and you can read all about it here in my previous post.

One snippet of information that came from the initial search was from film director Tung Wei. When John Little was in HK he had filmed an interview with Tung Wei and asked him if he knew of the location. Tung Wei played Lao in the film – the recipient of Bruce’s famous finger pointing speech – which was filmed at Tsing Shan  Monastery. However, because the initial fight scene was filmed a while after the main filming had finished (and was shot independently of Warner’s involvement) Tung Wei was not involved and simply said that he was told it was filmed at a location, somewhere near or in Yuen Long, known to everyone as Mui Gwai Yuen (玫瑰園) or in English “The Rose Garden”.

Of course, this eventually turned out to be a red herring, but it seems that The Rose Garden did exist somewhere and was a popular filming location during the 60′s and 70′s. The problem is – where the hell was this place? During my search last year I contacted several District Councils to find out if anyone knew anything. Yuen Long District Council did eventually get back to me but their information was sketchy at best (this is a common experience with District Councils). What I was told is that there used to be a pub (yes, a pub, as in a drinking establishment) called “The Rose Garden” in a local village called Shui Pin Wai.

Shui Pin Wai still exists in name but is now a Govt Housing estate. So any traces of the pub have disappeared long ago, so here is the purpose of this post…

Actually, as a recent update to this appeal, my good friends at Gwulo have finally nailed the exact location of this place. It turns out the Rose Garden was actually a hotel. According to posts on Gwulo, The Rose Garden Hotel was one of three hotels listed as being in the New Territories back in the 1970′s alongside the Carlton Hotel and the Shatin Heights Hotel. All of these establishments have disappeared in the intervening years but only the Rose Garden Hotel seems to be lacking any photographic records of its existance (whereas pictures of the Carlton and Shatin Heights can be found all over the internet).

David Bellis, the man behind Gwulo has sent me a copy from a “Hong Kong Streets and Places” (Pub: 1979) that shows a marker displayed where the Rose Garden Hotel used to be sited (well, at least we know it was still around in 1979). Sure enough it seems as though the earlier information I received from Yuen Long District Council was spot on because, low-and-behold, the position was on the road side next to Shui Pin Wai where Castle Peak Rd and Shan Ha Road intersect. You can see the map below. The Rose Garden Hotel is marked by the red number “2″.

Map courtesy of David Bellis

I’ve taken a snap from GoogleEarth so you can see the modern day comparison. Bear in mind that Yuen Long has changed a lot even if the basic road layout has changed little, and the area where the Hotel used to stand is now a fairly new apartment complex called Villa by the Park. The “Park” refers to Yuen Long Park which you can see is the green square to the immediate south of the site. It’s a great place and well worth a visit. Interestingly, in 1979, according to David’s map, the area was known as Shui Ngau Leng Cottage Area i.e. a squatter area.

So anyway, now we know where the place was exactly, but we still don’t have any photographs of this place and so have no idea what it looked like.

So now an appeal for photographs. I’m sure once we can see what the place looked like we can start linking it back to specific films which would be great. I have had a quick trawl through the Yuen Long District photo archives and found this Govt owned snap taken of the area in 1964.

As you can see I have ringed the area that should be the Rose Garden Hotel. Incidentally, the small hillock to the right of it is the area that now makes up Yuen Long Park. Anyway, unfortunately the picture isn’t high definition and so the actual location can’t be viewed clearly but it does seem to show a small cluster of buildings with some open space and doesn’t really look like your typical hotel. I suspect that the “hotel” part of the name was just that – a name – because the only descriptions of I have heard about it are as it being a pub or open air restaurant with a stage for live performances.

Anyway, the mystery deepens and I am still wondering why Tung Wei thought that Bruce Lee had gone there to film the initial fight sequence with Samo for Enter the Dragon…?