Wan Chai, Hong Kong
A report on Wan Chai nightlife to prepare first time visitors for the pitfalls and overall feel of the place
Thanks to Paul for this submission, a veteran of many trips to Hong Kong on his travels between Europe and Australasia.
This article contains references to the sex industry in Wan Chai but is not intended to be a sex trip report. It is simply to make first time visitors to Hong Kong aware of how things work in the entertainment districts so you will be armed and ready to avoid the dangers and pitfalls that the naive first time visitor can fall into. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.
Like many destinations in Asia, Hong Kong has its fair share of seedy nightlife. However, it's not just restricted to red light areas and spills over into more mainstream entertainment venues. Hong Kong is a very safe city, be in no doubt about that and while you should take all the usual precautions to protect yourself and your belongings, you should not worry too much and relax.
By far, the most well known entertainment areas for foreigners and expats are two areas on Hong Kong Island called Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai. While there are many entertainment areas in Hong Kong, they deserve their own page, so for the purposes of this article, we will concentrate on Wan Chai. Situated just a short distance from Hong Kong's Central district (the main business and finance hub), Wan Chai covers a fairly large area and comprises different zones with the bar and entertainment part of it concentrated on a few streets adjacent to the immigration tower, the Hong Kong Exhibition Centre and Central Plaza (unmistakable triangular building, once the tallest in Hong Kong) Several embassies can be found here, including those of New Zealand and Australia.
There are some drinking holes in Wan Chai that are very well known to expatriates as meeting places, such as The Old China Hand, a small pub style bar on Lockhart Road, nestled amongst a strip of gogo bars. The intersection of Lockhart Road, Jaffe Road and Luard Road mark the hub of Wan Chai's nightlife activity with an array of clean cut theme bars, invariably with Filipino live acts, to more seedy establishments, where scantily clad girls will stand outside and try to coerce passers by inside for a very expensive drink and pole dancing show.
You may think to yourself that the girls outside these gogo bars don't look very Chinese. Well, you'd probably be right as women from other Southeast Asian countries are trafficked into Hong Kong to work in the sex industry, usually from Thailand and The Philippines but also form other places like Vietnam and Indonesia. Not only that, many migrant workers in the domestic helper industry on very low wages will often find themselves tempted into prostitution to supplement their income.
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