Tai Kwun

This guide to Tai Kwun in Hong Kong opens in June 1931, when a man travelling under a false name was arrested on the street and marched into Victoria Gaol, the prison whose walls still stand here. His real name was Nguyen Ai Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh, and the French colonial authorities wanted him extradited from Hong Kong. The guide follows the legal fight that followed, argued by a British solicitor and carried all the way to the Privy Council in London. It also traces the compound's own history, from its construction in 1841 as the colony's first prison, courthouse and police headquarters to its reopening after restoration in 2018.