Paper, Memory, and the City

Bound like a keepsake and carried like a market bag, this book revives the tactile poetry of Hong Kong’s vanishing streets. Its design begins with a humble object—the brown kraft paper bag once ubiquitous in traditional shops—and turns it into a vessel of memory. The soft, fibrous cover bears the quiet warmth of aged paper, while the red-and-white twisted string handle recalls the everyday ritual of wrapping, tying, and carrying. In form and texture, it resurrects the modest beauty of local craftsmanship, capturing the spirit of commerce before the era of plastic and pixels.

The book’s proportions and format are modelled after the traditional Chinese almanac Tung Shing, an object that once guided daily life with its cyclical wisdom. Its flexible PUR binding allows the pages to lie flat, encouraging lingering rather than flipping—a design that invites reading as an act of intimacy. Along the spine, the vertical typography references the signboards that lined the columns of tong lau or ke lau, Hong Kong’s tenement buildings, once dense with tradesmen’s names and faded paint. This gesture binds architecture to print, anchoring the publication within the city’s material culture.

Typography becomes another form of storytelling. The title, handwritten by calligrapher Wong Suen-yau in Northern Wei-style regular script, lends an authority both historic and human—a contemporary echo of stone inscriptions and shopfront signs. Inside, five years of fieldwork unfold: layered portraits of tailors, tea houses, and herbalists rendered in photographs and essays, each page an act of preservation through design.

Each copy comes with a map tracing historic shop locations and a paper bag from Cheung Heung Yuen Restaurant, blurring the boundary between object and experience. As a whole, the design transforms documentary into artefact, translating the weight of memory into paper, ink, and string. It is not merely a book—it is the soul of a city, folded, printed, and carried home.