Wong Kar-wai's Central: the Mid-Levels escalator and the streets Chungking Express still owns

By half past nine the escalator is still carrying people down toward the harbour, a slow grey river of commuters moving one way only. At ten it stops, shudders, and reverses, and for the rest of the day it climbs — past the coffee stalls of Shelley Street, past a man folding newspapers into thirds, up through the terraced lanes that Wong Kar-wai (王家卫, Wáng Jiāwèi) filmed until they became more familiar on screen than in life.

The escalator that reverses at ten

The Central–Mid-Levels escalator (中环至半山自动扶梯, Zhōnghuán zhì Bànshān zìdòng fútī) is not one machine but a chain of twenty escalators and three moving walkways, roughly 800 metres of covered incline stitched up the hillside above the business district. It is free, it is public, and it moves in a single direction at a time: down from six until ten in the morning, up from ten until midnight. Miss that switch and you find yourself at the foot of a staircase you expected to ride.

Opened in 1993 to move residents uphill without cars, it now carries tens of thousands of people a day. To reach it, leave the MTR at Central (中环, Zhōnghuán) and walk inland from Queen's Road, past the restored Central Market. The first ramp lifts you over Stanley Street and Wellington Street; within a few minutes the towers fall away and the city narrows into something older and steeper.

Cop 663's window, still above the noise

In Chungking Express (重庆森林, Chóngqìng Sēnlín), the policeman played by Tony Leung lives in a flat the escalator seems to pass at eye level, close enough that Faye Wong can watch him from the moving stairs. That building stands on Staunton Street (士丹顿街, Shìdāndùn Jiē), in the district everyone now calls SoHo — South of Hollywood Road, a name coined by estate agents that stuck. The escalator still slides past first-floor windows here, and if you step off at Staunton or Elgin Street you are walking the exact grid the film used.

The snack counter that inspired the 'Midnight Express' stall is gone, as small food shops in Central tend to go. What remains is the geometry: the narrow junctions, the tiled stairwells, the way a doorway on Shelley Street (些利街, Xiēlì Jiē) opens straight onto the escalator's flank. Come on a weekday morning and the crowds thin enough to see it.

Get off at Elgin Street (伊利近街, Yīlìjìn Jiē) and the lanes fan out into bars and small kitchens that fill by nine at night; walk one block to Peel Street (卑利街, Bēilì Jiē) and you are back among hardware stalls and a barber who has not moved in decades. The film's Hong Kong was never a set. It was this exact overlap of the polished and the worn, half a staircase apart.

What the market kept

One street over, the Graham Street market (嘉咸街, Jiāxián Jiē) still runs — a wet market of fish tanks and vegetable crates that has fed this slope for more than a century, though redevelopment has pared it back year by year. Stop at Lan Fong Yuen (兰芳园, Lánfāng Yuán) on Gage Street (结志街, Jiézhì Jiē), one of the shops that claims to have invented silk-stocking milk tea (丝袜奶茶, sīwà nǎichá), strained through a cloth sock until it runs smooth; a cup is around HK$23, best with a slab of butter in a pineapple bun. For something heavier, Kau Kee (九记牛腩, Jiǔjì Niúnǎn) on nearby Gough Street has served beef-brisket noodles for generations, a bowl about HK$55, the queue forming before it opens.

Higher up, Hollywood Road carries you past Man Mo Temple (文武庙, Wénwǔ Miào), where spiral incense coils hang from the ceiling and burn for days, and past PMQ (元创方, Yuánchuàng Fāng) at 35 Aberdeen Street, a former police married quarters now full of design studios, free to enter. Just below, the antique sellers of Upper Lascar Row (摩罗上街, Móluó Shàngjiē) — the lane foreigners still call Cat Street — lay out jade, old clocks and reproduction posters on folding tables. The Goldfinch restaurant Wong used in later work has closed, over in Causeway Bay; here, on the hill, more of the frame survives than you would expect.

The films did not invent these streets. They noticed them, and then everyone else did too.

Walking it

Take the MTR to Central and leave by Exit C or D, or ride the tram (叮叮, dīngdīng) along Des Voeux Road for a flat HK$3, tapped with an Octopus card (八达通, Bādátōng). Go on a weekday before ten if you want the downhill run and the quiet; go after dark if you want SoHo lit and full. Wear shoes you can climb in — the escalator only covers the main line, and the streets it crosses run steep in every direction. The one mistake worth avoiding is treating it as a loop: it moves one way at a time, so plan to ride up and walk down the parallel stone stairs on Shelley or Cochrane Street (阁麟街, Gélín Jiē), which is where most of the photographs worth taking are anyway.

这条扶梯上午向下、十点后向上，来之前先看好方向。