hidden treasure

Last Saturday, I was cycling south along Lok Ma Chau Road, which leads from a usually popular but currently closed border crossing point, when I spotted what appeared to be a particularly impressive example of bougainvillea. I didn’t stop then, mainly because it looked as though I would have to encroach onto someone’s property in order to take a decent photo.

Bougainvillea has been providing dozens of instances of intense colour for the past few weeks, and I usually do stop to take a photo (I used several in my recent post A Grand Day Out), so when, yesterday, I happened to be cycling along the same road, but in the opposite direction, I noted that the intensity of the colour was equally striking:

Having made the decision to stop, I thought that I might as well check out the display from the other side, the side that had originally attracted my attention. However, what I’d thought was someone’s property turned out to be just a common-access yard where a number of cars were parked:

The car in the photo has not been parked though. It has been abandoned. I see scores of abandoned cars along the sides of roads as I cycle around the New Territories with the telltale red writing on the windscreen.

Much to my surprise, there appeared to be some kind of artwork on the wall next to the bougainvillea, which had to be worth a closer look. Unfortunately, the heavy plastic sheeting draped across the back of the makeshift garage makes it almost impossible to get a decent picture, and the bougainvillea has grown to obscure the left-hand side of the work completely.

I had expected this work to be a mural, but it turned out to be composed of ceramic tiles! This is what it looks like from the right:

What a splendid dragon!

I did take a close-range shot of the centre of the work looking over the plastic sheeting, which wasn’t at all satisfactory:

I would wager, given its relative inaccessibility, that nobody, not even the ‘owner’ of the makeshift garage, even notices this superb image. Dragons are a commonplace sight on public buildings—there are several on the new temple I described in A Grand Day Out. And whoever originally planted the bougainvillea—it isn’t in anyone’s garden—probably hasn’t been back to prune it.

However, I will be back, given that I pass this way regularly, to see whether I can obtain some better photos.

There is also a mystery to clear up here: who was responsible for this stunning artwork in the first place? My guess is that it would have been whoever built the house whose garden you can see in the first photo above, although I doubt whether they still live there. The new occupant probably isn’t even aware of the stunning artwork on the outside of the wall that encloses their property.