History in the making

Deep within the hillside, compressed by the office towers of Central, is a catacombs of underground glaciers, lakes and a mortuary where victims of wartime air raids lie in chill silence. Ghosts walk these corridors, some in chains, others perhaps licking ice-cream cones.

These are some of the myths and imaginings that are evoked by the modest Edwardian building on Ice House Street that once housed Dairy Farm, one of the first establishments to sell refrigerated milk and ice-cream in Hong Kong, and the site of an earlier trade in ice. It is now home to some of Hong Kong's more subversive establishments, the Fringe Club and Foreign Correspondents' Club, and the luxuriously decadent M at the Fringe restaurant.

Last weekend, Fringe Club director Benny Chia launched a project called the Excavation to create an oral history of the site, part of it made up. Inviting schoolchildren to participate in a mock archaeological dig for buried ice, imagining what they might find, Mr Chia later shared his own 'creative memories'. The children contributed the lakes and ghost stories, but they were not the first to do so, said Mr Chia, who was warned of ghosts haunting the building in 1983, when he first opened the space for contemporary visual and performing arts. He pieced the warnings together with a bombing raid in 1943, killing hundreds whose bodies may have been stored in the refrigerated basement. 'It becomes part of the Fringe Club building folklore,' he said. 'Did it really happen or not?' Mr Chia would argue that it does not matter.