Then & Now | How Sikh doormen became a symbol of old Hong Kong, welcoming visitors to banks, hotels and homes

The liveried Sikh doorman, a once-ubiquitous feature of high-end establishments and affluent homes in Hong Kong, has all but disappeared

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Kam Singh, a doorman at the Excelsior Hotel in Causeway Bay, in February 2019. Photo: SCMP

Jason Wordie

Published: 12:43pm, 20 Aug 2024Updated: 2:27pm, 21 Aug 2024

One formerly commonplace feature of local life that has almost vanished from contemporary Hong Kong is the burly Sikh doorman-guard stationed at the entrance to banks, hotels and department stores. And once upon a time, the gates of affluent private homes almost all had Sikh guards.

From the British colony’s mid-19th century urban beginnings, Sikh guards were mostly sourced from the ranks of recently retired Hong Kong police. When these men retired on pension, many chose to remain in the city where, after all, they had spent their entire working lives.

Such jobs kept them on their feet all day, rain or shine, and usually well into the night, but were otherwise physically undemanding.

Sikh doormen at the entrance to The China City nightclub in Tsim Sha Tsui in 1993. Photo: SCMP

Decades of working life in Hong Kong ensured that Cantonese-language abilities – an essential skill – ranged from serviceable to fluent. Other Sikh guards – usually Hong Kong born-and-raised younger men – were recommended for vacant positions by members of their own community already engaged in this closely interconnected private security world.

While clothes worn at private residences varied, men employed at commercial premises typically wore uniforms styled after interwar-era British or American cinema or theatre doormen; pseudo-Ruritanian, operetta-inspired “Chocolate Soldier” designs were immediately obvious sartorial inspirations.

Jackets were generally some fetching red tint – anything from lolly pink to deep burgundy – along with swags of gold braid, frogged buttons, lavish epaulettes, silk turbans and astrakhan collars.

In 1995, a policeman stands beside a Sikh security guard outside the Sham Shui Po branch of Kwong On Bank, where a robbery had recently taken place. Photo: SCMP

At Lane Crawford’s Central store, the pink-clad Sikh doorman remains a much-remembered childhood spectacle for many older Hong Kong Chinese. One friend, now in his fifties, particularly recalls an instance when, as a little boy, he stood astounded as perennially pink-clad socialite Brenda Chau alighted from her pink Rolls-Royce, the car door deferentially opened by her pink-clad chauffeur, and was then bowed and scraped inside the premises by the establishment’s pink-clad Sikh doorman, to whom she was clearly a familiar figure. In my friend’s memory, Chau carried a Henry Steiner-designed Lane Crawford shopping bag, also a fetching shade of pink. The dramatically overstated, sticky-cloying “elegance” and “pinkness” of the scene has never been forgotten.