Ripe for change? Vibrant Hong Kong fruit market faces growing challenges after 103 years

The sound of rumbling fills the night air, as shirtless men with towels wrapped around their necks drag pallet jacks with stacked boxes of fruit across the road. Buyers and sellers yell at one another across stalls, surrounded by lego-like towers of boxes perched on wooden crates. Workers load their cargo into half-empty trucks parked outside the cluster of alleys.

It’s almost midnight, yet the work day is just beginning at the Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market.

From dusk till dawn, the rustic market comes to life as thousands of boxes full of imported fruits are sold and transported to various markets, shops and stalls across the city.

From 2014 to 2015, the private market supplied 317,000 tonnes of fruit or about 47 per cent of Hong Kong’s total supply, according to an April audit report.

“The Yau Ma Tei fruit market represents our old community,” Cheung Chi-cheung, vice-chairman of the Kowloon Fruit and Vegetable Merchants Association, said.

“People in the old fruit wholesale trade were usually undereducated people with low cultural levels [who] made a living and supported their families with their physical strength. It has a very long history in Hong Kong.”

Established in 1913, the market is one of Hong Kong’s oldest and once handled nearly all of the fresh food sold on the Kowloon peninsula. Initially also selling poultry, rice and fish, it became solely a fruit market in the 1960s after the government relocated the poultry merchants and fishermen moved after the seafront underwent various reclamations.