Lennon Wall, Hong Kong (Admiralty)

The Lennon Wall in Hong Kong was a wall of handwritten sticky notes on the outdoor staircase beside the Central Government Complex on Harcourt Road, Admiralty. It first appeared in October 2014 during the Umbrella Movement protests and took its name from Prague's Lennon Wall. It was cleared in December 2014, reappeared in 2019 and was removed again.

Where the name came from

Hong Kong's wall borrowed its name from the Lennon Wall in Prague. The Prague wall had been a place for poems and political messages since the 1960s, and after John Lennon was killed in 1980 his portrait and words appeared on it. Hong Kong's version had no painting of Lennon. It was a surface where anyone could stick up a note.

October to December 2014

The wall started in early October 2014, during the street occupation known as the Umbrella Movement. It covered the curved outdoor staircase next to the Central Government Complex on Harcourt Road in Admiralty. Wikipedia counts more than ten thousand notes on it, many calling for universal suffrage. During the occupation, volunteers photographed the notes with a plan to put them online, the South China Morning Post reported.

On 11 December 2014 police and court bailiffs cleared the Admiralty occupation site. Radio Free Asia listed the message wall among the camp's features and reported that the road was washed down after the last protesters left.

Return and removal in 2019

Messages went back up on the same staircase in June 2019, during protests against the proposed extradition bill. Hong Kong Free Press reported that the wall was partly torn down on 30 June 2019, restored within hours, and cleared by police on 2 July.

By then the idea had spread. In July 2019 message walls appeared in districts including Tai Po, Sheung Shui, Tsing Yi and Causeway Bay, often in pedestrian subways and near MTR stations; Wikipedia puts the total at over 150. Some were torn down by government supporters and some by the authorities, including a large wall in Tai Po that the government removed in November 2019. Similar walls were set up by supporters in cities abroad, among them Toronto, Vancouver, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Melbourne and Prague.

Visiting the site today

The message wall at Admiralty was cleared in December 2014 and again in July 2019, and no later return to the staircase has been reported. The photograph above shows it on 21 October 2014, three weeks into the first occupation.