A wood engraving of a drawing made by Auguste Borget of cooked food stalls (dai pai dongs) around 1840.

A few steps from Queen's Road Central, concealed by skyscrapers, is an ancient, picturesque, Chinese market. It is a fascinating place. The easiest way to find Graham Street Wet Market is to walk down Queen's Road in a westerly direction until you spot a couple of hawker stalls. Graham Street is a narrow, pedestrian-only lane crammed with barrows piled high with delicious fresh fruit, fish and vegetables.

Around 168 years ago, just before Hong Kong became a British colony, there was a bazaar on the site. It supplied the numerous foreign ships that sheltered in Hong Kong harbour with food. This Chinese marketplace was later known as the Middle Bazaar.

There was a tendency to name the streets of the new colony after British statesmen, generals and admirals. Occasionally a local personality had a street named after him. A notable example was the Reverend Karl Gutzlaff.

Gutzlaff was a Pomeranian saddle-maker turned missionary who preached Christianity to the Chinese while selling them opium. He was a brilliant linguist and later became Hong Kong's Chief Secretary of Trade. Thanks to a survey he conducted in 1844, we know that both Graham Street and Peel Street were built on the site of the Middle Bazaar. There is a plan known as the Peel Street/Graham Street Redevelopment Project, which will destroy most of the old buildings in the wet market. Unfortunately most of Gutzlaff Street will also be demolished during the redevelopment.

The redevelopment site starts above Wellington Street and continues up to Gage Street. Peel Street, at the western edge of the site, was named after Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, best known for the creation of the British police who were called "Bobbies" or "Peelers" after him. The escalator marks the site's eastern border.

Nearby is a part of Stanley Street which is known as Dai Pai Dong (cooked-food stall) Street. The whole market area is a dai pai dong gourmet's paradise. The food is cheap and popular. Whether Lord Stanley, three times British Prime Minister, would have enjoyed the cuisine is extremely unlikely.

There is a popular myth that Graham Street was called after Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Hope Graham. Unfortunately the street had already been named before the colonel was posted to the colony. When he was given command of the 59th Regiment, only 62 of the original 650 troops who had left Ireland in 1845 survived. The rest had either died from malaria, been sent home or deserted.

Fortunately Hope Graham believed in physical fitness. He needed a playing field so the area around Murray Barracks was levelled and turfed over, thus, by chance, destroying the breeding ground of the deadly anopheles mosquito.

The Peak was a "Barren Rock" until Hope Graham kept his troops fit by planting thousands of trees there. In the city below and throughout Hong Kong Island, he created avenues and woods that are now small forests. In fact, the 59th Regiment planted many of the oldest surviving trees.

If anyone deserved to have a street named after him it is the colonel who was one of the pioneers of Hong Kong's forestation. This would have pleased Hong Kong's environmentalists. Who Graham of Graham Street was is still a mystery. Locally the Peel Street/Graham Street Redevelopment Project is unpopular. But many of the three- storey houses, built in the 1950s, are so dilapidated that plans to demolish them seem likely to go ahead.

Now is the time to visit the Graham Street Wet Market. Many local people don't even know that it exists. For the tourist it may be their only chance to see a genuine, old-fashioned, flourishing Chinese wet market.