By Margot Mottaz Photographer Ernest Chang and the Blue House share more than addresses along Stone Nullah Lane in Wanchai: they both overcame troubled pasts that could have cost them their existence. The former has emerged stronger and ever more tenacious after recovering from drug addiction, but the latter is still in the process of making a full recovery. The story begins in the 1920s, when a four-storey tenement building, or tong lau, was erected at 72 Stone Nullah Lane, replacing what was once the district’s first hospital. Over the years it housed a martial-arts school run by a former pupil of kung fu master Wong Fei-hung, and then an osteopathy clinic, always with a few residential units on the upper floors. Accidentally painted royal blue during maintenance in the 1990s by workers who only had the Water Supplies Department’s blue paint to hand, the building was named accordingly. Today, though temporarily moved for the duration of the renovation, a charity shop and an exhibition space, House of Stories, occupy the ground floor, while eight families live upstairs. …