What They Could Not Topple — The Lady Liberty Hong Kong 3D Model

Date

October 2019

Lady Liberty Hong Kong is a roughly four-metre statue of a wounded protester — helmet, protective goggles, and a respirator mask, one arm raised holding a black flag reading "Free Hong Kong, Revolution Now." Created in 2019 by a group of Hongkongers and carried through several of the year's mass demonstrations, she was assembled from the movement's own iconography: one lens of her goggles is shattered, for the woman blinded in one eye by a police projectile; her mask stands for the defiance of protesters facing tear gas; the raincoat on her back recalls a demonstrator who fell to his death in a yellow raincoat. Her white form deliberately echoes the ten-metre Goddess of Democracy that students raised in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — itself smashed when the military cleared the square.

At dawn on 13 October 2019, volunteers carried the statue to the summit of Lion Rock, the mountain whose profile of a resting lion gives its name to the "Lion Rock Spirit" — the ethos of resilience, adaptability, and taking one's fate into one's own hands that Hongkongers claim as their own. Placing her there was a deliberate act: to bind the movement's hope for the future to that older spirit of the city.

She survived barely a day. Within about twenty-four hours, opponents of the democracy movement had defaced her with red paint, toppled her, and pushed her over the cliff edge, leaving the shattered figure scattered down the hillside.

Days later, a team of about ten volunteers set out at night to bring her back. They were not the caricature of "rioters" — among them a schoolteacher, architects, and 3D designers — joined by experienced hikers and rock climbers who knew the terrain. Coordinating over encrypted chat and moving by headlamp, they left the official trail and worked along the cliff by rope, with a camera drone helping to locate pieces invisible from the path. One by one the fragments were recovered and passed down the line — the loudest cheer reserved for the statue's head, which had survived almost intact. Before dawn they carried the remains down to the University of Hong Kong. The search embodied the movement's own watchword — 齊上齊落, "we rise together, we fall together."

The team stayed open about what would become of the fragments. But on one point they were clear: what needed protecting was never the physical statue. It was the belief and the values she stood for. A figure can be toppled in a night; the will behind it cannot. "Even a goddess can be attacked," they wrote — and were only made more resolute for it.

To place her beyond the reach of any single act of destruction, Lady Liberty HK released a 3D-printable model of the statue for anyone to download and reproduce. What a regime can smash in one night can be reprinted a thousand times over — on desks and in public spaces around the world. The model stands about 15 cm tall and is supplied in separate parts (helmet, head, body, arm, leg, base, and the plume of tear-gas smoke), free to use for any non-commercial purpose.

Download the 3D modelThingiverse · STL · free for non-commercial use↗

Further reading: Amnesty International — Mission Lady Liberty