Most naming errors in Hong Kong's colonial records were transliteration problems — the phonetic conversion of Chinese place names into English, or English names into Chinese characters, producing mismatches that stuck. Rednaxela may be one of those. Another explanation, less documented, connects the name to Robert Alexander Young, an American abolitionist who used the name 'Rednaxela' in his 1829 work Ethiopian Manifesto — perhaps brought to Hong Kong by someone who knew the text, the reversed name adopted for reasons now lost. The Chinese transliteration of Rednaxela, Liht-nàh-sih Deih-tòih, followed the reversed English phonetically and was adopted by the neighbourhood. At some point the street appeared on official maps with this name, and the government chose not to make any further alterations. The error was, in effect, ratified by inertia.

The street's most celebrated former resident was José Rizal, the Filipino nationalist, novelist, and ophthalmologist — and the man whose execution by Spanish colonial authorities in Manila in 1896 helped ignite the Philippine Revolution. Between December 1891 and June 1892, Rizal lived at No. 2 Rednaxela Terrace with his family while practising medicine in Hong Kong. He ran an ophthalmology clinic at 5 D'Aguilar Street in Central, not far from the terrace, where among his patients he performed a successful cataract surgery on his own mother, Teodora Alonso. His business card from this period — showing his residence at No. 2 Rednaxela Terrace — survives and has been reproduced widely. The Hong Kong government erected a commemorative plaque at the intersection of Rednaxela Terrace and Shelley Street in 2004 to honour his time in the city. That a 63-metre lane on a hillside in Mid-Levels briefly housed one of Southeast Asia's most important historical figures is the kind of biographical detail that feels invented but is not.

The terrace junctions Shelley Street to the west and Peel Street to the east, closed to vehicles, climbing the slope of the Mid-Levels hillside in the way that many Hong Kong lanes do — steep, shaded, with views through gaps between buildings out toward the harbour. In the contemporary period, No. 8 Rednaxela Terrace became the ACTS Rednaxela, a serviced apartment building developed by Goldig Investment Group. Architects Gary Chang and the EDGE Design Institute designed the building, which received a Design For Asia Merit Award from the Hong Kong Design Centre and was later featured in Apple TV's documentary series Home. In 2012, Goldig sold ACTS Rednaxela for HK$200 million; a scale model of the building is now exhibited at the M+ museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. The street's very wrongness — its backwards name — has made it one of those Hong Kong corners that rewards the curious visitor who looks up from the phone long enough to notice what the sign actually says.

There is a version of this story in which a diligent administrator noticed the error in the 1870s or 1880s and corrected it, and Rednaxela Terrace became Alexander Terrace like dozens of other colonial streets. In that version, the lane is unremarkable. The error that was never corrected is the story. It made the street memorable in a district full of streets, gave it a name that puzzles first-time visitors and delights people who notice the palindrome, and preserved a tiny piece of the ad hoc, imperfect, haphazard process by which a city assembled itself out of translation errors and colonial paperwork. Rednaxela Terrace is 63 metres long and has been wrong for over a century. It is also, for those 63 metres, entirely its own place.