Sam Wan was 10 years old when his father, an officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, died in the line of duty. Reeling from his death, Wan’s family moved from their Tsim Sha Tsui apartment back to their ancestral village, Tai Po Tsai, where they owned a small tile-roofed house.
The year was 1966 and the village couldn’t have been more different from Kowloon. Situated on a small plateau beneath Razor Hill, about halfway between Clear Water Bay and Sai Kung Town, Tai Po Tsai was a centuries-old collection of ramshackle houses and farm fields. Almost everyone in the village was related to a common ancestor. Most of them made a modest living.
“The villagers were small-scale farmers — they grew rice and vegetables for sale in the market in Sai Kung,” recalls Wan. “Their income was not very good, so most of the male villagers went outside to work as sea crew members. Some went to England to work as labourers or in Chinese restaurants.”
But things were changing. Shaw Brothers had opened a film studio nearby in 1961 and many of the studio’s employees, including some future film stars, started renting houses in the village. Then, in 1972, a revolution: the government passed the Small House Policy, which gave each male villager and his descendants the right to build a 700 square foot house in the village, without having to pay a land premium or licence fee.
Sometime in the late tenth century, a Sung Dynasty bureaucrat named Tang Hon-fat left his hometown of Pak Sha Village in Jiangxi province atook a trip south, to the coast of Guangdong. When he passed through the lush valley now known as Kam Tin, he was so taken by its natural beauty and the friendliness of its peasant inhabitants, he decided to move his entire family there. They arrived, ancestral bones in tow, in 973.
If Tang were to pass through Kam Tin in 2011, he might be less impressed. The mountains are still as beautiful as always, but the banana trees and farm fields of the valley have mostly given way to a haphazard collecton of houses, shacks and junkyards, none built with particular care or concern for the surrounding landscape. And if the people of Kam Tin were once known for their generosity, they lost it at some point during the millenium of pirate raids, dynastic upheaval and British annexation that has passed since Tang Hon-fat’s arrival. Visitors to Kam Tin’s ancient walled villages are more likely to encounter a cranky old woman demanding an entry fee than they are to be greeted with smiles.
Still, Kam Tin is one of Hong Kong’s most intriguing places, both for its centuries of history (documented with flourish by Sung Hok-pang in a 1973 paper for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) and its more recent development. In 1950, the Royal Air Force opened a base here, which housed a number of military families until the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. (It was also used as a detention camp for Vietnamese refugees from the 1970s to 1992.) Today, the base is mostly disused, run by a single unit of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, whose soldiers are not allowed to leave the base. But the airfield still makes its presence felt through the large community of ex-Gurkhas — the Nepalese and Indian who formed their own regiments in the British Army — who have remained in the area.
It was bound to happen. 26 months after Tsoi Yuen Village received its death sentence, 100 police officers burst into the remaining villagers’ houses and told them to leave.
The villagers were incredulous. “I was negotiating with the government peacefully only a few days ago,” one man, Cheung Sun-yau, told the South China Morning Post. Tuesday morning, after workers cut through his front gate, police pushed him into his house and searched him, before telling him that it was his last chance to leave before a new high-speed railway is built through the village.
Tsoi Yuen’s residents have been protesting their village’s impending demolition for more than two years. Despite an evacuation order last year, 60 villagers have chosen to remain as they continue to negotiate with the government for compensation. Yesterday, apparently, the government decided it had had enough.
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
Two and a half years ago, my girlfriend and I were walking through a housing estate near Kowloon City when we happened upon something completely unexpected: a walled village. At first glance, we actually thought it was an old shantytown, surrounded as it was by street hawkers, outdoor barbers and houses made of sheet metal. But as we walked around its periphery, we came across a gatehouse, beyond which was an alley lined by small, tile-roofed houses. At the end was a temple.
“This whole place is going to be gone soon,” warned a village resident as we walked through the gate, towards the temple. In turned out we were standing in Nga Tsin Wai, the last walled village in Kowloon. In 2007, the Urban Renewal Authority decided to tear most of it down and replace it with two apartment towers and a heritage-themed park which will incorporate the temple, an ancestral hall and a few village houses.
Built with recycled sheet metal, its tin roof held down by bricks, this shack in Hong Kong’s Tai Wai Village is covered by potted plants — an improvised take on the sophisticated green walls pioneered by people like Patrick Blanc.
Shek O is a seaside village on the southeast corner of Hong Kong Island. It’s home to one of Hong Kong’s most popular beaches, which gives it a holiday atmosphere in the summer, when thousands of people flock there from across the city to sunbathe, swim, barbecue and drink. In the cooler months, though, it’s a lot quieter, and it returns to its wintertime existence as a picturesque hamlet of commuters and beach bums.
I don’t know much about the history of Shek O, but photos from the 1950s and 70s show that it was even smaller then that it is today, so there might not be a lot of history to know about. In some ways, it’s a typical Hong Kong village, with narrow lanes and small houses clustered around a temple dedicated to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea. But the beachside location has given it an atmosphere that evokes coastal California: there’s a surf shop, a pizzeria that wouldn’t be out of place in Venice Beach and a laid-back beach bar that plays reggae music.
The layers of irony in Nantou can be hard to appreciate. Here is a town that reigned supreme over the surrounding lands for hundreds of years; when China lost the first Opium Wars, it was here that British emissaries met Chinese officials to claim the nearby island of Hong Kong.
Later, as a result of Hong Kong’s prosperity as a British colony, the Kowloon-Canton Railway was built, bypassing Nantou and passing instead through the nearby town of Shenzhen. Nantou faded into obscurity. In the 1980s, after Shenzhen was declared a free-market Special Economic Zone, it was absorbed into the city’s urban sprawl. By the early 2000s, it had become just another urban village packed with migrants from every corner of rural China.
But Nantou was still littered with historic buildings dating back to its days as the economic and political capital of the surrounding prefecture, so Shenzhen’s officials decided to build a history museum and restore some of the old landmarks, which included the yamen where Hong Kong was signed away, temples, clan houses and 600-year-old fortifications. Unfortunately, nobody was interested, so the restored buildings were boarded up.
It’s easy to spot Mary Ann O’Donnell in a Shenzhen crowd. She’s the one wearing a pink-and-orange linen scarf and flowing dress. She’s also white — a rather rare sight in a wealthy city that is still off the radar of the roving crowd of expatriates that have settled in Shanghai and Beijing. Don’t let appearances deceive you, though, because O’Donnell knows Shenzhen better than just about everybody.
Armed with a camera and a notebook, O’Donnell roams the city’s streets, collecting stories and photos that sometimes posts on her blog, Shenzhen Noted. When she first moved to the city in 1995, it was just 15 years old, a shifty frontier town. Now it bears the veneer of global capitalism: giant malls that wouldn’t be out of place in Causeway Bay dot the landscape, in between luxurious housing estates and international chain hotels.
But Shenzhen is far more complicated than meets the eye. For all the new malls, the reality is that Shenzhen is still a city of villages populated by poor migrants who’ve arrived from across China for a shot at success. That’s the Shenzhen that fascinates O’Donnell.
I met her last month on a damp, chilly afternoon, in the western district of Nanshan. We strolled through a series of old country villages that had been absorbed into the fast-growing city.
I never thought I’d find a triplex in Hong Kong but it turns out there’s thousands of them. While Montreal’s triplexes were mostly built in the early twentieth century, though, the ones in Hong Kong, known in Cantonese as ding uk, are actually fairly recent.
While ding uk are usually called “village houses” in English, this isn’t a very precise translation: the term actually means “sons’ houses.” They’re a product of a 1972 law that allows the first-born sons of Hong Kong’s indigenous families to build a house in their ancestral villages without having to pay for the land. There are hundreds of such villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong, which were granted special rights, including a certain degree of self-determination, when they were annexed by Britain in 1898. In order to regulate the demand for housing, the law limited ding uk to three stories in height and 2,100 square feet of floor space.
For the next month or so, I’ll be staying in a village on Hong Kong’s Sai Kung Peninsula named Tai Po Tsai. Tucked between Razor Hill and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, it’s a likable little place of narrow lanes and typical village houses. Although it is traditionally home to members of the Wan family, it feels a lot more cosmopolitan than most villages, probably because of its proximity to the university and a large television studio.
It’s not unusual for a place to be referred to as an “urban village,” often referring to a particularly tight-knit neighbourhood or a commercial district whose merchants’ association has tried to foster a sense of small-town nostalgia. In the case of Hong Kong, however, actual villages do exist in the midst of a large metropolis. Dozens of them are scattered throughout Hong Kong’s outlying districts, some of them seaside fishing settlements, others old farming communities that have been absorbed into the city. For the most part, these villages retain a distinct culture and appearance, and they are one of the most remarkable aspects of Hong Kong’s urban form.
The villages owe their continued existence to politics and geography. Although it covers just 1,000 square kilometres, about a quarter of the size of Greater Montreal, Hong Kong’s physical landscape is remarkably diverse, ranging from fertile agricultural lands to mountains and barren, wind-swept hills. Less than a quarter of its landmass is actually developed, with most of the population concentrated in area with extremely high population densities, like Kowloon, the north shore of Hong Kong Island and a smattering of cities and towns in the New Territories, the large swath of land between Kowloon and the Chinese border.
The New Territories are where most of Hong Kong’s villages are found. In 1898, when this area was leased to the British government for 99 years, it was already populated with a smattering of old agricultural villages, most of them settled during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Many of the indigenous villagers were not happy living under a new colonial master so, in order to appease them, the British gave them special land ownership and political rights. To this day, many villages are populated by families that have lived there for generations, and each is still governed, at least symbolically, by a leader drawn from one of the village’s deeply-rooted families. Even as Hong Kong has grown and evolved, this political arrangement has ensured that many villages are remarkably stable.
The rapid urbanization of Shenzhen since 1980 has generated a contemporary landscape dotted with a series of urban villages, enclaves of buzzing urbanity and street life situated on land owned by Shenzhen’s original rural residents. These areas house much of Shenzhen’s floating population of workers from across China.
The local farmers or fishers who are now the village landlords have usually completely re-arranged their village space, which is increasingly hemmed in by commercial or residential high-rise projects. Shenzhen’s urban villages are typically a fabric of tightly packed ten to fifteen storey walk-up apartment buildings, with ground floor commercial, arranged around a very permeable street grid, punctuated with the odd public space or market. There are usually some fairly spacious main streets, but most of the buildings are accessed through a warren of alleys and pathways, most less than two metres wide, that wind their way between the buildings. Amazingly, there’s still some commercial activity within the maze—such as informal bicycle repair shops or very small canteens.
While they have struggled with a poor reputation in Shenzhen, and in other Chinese cities in which the phenomenon occurs, urban villages are starting to be perceived as islands of vitality, street life, and holdouts of traditional culture in the sea of modernity that is Shenzhen. One village in Shenzhen’s Futian district, Shuiwei, is even being targeted for tourism, while many others are falling under the scope of the somewhat ominous-sounding Urban Village Renovation Project.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 2 hours agofrom web
why does it now take decades to build subways in developed world cities, while china builds several a year? a summary http://t.co/VpgYJJ1Vabout 9 hours agofrom web
