Home to one of the world's most famous racecourses but otherwise little-visited, Happy Valley deserves some exploration. The area's original village - Wong Nai Chung - has become Village Road; no trace of this early hamlet can be found but the original wong nai chung (yellow mud stream) still runs through concrete culverts and underground drains and out into Victoria Harbour; Causeway Bay's Canal Road marks the exit point.

In the early years of British rule, deaths from fever were commonplace; the name Happy Valley is a British Army reference to a burial place - 'Jack's been posted to Happy Valley.' Another Happy Valley, which also contains a large cemetery, can be found in Aden, on the south coast of Yemen.

Happy Valley's religious cemeteries contain the graves of Muslims, Roman Catholics, Jews and Parsees. The Colonial Cemetery, established in 1845, was originally intended for Protestants but gradually it was used for anyone without their own religious or communal burial ground. Numerous Russian Orthodox memorials can be seen - reminders of the once-sizeable Russian community here - as well as several pre-war Japanese graves; many of which contain the remains of female prostitutes brought in to work in local brothels. Several 19th century naval and regimental memorials were defaced recently by shoddy, poorly supervised 'restoration' work.