Choi Yuen Tsuen, a farming village in Shek Kong, came to prominence after its residents refused to leave and make way for the Hong Kong to Guangzhou express rail link. Two years on, their campaign is lost: residents have left their homes for temporary housing.
Yet the memory of their village lives on - in a six-metre-wide painting called the Riverside Scene of Local Agriculture. The panoramic work, created by Hong Kong Polytechnic University students, showcases the community's life in its heyday.
The 30-strong team of part-time design students came to identify with the embattled villagers during a tense period last December. At issue back then was compensation for villagers.
Yet Michael Yiu Wai-hung, a participant in the project, thinks villagers' anger was not motivated by financial considerations. 'What they refused to give up was a close-knit community, their industriously built homes and farmlands,' he says.
The students went door to door to map out the village. They also interviewed the last 18 families that stood their ground till the end. Their project aimed to recapture the village's life in its prime between the 1950s and 1970s in a panoramic drawing fashioned after the famous Riverside Scene at the Qingming Festival.
Choi Yuen Tsuen village's story began six decades ago when new immigrants began turning the barren land into lush gardens and groves of tulips, cabbages and bananas. Some villagers raised pigs, others kept bees. The community became like a big family.
Hui Pok-leung, originally from Indonesia, was one of the early residents. He once bred 3,000 pigeons for sale to restaurants.