Advertisement
Advertisement
Tai Uk Wai village head Albert Cheung in front of the Blue Yard, a residential property in Tsuen Wan. Photos: Bruce Yan

Hakka clan to resurrect Hong Kong village that was lost to high-rise development

Hakka clan secures a plot near original site now submerged by reservoir

About 90 members of a Hakka clan indigenous to the New Territories are planning to recreate their village, more than a decade after it was demolished for high-rise development in urban Tsuen Wan.

The Cheung clan has bought a piece of land measuring about 30,000 sq ft in Tuen Mun and is now seeking to gather fellow clansmen to reconstruct the original village that is at present submerged by Tai Lam Chung Reservoir.

If the plan proceeds, it will contrast with the fate of villages that have disappeared in recent years or are set to become history.

Tsoi Yuen Tsuen in Shek Kong was cleared for a cross-border, high-speed railway, the six-century-old Nga Chin Wai Tsuen in Wong Tai Sin is to make way for Urban Renewal Authority redevelopment, and some villages in Kwu Tung North, Fanling North and Hung Shui Kiu are to yield to the construction of new towns.

"It is nostalgia that brings us together again," Tai Uk Wai village chief Albert Cheung Ka-fu, 57, said.

The clan's ancestors hailed from Wuhua, Guangdong.

The earliest records of their settlement in Hong Kong could not be traced, but they were estimated to have relocated more than two centuries ago, Cheung said, citing date inscriptions on ancestral graves lying in Tai Lam Country Park, Tuen Mun.

The original village was known as Tai Lam. It was submerged in 1956 as the government built the reservoir.

With their neighbours from Kwan Uk Tei village, Tai Lam people relocated to a new walled village in Tsuen Wan called Tai Uk Wai, where Cheung was born.

"My most unforgettable childhood memory was that even funerals were held in the village," he said.

"When my grandmother passed away, our family received her body from the mortuary and invited Taoist priests to conduct the rituals here."

The villagers moved again in the 1990s, having sold their land to a developer in 2000.

The site is now home to Blue Yard, a 29-storey residential block on Tai Uk Road, named after the village.

With male descendents of Tai Uk Wai eligible for the government's small-house policy, the clan spent more than eight years looking for a new place to rebuild its village.

In 2013, the clansmen acquired a vacant site in Sun Fung Wai village - back in the Tuen Mun district where their ancestors first started out.

"It will not be the same as our ancestral village," Cheung said. "No one farms nowadays and there won't be enough space to farm anyway, but it will be good for the clan to reunite and take care of one another again."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Bucking trend, indigenous village rises again
Post