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NOW little more than a collection of derelict squatter huts, once-flourishing Nga Tsin Wai village has a proud history.

  It was the centre of a village league which heroically defended the Kowloon City area against the Tai Ping rebels in 1854, in a battle that brought the then village head an honour from the Qing government.

  But long before it defeated the rebels, Nga Tsin Wai had been a well-established settlement.

 The first settlers - the Chan clan - established themselves in the middle of the 12th century.

 Two centuries later, the Ngs and the Lis also lived there.

 The three families continue to live in the area.

 Because the area was threatened by bandits in the mid-16th century, the villagers built walls and a moat in about 1570.

 'The houses are all very small because they wanted to build as many as possible, so that once the bandits came, their relatives scattered around the walled village could come in and be protected,' historian Dr Patrick Hase said. As a result, every house is only about 200 square feet.

 The period from the 1840s until about 1912 was a prosperous time for the village, which was socially dominant in the area.

 But the opening of the Tai Po Road and the railway took much of the business away and the 1920s saw a period of decline, which accelerated during the Japanese occupation.

 Fields east of the village were confiscated for the development of Kai Tak airport, the moat was filled and houses scattered around the village were demolished. Squatter huts, which now conceal the old village wall, were built after the war.

 There were only two other villages in Kowloon as ancient as Nga Tsin Wai. One, Po Kong, was demolished by the Japanese army and the other, Ma Tau Wai, was torn down between 1925 and 1930.



Dereliction belies heroic history