I am a san kai chai, a New Territories' boy. I have lived on the far side of Lion Rock for half a lifetime. Even before then, I spent much of my free time in villages along the road to Sha Tau Kok, at the seafood restaurants at Lau Fau Shan or on the far fringes of Mirs Bay.
In those days, Sha Tin was a quiet valley noted for the best rice in China (it used to be shipped to Beijing for the Ming emperors) and splendid farm-made tofu. In the 1960s, adventurous explorers from Hong Kong Island would go by Star Ferry to Tsim Sha Tsui to catch the cranky steam train that puffed laboriously north, to dine at a hillside restaurant whose speciality was roast pigeon coated with local honey.
The Sha Tin valley was home to 30,000 people. Today, more than 630,000 live there. Junks could once drop anchor at the fishing village of Tai Wai: it is now 4km inland. New cities have risen like giant concrete mushrooms from the paddy fields of Tin Shui Wai and Tai Po. The snug fishing ports of Castle Peak and Hang Hau are now the cities of Tuen Mun (488,800 people) and Tseung Kwan O (266,000 residents).
Most people do not realise it, but the New Territories, with 3.5 million inhabitants, is now home to more people than Hong Kong Island (1,262,000) and Kowloon (2,019,600) combined. And yet, if you drive from Plover Cove towards Starling Inlet and turn right to get to the cluster of villages at Wu Kau Tang, you go back three decades. The road ends at a tree-shaded stream. Follow the path; you walk into the past. The countryside is eerily quiet except for bird calls and the flap of huge wings as herons rise from abandoned rice fields. The deserted village of Sheung Miu Tin broods in the sunshine. The houses are stoutly built, meant to last generations. The last occupant, a lonely old widower whose children emigrated decades ago to Canada, died 15 years ago.
Doors have been prised open by illegal immigrants who find the empty homes a tempting abode on their way from beach landing sites to the city. The only signs of human life are occasional police patrols. Mid-week, you can walk for hours without seeing anyone, through empty valleys alongside a widening stream where turtles slumber on the banks and fish plop in deep pools. Scores of remote villages in roadless valleys have been abandoned. The demographics are simple. Subsistence farming collapsed in the desperate years of the 1950s and many villagers were forced overseas to find work. A large percentage went to Britain; because of our colonial status, they gained entry with ease. Another large number, 50,000 of them in the mid-1960s, went to sea on vessels of many flags. The villages died.
As Hong Kong's manufacturing and construction industries boomed, there were well-paid jobs for all. The men wanted their wives with them, and children at school. The families left isolated settlements to live in town, or headed for reunions in Britain. In a few short years, substantial villages which had stood proudly for centuries were deserted. A dwindling band of elderly people remained. The old men died. Finally, the gnarled old Hakka great-grandmothers, tough as the ancient village incense trees, remained the only occupants. And then their time came. Dozens of those abandoned hamlets were simply left to rot. The process did not take long. Once the protective plaster outer covering was penetrated by heavy summer rains, the mud packed between the stones washed away. Within three summers, a substantial home could be nothing but a pile of bricks and rotting timber, covered with vines and bamboo. It is a sorry fate for scores of clan settlements where a lack of roads meant villagers could not transform their old stone farmhouses into the profitable and ubiquitous three-storey villas.
