Today we feature Ping Shan as the grand winner in our Preserving Villages series, a project to highlight communities among the 600 surviving New Territories villages that are working to keep alive their heritage and communal traditions. The Post, together with the Home Affairs Department and indigenous villagers, has spent a year collecting suggestions from district officers, rural workers, businesspeople and friends. We visited more than 40 villages and identified seven finalists, of which we featured six runners-up over the past six weeks.
Tang Kwan-chi, 72, recalls as a boy running through the narrow stone-walled lanes between dozens of fortified houses to the Ping Shan guest house to meet Elder Uncle visiting from Guangdong.
Through the heavy metal gates, past the Imperial Civil Service examination plaques, young Kwan-chi ran up the wooden stairs. Inside the guest house, there was uncle reclining on the traditional cherrywood bed and puffing on his opium pipe.
In the days before the Japanese invasion, opium was a government-run monopoly in Hong Kong. There was little prejudice against using the drug.
'Ping Shan was a blissful place then,' Mr Tang recalls. 'It was surrounded by wide paddy fields and green mountains. Crops and fields extended south of the Yuen Long River to the Hung Shui Kui River.'
Now, as then, the large village and most of the surrounding hamlets were home to the great Tang clan that settled in the northwest New Territories more than 900 years ago. They remain the largest and most powerful of the 'five great clans' - Tang, Hau, Pang, Man and Liu - of rural Hong Kong.