Straggling around the eastern Kowloon shoreline, Lei Yue Mun is Victoria Harbour's last intact coastal village. Stone-cutting was once the major local industry and abandoned quarries can be seen on the hillsides. In every respect, this once-rural waterside community more closely resembles a ramshackle, squalid squatter settlement than the picturesque, 'traditional' coastal village the local tourist literature wants international visitors to expect. And this is an essential part of what makes Lei Yue Mun worth a visit - it's a living reminder of what Hong Kong overwhelmingly looked like until widespread prosperity arrived in recent decades.
Devil's Peak looms above Lei Yue Mun. The abandoned gun batteries and other fortifications here were built in the early 20th century, shortly after the New Territories lease was signed, to counter perceived military threats from the French and the Russians; they had been unused when they were dismantled in the late 1930s. Signposted paths lead up to the ruins from the village.
On a small rocky headland away from the main village, at the end of a polystyrene-strewn pebble beach, a Tin Hau temple contains an unexpected link to southern China's pre-Chinese ethnic origins. As contemporary Uygurs and Tibetans can unhappily attest, Han Chinese overlords down the centuries have often deployed distinctly colonialist tendencies. A thousand years ago, the majority of occupants of sparsely populated coastal Guangdong belonged to what today's regime would label an 'ethnic minority'. Stone clusters with phallic or cuniform features associated with vanished fertility cults provide lingering links to this temple's origins. Chinese colonists appropriated these sites of worship and overlaid them with Chinese myths or deities. Get the temple keeper to switch on the lights behind Tin Hau's altar for a glimpse of the boulder's unmistakable clefts and folds. It's even painted a realistic pink.
Well known locally for decades, the staggering variety of sea creatures on offer at Lei Yue Mun's seafood restaurants must be seen to be believed. Most live seafood is now imported, some from as far away as East Africa and Mauritius. Unwary diners be warned: they can expect to pay exorbitant sums for any exotic live offerings. Saltwater in the seafood storage tanks is mostly pumped up from the harbour below. Most of Lei Yue Mun village still has no modern sanitation facilities. Raw sewage drains straight out into the harbour, within sight, smell - and presumably water-tank-intake-pipe distance - of Asia's World City's most internationally hyped seafood restaurant strip. Nice! Fancy some e-coli with your steamed garoupa, sir? And perhaps a little cholera on the side?
