Once Hong Kong’s ‘Little Taiwan’, Tseung Kwan O has a rich history, hidden qualities – but is it still a little bland?
- Tseung Kwan O was once home to Kuomintang soldiers and Hong Kong’s first flour mill – which failed so badly, its owner gave rise to the naming of Tiu Keng Leng
- Today a growing waterfront promenade and cycle tracks connect to a ribbon of green spaces that thread through the entire district
Tseung Kwan O has a reputation for blandness – and it’s at least partly justified. Built on the shores of Junk Bay in the 1990s and 2000s, this high-rise bedroom community is where the late photographer Michael Wolf shot many of the images in his series “The Architecture of Density”, which evoked a sense of urban alienation.
Even for its residents, the suburb’s shopping malls and gated housing estates are hardly inspiring.
“It’s a rather ordinary commuter town,” says Maria Luk, who lived in the area, near Hang Hau MTR station, for more than a decade. Although the area’s public housing estates can be lively, most of it is dominated by private housing complexes built atop shopping malls, with little in the way of street life, cultural facilities or places to hang out without buying something.
“There was a lack of community ‘kaifong’ feeling,” says Luk. “We hardly ever saw our neighbours in 10 years. I wouldn’t recognise their faces even in the lift, but we made friends with the security guards and cleaning ladies.”
It wasn’t always that way. Luk grew up in nearby Sai Kung and remembers visiting Hang Hau Village when the nearby waterfront was being reclaimed for the housing estates that tower over the area today.