Ancient History

Picture the scene: it’s a normal Sunday at Big Wave Bay, and laid-back men and women with long, straggly hair sit at the Big Wave Bay Café, soaking up the sun and watching X-gamers practice their moves on the water.

Now rewind 6,000 years. It’s 4,000 BC, and at the very same spot, there are still straggly-haired men and women. However, they’re not the groovy weekend warriors of 2009, but the very first Hongkongers. They make tools and accessories out of stones, build fires out of bark to cook fish, and they carve geometric and animal patterns on a nearby rock surface. As sea dwellers, they believe that carving the patterns will calm the ocean and keep them safe.

So what remains today of our earliest ancestors? Not much, besides a few artifacts and rock carvings like the ones barely visible at Big Wave Bay and Tung Lung Chau, a reminder that we have far more history than our glistening, towering skyscrapers would suggest.

In fact, according to veteran archeologist Tang Chung, Hong Kong’s ancient history dates back over 7,000 years, a longer timeline than countries such as the Philippines. Even our history of archeology itself is rich. Our first known discovery of an artifact from the life of early man dates back almost two centuries, to 1819, when Qing empire official Wang Chongxi documented a 1.8-meter-high and 2.4-meter-wide dragon-shaped rock carving on the remote island of Tung Lung Chau.

But let’s be realistic; we don’t quite have the rich archeological history of Egypt, but with amateur and professional teams getting their mattocks (a small pickax) and shovels out since the 1970s, we’ve learned much about how Hong Kong’s earliest settlers lived.

The First Hongkongers

As we just mentioned, traces of Hong Kong’s earliest inhabitants date back 7,000 years to the Neolithic period. The Chinese University’s Centre for Chinese Archaeology and Art told us the relics they have uncovered show that Hong Kong’s early inhabitants lived by the shore. Then, about 4,000 years later, findings show that they migrated to the hillsides, at the foot of the hills or, if not too steep, at the top of smaller hills. Food was mainly gathered from the sea, with agricultural practices not recorded until the Western Han Dynasty in 250 BC. Early Hongkongers were fashionistas too; it is believed they were among the first in the world to wear clothes fashioned out of tree bark up to 5,000 years ago.