Then & Now | Holy cow! How Hong Kong got its beef with eating meat

Feral brown cattle roaming across the hills of Lantau and the New Territories are a common sight.

Abandoned when their remote agricultural villages were depopulated in the 1950s and 60s, the original herds have multiplied into sizeable wild communities.

Along with domestic cattle, water buffalo can also be seen in some lowland locations, such as Kam Tin. Ploddingly picturesque and, for the most part, harmless, both species enable Hong Kong’s annually less bucolic countryside to retain some rural atmosphere.

But why were these valuable beasts not rounded up and sold for their meat when their erstwhile owners, now fully engaged in running the Chinese takeaways that lured them overseas in the first place, realised they would never return to farming?

Quasi-religious reasons for protecting cattle are a cultural legacy from Buddhism’s migration from India more than 1,500 years ago.

Buddhism developed from earlier Hindu beliefs – much as Christianity and Islam evolved from Judaism – and many Hindu- Buddhist traditions spread to China. Most of these introductions, such as avoidance of beef, eventually became so Sinicised that their Indian origins today are only apparent on close inspection.

Buddhist scriptures, or sutras, for example, were rendered phonetically into Chinese characters many centuries ago; they mimic without meaning the original Sanskrit or Pali sounds, and are unintelligible as philosophical concepts. The pointlessness of these garbled recitations largely accounts for the amused contempt with which many classically educated Chinese viewed Buddhist monks and nuns, and the folk superstitions they propagated.