The chances are that Chun Man will have no more birthdays here, as all residents of old Ngau Chi Wan are soon to be evicted, in readiness for most of the village being demolished and, as initiated by then chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s government in 2019, replaced with public-housing blocks.

Ngau Chi Wan is among three “urban squatter villages” in Kowloon East – the others being Cha Kwo Ling and Chuk Yuen – that Lam targeted for land resumption and development, to help boost the supply of affordable housing.

The Hong Kong Housing Society, which bills itself as an independent organisation “providing quality housing for the people of Hong Kong”, has since been tasked with implementing the plans, and in spring this year released proposals for work that would start in August, though, at the time of writing, that has yet to begin.

Alarmed that the proposals involved razing the villages and leaving just a few token buildings, local heritage enthusiast Nicky Wong Hung-chuen arranged tours on a couple of June weekends, each with around a dozen fellow architects, aiming to highlight these three villages’ unique histories and devise alternative proposals to preserve more of their character.

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While the villages are little known, considerations of their “development” lead to larger questions of whether Hong Kong should be a utilitarian place, or whether history and cultural heritage deserve more attention.

This is not a new question for Hong Kong. Old photo­graphs of the former architecture in Central or its surroundings offer a shocking look at what beauty the city has lost.

These three villages are even older, and Wong’s first tour to rally enthusiasm for their preservation begins at Sam Shan Kwok Wong Temple, a squat building dedicated to the “kings of three mountains”.

The temple secretary and village chief, Yu Chi-wai, explains that there was a Ngau Chi Wan region, featuring several settlements, but only the village has survived.

Behind the temple, trees around and atop a rock as big as a house recall a rural past, but a towering new block of flats in the Kai Tak Mansion redevelopment reflects the surroundings’ increasing urbanisation.

With Lion Rock soaring in the background, Yu leads the group briskly past an open-air market, and into the old village, which proves mostly dilapidated. Near the house where little Chun Man sleeps, grassy patches behind mesh fencing indicate where buildings have burned down but couldn’t be replaced due to restrictions on “squatter houses”.

In one of those remaining, Oscar Ng Kwun-lok and his mother are relaxing this Sunday afternoon. Though windowless, their living room is spacious compared with many a Kowloon home, with two sofas facing a television atop a sideboard, beside which a steep ladder leads to upper-floor bedrooms, as in traditional Hakka houses.

“Oscar is 14, and he’s lived here all his life,” says his mother. “His father was a chef, but he recently passed away.”

It turns out there are three related families living in three interconnected houses, sharing a communal kitchen. Oscar belongs to the fourth generation of the Ng family to live here.

His mother says there have been threats of development for the past 30 or 40 years, so no one has been inclined to invest in long-term repairs.

It was only in 2022 the residents learned development plans had become more finalised, and despite community meetings now held each week, she and Oscar don’t know where they will go once evicted.

Ngau Chi Wan’s categorisation as a squatter village stems from a 1982 Housing Department survey, when expanses of shanty houses in and near Kowloon accommodated immigrants who had flooded in from mainland China.

While most squatter areas were relatively new, the survey was conducted 173 years after the first official record of Ngau Chi Wan, in a gazetteer called Xin’an County Chronicle – which gave an expansive overview of an administrative district including the area that became Hong Kong.

The Lands Department, responsible for categorising land in Hong Kong, said by email that taking in a broad definition of squatter structures, “mostly built in the 1960s and 1970s”, the villages are mostly on government land. Hence Oscar and his mother are “squatters”, even though the family has deep roots in Ngau Chi Wan.

Not far from the Ng residence, Yu enters a former school building now acting as the village headquarters, about big enough for an indoor badminton court. Based on plans released by the Housing Society, this and baby Chun Man’s building might be preserved as those around them are destroyed.

Further along in the planned demolition zone, a shack sells snacks and chilled drinks in the shade of a shrine-housing banyan tree, and tattered buildings host a basic barber’s shop, and the Po Fook Cafe, opened in 1964.

Through a locked gate, a two-storey building is quite possibly the last of the Ngau Chi Wan chai tong – akin to nunneries – that once accommodated retired single women from across Hong Kong, as detailed by historian Patrick Hase in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch.

Hase also wrote of nunneries being operated by a cult-like sect whose members prayed for the coming of a Golden Age, and of “meditation cells” for male sect members as well as many purported nunneries being downright sleazy places used for illicit sexual liaisons.

At that, Yu says his goodbyes and returns to the temple, and Wong takes over for the second village visit, to Chuk Yuen – Bamboo Garden – just two stops away on the Kwun Tong MTR line, at Wong Tai Sin.

Since high school, Wong says he’s “enjoyed looking at old pictures, such as with old colonial buildings. The photos didn’t show the Hong Kong I was familiar with”.

Wong eventually joined the Heritage and Conservation Committee of the Hong Kong Institute of Architects, which led to opportunities to work on some conservation projects. He published a related website, and in 2017 he and wife Cherry set up a Facebook page, “Hong Kong Heritage Exploration”.

After Lam announced in 2019 that the three Kowloon East villages would be developed, Wong began visiting those, too, talking with villagers and scouring libraries, government records and online reports for information.

Five minutes’ walk from Wong Tai Sin MTR, Wong takes a footpath that soon leads into a tunnel-like passage between two sturdy brick houses, with overhead wires and air-conditioner pipes obscuring most daylight.

A lingering group member takes photos, prompting a young man who arrives moments later to ask, “What are you doing?”

After a brief explanation, the local introduces himself as Kenrick Cheu Siu-fung, and says he lives in one of these houses. His mother emerges from within, and tells us that this has been the family home since Cheu’s grandfather settled here.

She doesn’t want to move out, but instead hopes the government can protect their home. “We’re happy living here,” she says, “it’s peaceful.”

Judging by an old map, more than half the original village has already gone, replaced by a road and tower blocks housing the Wong Tai Sin Fire Services Department.

Yet with the cluster of remaining houses largely shaded by banyan trees, Chuk Yuen, or what’s left of it, remains a tranquil place, hardly the right term to describe the third village back in its heyday.

Cha Kwo Ling was a major player in mining kaolin, a form of clay that was chiefly used for making tiles, and quarrying granite for a host of uses, including landfill for the nearby Kai Tak Airport, but when Wong arrives, the village is quiet.

Much like Ngau Chi Wan and Chuk Yuen, its life has mostly ebbed away during its decades-old designation as a squatter village. The surviving one- and two-storey buildings occupy a coastal strip below an abandoned quarry.

In summer 2022, an NGO, the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage, devised an “exhibition” of Cha Kwo Ling, with information boards indicating buildings of interest, such as the white-painted St Mark’s Lutheran Church, past which, along a narrow lane running parallel to the coast, the houses’ paintwork is faded and peeling.

One of the two-storey buildings has a doorway opening to a ground-floor store, with a spartan selection of goods that includes Chinese condiments, cigarettes and beer. Proprietor Lo Kwok-keung says his father used to sell rice wine in the shop, and indicates a set of antique-looking measuring scoops on the wall.

“This building is over 100 years old,” says the 64-year-old, who has worked in the store for 50 or so years, more than 30 of them with his wife.

For most of Lo’s working life, the government has been mooting development plans. The couple worry that as and when they are evicted, any compensation will be inadequate for rent in government housing.

“But if the village is protected and we can stay we’ll be very happy,” says Lo. “It’s very cosy.”

Further along, another lifelong resident, Law Chun-sheung, tells of celebrating Christmas with Catholic priests, and toughening-up exercises for lion dancing.

His family built one of Cha Kwo Ling’s largest houses in 1900, now known as the Law Mansion, which is officially listed as a historic building, partly as it was built with local granite blocks.

Nearby stands a small cafe and a former teahouse, with another elderly resident now selling simple fare such as noodle soup.

By a coastal highway, a solid-looking building serves as the rural committee headquarters, where vice-chairman Chan Kwok-hong says, “We know nothing about the fate of the rural committee. It seems the village will be destroyed.”

Plans released by the Housing Society so far indicate Cha Kwo Ling village will indeed be obliterated.

At most, five buildings might be preserved, including the Law Mansion, which in an artist’s impression of the development appears beside glass facades of new residential blocks – a building out of time and out of place, even in its original, quarry-town setting.

“Quality granite was exported to not just nearby places such as mainland China and other Asian cities, but across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco,” wrote Dr Poon Sun-wah and Dr Katherine Deng Ying of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in a lengthy report on the granite export business.

On the fringe of Kowloon East, quarry operations were organised into a loose alliance dubbed the “Four Hills” – with Cha Kwo Ling prominent among them.

Along with quarrymen, Cha Kwo Ling became home to Hakka stonemasons who were highly skilled at cutting and polishing granite.

In the 1890s, this led to local granite being used for building the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Guangzhou; it was also used in prestigious Hong Kong projects, such as the former Legislative Council Building and the old Bank of China Building.

A warehouse-like, granite-block building below the hillside is a remnant of a related industry. According to the “Industrial History of Hong Kong” website, mining kaolin began in 1933, and employed up to 60 villagers during the 1950s.

While both the quarrying and mining operations are no more – the former dwindled after a 1967 ban on the use of explosives, and the government terminated the mining lease in 1996 – Cha Kwo Ling is steeped in their history.

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With other members of the Four Hills transformed by modern developments, only here bears testimony to their history.

A map of the Housing Society’s proposed development does include a mining history interpretation centre, but it is small, and disconnected from the mining and quarrying areas.

Even on leaving Cha Kwo Ling, one of the architects has sketched ideas for protecting more of the village, by shifting the planned residential towers and elevating at least one to allow space for rebuilt and renovated village buildings below it.

In the following weeks, Wong and other members of the tour groups improve on these ideas, reflecting on Hong Kong’s overall urban development.

“I don’t agree with what the government is doing right now, and has done for the past 20 years,” writes Frankie Lui Tat-man, Hong Kong native and founder of urban design company Atelier Global, via WhatsApp.

“They only put homogeneous efficient residential towers in virgin sites or sites with no historic context. Hong Kong had diverse neighbourhoods/villages/urban fabrics, yet nowadays you can hardly tell the difference between new housing districts.

“I’ve found Shenzhen [where he is now based] and other GBA [Greater Bay Area] cities treasure their own cities and are more open-minded towards new ideas than Hong Kong.”

Bernard Brennan, an adjunct assistant professor in the Faculty of Architecture at HKU, joined the outing to Ngau Chi Wan and Chuk Yuen, and likewise hopes for something better than homogenous developments for the three villages.

“Each of them was originally set out as a traditional village long before the British colonial period and still contains built fabric that has significant historic interest and rarity in the Hong Kong context,” says Brennan.

“It would be wonderful if more extensive parts of these places could be retained as part of an urban renewal strategy. There are many examples of such conservation-led urban renewal projects, internationally, and in China.”

Asked by email if it were open to ideas for preserving/rebuilding more of the three villages, the Housing Society indicated the answer was “no”:

“The Cha Kwo Ling village project has successfully navigated the statutory planning procedures […] The remaining projects are set to follow similar procedures […]

“HKHS will continue to maintain close communication with the Government and relevant authorities in regard to various planning issues including preservation of historic buildings.”

Wong still holds out hope that creative projects can preserve old buildings alongside new developments, however. He and fellow enthusiasts have contacted representatives of the Housing Society, government officials and Legco members, to gain support for their ideas.

While there are positive responses, he is only cautiously optimistic.

Perhaps plans can be revised, resulting in projects that, Wong notes, would benefit all Hong Kong people, not just developers.

“If a village is swept away, with just one house saved,” says Wong, “there will simply be another housing estate, with no relation to how villagers lived, and certainly no history.”