Speaking of 1936, as we just were in this post where I mentioned the great (but not as great as 1937) typhoon of 1936, not far away from Sam Kung temple is a very old building sitting right next to Ting Kok Road at the edge of Po Sam Pai village.
We know it’s old because right above the central entrance – as is common with many older houses in HK – is a date stamp, you guessed it: 1936.
Another little side excursion from Ting Kok Road that isn’t too far from the formerly mentioned Kwun Yam statue is the recently rebuilt Sam Kung (three palace) Temple of Shuen Wan.
Shuen Wan is of course the proper Chinese name for the area known as “Plover Cove” which includes the area west of the Sam Mun Tsai headland (the bit that now contains that utterly hideous construction known as The Beverly Hills). A large proportion of the original ‘cove’ was lost in the mid-60′s when the Plover Cove Reservoir was built, but the remaining area still contains a few Hakka hamlets that have been along this shoreline for a considerable amount of time.
Or, to paraphrase The Hollies – She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Buddha.
Yes indeedy, the north Tai Po treeline has recently acquired a new addition in the form of a rather large Kwan Yam statue. If you are wondering who I am talking about you may know her better as Guan Yin/Quan Yin or even Avalokitasvara, the Buddhist Goddess of compassion.
I had no idea these even existed until I walked past one the other day in a village in the more northern part of Tai Po District (i.e. along Ting Kok Road – more on that later).
So here we are, for those people who can’t be bothered to make the trip into the town centre to post their parcels and letters, you can instead have the postie visit you in his nice shiny green van. I think his name was Postman Pak 
Traveling along the Tai Po Road is one of my favourite things to do when I get a spare bit of time (not often). Granted, the road is now broken (as in non-contiguous) in various places by highways and flyovers but the original route of the road still exists – more or less – between Tai Po <-> Fo Tan and Tai Wai <-> Sham Shui Po.
I’ve been intending to walk as much of this as I can for some time now, no real objective in mind other than trying to absorb a bit of old HK roadway nostalgia and to track down anything that may be a relic of the halcyon days when the road was the only way to get into the NT. Anyway, the other weeks I finally found the time to walk the Tai Po to Fo Tan leg.
Continuing with the postal theme, I have Cheddy to thank for bringing my attention to the next one. It could potentially be the territory’s final remaining red post box.
Just to the west of Tai Po, running along the south side the Lam Tsuen river, is a rather nice place called Mui Shue Hang Park. I did a post on it about 5 years ago (yes, this blog is that old but at that time it was hosted by MSN Livespace) because it also has the so-called ‘quali-walk’ inside, but it is a nice place to just wander and look at the nice foliage and flowers. It’s named after a nearby village that I may talk about in a later post – although when I walked past the other day it looked as though the place has gone courtesy of the Tolo Highway widening project.
Time for another installment of good cheap DIY bus tours – this time we’re looking at a route that is already well-known amongst those who’ve made the effort to come and see some of the more popular things in the Tai Po area. The 64K route takes us up into the Lam Tsuen valley and to various sites including the Wishing tree, Ng Tung Chai and Kadoorie Farm. However, unlike various minibuses/maxicabs, the 64K continues down into the Kam Tin plain and onwards to the west into Yuen Long – where it terminates before making the return journey.
Actually, it’s a great ride that takes in a large swathe of the NT and you get to see both the beauty and horror that is the modern NT for a price equivalent to the cost of a bottle of Coke Zero from 7-11 (or thereabouts). Of course, to enjoy this journey you first have to make the trip into either Yuen Long or Tai Po (which makes it less cheap than advertised, but hey ho that’s life) but getting to either place is a doddle these days thanks to overland rail lines (West Rail for Yuen Long, East Rail for Taipo Market. So, you have no excuses anymore, especially as I am about to give you the idiot’s guide…
One of the great walks I’ve done in Hong Kong is the trail from Ng Tung Chai to the famous (locally at least) waterfalls in the foothills of Tai Mo Shan. It’s great for several reasons: 1). the waterfalls are some of Hong Kong’s more impressive natural phenomena, 2). it’s one of those trails that hasn’t been defiled by the Govt’s over-enthusiasm with concrete and 3). it passes one of the coolest temples I’ve encountered in Hong Kong so far: Man Tak Yuen.
As a Tai Po resident for 6 years I have a fairly good knowledge of the place as it stands today but my knowledge about the Tai Po of old is limited to say the least. It’s not surprising, there is a dearth of English language history of the place and even the local district council (people I assumed to have a greater knowledge than myself) have problems answering the odd question I pop off to them – 10/10 for effort, but only 3/10 for results I’m afraid.
A couple of years ago I wandered around the older part of town – Tai Po Market – to seek out anything that looked as though it might have a bit of history. Success was hit and miss however, as you can see from this blog post, so it was with great personal interest that I stumbled across a map – in Dr Patrick Hase’s history of the Catholic Church in Tai Po 150 Years of Evangelisation in Tai Po – of Tai Po Market detailing the areas and dates of the town’s early development.
I recently joined a battlefield tour of the NT (courtesy of Dr Pat Hase and the Orders and Medals research Society) that visited some of the sites listed in Dr Pat Hase’s book on the Six Day War. The tour started off here in Tai Po and to my surprise involved a 30 minute or so tour of the Old Police Station site at the top of Flagstaff Hill. I’ve passed this place many times and even wrote a blog entry on it many moons ago but never got more than a fleeting glimpse due to it being off-limits to the public. So anyway, here are some snaps I took showing some of the compound inside.
If you have ever read the Tai Po-centric parts of this blog you may be familiar with an organisation known as the Tsat Yeuk (七約). The Tsat Yeuk was founded by a Man Punti villager from Tai Hang called Man Tsam-chuen who was cheesed off with the influence of the local Tang clan over commerce and politics in the market town and decided to fund (because he was loaded) the establishment of what became the Tai Wo Market in Fu Shin Street and it’s admin centre the Man Mo Temple.
I was wandering around Tai Po the other day with Glenn Griffith, after having a rather large dim sum brunch at nearby Choi Fuk – Glenn’s a pessimist, so I am sure he wasn’t disappointed with our spread – and happened to glance down at the ground and see not just one but three old Rediffusion covers on the pavement. Stone me, I thought these things were hard to find and here I am with three of them. Glenn offered to lend me his camera but I really felt that I was already sad enough - having 1) spotted them 2) taken an interest in them and then 3) actually told someone else about them – and I didn’t want to do anything that might push me over the edge into complete and utter trainspotter territory - besides, I could always come back later 
Here’s a good example of how you should never take HK’s landscape for granted – something I am guilty of all the time despite knowing better.
A while ago now (2010 I think?) a nice fellow called Sean Olson posted some old pics on Gwulo.com in an attempt to wind up a few remaining loose ends concerning his family history (a decade long research project – the result of which can be found on Sean’s website: The Hong Kong Legacy). Sean had a whole bunch of old snaps that needed the locations identifying. It can be fun trying to nail these places, and let’s face it I’ve had a reasonable amount of practice – sometimes it’s easy, but sometimes the topography of the land has altered so much due to development that it can be quite a challenge (for an excellent recent example of how you can be fooled, check out this recent addition to gwulo and the ensuing discussion that followed – a picture supposedly of Castle Peak turned out to be 50km away in Macau!).
Here’s one that despite me living very near to I had no idea it existed. I have Cheddy to thank for giving me a nudge in the right direction because he had some aerial photos that showed the place – try and find it at ground level and the place is completely obscured by trees. Anyway, I promised I would have a dig around and find out what it was.
A couple of years ago I did a rather long post on buildings and structures of age and interest in my home town of Tai Po. Included on that list was a stone block that bore an inscription for the Kwong Fuk Bridge in English and Chinese as well as a date: 1957. Here’s the original post.
This block made up the end of a set of stone railing made out of similar stone blocks and I wondered at the time if these blocks were remnants from a previous incarnation of the bridge. I don’t have definitive information but I did stumble across an old photo of the bridge a while ago that shows what I believe to be the 1957 version of it complete with some very familiar looking stone railings.
One of the many things I enjoy in HK is the variety of wildlife (big and small) that can be found – even if you don’t venture into the hills too often. I live in a fairly urbanised and modern part of the territory (yes, I am talking about Tai Po) but it’s also surrounded by vast countryside and has led me to encounter some fairly cool wildlife just on my doorstep. Wild boar and monkeys are the largest things I have encountered but we’ve also seen many types of birds, spiders, beetles, lizards (no snakes yet mind you), stick insects, bull frogs, African snails and many more. There are the infrequent visits by monkeys to the slope at the back of my apartment complex which provide a bit of fun for an hour or so as they run amok in the trees and just the other day I encountered another ‘first’: Muntjacs.
I recently read a great book by local historian, Dr Patrick Hase, called – The Six-Day War of 1899:Hong Kong in the Age of Imperialism. It’s basically an retelling and analysis of the so-called ‘skirmishes’ that took place in and around Tai Po at the time when the British officially took over jurisdiction of the New Territories in 1899 (they were ceded the year before in 1898 on a 99-year lease but the Brits took a bit longer to actually take control). According to Dr Hase’s research (he is an expert of some note on the indigenous people of the NT and so is one of the only non-Chinese authorities who could write such a book) rather than the fighting being small skirmishes with little loss of life, the ‘war’ actually lasted 6 days and killed a lot more NT villagers than was officially reported.
Perhaps the first thing I need to do is point out the distinction between Tai Po Market railway station and Tai Po railway station. The former exists in two forms: 1) as the current MTRC East Rail station that serves the south side of Tai Po, and 2) the old Chinese style station (built in 1913) that closed down when the line was electrified in 1983 and turned into the small, but very excellent, Railway Museum.
I’ve been planning on doing this for sometime. I did do it in the opposite direction, using a bike, sometime around 1996 but obviously the whole area has undergone vast transformation since then and I was curious to see how it had all turned out. So off we set after a nice fortifying lunch at Sha Tin’s Crystal Jade restaurant (at the back end of the shopping mall) and headed off down the woefully slim ‘pavement’ that runs alongside the cycle track.
A while ago I wrote about a mystery house, built in the art-deco style, situated in Ma Wo village in Tai Po. At the time I had no idea what it was until a friendly reader LKLau was able to translate the writing on the house and tell me the name. It turned out to be a monastery called “Po Kok” built in the 1930′s and it was included on the recent Govt survey of historical buildings and structures.
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