Thursday 7 March 2024

gathering of the clan

A few days before Christmas last year, I was walking past the entrance to Kun Lung Wai, the walled enclosure in our village, and I couldn’t help but notice the pai bin next to the gatehouse:
I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because structures like this are fairly commonplace. However, whenever I walk back home from Luen Wo Hui, the district of Fanling nearest to our village, I tend to follow an indirect route that takes me through Wing Ning Wai, the oldest wai in the neighbourhood. And there was also a pai bin here that I saw as I exited the wai:
I immediately wondered whether there were more of these structures next to the other wais in the neighbourhood, so after first returning home, I decided to find out.

My intended first destination had been Tung Kok Wai, but for some unaccountable reason I forgot to turn right when I reached the unnamed road that starts next to this wai and instead simply carried on along the road. After about 200 metres, I rounded a right-hand bend and was confronted by this sight:
The ramshackle building, the likes of which I’ve seen many times in other locations, is a temporary theatre, and at the time that I took the photo, I could hear Cantonese opera being performed. But what struck me more strongly was the line of no fewer than ten pai bins:
You will notice that each pai bin is different. The top line reads ‘Lung Yeuk Tau’, the generic name for the entire neighbourhood, on each one, while the second line is a general feel-good slogan or motto. The third line is a cheng yu or ‘four-character idiom’, often mistakenly identified as a ‘Chinese proverb’ by people in the West. Incidentally, my favourite cheng yu is yim yee doh ling (‘cover ears, steal bell’). I think you can guess its meaning and the context in which it would be used!

I couldn’t get far enough away to capture everything in the previous two photos, but this photo, looking back the way I’ve just come, provides some extra detail:
The pai bins on the left mark the entrance to the theatre.

A little further on, just past the entrance to the large open space in front of the theatre, everything was suddenly very busy:
There were more pai bins crowded into the sitting-out area in front of the Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall (off-camera to the left). And the people with yellow jackets are there to direct traffic and marshal the crowds.

And this is a view of the main entrance to the ancestral hall:
You can see that the area in front of the hall was filled with tables, as was the sitting-out area and the large carpark behind the hall. Each table would have had a heater and a large pot filled with broth, into which participants would dunk bite-sized pieces of meat and seafood (food is an integral part of any serious Chinese celebration).

And this is a view from a short distance further along the road:
There were flags like these along all the roads in the area.

A short distance further along the road is Lo Wai, in my opinion the most impressive of the walled villages in this area:
There was a third pai bin on the far side of the road, off-camera to the right.

There was just one more port of call along this road:
There was just one pai bin in front of Ma Wat Wai, and for some reason it hadn’t been erected next to the gatehouse, which you can see on the left of the photo.

Time to backtrack, although I didn’t want to just follow the road, so I followed quiet paths to reach Tung Kok Wai, where there was also just one pai bin next to the gatehouse:
After ticking off Tung Kok Wai, I followed another path heading for Wing Ning Wai (where I took the photo above). However, my route took me past the only basketball court on the south side of Sha Tau Kok Road (there is also one in our village), the only road out of Fanling to the east. There were no fewer than five pai bins adorning the north end of the court:
…and two more pai bins on the south end, which I didn’t spot at the time but photographed the following day:
You can see a wall on the left of the photo that I think is too low to have a defensive function, but there was another pai bin over the entrance to the enclosed area:
It was now time to head home, but just before the road past Wing Ning Wai (Sui Wan Road) reaches the main road, there were five more pai bins (two on the left, three on the right):
This is a closer view of the two on the left:
There were three pai bins on the main road, presumably to alert participants in the festivities who were coming from Fanling (and beyond) that they should turn right here:
And this is what the junction looked like:
The village arch in this photo is a very recent construction. In fact, a few months ago, I was following my usual circuitous route home when I heard a lion dance in the distance, but by the time I reached the arch, the inauguration ceremony had finished. The inscription reads simply ‘Lung Yeuk Tau’.

This pai bin marked the entrance to San Uk, the first village that you will come to on the north side of Sha Tau Kok Road:
All this took place on a Saturday, and Paula always goes to church on Sundays. I walk with her as far as Luen Wo Hui, and on this occasion, just as we were starting along the path that links our village with San Uk, we encountered quite a large group of men dressed in traditional costumes. We didn’t have time to stop and watch what they might do, although I did notice that they headed towards the village shrine.

On my way back home, I decided to take a longer walk than usual, past Ma Wat Wai, and to my surprise I encountered what I assumed was the same group of costumed men in the vicinity of this wai:
I’m unable to comment on the purpose of their activities.

I also wanted to take a closer look at the open area in front of the theatre. There were fortune tellers around the perimeter, and also several shrines:
Notice the size of the joss sticks planted in the blue metal barrel in the first photo.

And this is a closer view of the ‘creature’ in the third photo:
…while this a view of the figures on the left of the creature:
I conjecture that the two figures furthest from the camera are members of a harem, while the nearer pair are eunuchs. I’m unable to offer any information on the identity of the central focus of this shrine, but although I’ve used the term ‘creature’, I suspect that it represents a human, despite its fearsome appearance.

Finally, this is a view of the front of the theatre:
No performance was taking place, so I felt confident about going inside without being asked to pay:
During this visit, I also learned that the celebrations here take place every ten years, and presumably they attract members of the Tang diaspora from around the world. Members of the clan are the principal landowners here, and they used to dominate local politics, to the extent that a Tang was always returned unopposed in the district board constituency where I’m registered to vote. That no longer happens.

Thursday 29 February 2024

a flight of fancy

The other day, I decided to walk past one of the two completed apartment blocks that will eventually form part of the Fanling North NDA (New Development Area). Apart from these blocks, this whole patch is now a no-go area, which means that in order to reach Fanling from our village, we have to take a considerable detour. However, the path that I followed on this occasion doesn’t lead anywhere useful. I just wondered whether I might see something interesting. And I did.

After passing the larger of the two completed blocks, I was surprised to discover a sequence of six images mounted on the barrier that runs alongside the path and is there to prevent access to the construction site. This is the first image (from left to right):
My first thought was that this is an ‘artist’s impression’ of what the site will look like when construction has been completed, even though it is obviously the work of a child. However, although the idea of the river as an amenity is appealing, there is no trace of the so-called ‘bypass’ currently under construction.

The next image does show what might be intended to represent the bypass, and we have seen tortoises in the river:
Nevertheless, it is also clearly not a reflection of future reality.

And neither is this, although children can certainly have a whale of a time:
The next image appears to be the most fanciful, although it does include some important clues as to what this artwork is all about:
In the background is a shopping mall—all housing estates have such a facility, although there is as yet no sign of one in the development thus far—and the blue flash near the bottom of the picture identifies the subject of this image as Hung Shui Kiu, part of the Ha Tsuen New Development Area. I suspect that this is a fictitious entity, although I don’t think that the original name of this area, Ma Shi Po (‘horseshit area’), is likely to be preserved when the development has been completed.

Incidentally, the four tent-like structures in the foreground of the image are labelled ‘Fish’, ‘Vegan’. ‘Cakes’ and ‘Organic soap’. And the ‘25th’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the image is a reference to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the handover from British rule in 1997, which appears to have been widely celebrated in Hong Kong. These images were apparently the winners in some kind of art competition in schools to mark the occasion.

An ornamental boating lake is unlikely to have been part of the plan in the development here:
The final image, of a child contemplating the setting sun, is probably the most realistic as a vision of the future:
My final photo should help to explain why all the above images are slightly skewed: the path is so narrow that I struggled to capture the entire image in a single photo at such close range:
The road in the photo is Ma Sik Road, which is a dual carriageway that in my opinion makes the new bypass currently under construction completely unnecessary.

You can also see the paintings featured above and the larger of the two new blocks in the photo. The new blocks also hint at an unanswered mystery: why are the new buildings only 20 storeys high. All the housing estates on the other side of Ma Sik Road—Green Code, Bel-Air Monte, Regentville and Union Plaza—are 40 storeys high. There are two estates downstream—Noble Hill and Hillcrest—that are only 15 storeys high, but they are quite clearly upmarket estates, while the others that I’ve mentioned are obviously more downmarket. Given that the rationale behind the NDAs is to tackle Hong Kong’s chronic housing shortage, why are the new blocks being built here not much higher?

Thursday 22 February 2024

what happened here?

Unless we decide to go for yam char, Paula and I go to Tai Fah Wut (Fairwood) in Queen’s Hill Estate for breakfast. There is only one road leading into the estate, Lung Shan Road, and a few days ago, as we were walking along the path running alongside this road, before reaching the entrance to the estate, Paula spotted this on the other side of the road:
This is an enlarged view of the previous photo:
It’s cleat that whatever vehicle flattened these four hooped railings, which are there to block access to the cycle track, was travelling from left to right; in other words, away from the estate. And ever since we saw the damage, I’ve been trying to figure out how it happened. And why?

You can see that the vehicle must have mounted the kerb only slightly, because the lamp-post, which is much more substantial than the railings, was unscathed. Any further onto the pavement and the lamp-post would have stopped the renegade vehicle in its tracks—and the second, third and fourth hoops would not have been flattened. Did a driver lose control of their vehicle? The road here is a broad curve, not an acute bend, so this hypothesis does seem unlikely:
However, my final photo contains an important clue:
Notice what appears to be some kind of hazard road sign lying on the ground in the foreground. I would conjecture that it was originally located in the hole where the brick paving has been disrupted, and it was subsequently moved to the location shown in the photo so that it didn’t impede access to the quasi-industrial premises that you can see in the first photo above (the entrance is marked by the parked car). So it appears that the culprit driver deliberately mounted the kerb, flattened four hooped railings and drove between a second lamp-post and a plastic bollard on the cycle track, flattening a hazard sign in the process. But why? Access to this site is provided, as it is for several other quasi-industrial premises along this section of the road, direct from the road. Strange!

Wednesday 31 January 2024

tunnel vision

“Where are all the mountains?” I asked my son, who lives in Switzerland.

After all, the first thing you would think about if this country came up in conversation would be the mountains. However, where Siegfried lives the terrain is merely undulating.

So he suggested that we visit the Walensee, a large lake to the south of where he lives.

On the way there, the rain was so heavy that I could barely see the car in front. I almost suggested that we turn back, but I’m glad I didn’t.

There is a motorway running along the south side of the lake, and also a regular road, which we followed. The traffic on this road was quite heavy, and progress was slow, but we eventually reached the western end of the lake and turned onto an extremely narrow single-track road. There are no passing places on this road, and the traffic arrangement to compensate for this is something very unusual. At the start of the road, there is an open area where cars wait. They have a seven-minute window, starting on the hour and half hour, when they can proceed. Vehicles travelling in the opposite direction also have a seven-minute window to proceed, starting at quarter past and quarter to the hour.

When we reached the end of the road, we were able to get out and walk around, and I took these photos of the lake and the surrounding mountains:
…and also this quite spectacular narrow waterfall:
…while Paula took these photos of an obvious temperature inversion (the rain had stopped by this time):
On the way back along the narrow road, I shot this video to illustrate how tricky the narrow road is to drive along:

If you do watch this video, be sure to turn the volume up, because the car’s sensors were constantly being triggered by the proximity of the walls. Siegfried said that he’d walked along the road previously, which must have been quite harrowing, because there are no opportunities to avoid the tunnels on foot, although he’d never driven along it.

And that was yet another great day in Switzerland, a country that I’d not previously visited (I was pulled from a school trip to Interlaken at 24 hours notice back in 1964 because I’d led a canteen protest earlier).