on the (heritage) trail

When we moved to a village a short distance east of Fanling in 2008, it didn’t take me long to notice that the Leung Yeuk Tau Heritage Trail ran through the place. I thought I could see what it was about. After all, the centrepiece of the village is Kun Lung Wai (wai is Cantonese for ‘walled enclosure’):

I’d heard of Kam Tin, a walled village in the west of the New Territories, but I’d assumed that it was well known because it was a singular example of such structures. Naturally, therefore, I was surprised to find an even finer example right on my doorstep! And when we walked south to the next village (San Uk), there were a few traditional houses:

…but I thought then that that was it! Actually, the second photo shows the rear of the Shin Shut Study Hall, but I didn’t know what a study hall was at the time.

This state of ignorance persisted until 2012. I always used to return to Hong Kong on a Friday, so that we could go out cycling the following day—Paula was still working then. At the end of our ride, we always went to Sun Ming Yuen, which at that time was still located in a shopping mall next to Fanling station, for yam char—it’s now located in a shopping mall within easy walking distance of our house. Afterwards, we followed the cycle track that runs parallel to Sha Tau Kok Road to the point where we would usually turn left (north) to reach our village.

On the spur of the moment, however, we decided to find out whether there was anything to see to the south. We might have stayed on the roads, but we spotted another cyclist ahead who was about to follow a narrow path, which I’ve described subsequently in The Eastern Descent (in the opposite direction). We followed the cyclist until the path finally emerged onto a road, and we’d arrived at the entrance to Tung Kok Wai:

This is a photograph that I took at the time. You can see immediately that the walls are nowhere near as impressive as those of Kun Lung Wai, but at least we’d discovered something new.

However, nothing could have prepared us for what we were about to see as we continued. I’d once watched an item on the local TV news about an ancestral hall, and as with my erroneous assumption about Kam Tin, I’d thought that it was something exceptional. I was totally gobsmacked when I saw what lay ahead:

This is the Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall, which was built in 1525. However, at this point, I will defer any description of the hall and instead embark on a guided tour of the heritage trail, as defined by the following map, which I’ve borrowed from a government website:

The trail starts in the village of Siu Hang, which can be reached by the 56C minibus from Fanling station:

According to the government website, the archway and the extension of the wall in front of the village were built to enhance the fung shui and thereby ensure that more male children were born in the village. There are ways to skew the sex ratio among newborns from the normal 50:50, but this isn’t one of them. Note the fish on the roof ridge of the small temple on the right—fish are a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture.

The trail follows the only road out of the village—the other roads on the map merely lead to the backdoor of San Wai Barracks and a firing range occasionally used by the PLA. As you cross the Ng Tung River, you will see this sign:

I’ve included it just to point out that ‘San Wai’ is the name given to the entire village, as recognized by the Hong Kong Post Office. The walled enclosure, the only thing of any historical significance in the village, is Kun Lung Wai!

Like the UK, Hong Kong has a graded system for the preservation of historical structures, the highest of which is ‘declared monument’. The last time I checked, there were 123 structures with this designation, six of which you can see on the Lung Yeuk Tau Heritage Trail. The gatehouse of Kun Lung Wai is one:

The rectangular blocking structure that you can see is a double door, known as dong chung, which is usually kept closed. Its purpose? To keep out evil spirits, which can only travel in straight lines. This seems to me to be a case of making up the rules to suit, because if I were an evil spirit, I wouldn’t allow mere humans to tell me what I can and cannot do.

In order to keep out genuine intruders, the gatehouse has a superb wrought iron double gate, but because this is kept permanently open nowadays, it’s impossible to get a good picture of the entire thing. The following photo shows just half of the gate:

…while the following photo shows the intricacy of the workmanship:

There is also a shrine inside the gatehouse:

…and a wooden staircase to an upper floor, which provides access to the windows you can see in the above photo.

The walls and corner guard towers are a separate declared monument. I’ve been trying to get permission to take a look inside one of the guard towers, which are permanently locked, for ages, so far without success.

The entire structure was built originally in 1744, although the walls have been rebuilt from time to time over the years, including a major rebuild a couple of years ago that struck me as unnecessary.

Incidentally, just one traditional house remains inside the wai:

There were two when we first moved here, and I would expect this one to disappear too in the next few years.

Although there is a sign to indicate where to go next, unlike other signs on the route, it isn’t particularly conspicuous. Look for a path that starts close to the southwest corner of the car park in front of the wai and follow that. Within a short distance, this is what you will see:

This is a profile view of the Shin Shut Study Hall. As you can see, it has a notably shabby appearance, because it simply isn’t being maintained. It was built in 1840, originally to prepare candidates for the imperial civil service examination, and it continued to function as a school until the Second World War. It is currently in private hands and is used to cultivate flower bulbs in the run-up to Chinese New Year, so I can’t help but ask: why include it in the ‘heritage’?

For real heritage in the village of San Uk, you should venture down the narrow alleyways on the other side of the study hall. There are still a few vernacular houses with plaster mouldings over doorways and under eaves, although they aren’t being maintained. This is a typical example (it can be seen on the traditional house in the first photo above):

Once you’ve seen everything in San Uk, simply continue in the same direction until you reach Sha Tau Kok Road. Cross this major traffic artery and continue along the road on the other side, which bears to the left before turning 90 degrees to the right. If you’re on the right track, you will see this sign:

Not every gap between ‘features’ on the trail has this kind of sign, so I do find it ironic that here’s one that is pointing to two of the least interesting such ‘features’. See what I mean:

This is Wing Ning Wai. Not only is it the only wai on this tour that doesn’t have a proper gatehouse; what you can see in the photo is all that survives of the walls! You can even walk in and come out through the back. However, all this may be explained by the fact that it’s the oldest wai here, dating back around 400 years.

Keep on following the road, which is called Siu Wan Road, although there aren’t many signs to this effect. You’ll have trouble spotting the detour to Tung Kwok Wai, but you will eventually arrive at the ancestral hall, which is the next declared monument on the trail.

The Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall has the typical layout associated with ancestral halls—three halls separated by open courtyards. There are a lot of features to admire here, and the polychrome mouldings were renewed a couple of years ago. The roof beams in the central hall are particularly impressive, featuring elaborate carpentry and intricate carvings, but the roof here is currently being repaired, and the scaffolding makes it impossible to take a good photograph. However, I took the following photo on that initial visit to provide some idea of what they are like:

The rear hall houses the Tang clan’s ‘soul tablets’, which are the earthly representations of past members. The central alcove features the clan’s earliest ancestors, including that of a fugitive Song princess who married the clan’s founder, while the right-hand alcove houses the soul tablets of members of the clan who made a significant contribution to the clan or who achieved high rank in the imperial court:

…and the left-hand alcove commemorates those clan members who excelled in virtue:

Each horizontal row represents a single generation.

It is widely believed in the West that the Chinese worship their ancestors. No they don’t! They revere them, which is not the same thing. Incidentally, I may have thought that ancestral halls were a rarity a decade ago, but I’ve subsequently discovered more than a dozen across the northern New Territories, which in retrospect isn’t surprising, After all, this part of Hong Kong was a prosperous part of imperial China until 1898, which the ‘barren rock’ seized by the British in 1840 wasn’t.

Right next door to the ancestral hall is a Tin Hau temple:

I’ve not been able to find a precise date for the temple’s construction, but I believe that it’s slightly older than the ancestral hall. Since discovering this temple, which is also a declared monument, I’ve often wondered why it’s dedicated to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, given that the temple is about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in Hong Kong.

The polychrome mouldings under the eaves on the front elevation are particularly fine:

The temple contains two bells that were cast more than 300 years ago. Both the temple and the ancestral hall have superb painted door gods, which you can see in More Door Gods. The representation of Yuchi Jingde on the left-hand door of the temple is particularly fierce.

A short distance along the road is another wai:

This is Lo Wai, yet another declared monument. Unlike Kun Lung Wai, there are no embrasures in the walls or corner guard towers. Instead, there are square projections in the middle of each wall, which would have allowed defenders on the ramparts to shoot along the walls at bandits, pirates and other potential attackers. The area was this lawless even after the British took over in 1898.

Continuing along the road past Lo Wai, the next point of interest is a shrine to the earth god:

There are shrines like this in several places in the area, but this is typical. I take the term ‘earth god’ to be a reference to one of the five elements in Chinese cosmology rather than having anything to do with planet Earth.

On the other side of the road from this shrine is a long-abandoned traditional Chinese mansion, and I’ve no idea why it was never included as a point of interest along the trail. I wrote about it in Bamboo Garden, but in the past year, major construction work has started here, and I’m not even sure whether the mansion will survive

As you continue down the road, you will gradually become aware of industrial panelling on the left. I assume that this is because the surviving walls of Ma Wat Wai here have been deemed unsafe and are likely to collapse. However, the gatehouse of the wai is the last declared monument on the trail:

Like Kun Lung Wai, it has an elaborate wrought iron gate that is permanently open nowadays:

At this point, there is no good reason to continue on the trail, because there is nothing worth seeing beyond Ma Wat Wai, even though the next sign on the road points to Shek Lo:

However, before reaching Shek Lo, the road passes the entrance to Happy Garden, which I wrote about before the entrance was ‘restored’ in 2015:

In my earlier post, I conjectured that there was a connection between the garden and Shek Lo, but the garden is now choked with vegetation, as is Shek Lo:

It defies belief to contemplate this long abandoned mansion being included in a tour of the ‘historic’ sites in the neighbourhood, given it’s grossly neglected state. It was built by a local bigshot, not a member of the Tang clan, as late as 1924. Needless to say, I have been inside—when it wasn’t so overgrown—but access is now impossible (I’ve tried). This is what it looked like in 2014:

The final point on the trail is Tsung Kyam Church, which was originally built in 1927 and extended to two storeys in 1951. Once again, access isn’t possible, although there is nothing in the church’s external appearance to suggest that there is anything interesting inside:

It has now been abandoned, to be replaced by a newer building nearby.

The Christians who established this church have no connections with the Tang clan, and when they moved into the area, they built their own village, Shung Him Tong. And while the church is singularly uninteresting, there is a building, set back from the road, that I do think is worth a closer look. There is a turn off the main road just before you reach the church, and if you follow it for a short distance, this is what you will see:

Nothing exceptional, you might think, but there is a walled courtyard in front with quite an impressive entrance gate:

This is Kin Tak Mun (mun is Cantonese for ‘gate’ or ‘door’), and an inscription on the left states that it was built in 1910. It isn’t possible to gain access, but I took this photo by poking my camera through the bars of the gate:

The architectural features you can see are unusual for a Chinese building. The inscription on the wall states that this is a place where you can find tranquillity of mind.

There is an alleyway leading directly from the main road to the gate, and this is what the gate looks like from the side:

And that’s the Lung Yeuk Tau Heritage Trail. I do think it’s worth a visit, but I have one piece of advice: whatever you do, do not consult the Hong Kong Tourism Board website on the subject. It claims that the start of the trail is Fung Ying Seen Koon, a Taoist temple complex next to Fanling station. This site is worth a visit in its own right, but it is not part of the trail, and if you were to start here, you would find it impossible to locate the next stop on the website’s proposed itinerary, which omits Kun Lung Wai! And if you did decide to head east, the correct general direction, you would probably spot a traffic sign as you approached the first set of traffic lights on Sha Tau Kok Road indicating that you should turn right for the heritage trail. That would land you in Fanling’s industrial district. And from there you would be on your own. Good luck!