the top road

When we moved to our present house in 2008, Paula was still working, and I didn’t do much exploration in our local area. During the week, if I got my bike out, it was merely to ride up and down the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road that ran alongside the Ng Tung River. About 2km downstream from our village, the river is crossed by Man Kam To Road, a major freight route into and out of China, and I can no longer remember whether I crossed this busy highway to continue downstream. I probably did though, because I can’t imagine cycling on Man Kam To Road, given the traffic density. which I would have needed to do to reach the start of the road that is the subject of this article had I not followed the DSD access road further downstream.

The access road continues downstream for a further 1km, where it reaches the main railway line north of Sheung Shui station. However, this is the start of Fu Tei Au Road, along which it’s possible to double back towards Man Kam To Road. The junction of these two roads, which is about 200 metres north of where the DSD access road emerges onto the main road, is controlled by traffic lights, and there is an unnamed road directly opposite Fu Tei Au Road that did seem to be worth checking out, despite it starting with quite a steep little hill.

Since discovering it, I’ve always referred to this road as ‘the top road’, because it runs across the hillside above the river, although, given the terrain, the two are not parallel. This is an account of a walk along the top road that Paula and I did a few days ago as part of the rehabilitation process after my recent back injury (I’d previously had trouble walking downhill).

The first 200 metres or so provide access to a few industrial premises, mainly godowns (warehouses), but after that, you’d be extremely unlucky to encounter any more traffic, except on the Ching Ming (spring) and Chung Yeung (autumn) grave-sweeping festivals, for reasons that will quickly become apparent.

My first photo was taken just after we passed the entrance t0 the last industrial site on the road and shows one of the most impressive clumps of bamboo that I’ve ever seen:

This is not the bamboo species used in scaffolding, which creaks and groans on a windy night, which can be quite spooky.

The next photo looks back along the road towards the bamboo clump in the first photo. The bamboo clump on the left isn’t nearly as impressive:

The next photo provides the first indication of why it isn’t a good idea to walk this way during the Ching Ming and Chung Yeung festivals:

The structures in the foreground are graves, but those at the back are ossuaries, which house large earthenware jars that contain the bones of the deceased.

I’ve included the next photo only because it shows the start of by far the toughest cycling challenge that I’m aware of in Hong Kong:

This is a jeep track constructed by the British Army during their occupation of Hong Kong. It isn’t just a case of getting to the top of the hill and ‘job done’. This road goes up and down (…and up and down, and up and down) for about 6km, and on some of the uphill sections, the gradient is close to 40 percent. I described it in Military Madness).

Notice too the yellow sign on the bushes on the left. It is the calling card of a company that is offering to construct a grave for you, should you want one. There are several such signs along the road, because, surprisingly, it is still legal to bury your dead on the sides of mountains, and there are few formal cemeteries in Hong Kong.

The next photo shows another cluster of graves, with an ossuary in the foreground.

The jar in the ossuary in the next photo is quite small, leading me to conjecture that it contains the remains of a child:

I’ve included the next photo because Christian symbolism around these kinds of graves is distinctly uncommon. The bone jars on the right are of conventional size:

The next photo is just a view of the road ahead, but notice the red pipe on the right:

Even if it’s pouring with rain on the days of the grave-sweeping festivals, the Hong Kong Observatory always issues a red fire danger warning, because those tending the graves burn not only joss sticks but also paper money (not real), which the deceased can then spend in the afterlife. As a result, there is always a spate of hill fires at this time, and the red pipe is a fire hydrant! The jeep track follows the skyline.

The next photo is another shot of the road ahead:

…while this one was taken from the same point, looking back the way we’ve just come:

At this time of year, you don’t see many flowers anywhere, but I took this photo of what appears to be a creeper with small yellow flowers a little further down the road:

Notice that this plant employs aerial seed dispersion, which I tend to associate just with annuals in the UK, but this one is clearly a perennial.

We are now approaching a road on the right that provides access to the village of Wa Shan, so the road ahead does carry some traffic, but before reaching this point, there is a grave that I consider the most impressive I’ve seen anywhere. You can’t see it from the road, but if you know where to look, it’s up this track:

There are several smaller graves here, and a specially constructed path (on the right) to the main grave:

And this is the main grave:

Notice the lions, one on each side, guarding the grave. Unusually, both appear to be male, and I couldn’t help but refer to them as ‘big-eared lions’, a feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else:

This is the lion on the left, and it doesn’t look at all fierce. I didn’t take a closer look at the right-hand lion, but when I examined the above photo, I thought it looked different to its counterpart on the left. I shall have to check the next time I’m nearby.

This is a closer look at the grave:

Whoever is interred here was clearly very rich, and probably very important too. Notice the five golden bats above the central panel (the Chinese words for ‘bat’ and ‘blessing’ are homophones). Notice too the herringbone brickwork in the sidewalls, which is clearly the work of a highly skilled craftsman.

This is a closer view of one of the two side panels:

The Chinese characters read ‘dragon gate’, although I cannot explain this, but I do know that fish are a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture, presumably because they are also homophones in Chinese.

And notice the fierce creatures on guard duty on each side of the grave. I’ve montaged them together here:

Unless you’re familiar with the Chinese bestiary, you are unlikely to be able to identify what kind of animals they are, and I’m not going to identify them here, but if you really want to know, then check out Fearsome Beasts, which is an account of my attempts to identify them after coming across a pair guarding a small temple between Shatin and Taipo.

There is a fenced-off cultivated area in front of the graves, which wasn’t there a couple of years ago:

And while we were there, a man came up on the other side of the fence to talk to us. We recognized him immediately, although we don’t know his name. To Paula and me, he was just ‘the farmer’, because we used to pass the large plot where he grew vegetables on our way to our local restaurant for yam char, and he was always busy tending his latest crop but always had a friendly word as we passed. He used to be a regular patron of the same restaurant, but he told us some time ago that he’d found another that he thought was better. He told us that he was grateful to the government for giving him the opportunity to continue doing what he loved doing—growing vegetables—but, he said, the soil here is nowhere near as fertile as the soil on his old plot. That didn’t surprise me, because the soil on his old plot was river alluvium, while here, being on a hillside, it’s just weathered volcanic rock with almost no organic content.

The farmer also complained that before he could grow his first crop, he’d had to remove a lot of large rocks from the soil, which you can see piled up along the fence on the left of the photo. A bit like his old plot, which, like that entire area, has now been covered by huge amounts of construction rubble to prepare the site for ‘development’, which I’ve been reporting on a lot recently.

There isn’t much to see along the rest of the road, which eventually crosses the river and heads into Sheung Shui, so we cut down to the DSD access road at the first opportunity and headed home.