hidden history #6

Were someone who lived in Fanling a century ago to come back to visit the area, they wouldn’t recognize anything. For a start, most of what is now the built-up area was open fields, and the only sites that existed then and still survive would have been Fanling Wai—the enclosing walls were probably still intact a hundred years ago—and the associated Pang Ancestral Hall, Tsz Tak Study Hall and Sam Shing Temple, all of which are some distance from the site that I’m about to discuss.

Since the start of construction work on the Fanling North NDA (New Development Area) last year, we’ve stopped following the Drainage Services Department’s access road along the Ng Tung River whenever we want to cycle ‘out west’. Instead, we follow the dedicated cycle tracks that run through Fanling and Sheung Shui, starting with the cycle track that runs alongside Sha Tau Kok Road, a dual carriageway that is the only road out of Fanling to the east. This is an inferior option, not least because we have to negotiate no fewer than six light-controlled junctions before we reconnect with our original route.

Between the junctions with Ma Sik Road and Fan Leng Lau Road, there is only one road that turns left, into what is now Fanling’s industrial district: Lok Tin Road:

Not many vehicles turn left here, but you certainly don’t have time to look at anything, although just before the crossing point, I couldn’t help but notice the graffiti on the walls to my left from the opposite side of the road, which I subsequently visited on foot to take photos (I wrote about them in Scrawl on the Wall). However, I didn’t notice the subject of this post at the time.

This is a view of the same crossing point looking east:

Incidentally, the blue sign reads

Cyclists dismount
Use pedestrian crossing

It is actually a legal requirement that cyclists get off and push their bikes whenever they cross a road, but it’s a rule that hardly anybody follows. After all, there is no pedestrian crossing here! And even if there were, my contention is that if you push your bike across the road, you are in the potential danger zone for longer, so it’s safer to check for traffic then ride straight across.

There would be nothing else to say about this location, except that on a recent walk around the Lung Yeuk Tau area, we needed to go into Luen Wo Hui (signposted on the first photo above) to do some shopping. And that brought us to Sha Tau Kok Road at precisely this location. Notice the semicircle of construction barriers in both the above photos. Paula spotted the stone tablet that these barriers enclose:

And this is a closer view of the tablet:

Apparently, it commemorates ‘reconstruction’ of Tai Po, the name of a location that no longer exists, even as a name; so this is probably the only extant reference to the place, although On Lok, a village now subsumed by Fanling’s industrial district and therefore also no longer existing as a physical entity, is still signposted before the turn off Sha Tau Kok Road. The main ‘text’ of the tablet appears to be a list of contributions to the project, written in an old Chinese tabulation style:

There are three dates on the right (1908, 1917 and 1921) so this reconstruction, whatever its nature—and this isn’t explained on the tablet—took place in three phases.

After discovering this tablet, I can’t help wondering whether there are any more in the area, although as I pointed out above, almost this entire area was just fields a century ago.

other posts in this series
Hidden History.
Hidden History #2.
Hidden History #3.
Hidden History #4.
Hidden History #5.