Spirit of daring Hakka people at Lai Chi Wo Village
Lai Chi Wo Village settled by migrants of Han Chinese
Most of the trail steps are widely spread out
Lai Chi Wo relic of the past
Nestled in the northeastern reaches of Hong Kong’s New Territories, the village of Lai Chi Wo emerges like a whispered secret from the past.
Tree roots threaten to trip over distracted hikers
In fact, it’s a living relic of the Hakka people’s unyielding spirit. The Hakka were perpetual migrants, a branch of Han Chinese who traced their origins to the heartlands of central China.
Across dynasties, from the Qin’s iron-fisted unification to the Ming’s cultural zenith, they journeyed southward, fleeing war, famine, and upheaval.
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By the seventeenth century, their odyssey brought two clans, the Tsangs and the Wongs, to the rugged shores of Sha Tau Kok.
The Tsangs, led by an ancestor from Dongguan, first settled in Mui Tsz Lam, a hamlet cradled by misty hills.
Neat rows of trees line either side
Nearby, the Wongs – descended from a Ming military commander who refused to bow to Qing rule – carved out Chu Mun Tin after dismissing their loyal followers at Hung Shek Mun.
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Drawn to Lai Chi Wo’s rare expanse of flat land and its proximity to the sea, the clans joined the Punti settlers (the region’s original inhabitants) to forge a community where terraced fields climbed like stairways to the heavens.
These rice paddies and orchards, etched into the hillsides, fed over 1,000 residents at their peak. Sweet potatoes, yams, and tangerines thrived in the fertile soil, while pineapples and plums sweetened the harvests.
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The twentieth century unravelled this agrarian idyll. The 1950s brought a tidal wave of emigration.
Abandoned by villagers
Young men sought fortunes in Europe’s restaurants and London’s docks, while others fled to Southeast Asia.
By the 1960s, Lai Chi Wo stood nearly abandoned, its fields reclaimed by wild grasses, its ancestral halls hollowed of laughter.
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Only the elderly remained, their stories clinging to the weathered bricks like lichen.
Once a jewel of Hakka prosperity, the village became a ghostly tableau of cracked walls and silent courtyards, its history preserved in the stubborn persistence of camphor trees and the whispers of a forgotten stream.
Which village will it be?
Lai Chi Wo’s layout is a harmonic dialogue between human ambition and nature’s wisdom.
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The village unfurls in precise geometric rows: nine horizontal lanes intersect three longitudinal paths, ascending gently toward the protective embrace of hills.
Mountain at the back, sea-facing front
This configuration, dictated by feng shui, ensures the village backs onto mountains and faces the sea, a formula believed to channel prosperity and stability.
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Each of the 200-odd houses, built of indigo-fired bricks and sun-baked mud, follows a sacred blueprint: kitchens, symbols of fire and fertility, occupy the right side, while bathrooms, conduits of water and wealth, anchor the left.
T-shaped steps marked a particularly steep part of the trail
At the village’s heart stand three ancestral halls, their tiled roofs curving like the wings of cranes. These sanctuaries, adorned with fading calligraphy and incense-stained altars, once hosted clan meetings and seasonal rites.
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Nearby, a meandering stream (the jade belt around the waist) encircles the settlement, its waters channelled for irrigation and ritual.
A lone facade
Villagers believed this aquatic loop trapped fortune within its currents, a belief reinforced by the rustic feng shui wall erected centuries ago.
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Legend claims the wall was the remedy to Lai Chi Wo’s poverty: a geomancer, noting the village’s leaking energy, prescribed its construction to corral wealth and repel misfortune.
Soon after, scholars emerged from its lanes, and coffers swelled with agricultural bounty.
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Yet time has a way of humbling even the most meticulous plans. A skeletal incinerator at the village’s edge, a relic of 1960s modernisation, looms like a sentinel of change.
A 1960s brick incinerator
Once, villagers buried waste in fields, transforming it into fertiliser; now, the incinerator’s brick chimney, streaked with soot, symbolises a lost equilibrium between human and earth.
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Crumbling houses, their roofs collapsed, and walls breached, frame courtyards where pumpkins once dried in the sun.
Moss-covered milestone/grave markers spring up near the villages
In their shadows, rusted farming tools lie abandoned, and ancestral graves, overgrown with ferns, whisper of generations who tilled this land.
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Walking through Lai Chi Wo’s feng shui woods is to step into a cathedral of green. This crescent-shaped forest spans five to seven hectares.
Remains of a buidling among the growth of tres and foliage
Planted centuries ago, the villagers who did so understood nature as a partner to cherish. Towering camphor trees, their trunks wide as an embrace, release a medicinal fragrance into the air.
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The Hollow Tree, a century-old sweet gum, stands as a testament to resilience, its trunk a cavern of scars and secrets.
Woods are guardians
Strangler figs, their roots serpentine and possessive, cling to host trees in a slow, silent dance of life and death.
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These woods are more than spiritual guardians. They are ecological marvels.
The path narrows over creeks…
Their roots bind the soil, thwarting landslides; their canopy tempers typhoon winds and nurtures a microclimate where mushrooms, ferns, and orchids thrive.
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For villagers, the forest was a lifeline: its branches became firewood, its leaves herbal remedies, its bark material for dyes. But access was governed by reverence.
Many of the houses beside the village entrance are in ruins
Only one or two days a year were allotted for gathering sticks, ensuring the woods’ immortality.
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Today, this sanctuary shelters endangered yellow-breasted buntings, whose songs are a fragile melody, and the ghostly flutter of white dragon-tail butterflies, Asia’s smallest swallowtail.
An abandoned house returns to nature
The trail to Lai Chi Wo mirrors this interplay of order and wildness. It begins as a tidy path of stone and concrete before dissolving into a labyrinth of roots and leaf litter.
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Hikers navigate narrow tracks where sunlight filters through bamboo groves, cross slow-moving creeks on stepping stones, and pause at the Lai Chi Wo viewing point, where the fog-cloaked bay unveils islets like Lo Chi Pai, their outlines blurred as ink wash paintings.
Some grave sites are barred for protection
Nearer the village, ancestral graves emerge – some adorned with fresh joss sticks, others crumbling into the earth – their inscriptions a ledger of lineage and loss.
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At its peak, Lai Chi Wo pulsed as the cultural and economic centre of the Hing Chun Yeuk, an alliance of seven villages.
Path widens among dense foliage
But the mid-twentieth century saw the village school formalised under British rule. The twentieth century’s tides proved relentless.
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By the 1980s, the school was abandoned, and few families remained. By 2010, only one or two elderly villagers remained.
Part of the old village square
But the Lai Chi Wo’s story doesn’t end there. In 2013, the village became a cornerstone of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark, its revival fuelled by scholars, NGOs, and descendants longing to reconnect with their roots.
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Abandoned homes, their walls stabilised and roofs re-tiled, now house the Hakka Life Experience Village, where visitors grind rice flour, weave bamboo baskets, and sleep under mosquito nets in restored quarters.
Inside the ruins of a village house
The fields, once strangled by invasive weeds, have been painstakingly cleared. Organic rice paddies shimmer emerald in the sun, while turmeric and roselle bloom in vibrant bursts of orange and crimson.
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Lai Chi Wo’s revival is fragile, balancing preservation and adaptation. Yet the village resists becoming a museum.
Informative signs dot the immediate area surrounding
It is a living experiment, where Hakka traditions breathe anew. Farmers, both retirees and urban transplants, till the soil using methods honed over centuries, their hands as calloused as their ancestors’.
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The village’s once-silent ancestral halls now host workshops on Hakka embroidery and tea ceremonies, their walls echoing with renewed purpose.
As dusk falls, the woods deepen into shadows, and the stream’s murmur grows louder. Bats flit over restored fields, and fireflies ignite like stray embers.
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In these moments, Lai Chi Wo feels suspended between eras. It’s a place where the past is not dead, but lies dormant, waiting to be awakened by footsteps on its ancient trails.
The view from the top
The feng shui wall, though cracked, still stands. It no longer guards against bandits or malevolent spirits, but against something far more insidious: oblivion.
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In Lai Chi Wo, every restored brick, every replanted rice shoot, is a rebuttal to the notion that progress requires erasure. Here, history is a rootstock, grounding the village as it reaches, tentatively, toward the light.
Text and photos Victoria Mae Martyn
