Stonecutters and Divine Interventions

It wasn’t the presence of British troops that drew fishmongers and restaurants to Lei Yue Mun, as I had first thought, but it was the Devil’s Peak.

“The first families moved from the other side of the bay because they believed that this side was better protected from typhoons by Po Tai Shan,” seafood seller Damien Cheung said, using the Chinese name for the peak that translates as Battery Hill.

Cheung’s ancestors were one of the three that formed the village of Sam Ga Tsuen, Three Family Village, around the end of the 19^th century. They were not fishermen, as you might have expected from the main trade we see today, but they were Hakka quarrymen from Guangdong province looking for good stone to cut from the rock face.

“The first miners worked all by hand. They sold the rocks to Hong Kong,” he said.

A view of the headland behind the Tin Hau temple made it clear where the quarries had been, although nature has done a good job of reclaiming the cliffs over recent years, so they are not obvious at first glace.

After dynamite became the main tool of quarrying, the traditional skills of the Hakka stonecutters became obsolete, so the three families turned to farming, says Cheung.

He says that when the fishermen started calling in on Lei Yue Mun in the 60s, it wasn’t to sell fish that they came, it was to make repairs to their boats. They were from as far away as Lau Fan Shan in northwestern New Territories, and if they had stock on them they would try to offload at the local market.

“In the beginning they didn’t know how sell their fish,” Cheung told us. “They just put it on the road and sold it there. Some people saw the chance to do business and set up shops.”

Then the teahouses came, and then the 1970s saw the boom in the seafood restaurants. Cheung reckons that the 70s had very specific conditions that fuelled the fortunes of Lei Yue Mun.

“Industry was starting. People earned money, but they had no entertainment. They only had majong. Restaurants provided majong spaces. Three tables for majong, one table for eating.”

Things aren’t as good now, he reckons. “Now people go to China for entertainment instead of playing majong,” though it is evident from the constant slamming of tiles on tables that the game still has a robust local following.

But if they are losing Hong Kong customers to China now, they are also getting mainlanders back in return .

“The Shanghainese come because they can only get river food, not sea food. And river food is no good,” Cheung told us bluntly.

Now Cheung says that selling seafood is a tough life, and it’s not a stable livelihood. He doesn’t know if his son will continue the business, but hopes that his study of accounting will at least give him more options.

We found out a bit more about Devil’s Peak.

It’s not clear if the British kept the battery on the 200m high lookout in operation after the second world war, but Cheung who was born in 1956 doesn’t remember seeing any squadies around. “We used to play in the tunnels near the fort when we went up there to steal fruit,” he said.

His dad told him stories of helping to set up the big guns on the hill, before the war. The parts were delivered to the pier, then carried up to the vantage point.

When it came to the crunch the four batteries the Brits set up did little to defend Hong Kong from the marauding Japanese. Troops poured overland from the North, rendering the strategic purpose of the battery, the defence of the harbour, an irreverence. The invaders quickly took command of Devil’s Peak on December 11, 1941 and then turned the big guns onto Hong Kong island.

Cheung’s father joined the guerrilla resistance against the Japanese during the ensuing occupation, as a member of the East River Column which operated under Chinese Communist command.

“My father helped the government to defend against Japan. He was only 17, very young.” Cheung told us.

But in the post war years it is difficult to see how much support the government gave back to Lei Yue Mun and other Kowloon villages.

“This building is the story of Lei Yue Mun,” Chueng told us. It was built by the donations of the local villagers, which were matched by the wife of Singaporean tiger balm king A.W. Boon Haw.

“The local people thought, if there is no education, no good.” So they clubbed together.

There was no help from the colonial government. Instead the village had a teacher who happened to have contacts with the wife of A.W. Boon Haw, himself a Hakka migrant who had made millions from selling a tiny pot of cream to every Chinese person in the world, and wanted to give something back to the Diaspora.

It wasn’t really until the 1970s that the village started to feel the influence of the colonial administration, Cheung told us.

“These villages were not Central. It used to take me an hour and a half, over three mountains, just to walk to Kwun Tong,” he explained, illustrating the isolation of places like Lei Yue Mun until recent years.

Unfortunately the government closed the school down just last year because of a lack of pupils.

The other important institution of the village is the Tin Hau temple on the tip of the headland, and that one got its funding from Devine intervention.

Cheung’s wife, Money Chu, showed me an old mysterious photograph of the temple roof. Close inspection revealed an unusual cloud formation that showed a very Chinese form of a figure in the sky. I couldn’t make out exactly what Money was saying about the picture but when we visited the temple we saw an enlargement of the same image. I later found out that it was an apparition of the god Tin Hau above the temple in 1953. It made headline news all over Hong Kong at the time, and resulted in a stream of generous donations that allowed renovations to take place that year.

During the course of the renovations they discovered inside the building a stone tablet that dated the sacred site to 1753, built in the name of a certain Cheng Lin Cheong, subordinate to “General” Cheng Shing Kung.

The name is of interest, as Patricia Lim’s pirate warlord who was said to occupy Devil’s Peak from 1723 was another Cheng, Cheng Yat.

Another local writer, Jason Wordie, says there is a hidden rock inside the temple that is shaped like a vagina. Attendants might let you see it if you ask discreetly. I’ll ask next time, telling them I want to ponder on the mysteries of religion.

The area behind the temple seems to have the flimsiest looking housing of Lei Yue Mun. I’m not 100 percent sure if they are squatter buildings, but I would say they look like it.

Cheung told us that there have been a lot of poor migrants from China. “They live in ‘wood’ houses. These houses are dangerous,” he said. We didn’t see much wood when we walked around in the area, but the houses we saw were thin-walled and made of a varied patchwork of construction materials.

According to a September 2008 report on a waterfront enhancement project set to start in 2010, it looks like at least some of the housing is slated for clearance.

“We have tried to minimize the number of squatters that may be affected so as to reduce the impact on the community.? Affected residents who are eligible will be rehoused in accordance with government’s rehousing policy,” it says.

Looking for Lei Yue Mun

We wanted to reach Lei Yue Mun via Devil’s peak. It looked simple enough to jump off the MTR at Tiu Keng Leng and work our way back over the headland, then drop down into the village. I had my wonderful “Palm atlas guide of Hong Kong” so I thought there wouldn’t be any problem. I was wrong.

We came out of the MTR building to find ourselves in the middle of a barren suburban landscape. There was a huge forest of steel scaffolding just outside the exit, the framework for the next stage of the new town’s vertical upsurge. The completed apartments that shot up from the transport interchange were as tall as any I have seen in Hong Kong, that means probably 60 or 70 storeys. The clouds were low that day, showing how perfectly apt the term sky-scraper is for these aerial residences, unless you prefer cloud-ticklers.

Dense though it is, Tiu Keng Leng isn’t very extensive and we were soon climbing away from the estates, negotiating wide empty roads made all the more difficult to cross thanks to randomly placed crash barriers. The hill tops were covered in mist so it was difficult to know which way to go. Basically we guessed, based on the impression that we needed to head uphill.

We climbed steep steps that led to a new reservoir, built in 2002. Workers were turfing the top of it. Along the way we spotted the first of the day’s odd rest benches. It’s a Hong Kong phenomenon that the government will conveniently place seating in the last place you would want to sit. Saikung district council had put sturdy iron bus shelters along this concrete stairway that is unreachable by bus. There was one that offered the view of a steel crash barrier, then wire mesh fencing behind that, with the dam wall in the background. If you strained your neck by turning around you would see panoramic views stretching down a green valley. The shelter was covered with a steel sheet punctured by picnic area logos, so it wouldn’t do much good in the rain but at least you would know that you were on an officially designated picnic bench.

Further up we came across another sitting out area that straddled the top of the ridge and would have commanded views down to Lei Yue Mun on a clear day. This one was a concrete patio with a couple of round benches, also made of concrete, underneath a thick concrete roof. So that old people and children wouldn’t fall off the concrete, a 2 m high wire mesh fence was wrapped around the rock hard leisure facility, supported by angular iron posts.

From there we dipped down to a road that had worn a deep cut through the hilltop. The bank opposite was heavily reinforced against landslides. It’s not usually the sort of place that you see people, but here there were several clambering along the embankment. On close inspection we could see that they were collecting water that trickled out of pipes jutting from the stonework. At ground level we spoke to an old lady filling up several receptacles. “It’s good for making tea,” she told us. I took a sip straight from the pipe and it tasted good. That was the first time I had ever drunk natural untreated hill water in Hong Kong.

After that we climbed up more steps into the mist. It was a steep and narrow concrete staircase hemmed in on both sides by fencing. We were following signs to the Wilson trail but we made the mistake of striding out onto an unpaved hiking trail up to the misty mountain top.

“It’s impossible to get lost here,” I told my friends, who were barely visible through the white cloud. “We’re on a small headland, we have to hit a road, or the sea at some point.”

Instead we hit the perimeter fencing of a graveyard. It was too high to scale.

We pulled out the iPhone GPS. It looked very cool, but we couldn’t make out where to go. We were lost. So we backtracked to the concrete staircase.

Along the way we saw a deep and mysterious tunnel. We peered into to its dark bowels and had no idea what we were looking at. Something to do with WWII defences, perhaps?

We finally got back on track. Once on the Wilson trail it was easy to follow, with bold yellow and black signs painted onto storm water drains at regular intervals.

The municipal benching continued too, all of them uncomfortable and facing into the hill instead of overlooking potentially stunning views.

Then we came across what could only have been a home-grown rest spot. Its irregular angles and recycled materials, plus its quirky charm and eccentricity clearly distinguished it from the inhuman creations of city bureaucrats.

Much of it was made from pilfered (?) building material – scaffolding, masonry of various types, tiles, ornamental stones, and hundreds of wine bottles. The wine bottles were all the same brand of red in 250ml bottles and they formed the borders of flower beds, and sectioned off different parts of the three level complex. The little hideaway was a cool example of grassroots, guerrilla landscaping. And guess what, the benches faced the open views.

Just below the final ascent onto Devil’s peak we turned back and dropped down into a valley that took us to the back of Lei Yue Mun. It was a lucky detour because we got to see the remnants of an abandoned squatter village that surrounded a temple.

The first derelict buildings looked like old cottages made from large sandstone blocks. The jungle was making a slow creeping attack over the crumbled walls and concrete floors. Remnants of drainage piping remained clinging to moss covered stonework. Decaying scraps of linoleum hinted at ordinary lives once lived on the hillside.

The temple was freshly painted and well kept. A man sat alone at a table in the yard. Scrappy dogs bristled as we approached but were too lazy to see us off.

A new looking reservoir hung over the small valley and around the temple there were derelict homes abandoned to the elements. The homes were obviously makeshift and built around the natural contours of the valley. Boulders formed outer walls and a stream ran through the middle of the residences providing a sewage outlet from the head of the valley downwards. One ceramic toilet remained in place on a platform that over hung the stream.

But it wasn’t true to say that the site was fully abandoned. Once we started taking in what we were looking at, we realised that there were many vegetable patches that there growing fresh produce. Where there had once been living rooms and kitchens there were now rows of spring onions and lettuces. Papayas grew where people once slept and lychee trees sprouted from where they sat.

We met one man harvesting veggies for his evening meal. He told us that the village had been relocated to a vertical housing estate thirty years ago. He lived in a flat that towered about 100 m above the ground, from where he could keep an eye on his squatter garden.

When we reached the bottom of the valley and walked across the main road, Hong Kong’s suburbia hit us with shoppers, buses and evening lights. The contrast was strong, we had just walked out of a lost world.