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.