Chik Tsuen Wai, also known as Tai Wai Village, was founded in 1574 during the late Ming Dynasty. Though it is Sha Tin’s oldest and largest walled village, few of its historic structures have been preserved, so from the outside it looks like an untidy huddle of concrete village houses. But there is a logic to its layout, one that has remained largely unchanged since its founding 450 years ago.
At City Unseen, we explain why Hong Kong’s urban landscape is the way it is. Sometimes, our city’s was shaped by the stages of coastal reclamation, or the sequence in which streets were developed, or by the existence of long-buried waterways. But occasionally—just occasionally—we encounter a story like this: Tai Wai Village has this layout because some youngsters were once very rude. At least, that is the story villagers told to historian Patrick Hase.
Hase, an expert in rural history, first heard this story in 1982 when he went to document Tai Wai Village’s abandoned temple (a different temple than the Hau Wong Temple that exists today) just before its demolition. In the decades since, he has collected countless oral histories from village elders, corroborating them with written records wherever possible. Of course, many tales are impossible to verify, but they bring life and colour into our imagination of the past, enabling us to picture its inhabitants as not so different from ourselves.
Tai Wai Village’s Qing era gatehouse is its oldest existing structure. It bears the village’s formal name, “Chik Tsuen Wai”, which alludes to the phrases “chik sin” (to accumulate virtue) and “tsuen yan” (to maintain benevolence). The flower plaque above celebrates the birthday of Hau Wong, the god enshrined at the village’s temple. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
In the 16th Century, coastal China experienced a wave of piracy as the Ming government’s tightening prohibitions on foreign trade turned merchants into outlaws. Between 1568 and 1574, the pirate Lam Fung (dubbed “Limahong” by the Portuguese) rampaged his way though Hong Kong and the surrounding region, reportedly killing 20,000 people. Many of Hong Kong’s walled villages, including Tai Wai, were founded around this time as farmers sought safety behind fortifications.
As was the common practice, Tai Wai’s clan elders sought out a fung shui master to advise on the construction. They hired the same master who had advised Nga Tsin Wai Village (which was in Wong Tai Sin and was demolished by the Urban Renewal Authority in 2016). Oral histories say this master was the legendary Lai Po-yi, but this cannot be true as he lived 400 years too early. Whoever he was, the village youths apparently subjected him to so much ridicule that he threw his ritual bowl of water on the ground and walked out mid-ceremony.
The story does not describe what the youngsters found so funny, but here we can vividly imagine how it played out. Picture the man frowning in concentration as whispers spread through the crowd. Picture his face turning red as the whispers turn to giggles, then jeers. Now picture him storming off down the path, flustered elders trailing behind him. The elders followed him all the way home and begged him to come back, but he refused. After some protracted kowtowing on their part, he told them to build their village gate where his bowl hit the ground, facing northeast.
The story does not describe what the youngsters found so funny, but here we can vividly imagine how it played out. Picture the man frowning in concentration as whispers spread through the crowd. Picture his face turning red as the whispers turn to giggles, then jeers. Now picture him storming off down the path, flustered elders trailing behind him. The elders followed him all the way home and begged him to come back, but he refused. After some protracted kowtowing on their part, he told them to build their village gate where his bowl hit the ground, facing northeast.
From this gate, they should lay out their main street in a straight line, placing the temple at the opposite end. With the main street running down the centre of the village, they should build their walls in a rectangle with the corners facing to the cardinal directions. You can still see this layout in the northern, older half of the village, with the main street oriented northeast to southwest, and the houses arranged in rows with their doors facing to the northeast.
Left: Hau Wong Temple still in its original location at the southwest end of Tai Wai’s main street. The building itself was rebuilt in the 1980s. Right: The main altar inside the temple. Photo credits: City Unseen, 2025.
We will never know how true this story is. A different version was recorded by the Sha Tin Arts and Culture Promotion Committee in 2019 in which the villagers were dissatisfied with fung shui master’s original advice. Outsiders prospered more than the villagers themselves, and people kept dying in threes. In a fit of frustration, they built their gate where the master had spilled his tea. Somehow this worked, and the village did well afterwards. What we do know is that Tai Wai Village’s layout is remarkably similar to Nga Tsin Wai Village’s. Both were unusual among New Territories walled villages in that their temples were located inside the walls, their houses were tiny (less than 200 square feet) and their lanes were very narrow, which points to their being designed by the same person.
Comparison of Tai Wai and Nga Tsin Wai’s layouts in the early 1900s. Sources: Patrick Hase, “Settlement, Life and Politics” (2020), and Patrick Hase, “Beside the Yamen: Nga Tsin Wai Village” (1999).
At Tai Wai’s Hau Wong Temple, there is a room off to one side containing a tablet honouring the village’s 29 founders from its 16 founding families. It has 32 names on it. Who are the three extras? Three names have “hero” written before them, indicating men killed in a war with Nga Tsin Wai Village in about 1860. Up until the Kowloon-Canton Railway and Tai Po Road were built in the early 20th Century, Sha Tin was a small, isolated, and not very wealthy agricultural community, reachable only by ferries and steep, narrow mountain paths. When travelling to the market in Kowloon City, villagers would gather at dawn at Che Kung Temple and travel in a large group banging drums and blowing conch shells to scare away tigers. Due to this isolation, while there were occasional bandits to fight off, Sha Tin’s inhabitants rarely got into fights with other villages. So what could have caused this rare clash?
Left: The side altar of Hau Wong Temple, which honours the village’s 29 founders and 3 heroes. Right: Founder’s tablet with the three heroes highlighted. Photo credits: City Unseen, 2025.
According to Hase, one day at the market in Kowloon City, some boys from Tai Wai insulted some girls from Nga Tsin Wai by singing rude mountain songs at them. Mountain songs were a folk custom in which improvised call and response duets were sung competitively between men and women, with lyrics that walked the line between flirtatious and raunchy. Whoever ran out of ideas first was deemed the loser. Young people from Nga Tsin Wai and Tai Wai frequently engaged in these musical contests of wit, but on this occasion, someone took things too far. The girls were offended, the young men of Nga Tsin Wai were outraged, and when village elders failed to broker an acceptable apology, they went to war against Tai Wai.
The villages of Sha Tin were part of a defensive pact called the “Gau Yeuk”(the Nine Alliances) which required each village to come to the aid of the others in case of attack. Defence was a serious business, and villages often employed a martial arts expert to train the young men in combat. This time though, Tai Wai’s allies refused to get involved, calling the dispute a “private matter”. We have no details from this discussion, but can you imagine the looks on the other village heads’ faces when told the reason for the war? At least the conflict left no long-lasting grudges; within a few years, Tai Wai and Nga Tsin Wai resumed friendly relations.
As before, this is one version of the story. In another telling published in a short magazine article, it was business competition at the market that put the two villages at odds. What remains consistent is that a conflict took place, that it started at the market, and that three casualties are now memorialized at the temple.
Our third and final story takes place over a century later, long after Tai Wai’s defensive walls had been dismantled, its moat filled in, and the village had expanded beyond its original boundaries. However, even as the houses were redeveloped and modernized, they remained as closely packed together as before.
The extremely narrow lanes made it impossible to bring in digging machines to connect the homes to the sewer system, so even as housing estates sprung up around Tai Wai Village in the 1980s, its 266 village houses remained on septic tanks.
In the mid-1990s, the government arrived at a solution. They contracted a British company to install a special vacuum sewer system, in essence a massively scaled-up version of the suction toilets found on aeroplanes. The advantage of this system was that it could use narrow plastic pipes placed in shallow hand-dug trenches, avoiding the need for heavy equipment. Each house’s wastewater drains into underground collection tanks, and when these become full, a valve opens to allow it to be sucked away. The suction comes from two large vacuum pumps which extract the sewage at a speed of 6m/s, enough force to prevent clogs from forming in the pipe network’s tight bends.
Narrow lane in Tai Wai Village. Note the multiple small manhole covers with a square pattern indicating that they belong to the Drainage Services Department. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
The vacuum pumps are housed at at Tai Wai Vacuum Pumping Station, located a short distance away next to the Tai Wai Nullah. It is a small white tiled building with a plum coloured roof that might be mistaken for a 1990s village house. There is a nearly identical station at Shui Wai Tsuen in Tai Po Tau, installed at the same time by the same company for very similar reasons.
Tai Wai’s village founders could not have possibly imagined that their decision to band together against pirates would one day result in giant vacuum pumps being required to extract their village’s sewage. Which goes to show, sometimes our ancestors leave us with priceless heritage, and other times they just leave us stuff to deal with.
Tai Wai Vacuum Pumping Station. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
Special thanks to Dexter Tse, co-founder, Hong Kong History & Heritage Advisory.
Patrick Hase, Settlement Life and Politics: Understanding the Traditional New Territories, 2000, Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press
Patrick Hase, “Old Hau Wong Temple, Tai Wai, Sha Tin”, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society , 1983, Vol. 23, pp. 233-240.
Patrick Hase, “Beside the Yamen, Nga Tsin Wai Village”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, 1999, Vol. 39, pp. 1-82.
葉德平, 《沙田文化研究計劃—竹枝词研究》, Sha Tin Arts and Culture Promotion Committee, February 2019.
陳天權, 《沙田最大和最古老的圍村》, Master-Insight.com, 19 December 2017.
Redivac, “Case Studies: Tai Wai & Tai Po, Hong Kong”, Redivac, 2017.
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