Shun Tin Estate, Shun On Estate, Shun Lei Estate and Shun Chi Court 順天邨、順安邨、順利邨及順緻苑
Four estates. Four names meaning smooth. Beneath them: a Song Dynasty salt empire, a colonial graveyard, WWII burials, six thousand people living among bleached bones — and a naming that tried to cover all of it.
This is a historical travel essay about Hong Kong's Sze Shun district — four public housing estates in Kwun Tong whose names all begin with the Cantonese character 順, meaning smooth or favorable. Beneath them lie seven distinct historical layers: a Song Dynasty imperial salt field, a colonial-era graveyard that became a WWII burial site, a community of six thousand people forced to live among the exhumed dead, a wartime guerrilla escape corridor, and — finally — an act of naming that attempted to correct, in the Taoist tradition of cosmological inscription, everything the ground had suffered. This piece follows those layers down.
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