Sai Kung 西貢
Sai Kung is not what the maps suggest. For four hundred years, its hidden bays, mountain paths, and fisherfolk's knowledge of the tides have served as Hong Kong's most consequential refuge — saving entire communities, and the lives of China's greatest writers, in the dark.
This is a work of historical landscape writing — a close reading of five episodes in which the peninsula of Sai Kung, on the eastern edge of Hong Kong's New Territories, functioned as a refuge in moments of catastrophe. The episodes span four centuries: a Qing emperor's coastal clearance and the Hakka transplant that followed; a wartime underground railroad that saved hundreds of China's greatest writers and artists; a pirate confederacy's genuine maritime sovereignty; the reservoir engineering that drowned a living community; and the slow dissolution of the Tanka boat people's seafaring civilisation. The walk takes in the preserved Hakka walled village at Sheung Yiu, the Tin Hau Temple and old stone pier at Sai Kung town, and the eastern dam of the High Island Reservoir, where some of the world's most extraordinary volcanic formations descend, largely unregarded, into the South China Sea.
Lawrence
Lawrence
Lawrence
Lawrence
Lawrence
Lawrence
Lawrence