Kam Tin anyone?

Most people in Hong Kong seem to live in high rise apartments. Half the population live in public housing, up to 30-50 storeys high. Most of those who own property also live in high-rises but with lots of amenities like pools and gyms. We will probably look at an apartment when our short-term lease runs out at the hotel. They have 24 hour security and the kids can run around quite safely. There are some who live in villages.

Not far from Tin Shui Wai, where we are staying, there is a village called Kam Tim. We visited it last Sunday. To get there we had to take the ultra-modern West Rail train, all in air-conditioned comfort. Out of the station we walked over a bridge that spanned a very wide storm water canal and into a village. Most villages are on land owned by some of the original peoples of Hong Kong. The Hakka (meaning ‘guest people’, who migrated from the North in the 1600s) are distinguishable by their circular hats with a whole in the centre and a black cloth between the hat and the head. The Hakka women are most often seen sweeping roads and parks, usually elderly. Kam Tin is a Punti village, from a clan called the Tangs who have lived in the area since 940 AD.
Modern villages are built on clan land and can’t be sold and there seems to be a law prohibiting high-rise buildings. The limit seems to be three stories. It was quite nice to be somewhere you could mountains of green instead of mountains of concrete. The village had buildings of a range of ages, from brightly coloured new builds to obviously ancient ones, hundreds of years old with tiny doors.

Kam Tin was not very bustling which, was part of its charm but town elders or somebody must have thought it needed a bit of revitalisation, so in the middle there is a covered modern market. Imagine the Christchurch Art Centre with a roof. This was a bit too manufactured for my taste, but a walk down the main drag quickly transported me back to more unplanned style. We had lunch at a Nepalese restaurant which was very pleasant and the proprietors equally as pleasant. As the heat was killing us, we thought we should head back home and get back to the air-con. Outside the train station a modern market was in operation. Think Christchurch Art Centre again.

It wasn’t until I did some research that Kam Tin actually has a walled village inside it that we completely missed that dates back 400 years with a moat and really thick walls. The walls were built to keep out bandits and wild tigers back in the day, with big iron gates protecting the only entrance. Apparently the British stormed the village in the 1800s and sent the gates back to England for some lord’s private estate. They were returned but mixed up with some other village’s, so now they have a mismatched pair of gates.
I feel this village requires some further investigation and I’m sure there will be somewhere very pleasant, under the shade of a tree, where one can purchase a nice cold beer.