It may be that you've visited a beautiful place or two on your holidays. It may be that you've had to struggle a little to get there, by road or by foot. It may be that you've spent a little time wandering and wondering -who lived here, when was it built, what was life like for them back then? It may be that these questions remain and re-emerge when your photos of this beautiful place are seen again. If this is so, then you've experienced what can only be termed a romantic association with a place and, as with all romances, it's something about which you fondly care –even if you're no longer together.
Such is the case with the hidden village Pak Sha O (白沙澳). Peacefully nestled in the bountiful and verdant hills of the Sai Kung Country Park under the watchful gaze of Mount Hallowes (柦柴山), the sleepy village is hidden from most eyes. Many visitors to the park head on down for a mooch upon the soft sandy beaches of Hoi Ha (海下), grab a quick ice cream and whiz back to fishy fleshpots of Sai Kung without even knowing they have passed an architectural jewel modestly nestling within an exquisite natural setting. They will not have heard the cacophony of frogs and crickets in the marshy fields, nor seen the abundance of butterflies in the flower gardens, the old tiled roofs, the watchtower and the reinforced wooden-barred courtyard door –for keeping bandits and pirates at bay!
It's not that Pak Sha O is a grand palace of the last Emperors or a cascading monumental Machu-Picchu citadel – there isn't a convenient shop to buy "I ♥ PSO" t-shirts or cups of speciality tea and the nearest public toilet is half-a mile away from the village beside the Hoi Ha Road. Instead, this village is a small, vulnerable and fragile remnant of a past era of simple, somewhat-unassuming Hakka folk that literally forged their lives from the environment. Its unambitious beauty really does mean for some, 'once bitten, forever smitten'!
For centuries the villagers of Pak Sha O deftly farmed their rice from a myriad of tiny fields -some the size of a large room- and ensured that their stream water irrigation was in good working order from year to year. They fished where they could and at low tide would gather at the rocky bays of the peninsula to collect shellfish and the fruits of the sea, returning to the village to feast on their catches.
Each festival was properly celebrated and civic duties undertaken with propriety, if not pride. Certainly the rich decorative motifs that adorn the buildings are symptomatic of residents that held themselves in check by form and convention. They were good Hakka people.
Round about them the rest of the world moved on so that by the latter quarter of the 20th century the tensions brought about by the conflicting aspirations and opportunities for many Hong Kong villagers were simply too much for their communities. The beginning of Timothy Mo's 1982 novel, Sour Sweet, encapsulates the dilemma of those times: the happy rural village life had become unsustainable and most of the younger people simply had to move away either elsewhere in Hong Kong or to cities in Europe and North America. Year-by-year, the older people also moved out to inhabit urban rest homes or died in-situ to be ceremonially buried up in the hills, sometimes in magnificent horseshoe-shaped graves. Those empty properties that they looked down upon eventually fell apart, collapsed and were buried under the ever-encroaching forest: lifeless and rotting midden mounds are all too often the sum total of the work of generations.
Some villages, however, have had a new life breathed into them by quite a different set heading in the opposite direction, purposefully removing themselves from the stress of the city to live a quieter life closer to nature. These settlers are predominantly westerners who have sought, along with creature comforts and air-conditioning, to incorporate their values into their revitalized abodes. For them the old has an intrinsic beauty, its value matched with age. For them simplicity has clarity and unecessary re-development remains unwelcome: what has simply been left by others is the first and best reason to live 'miles from anywhere' and has stirred in them a need for sympathetic (read expensive) maintenance and preservation of those unique remnants of the past.
It would be naive to suggest that the new tenants' motives are entirely selfless, but they would be in keeping with similar such projects undertaken in remote French or Italian villages -it's just what some westerners do! The fate, however, of other vulnerable and beautiful old Hong Kong buildings springs to mind, such a the King Yin Lei building on Stubbs Road (above) where demolition was reprieved in the nick of time by government intervention only after the press expressed outrage.
Pak Sha O today is under immanent threat – the village is set to be purchased piece-meal, evacuated, razed to the ground so that in its place will be new luxury developments. This overall aim, of course, has not been explicitly admitted by the purchaser, Lau Ming-shum of Xinhua Bookstore Xiang Jian Group, the company that has been buying up these recently un-zoned plots. It has put in an application to build two new houses in the village. If they get final approval it means the future of this astonishing village as it stands is uncertain.
The local and international press have investigated further (we attended the recent press briefing by Friends of Sai Kung that explained the plight of village and its environment), but so far the Hong Kong government remains unmoved or unable to move –the village enclave is technically not part of the Sai Kung Country Park and the new landowner is within his rights to do whatever he likes to his land, even if that means irrevocably destroying it! It therefore seems likely more damage will probably be done and bewailed before the security of the village, the residents and the surrounding wildlife can be guaranteed through government action.
To emphasize what has already been reported above, a third of all Hong Kong species are found in the valley; "75 species of butterflies, 11 types of freshwater fish, 38 types of birds, eight species of amphibians and 23 types of insects". One can imagine the devastating impact if the woodland was 'improved' into terraces of tarmac car spaces and concrete box dwellings. It's a story familiar to many in Hong Kong's environmentally-empoverished New Territories villages.
So, what's to do? Plenty – please feel free to share comments on this blog or copy this blog's link or links within. Drop a quick email to the reporters (through the highlighted links above) and let them know you read their stories. Better still, write to the Town Planning Board to remind them of their responsibilities to preserve one of Hong Kong's best-kept Hakka villages. Write an email to the Hong Kong Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department's Sai Kung Country Park office to inform them of your interest in this matter. Ask the Antiquities and Monuments Office Heritage Conservation office what they are going to do about Pak Sha O.
Please don't let this beautiful and remote village disappear because it's too much bother to defend. It could be your next romantic association!
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