The greatest concentration of tourist shops and hotels is in the Tsim Sha
Tsui section at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula and within a five-minute
walk of the Star Ferry terminal. Nine-tenths of the Kowloon hotels and
luxury shops are strung along Nathan Road, the central thoroughfare, and
its intersecting streets. At its best, Tsim Sha Tsui is a tourists’ Happy
Hunting Ground; at its worst, it is an outrageously over-priced deadfall.
The refugee resettlement estates spread across the upper end of the
Kowloon Peninsula, several miles north of Tsim Sha Tsui. Visitors
who want to see what has been done to help the colony’s refugees—and
to appreciate how much must still be undertaken—should visit the
resettlement estates and the remaining squatter shacks with either a
guide or an experienced Hong Kong welfare worker. The terrain is too
irregular and the estates too extensive to be covered on foot.
Visitors with an archaeological turn of mind may want to have a look
at the Li Cheng Uk tomb in Sham Shui Po, about a mile north of the
Kowloon-New Territories boundary. Workmen excavating for the Li Cheng Uk
Resettlement Estate discovered the tomb in August, 1955. Its T-shaped
chambers and barrel-vault roof containing pottery and bronze objects from
the Later Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220) and Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589)
indicate that the Chinese may have settled in Hong Kong and neighboring
Kwangtung Province many centuries earlier than had been supposed. The
colony government preserved the tomb by encasing it in an outer shell of
concrete, built a small garden and museum around it, and opened it to the
public in 1957.
A guided motor tour, probably the best way of seeing the New Territories,
carries the visitor through the manufacturing center at Tsuen Wan, then
west past the beaches and eroded hillsides to Castle Peak. The tour
proceeds through some of the colony’s best farmland to the marketing and
shopping center at Yuen Long.
Brown cattle and water buffalo are the only aids to human labor on these
farms, and every square foot of land is fertilized, weeded, irrigated and
tilled with unsparing diligence. Walled cities, such as Kam Tin, appear
along the way. Once they were fortresses to protect the farming families
against marauding bands; today they are packed with poor people living in
cubicles.
If border conditions are stable, the driver may continue to Lak Ma Chau,
a hillside overlooking Red China’s farming communes on the far side of
the Sham Chun River. The return route is through the fishing settlement
at Tai Po, with a view of Tolo Harbor, one of the finest in Hong Kong. In
the Shatin Valley, with its intricate pattern of terraced rice fields,
the sightseer may catch a glimpse of Amah Rock, a natural formation
resembling a woman with an infant on her back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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