On Lok Tsuen, Hong Kong — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in On Lok Tsuen?

Two stone tablets stand at a car park corner. One is a direction marker for Shung Him Tong village and the other forbids the tethering of cattle, set up in 1930 and 1934, and together they record a quarrel between neighbours. The road was the cause.

Shung Him Tong could not go out through Lung Yeuk Tau, so it used the On Lok Tsuen road, and in 1928 the village put a gate and a guard on it and opened it only from nine in the morning to nine at night. The government bought the road. It did so after the Shung Him Tong village head took the matter to the district officer, and the two villages made peace once the road was public again.

The Yellow Emperor temple replaced an ancestral hall. The Hin Yuen ancestral hall was the most famous building in the village and was rebuilt at great expense around the millennium.

What is the history of On Lok Tsuen?

A land company built this village. Chinese merchants set up the Kui Yip hall from 1914 to buy farmland from Fanling landowners, and on 25 January 1916 more than ten of them raised seventy-five thousand dollars to found the Kui Yip land and stock company, issuing a hundred and fifty shares to turn the land into a garden villa district. The village was finished in the early 1920s.

Its ground ran to about three and a half million square feet, divided on a grid so that each buildable plot held about ten thousand, with four entrances, streets and watercourses laid out and a well for every household. Water came from the Ma Wat river. It was led in from Tong Hang for irrigation, and a stream ran along the western and southern sides, separating the village from everything outside.

Settlers arrived in three waves. Only the company's founders lived there at first, Hakka returning from the Americas moved in from the middle of the 1920s, and soldiers' families and refugees from the mainland came from the end of the 1930s. Refugees filled it during the war.

A children's home and a young farmers' institute were set up in the On Lok hall, and by 1940 about seven hundred refugees were staying in the village on relief from three merchant associations.

Where is On Lok Tsuen?

On Lok Tsuen lies north of Wong Kong Shan in Fanling, east of the Sha Tau Kok Road, in the North District of the New Territories of Hong Kong.