No Heritage Found on Map: The Vanishing Villages of Hong Kong
Two decades after its 1997 reversion to China, Hong Kong retains a singular global presence, shaped by British colonial legacies etched into its identity and landscape. The Small House Policy (SHP) of the New Territories, enacted in 1898, stands out as a peculiar vestige. In a city starved for land, it grants descendants of ‘original villagers’—mostly Hakka—the right at 18 to build a three-story, 2,100-square-foot house. Soaring urban housing costs have fueled a surge of these ‘village houses,’ often sold to city-dwelling ‘new villagers,’ swallowing former farmlands and erasing traditional Hakka ancestral homes. This visually driven study investigates this transformation in Hong Kong’s Northeastern New Territories, employing multimodal methods—observation, high-quality audio-visual documentation, collaborative creation, and joint analysis—to capture the shifting essence of village life and its cultural identity.
Relocating to Hong Kong in 2017 as a visual arts professor, I settled in a Ting Kok Road village, drawn by its natural respites akin to my Newfoundland upbringing. Daily commutes unveiled decaying ancestral homes amid banal modern villas, sparking this inquiry into their neglect and cultural significance. The SHP has catalysed profound change, replacing heritage with uniform ‘Spanish-style’ structures as traditional lands are sold off. This study spanned 26 villages along Ting Kok and Bride’s Pool Roads, with 21 case studies involving 50 interviews and extensive multimedia documentation. A 2018 pilot tested methods like ‘walking interviews’—informal tours guided by villagers—yielding rich visual data and candid insights. The three-year main study, funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, used lossless imagery, video, and in-situ elicitation with artefacts and landscapes to deepen narratives, despite pandemic delays.
The findings reveal a landscape reshaped by infrastructure—roads and the Plover Cove Reservoir ending centuries of farming, triggering migration, and fracturing Hakka language and practices like Qilin dances. Villagers recounted tangible losses: farmland submerged, homes modernised into beige-tiled uniformity devoid of cultural markers. Intangible erosion emerged too—generational disinterest threatens rituals like Cha Kwo making, preserved only by elders in rare instances. ‘Walking interviews’ uncovered poignant markers, like a typhoon-felled tree stump in Ha Hang, symbolising a lost seashore and childhood memories of fireflies. Migration, notably to the UK, left homes crumbling, maintained sporadically by returning elders. Government policies, from colonial water projects to the SHP, were blamed for both demise and preservation challenges, with villagers torn between heritage and modernity’s comforts. A June 2023 exhibition of over 400 curated images (selected from over 10,000), maps, and quotes illuminated these shifts, connecting villages’ past to their present flux. This study’s multimodal approach—prizing villagers as guides—revealed how visual changes signal deeper socio-cultural ruptures, urging recognition of a 500-year Hakka legacy fading beneath Hong Kong’s relentless modernisation.
For the full article and documentation of the exhibition, please visit:
McMaster, S. R. (2025). No heritage found on map: the vanishing villages of Hong Kong. Visual Studies, 1–17.
Assoc. Prof. Dr Scott McMaster
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)
Email: [email protected]