Tai O

A century ago this mostly Tanka village on the west coast of Lantau was an important trading and fishing port, exporting salt and fish to China. Today Tai O is in decline, except perhaps as a tourist destination offering an intriguing glimpse of the life of a traditional fishing village. A few of the saltpans still exist, but most have been filled in to build high-rise housing. Older people still make their living from duck farming, fishing, making the village’s celebrated shrimp paste and processing salt fish, which you’ll see (and smell) everywhere. It remains a popular place for locals to buy seafood – both fresh and dried. As recently as the 1980s Tai O also traded in IIs (illegal immigrants) brought from China under cover of darkness by ‘snakeheads’ (smugglers in human cargo) in long narrow boats, sending back contraband such as refrigerators, radios and TVs to the mainland. Tai O is built partly on Lantau and partly on a tiny island about 15m from the shore. Until the mid-1990s the only way to cross was via a rope-tow ferry pulled by elderly Hakka women. That and the large number of sampans in the small harbour earned Tai O the nickname ‘the Venice of Hong Kong’. Though the narrow iron Tai Chung footbridge now spans the canal, the rope-tow ferry is resurrected on some weekends and holidays: drop $1 in the box as you disembark. There are also brief river boat tours departing from the footbridge. Some of the tiny, traditional-style village houses still stand in the centre, including a handful of Tai O’s famed stilt houses on the waterfront. There are a few houses that escaped a fire in 2000, plus a number of shanties, their corrugated-iron walls held in place by rope, and houseboats that haven’t set sail for years. The stilt houses and the local Kwan Tai temple dedicated to the god of war are on Kat Hing St. To reach them, cross the bridge from the mainland to the island, walk up Tai O Market St and go right at the Fook Moon Lam restaurant. There’s a couple of other temples here, including an 18th- century one erected in honour of Hung Shing, patron of fisherfolk; it’s on Shek Tsai Po St, about 600m west of the Fook Lam Moon restaurant.