Stilt houses over a tidal creek on western Lantau, built by a boat-dwelling people who have largely stopped living on boats.
Tai O sits at the western tip of Lantau, where a tidal creek runs inland between hills. It is the last substantial stilt-house village in Hong Kong.
The houses — pang uk — are built on timber piles over the water, connected by walkways, with boats moored beneath. Several hundred remain.
The Tanka
The village was settled by the Tanka, a boat-dwelling people of southern China who lived on their vessels and were for centuries excluded from land ownership, from the imperial examinations and from marriage with land-dwellers.
They moved ashore progressively through the twentieth century, and the stilt houses are the intermediate step — a home over water for people who had always lived on it.
The Hoklo are the other traditional fishing community here.
A fire in 2000 destroyed around ninety stilt houses. Most were rebuilt, some in metal rather than timber, which is why the village is a mixture.
What Tai O does
Shrimp paste — ha jeung — fermented in the sun in open vats along the creek, and the smell reaches you before the village does. It is a serious local industry and the paste is sold everywhere.
Salted fish, dried seafood, dried scallops, and salted egg yolks, hanging and drying in every doorway.
What to do
Walk the village — it is small, and an hour covers it. The drawbridge over the creek, rebuilt in 1996, is the centre.
Boat tours run from the creek: twenty minutes through the stilt houses and out into the estuary to look for Chinese white dolphins — the pink dolphins of the Pearl River. Sightings are not guaranteed and the population has declined severely with development and traffic in the estuary. Operators are honest about the odds; some are not.
Yim Tin Temple and Kwan Tai Temple are both small and old.
Tai O Heritage Hotel, the former marine police station of 1902, restored and open — you can visit the rooftop and the small exhibition without staying.
The Fu Shan Viewing Point is a fifteen-minute climb for the view back over the village and out to the Pearl estuary, where the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge is now visible.
Getting there
Bus 11 from Tung Chung MTR, about 50 minutes on a winding coastal road.
Bus 21 from Ngong Ping, twenty minutes, which is how to combine it with the Big Buddha.
A ferry runs from Tuen Mun at weekends.
Practicalities
Free. Busy on Sundays and public holidays; quiet on a weekday.
Take cash — many stalls do not take Octopus.
It is genuinely a working village and people live in the houses. Photograph the buildings rather than through their windows.
