This 300-year-old farming village was abandoned in the 1960s. Now residents are moving back

By Rebecca Cairns, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — Surrounded by forest-covered mountains cloaked in mist, a patchwork quilt of green farmland and steel-blue waves breaking on mangrove-strewn mudflats, Lai Chi Wo does not look like it belongs in Hong Kong.

The remote 300-year-old village is one of the city’s oldest settlements — and one of its most biodiverse.

Its location is no accident: it draws on the traditional philosophies of the Hakka people, one of Hong Kong’s pre-colonial indigenous groups, who built the settlement.

“We maintain what is called a feng-shui forest, to preserve the village,” says Susan Wong. The 73-year-old grandmother is the village chief, and was born in Lai Chi Wo, when the town was home to around 1,000 residents. “From our ancestors to now, it has been passed down, not to let anyone cut down the trees. If you cut all the trees out, the mountain will become bare, and nothing can cover the village.”

Feng shui — which literally means “wind” and “water” — is a design philosophy about how homes, villages and cities should be arranged for good fortune.

In Lai Chi Wo, the position of the forest is intended to shelter the village from typhoons, prevent landslides, and manage extreme heat and cold.

However, in the 1960s, residents began to leave their ancestral home: Hong Kong was industrializing rapidly, and it was becoming hard to make a living from farming.

“We didn’t even have shoes or clothes to wear,” Wong recalls. Lai Chi Wo is so remote that, even today, it can only be reached by a three-hour hike through the jungle, or a long boat trip around the coast.

In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, many families emigrated overseas — like Wong’s, who moved to the UK when she was 15 — for better opportunities, and elderly residents passed away.

Lai Chi Wo became a ghost town.

Restoring a community

Over the decades that Lai Chi Wo lay empty, buildings crumbled, and farmland grew wild with weeds. The roots of banyan trees twined around open doorways, and wild boar or lost hikers were the only foot traffic through the decaying village.

But Lai Chi Wo was not entirely forgotten.

“Elsewhere in Hong Kong, many abandoned villages had houses collapsed beyond recognition and vegetation invaded the whole village,” says Chiu Ying Lam, head of the Hong Kong Countryside Foundation. However, when he first visited Lai Chi Wo in 2009, he was surprised to find several homes were well maintained.

Lam speculated that these absentee homeowners were still connected to their ancestral home, and were planning to return one day, perhaps to retire. This sparked an idea that would eventually become the Sustainable Lai Chi Wo program: a decade-long collaboration between NGOs, universities and government agencies to restore the village to its former glory.

In re-establishing the community, the unique biodiversity around the village could be protected too, says Lam.

Over the years, Lam estimates around HK$100 million ($12.8 million) in funding from businesses, non-profits and the Hong Kong government has been invested into the village’s redevelopment, including the restoration of five hectares of farmland and the reconstruction of 15 dilapidated homes.

While the project aimed to bring back former residents, it also wanted to bring in new people. In 2015, Ah Him Tsang and his wife, who are not Hakka, were one of the first families to move to the village, looking for a life “closer to nature” to raise their then-infant son.

Like many residents in Lai Chi Wo, Tsang works a variety of jobs: he grows vegetables and cash crops on a small farm, and on weekends, runs “Hakka Experience” homestays and a store that serves locally grown tea, coffee, and homemade vegan ice cream to tourists who pass through.

“I also grow these vegetables for my staycation program, (for a) farm-to-table dining experience,” says Tsang, adding that the Hakka Experience is designed to give visitors a more authentic experience of village life. “You can really feel the quietness, the serenity of the nature here. I hope more people can stay longer and enjoy the slow pace.”

Homecoming

The influx of new residents to Lai Chi Wo encouraged more of the original residents to move back, too.

Upon retiring, Wong returned to Hong Kong from the UK to care for her elderly parents, and heard about the revitalization project.

In 2019, she decided to return to the village with her now-103-year-old father, into the home they were both born in. “I’m very happy because I like this village. I have so many friends (who have) come back,” she says.

With her father, Wong runs a small farm, growing mandarin oranges, lemons, chilis, flowers, and vegetables, and uses organic agriculture techniques, such as grinding up discarded oyster shells to make plant food.

The project also introduced new crops like coffee, which grows in the shade. This agroforestry technique protects the forest by growing high-value plants around the perimeter of the native woodland, while boosting profits for farmers.

Lai Chi Wo now has around 700 coffee plants across several farms, making it the “biggest coffee-producing region in Hong Kong,” says Ryan Siu Him Leung, senior project officer at the Centre for Civil Society and Governance at the University of Hong Kong, which oversaw parts of Lai Chi Wo’s revitalization program.

The University of Hong Kong is leasing some of the land for experimental farming, and helping villagers turn their crops into higher-value products in a licensed food processing plant in nearby Sha Tau Kok, on Hong Kong’s border with mainland China. Products include pickles and unusual fruit jams, or seasonal foods like popular radish cake for Chinese New Year, says Leung.

“We’re also looking at traditional Hakka recipes, and trying to explore the possibility of turning those recipes into commercial products,” he says, adding that they are currently selling via local supermarket suppliers and pop-up farmers markets, and plan to launch an online shop soon, to reach more customers.

A model for redevelopment

While the project has garnered positive attention — including recognition from UNESCO in 2020 for cultural heritage conservation and sustainable development — it’s not all been smooth sailing.

There’s been resistance from some of the original villagers, who claim they were not properly consulted about the redevelopment.

Additionally, more than a decade into the project, the village is still not financially sustainable, and is supported by external funding, including government subsidies for the farmers.

Farming at such a small scale is largely unprofitable; so like Tsang, most residents have multiple income streams. Leung says that most of the new residents work remote jobs online, or in creative industries, with farming as a hobby where any income is a bonus.

Leung says that, aside from preserving the town’s traditional lifestyle, there’s an ecological advantage to maintaining the farmland: sustainable agriculture helps to better manage water drainage and improve soil health.

Even if the village isn’t economically independent, he feels it’s worthwhile, and that cultivating a sustainable community is more important. “As long as there are people willing to stay in the village, and they are making their living — to me, it’s financially viable for those individual households.”

The project has become a model for sustainable revitalization, and the Forest Village Project, launched in 2024, is applying the lessons from Lai Chi Wo to two nearby hamlets, Mui Tsz Lam and Kop Tong. These settlements are around one-tenth the size of Lai Chi Wo, says Leung, but they both have a feng shui woodland, diverse flora and fauna, and offer the potential to develop a wider eco-tourism destination.

“Hopefully, we could have a more comprehensive region of revitalized villages, which (could be) a bigger attraction to the wider (Hong Kong) community,” Leung adds.

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