The last remaining walled village in Kowloon went up in flames overnight amid a years-long disagreement over redevelopment plans.
A store containing metal and wooden objects ignited at around 4am on Tuesday at Nga Tsin Wai Tsuen. The walled village has a history of around 600 years. Flames reached up to five metres in height and affected nearby houses and stores.
The Fire Services Department said that there were no suspicious circumstances and no one was evacuated. The inferno was extinguished within an hour.
Redevelopment plans for the village in Wong Tai Sin commenced in 2007. The Urban Renewal Authority (URA), which is responsible for the project, aimed to redevelop the site into a “conservation park”, whereby three relics of the village would be preserved. However, some villagers refused to accept compensation and leave.
One villager was quoted by Apple Daily as saying that he was suspicious of the cause of the fire.
“It was raining the whole night, there is no reason that a cigarette bud could have caused this,” said the villager, surnamed Ng.
He claimed that the incident may be related to the government’s ongoing acquisition of the village for redevelopment.
Most of the residents of the village moved out before the fire. The URA wrote on the project information page that only one-third of the village houses were left and that they were “very decrepit”. It noted “illegal occupations surrounding the project boundaries”.
The project was delayed as not all villagers accepted a deal with the URA. In 2013 one villager, who was born and raised in the village, refused to leave, saying the URA had not arranged relocation compensation for him. “Do they want me to sleep on streets?” he asked.
A group of remaining residents recently posted on their Facebook page that they had been receiving “Writ of Possession” notices from court bailiffs. The letters demanded they leave by July and stated that the writ would be executed by bailiffs on September 7.
Walled villages are traditional groups of structures built by Hong Kong indigenous people who settled in the New Territories and Kowloon after the Song Dynasty. Many walled villages are literally surrounded by a walls as a defensive measure. Nga Tsin Wai Tsuen’s protective wall is the only one formed from the outer walls of the houses within it.
It is the last remaining village of the “Kowloon League of Seven”, a defensive union of seven villages formed to guard against pirates and bandits, according to a LegCo document citing the government’s Antiquities and Monuments Office.
Image via Apple Daily.
