Tai O

Where it sits. Tai O occupies the far western tip of Lantau Island, where the Tai O River splits into a northern arm, called Tai O Creek, and a western arm, leaving a small island in the fork that the village is partly built on. The name means large inlet. Two pedestrian bridges cross the water, and the settlement runs along both banks in a tangle of lanes barely two metres wide. Looking west from the seawall, you are facing the mouth of the Pearl River and, on a clear day, the coast of Guangdong; the outer, seaward faces of the island are uninhabited. It is about an hour by bus from Tung Chung, which puts it a very long way psychologically from the airport eight kilometres to the north.

Salt, smuggling and stilts. Archaeological sites nearby go back to the Stone Age, but continuous settlement here is roughly three centuries old, dating from 1669 when the coastal evacuation of the Great Clearance was lifted and Tai O was among five Lantau villages resettled. Before that, the Portuguese briefly held ground here during the Battle of Tamão in the early sixteenth century, remembered in the place name Fan Kwai Tong. A fort was built at nearby Fan Lau in 1729 to police shipping in the Pearl River estuary, and the creeks made Tai O a natural base for smuggling, which has never entirely stopped. The village was primarily a Tanka boat-dwellers' settlement under British rule, later joined by Hoklo and Hakka families and, after 1949, by people crossing the border from the mainland. Salt was the industry: the pans covered some seventy acres in 1940 and produced over 1,500 tonnes in 1938. Fishing sustained the village afterwards, and is now essentially finished as a livelihood. The signature pang uk stilt houses — corrugated iron and timber on posts driven into the tidal mud, linked by narrow walkways — are what remain, rebuilt many times, most recently after a fire destroyed a large number of them in July 2000.

On screen. Lantau has never carried much of Hong Kong's film history, which is concentrated on the urban north shore and in Kowloon, and Tai O's screen record is honest to that: it is a location that turns up in television drama, documentary and advertising far more often than in features, used when a production needs a Hong Kong that is unmistakably local and unmistakably not the city. What Tai O offers a camera is a set of textures the urban locations cannot — water under floorboards, drying racks, rusted iron, tidal light — and Hong Kong crews have used it that way for decades. For visitors following the cinema of Hong Kong rather than the industry's back catalogue, the interest here is contextual: this is the fishing-village Hong Kong that the city's post-war films were leaving behind, and it is one of the few places you can still stand in it.

What you actually see today. The heritage inventory is unusually dense for a village this size. The Yeung Hau Temple of 1699 is a declared monument. Kwan Tai Temple on Kat Hing Back Street dates from 1741 and the Tin Hau Temple attached to its left from 1772; Hung Shing Temple on Shek Tsai Po Street was built in 1746. The Old Tai O Police Station, a graded colonial building of 1902 on the hill above the harbour, was converted in 2012 into a nine-room heritage hotel with a public exhibition area and a rooftop terrace that gives the best overview of the village. Along Kat Hing Street the shops sell what Tai O still produces: shrimp paste fermented in tubs, salted fish and dried seafood hanging in the open air, and shrimp-paste-flavoured everything aimed at day trippers. Small boats run twenty-minute trips out of the creek to look for Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, the pink dolphins of the estuary, whose numbers in Hong Kong waters have fallen sharply.

Getting there. From Tung Chung station, bus 11 runs to Tai O in about fifty minutes on a winding south Lantau road with long sea views; bus 21 connects from Ngong Ping, so the standard day combines the Big Buddha with Tai O. A ferry links Tai O to Tuen Mun and Sha Lo Wan at weekends. Coming by bus and leaving by ferry, or the reverse, is the most interesting itinerary. The village is walkable end to end in half an hour, but two to three hours does it justice.

Timing and conditions. October to March is dry, cool and clear. Summer is hot, humid and the typhoon season, and Tai O is exposed enough that storms have historically done real damage. Weekends bring heavy day-trip crowds onto lanes that cannot absorb them; a weekday visit is a different village. Late afternoon light down the creek, with the stilt houses backlit, is the best of the day. The main streets are flat, but they are narrow, uneven and crowded, and the bridges and boat piers involve steps.