Perched on the hillside in the west of Hong Kong Island is the 200-year-old Pokfulam Village, home to the city’s first dairy farm. As one of the cultural heritage sites at risk listed in the 2014 World Monuments Watch, the village was first mentioned in the Xinan County Journal during the Kangxi period in 1819. Today, it is still famed for its Fire Dragon Dance held every Mid-Autumn Festival, with its incense-lit dragons believed to have driven away a plague over a century ago.

Nigel Ko, member of the Pokfulam Village Cultural Landscape Conservation Group, says the shabby tin-roofed huts are home to numerous stories of community and kindness, but the true history of the village remains a mystery after all these years.

“Unlike the rural villages in the New Territories where ancestral halls are dedicated to surname lineages or families, Pokfulam Village has no such documentation,” Ko says. His family has lived in the village for four generations since his great-grandfather settled here in 1889. As one of the oldest villages in Hong Kong, Pokfulam Village literally means “the forest of Pok-fu,” with Pok-fu referring to a bird inhabiting the nearby reservoir.

Ko considers the centuries-old village a historical and cultural treasure worth exploring. “According to oral history, Cheung Po Tsai, a famous pirate of the Qing Dynasty, operated his piracy business from Lamma Island while helping villagers on this side to build houses. When Cheung accepted an amnesty offer from the Qing government, some of his gang members might have stayed and settled in the village.”

The village is also unique for the heritage remains of a dairy farm set up by Scottish surgeon Patrick Manson in 1886. The farm, once stretching from the village to Queen Mary Hospital, had employed many inhabitants to take care of the 80 cows imported from Britain for daily supplies of fresh milk.

The hidden entrance to Cowshed No. 8, an area composed of an abandoned grassland, a water tank and a manure pit, has now been blocked by fallen trees. Ko needs to wave around a sickle as he treads a path. “This is the last and biggest remaining manure pit, but its roof had already collapsed due to lack of maintenance. It was used to store cow dung to be fermented into fertilizer.” The other side of the hill, with a 270-degree view of Lamma Island, is the other side of the cowshed and grassland for feeding and pasturing of cattle.

Another historic building closeby is the Old Dairy Farm Senior Staff Quarters on the right of Béthanie. Built in 1887, it was listed as a Grade One Historic Building by the Antiquities and Monuments Office in 2009 and is expected to be revitalized into a living museum latest this year in a bid to revive dairy farming in Hong Kong.

Apart from the dairy farm, Pokfulam Village is renowned for its Fire Dragon Dance tradition which made the 2017 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Hong Kong. Alun Siu, founder of the Pokfulam Fire Dragon Dance Group, says the whole event consists of the crafting of straw-filled fire dragons, the performances of consecration and signature dance through different spots of the neighborhood to drive away bad luck and plague.

The dragon dance is usually an opportunity for many former residents to revisit the village and meet friends. However, the large-scale parade was downsized last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ceremony was closed to the public and only four dancers were permitted to handle the dragon skeletons and tour around the village.

The village’s vegetable garden used to be a piece of abandoned farmland, until some female villagers took the initiative to restore it in 2013. Equipped with a cast iron wok and stone mill donated by senior residents, the area has become a communal space for growing turnips and making festival delicacies such as sticky rice dumplings and Lunar New Year deep-fried snacks.

While families meet here and share their respective hometown recipes, the Teochew-style home-cooked cuisine prepared by villagers stands out. A villager surnamed WahShe first pan-fries julienned Chinese celery, pork, turnip, dried mushrooms and preserved cabbages and mixes them together, before pouring a rice flour mixture over. Once the mixture is cooked in a fully heated wok, she skillfully scraps the rice pastry out with a spatula. The silky yet crispy pastry, topped with garnishes like pickled cabbages, is a new year’s special for visiting guests.

Generations of villagers are kept together as the old traditions converse with new habits, but the place has its share of problems that threaten to tear them apart. For instance, with no sewage system in place, wastes from the village are discharged through the streams to the Waterfall Bay. The missing sewage system has also resulted in the easy flooding of low-lying spots in the village.

Ko, whose group formerly helped villagers with their sewage issues, notes how long-standing squatter policies have contributed to the village’s problems. “When the refugees from mainland China decided to live here, they took shelter in the tin-roofed huts on the hill, and registered themselves as squatter occupants,” he says. “Wood and tin have been the only allowed building materials until today. Moreover, with demolition rumors circulating regularly, most villagers have never thought of spending money on repair work.”

Despite all these problems, the village’s cultural heritage – the Fire Dragon Dance, the farmland, and the dairy farm – are what Ko hopes to protect and defend. “Our conservation work may not be able to stop the demolition, but we will maximize whatever resources we have to record our predecessors’ wisdom and cultures as long as we can,” says Ko, the fourth generation of Pokfulam Village.

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