Wong Chuk Shan village [????- ]

Wong Chuk Shan - Yellow Bamboo Mountain.

We passed the remains of this village yesterday. It is on an old boulder trackway that is still in good condition, and the many stone terraces in the area are also in good condition.

There's nothing to see on the modern map above, but if we switch to the 1952 map, the village was one of the larger villages in the area. James Hayes, in his notes on the village from the mid-1950s, recorded 133 people living there. He wrote "apart from farming, the main occupation of the men seems to be the construction business. Several employ their own relatives and other male villagers from the Sai Kung area, and travel around the New Territories building houses." Source, p.19 in Beyond the Metropolis: Villages in Hong Kong.

Those construction skills help explain the good condition of the paths and walls around the village. However, Hayes also gives the villagers' reliance on construction work as a reason for them abandoning the village: "[The inhabitants moved away] and it became completely abandoned in the 1970s. The death-knell of the village was the switch to concrete rather than the traditional stone and brick houses, rendering the village's artisan skills no longer wanted."

I don't think they moved far though, as if you follow the trail from here to Sai Kung, the first modern houses you meet on the outskirts of Sai Kung are in an area called the Wong Chuk Shan New Village.