About the Collection

There were a good deal of villages in Hong Kong. The villagers’ livelihood mainly depended on agriculture such as cultivating rice and vegetables. Others worked in farming livestock, fishery or quarrying.

Almost all of these old villages have vanished. While many of these villages managed to weather predicaments over the centuries including the sea ban during the Qing Dynasty and the razing of villages by the Japanese military during the Occupation Period, they went crumbled at the hands of urbanisation.

The Map Library, Hong Kong Central Library held the exhibition “The Vanished Villages” in 2018. The exhibition tells the many stories of these villages that were scattered in different parts of Hong Kong. Some were removed to make way for public housing to accommodate the influx of post war refugees, while some others were torn down for infrastructure development.

This collection presents the contents of the above mentioned exhibition and old photos collected by the Map Library, to record some of the vanished villages. Setting the past landscape side by side with the present, readers might learn more about the changes of Hong Kong and its people.