Boat dwellers and maritime heritage in Hong Kong: coming ashore to Yue Kwong Chuen (Fishing Lights Estate)

ABSTRACT

Hong Kong’s cultural heritage and tourism offerings include several prominent symbols and legacies drawn from the waters that surround it, including dragon boat racing, Tin Hau temples honouring the Goddess of the sea, and iconic junk boats sailing on the harbour. Within the growing field of Hong Kong heritage studies, however, there has been little work addressing these and other aspects of its maritime past. This paper addresses this contradiction, of the simultaneous presence and absence of maritime heritage. It does so by considering the story of the ‘coming ashore’ (上岸) of people who lived on boats in the fishing centre of Aberdeen on the south side of Hong Kong Island. In the 1960s, many of them moved into Yue Kwong Chuen, an early public housing estate which is now being redeveloped. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, we consider the significance of the estate as an important example of the heritage of public housing that sheds light on the status of boat dwellers, excluded for centuries in South China, and their eventual incorporation into land-based society. The paper contributes new insights on collective memory and identity formation in Hong Kong under and after colonial rule.

KEYWORDS:

• Maritime heritage
• Hong Kong
• public housing
• colonial governance
• collective memory

Acknowledgement

We thank the interviewees for sharing their time and stories and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This term is also used to denote rural migrants in mainland China (Li 2001). Here, it refers only to people literally living in boats floating on the water.

2. According to a government report in 1883, although opium smuggling was not a widespread phenomenon in Aberdeen, the illegal transport of salt, especially during the southeast monsoon season, was common. To address this the Aberdeen police stepped up monitoring of boats in Aberdeen’s waters. (Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1884, 11–12).

3. To respect the privacy of participants, interviews are cited in-text with a title (Ms. or Mr.), an initial, the date of the interview and, where appropriate, demographic information.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lachlan Barber

Lachlan Barber is an independent scholar who conducts research on cultural heritage and mobilities in Hong Kong and Canada. He lived and worked in Hong Kong from 2015 to 2022.

Po-Yin Stephanie Chung

Po Yin Stephanie Chung is Professor in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on socio-economic history and heritage, including the histories of businesses, migration and transnational enterprises in South China and Southeast Asia.