Where old Kowloon starts
Yau Ma Tei is a working district, and its name explains it: the land in front of the Tin Hau Temple was where fishermen dried and repaired their rope, and the shops that sold the tung oil and the hemp for the job gave the area its name. Almost none of that survives, but the temple does, and the street it produced is still the most famous night market in the city.
The Tin Hau Temple
The temple was built in 1865 by the local boat-dwelling community, when this was still the shoreline; in 1870 residents formed the Yau Ma Tei Five Districts association and rebuilt it. The typhoon of 1874 damaged it badly, and after that the colonial government granted the present site and the rebuilt temple was finished in 1878. It was declared a monument in 2020. The square in front of it is known as the Banyan Tree Head, and it is the reason everything around it exists.
Temple Street
The street appears on a map of Kowloon as early as 1887, when it was two streets - Temple North Street and Temple South Street - divided by the temple; the modern name is simply the two joined. From the 1920s the square outside the temple grew into a night market of the dai dat dei kind, selling household goods, clothes and food. In 1968 the plan to put a community centre on the square was resisted by more than two hundred hawkers, and the compromise was to allocate marked pitches nearby by ballot. In March 1975 the Urban Council declared a hawkers' permitted area along the street - the first street in Hong Kong zoned for night trading - with close to six hundred pitches, and the market has run from about two in the afternoon until midnight ever since.
It is called Men's Street, for the obvious reason, and the poor man's nightclub, which is a more accurate description: claypot rice and seafood at the stalls, curry fish balls and noodles standing up, fortune tellers set out in a row along the temple's south wall, and Cantonese opera sung by amateurs in the corner of the square. The covered market stalls open in the afternoon, so we run this walk in the afternoon or evening when the group wants the market at full pitch.
The jade market
At the corner of Kansu Street and Battery Street, under a covered roof, several hundred stalls sell jade of every quality, along with pearls and semi-precious stone. Prices are negotiated and the buyer should know what they are looking at; your guide will tell you honestly what a piece is likely to be.
Kowloon Walled City Park
The Walled City was the densest place on earth, a Chinese enclave inside the colony whose legal status was unsettled for a century, and it was demolished between 1987 and 1994. The park that replaced it opened on 22 December 1995 and covers 3.1 hectares, laid out as a Jiangnan garden - quite deliberately, a park of water, rock and quiet where a city had been. It was built between May 1994 and August 1995 by craftsmen brought from the mainland.
Cultural Insight
The excavation that preceded the landscaping produced the single best find in the site's history: the two granite plaques from the South Gate, inscribed Nan Men and Kowloon Walled City, which residents had taken down and buried in 1942 rather than see them taken away during the occupation. The wall foundations, the drains, a stone-slab street, three cannons, stone beams, couplets and column bases were recovered too, and the three-hall yamen was restored as the exhibition hall. The park was chosen over housing for a practical reason: the site was too close to the Kai Tak runway, and the district had almost no open space at all.
Two hours on foot, with a Cantonese lunch - claypot rice if the hour is right, otherwise a cha chaan teng - in the middle of it.
Meals
Lunch (Cantonese)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
