As Hong Kong builds its new, 30,000-hectare housing and technology hub, Ilaria Maria Sala considers the human and ecological costs
“I don’t know where I am going to go. We will see, I guess,” says Wong Hung-kuen, the owner of the last large sawmill in Hong Kong, now in his seventies, as he looks towards the cranes that are helping to build the urbanisation megaproject Northern Metropolis. He tells me this while sitting on a little chair he has crafted out of repurposed wooden streetlight poles, discarded when Hong Kong switched to metal ones, and which are now piled high in the large yard of his sawmill, which Wong, and his father before him, have kept running for 75 years. “Also, who will take care of these dogs?” he asks, caressing one of the strays he feeds.
Jack Pong, a third-generation artisanal soy sauce manufacturer, looks at the vats used to ferment beans on the rooftop of his factory and shakes his head. “It is not easy these days to find a place for a soy sauce factory. Even if you produce just a limited amount, you need the space for the soy sauce vats to be sunned, and that is difficult to find in Hong Kong these days,” he explains. Both Pong and Wong live in Kwu Tung, near the border with Shenzhen, in a very green area that has been undergoing significant redevelopment since 2023.
This new ‘metropolis’ is being described by the government as a ‘technology hub’ that will expand across 30,000 hectares and include the (already existing) areas of Tin Shui Wai, Yuen Long and Fanling/Sheung Shui, to which will be added a generous portion of rural and semirural land, in what today are the settlements of Kwu Tung North/Fanling North, Hung Shui Kiu/Ha Tsuen and Yuen Long South. It is one of the most ambitious construction projects undertaken by the Hong Kong government to date, integrating existing areas and carrying out a fair amount of demolition to create a whole new city.
The reason for all of this is to further incorporate Hong Kong into the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, with the aim of turning northern Hong Kong and Shenzhen into something of a seamless urban expanse. Such development projects sit within a grander initiative to make nine southern Chinese cities, including Hong Kong and Macao, as integrated as possible – subject to technology, new infrastructures and the disappearance of civic and political opposition.
Kwu Tung is currently a small village around which local industries operate (the large sawmill, a couple of artisanal soy sauce producers, organic farms, small restaurants and so on) and which has a particular charm. An abandoned old brick school, painted in red and yellow, and a former wet market space give a vintage air to Shek Tsai Leng alley: it is one of those out-of-the-way Hong Kong spots where the more you look, the more stories you find. They seem to pop out from the wrought iron gates from which old toys hang like improbable scarecrows. An old railway in the vicinity, no longer active, used to take workers to nearby factories, before such buildings were relocated to places across the border. Just a stone’s throw from here, if you strain your neck just a little, you will see Shenzhen’s skyscrapers on one side, and on the other, the skyscrapers to come, alluded to by the cranes digging the red earth to lay their foundations.
A mix of rural and semiurban areas will be affected by the soon-to-be constructed parts of the Northern Metropolis. One part used to be a green belt between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, in which a number of rare animal species had found a natural habitat. It is expected that the Mai Po Nature Reserve will now be further sandwiched between high-density areas and even more highways, as well as the San Tin Technopole for innovation and technology (a 600-hectare area designated as ‘a hub for clustered I&T development that creates synergy with Shenzhen I&T Zone’ by the Hong Kong Government). But people, too, of course, are going to be affected: the hundreds of farmers and workers who still live in this area do not have a representative voice in Hong Kong’s institutions, and their uncertain destiny is being treated as just a footnote in the grand plan.
A recent documentary by Hong Kong-based artist Daphné Mandel and photographer Guy Bertrand, Cha Guo (2024), sheds light on the lives of those who have been inhabiting Kwu Tung for generations – such as artist Sam Lui, who comes from a family of artisanal soy sauce makers and who created a wok-yielding persona called Wendy as a cooking alter ego, part of an ongoing performing arts project. There’s also seventy-two-year-old Kanny Au Chi-hung, a concrete master who has been producing fibreglass moulds and concrete spacers used for major infrastructure projects around the territory (including Chek Lap Kok International Airport and the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge, among many others). We’re shown the workshops of those who have been toiling here for decades, as well as agricultural projects like the organic dragon fruit farm founded by Yan Fu Qin in 2009, when she emigrated from Chongqing to marry a Hong Kong man from this very area. Most of the Kwu Tung residents still don’t know where they will live next, despite the cranes that are preparing the land for new skyscrapers getting closer and closer. The film takes a slow, loving look at the people who shaped Kwu Tung, inviting old ladies and community workers to speak and tell their stories.
Yet Hong Kong has changed so drastically since the National Security Law was introduced in 2020 that the whole documentary makes no mention of the fact that these people will have to move out very soon, nor does it mention the reason why. It remains an unspoken backdrop. Criticising the government, or being perceived as doing so, has now become such a zone of uncertainty that although many conversations in the city still take place, they are carried out with a tacit you-know-what-I-mean agreement. Of course we are talking about the Northern Metropolis. Of course it may bring benefits, but what of the local culture that it will forever delete? We don’t talk about these things anymore. At least, not like that; not like we used to.
When I went to Kwu Tung, the soy sauce manufacturer and the sawmill woodworker both told me, in their own ways, the usual story of Hongkongers being pushed to the outskirts of an ever-developing city. The sawmill was originally located in Hong Kong Island’s central Wan Chai neighbourhood when it first opened, during the early 1940s, then had to relocate to Chai Wan, on the Eastern edge of the island, and moved again a few times, finally ending up at the border with the mainland. The soy sauce manufacturer was first further south, in Tsuen Wan. When it moved to Kwu Tung it was able to occupy more land, but had to start putting the soy sauce vats on its rooftop as other buildings encroached. Each time, they were forced to move due to developments that were being planned, over people’s heads, by a government that had a vision and did not feel the need to ask its citizens for their opinion. Since the enforcement of the National Security Law, and the new requirement that only ‘patriots’ run for elections or work in the public sector, oppositional views have become increasingly restrained. And certainly not public enough to really discuss the need for, or the ongoing direction of, the Northern Metropolis, not to mention its impact on the human and natural habitats that it will forever alter.
Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist based in Hong Kong
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
