Standing on the top of Robin’s Nest, gazing afar, the Chinese border area and the British one doesn’t exist anymore. Mass building works on one side, and high-rise buildings on the other. Gradually one could not distinguish which side was leased.

After re-establishing the border, a huge number of Hakka people flushed into the New Territories reshuffled the traditional clan influence to an extent that even the feng shui burial places tied to a clan’s rise and fall were neglected. Villages competed for natural resources leading to sporadic armed conflicts. The weak and small villages thus formed alliances to resist the large clans by offering sacrifices to the same god.

In 1894, the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War sent the great powers into a frenzy for their lion’s shares. The British took this opportunity to lease the New Territories for 99 years and extended its territory from Boundary Street northward to the south of the Shenzhen River. In terms of population, natural resources, and land resources, the Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong Island were pale compared to the new crown land.

The British took the new land seriously and sent James Stewart Lockhart, Registrar-General of Hong Kong, to survey it. The British government even held a flag-raising ceremony to commemorate its take-over of the New Territories, but the local villagers met it with fierce resistance. The British army quickly quelled this “war” with its superior armament, and the anti-British leaders absconded. The villagers could only pay homage to their anti-British martyrs in a low-key manner.

Before World War II, the boundaries between China and Britain were clear, and the people of the two places came and went freely. Hong Kong’s rapid surge in population coerced its urban area to expand northward. Some of the leased lands became the New Kowloon, and the New Territories was regarded as a buffer zone.

After the liberation of Hong Kong from the Japanese occupation, political upheavals sent an enormous number of refugees pouring into Hong Kong, making it imperative to develop the New Territories. The situation also left the Hong Kong government with no choice but to cordon off part of the borderland as a buffer zone. In 1997, the leased New Territories was returned to its motherland with the two pieces of land ceded, rendering the restricted zone losing its original function. For the people of Hong Kong, this unfamiliar piece of land is now facing earth-shaking changes.

Assistant Executive Director at The Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage. He obtained his PhD at the Research Institute of Chinese Literature and History at Chu Hai College of Higher Education, Hong Kong. He is also a Board Member at the Society of Hong Kong History, and published numerous academic and educational works.