Hong Kong's Mountains: A Hiking Map of Trails, History, and Urban Memory

Not climbing the mountains so much as using them to get to know Hong Kong again

The first time I walked the MacLehose Trail was last November. Getting off the minibus at the Pak Tam Chung trailhead, the temperature was twenty-three degrees, and the sea breeze poured in from the inner waters of Sai Kung, pressing the backpack straps flat against my ribs. About forty minutes into the first stage, after rounding the dam of High Island Reservoir, the whole of Sai Wan slowly opened up—the granite jointing as clean as if sliced by a knife, distant Po Pin Chau glowing white under the sun. In that moment I realized that this city, famous for being crowded, expensive, and high-density, actually has 70% of its land empty.

That 70% is not a natural figure; it is a political legacy. On August 13, 1976, Governor Murray MacLehose signed the Country Parks Ordinance into effect, and within three years carved out 21 country parks in one sweep, covering roughly 40% of Hong Kong’s land area—later expanded to nearly 50%, and together with other protected and undeveloped land, the overall green coverage reached 70%. For 1970s Asia this was avant-garde. At the same time Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul were still building houses on their hills, but Hong Kong drew its most valuable 1,500-meter ridgelines into a no-build zone with a single stroke of the pen. Today we can climb Lantau Peak at three in the morning to watch the sunrise, drink a signal-free cold beer at Tai Long Sai Wan, walk thirty minutes from the heart of Hong Kong Island into the native forest below Victoria Peak—all of it the lingering shade of that one signature in 1976.

More ingeniously, two governors turned the mountains into their own political totems. During MacLehose’s term (1971–1982) he pushed the Ten-Year Housing Programme, established the ICAC, and steered the handover negotiations; before leaving office he left behind the 100 km MacLehose Trail, his name nailed directly onto the ridgeline. His successor Edward Youde died in office during his term; the next governor, David Wilson, was himself a mountaineer and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 1992, four years after he left office, Hong Kong opened the 78 km Wilson Trail. Of Hong Kong’s four longest trails, two are named after governors—something for which it is nearly impossible to find a second example anywhere in the world. The mountains here are not neutral nature; they are institutions with names written onto them.

The notes that follow are not arranged by geography but by three kinds of narrative: first, the trails the colonial governors built (the four long-distance “Four Trails”), about how institutions turned mountains into footpaths; second, the city’s spiritual symbols (Lion Rock, Victoria Peak, Tai Mo Shan), about how mountains were painted over and over by TV dramas, pop songs, and coronation rituals into a kind of collective mood; third, the boundary between war and the everyday (the Pat Sin Leng fire, the Dragon’s Back sunset, Tsz Shan Monastery), about how mountains carry the emotions this city never said out loud. This piece covers the first kind.

Part I · The Trails the Colonial Governors Built

Hong Kong’s “Four Trails” total 298 km, spread across the 17 years from 1979 to 1996. If you overlay them on a map in the order they opened, you notice something: this is not hiking planning, this is the physical sediment of institutional history. The MacLehose Trail is the monument to the 1976 ordinance; the Hong Kong Trail is the olive branch the colonial government extended to urban residents in the 1980s; the Lantau Trail is the turning point of Lantau Island shifting from military exclusion zone to tourist area; the Wilson Trail is the last signature on the eve of the 1990s handover. Each corresponds to a political judgment of its time; what we walk today is a footpath, but what’s paved beneath our feet is an archive.

MacLehose Trail (1979)

Length: 100 km · Stages: 10 · Opened: October 26, 1979 · Named after: the 25th Governor, Murray MacLehose; Hong Kong’s first long-distance trail.

MacLehose moved from Scottish diplomat to Governor in 1971. When he arrived, Hong Kong’s per-capita living space was 3.5 square meters, corruption was rampant, and ordinary people barely went up the mountains—the hills were the domain of illegal squatter settlements, smuggling, British army firing ranges, and cemeteries. In his 11 years he did three things that rewrote Hong Kong: the Ten-Year Housing Programme (1973, promising public housing for 1.8 million people within a decade), the founding of the ICAC (1974, in the aftermath of the Godber case), and the Country Parks Ordinance of 1976. The first two were about livelihood and rule of law; the third, to outsiders, seemed almost off-topic—why would a governor facing a population explosion suddenly turn to managing mountains?

MacLehose’s calculation was in fact very practical. In the early 1970s, the rural population of the New Territories was rapidly draining away, the hill slopes around reservoir catchments were left unguarded, and wildfires, illegal logging, and unauthorized dumping were spiraling out of control. If the hill land were not given legal status, the urban expansion of the 1980s would sooner or later swallow these hilltops. The ordinance was a preemptive land enclosure—in the name of country parks, it shut off the development potential of the next 50 years in advance. From a real-estate logic it cut off a revenue stream; from an urban-planning view it was the gamble of the century—and today it has proven to be the right bet.

On October 26, 1979, the Governor personally walked the first stage of the trail he had named himself, from Pak Tam Chung to Tai Long Wan. The full 100 km begins at Pak Tam Chung in northern Sai Kung and runs west over Ma On Shan, Tate’s Cairn, Lion Rock, Beacon Hill, Tai Mo Shan, and Tai Lam Chung, ending at Tuen Mun. There are 10 stages, each 8–16 km, with markers numbered M001–M200, one every 500 meters. In 2012, National Geographic listed it among the “Best Hikes of a Lifetime” (its 20 best hikes worldwide), one of only a few in Asia to make the cut.

The part of the whole trail that deserves a closer look is Stage 2. From Pak Tam Au it crosses Chek Keng and presses south into the Four Bays of Tai Long—Sai Wan, Ham Tin Wan, Tai Wan, and Tung Wan—four east-facing crescent beaches strung in a line, with the sharp conical peak of Sharp Peak behind and the boundless South China Sea ahead. This stretch is about 13.5 km, markers M021–M048, and it is the deepest impression ninety percent of Hongkongers have of the words “MacLehose Trail.” The white sand and black rock contrast is unique to this place: the sand in the bays is the pure white of deep-sea quartz weathering, while the basalt and granite jointing exposed on the headlands soaks ink-dark in seawater at high tide. From the air it reads like an alternating black-and-white keyboard. In 1996 a developer almost bought Tai Long Sai Wan to build a resort; after the affair surfaced in 2010 the government urgently listed it as “designated land,” writing it into the planning framework—this is the very work that the 1976 ordinance is still doing.

The most iconic little slice of Stage 2 is at Ham Tin Wan: in the very middle of the bay a bamboo bridge crosses the brackish boundary at the river mouth, and at low tide the whole horseshoe-shaped intertidal flat is exposed beneath it, walking barefoot across it is fine sand clinging to your soles; the “Hing Kee Store” at the head of the bridge has been open since the 1980s, the owner’s surname is Ho, and the fridge behind the counter is forever stocked with frozen Tsingtao and Blue Girl. This is the most remote convenience store in all of Hong Kong—a two-hour mountain walk from the nearest road.

Another stretch worth describing in detail is Stage 4. Setting out from Gilwell Camp (built in 1957, the ancestral camp of the Scout Association of Hong Kong), it runs along Buffalo Hill via Ma On Shan’s Ngong Ping to Tate’s Cairn, about 12.7 km in total, markers M075–M104. The highlight is the Ma On Shan Ngong Ping plateau—about 400 meters in elevation, Hong Kong’s largest natural alpine meadow, where an eagle flying over drags a shadow behind it; continuing north along the ridge you reach the main peak of Ma On Shan (702 m), from whose summit you can take in Sai Kung’s waters and Tolo Harbour in one glance. This stage is also the first hard stretch of the Trailwalker.

The Trailwalker itself deserves a standalone mention. In 1981, the Gurkha units stationed in Hong Kong used the MacLehose Trail as an internal course for jungle-tracking training—a hundred kilometers carrying their own food and water, checkpoints within 48 hours. From 1986 the Gurkhas opened it to the public and, partnering with Oxfam, turned it into a charity fundraising event. Today, every November, more than four thousand four-person teams from across Hong Kong start at Pak Tam Chung, aiming to cover 100 km without sleep within 48 hours. The fastest record is 11 hours 11 minutes, set in 2019 (by a Salomon trail-running team). The mountains thus became a kind of collective marathon endurance ritual for Hongkongers, walked every year from one end of the city to the other.

On-the-ground info: The most iconic entry point for Stage 2 is Pak Tam Au—from MTR Diamond Hill Station Exit B1, take the 96R bus (weekends and public holidays only), or take the 92 bus from Kowloon Tong Station to Sai Kung and transfer to minibus 7 to the Pak Tam Au stop. The ideal departure time is 8:30–9:30 a.m.—good light, temperature still low, and arriving at Sai Wan by early afternoon just in time for lunch at Hing Kee. Supply points: Pak Tam Au (none) → Chek Keng (village houses occasionally sell water) → Sai Wan’s Hing Kee / Hoi Fung Store (lunch + cold beer) → Ham Tin Wan’s Uncle Ho’s store (dinner) → Cheung Uk village (Chek Keng pier is the disembarkation point for the return leg from High Junk Peak). The top photo spot is the position on the southeast ridge of Sharp Peak that takes in the full panorama of the Four Bays, marked near M032—light is softest around 3 p.m. Hard equipment point: do not walk Stage 2 from May to September—typhoon season plus rainstorms plus 38°C plus 100% humidity, this trail kills people every year because of it. The best season is November through the following March.

Wilson Trail (1996)

Length: 78 km · Stages: 10 · Opened: January 21, 1996 · Named after: the 27th Governor, David Wilson; the only trail in Hong Kong that runs the length of both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.

Wilson and MacLehose were two completely different governors. MacLehose was a diplomat by training, a workaholic, a fatalist; Wilson was a quiet China hand—his doctoral thesis studied the nineteenth-century British consular system in the Yangtze valley, he could speak Mandarin and Cantonese, and when he took office in 1986 he was only 51, the youngest governor at the time. The biggest troubles of his term were the political upheaval of 1989 and the new airport negotiations, but more worth mentioning is his personal “other side of the mountains”: he was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a hiker in his spare time, who had joined several mid-altitude Himalayan expeditions, and continued to hike Hong Kong’s trails every weekend during his governorship. In 1996, after he left office, the Friends of the Country Parks proposed naming a trail linking Hong Kong Island and the New Territories after him—and he himself set out from Stanley Gap Road and walked the first stage in person.

The full 78 km starts at Stanley Gap Road on the southern end of Hong Kong Island, crosses the island’s ridge to Tai Tam Reservoir above Causeway Bay, crosses the harbor to pick up again at Kowloon Bay, then heads north via Kowloon Peak, the western ridge of Ma On Shan, Tai Po Kau, and Pat Sin Leng, ending at Nam Chung (on the Sha Tau Kok Hoi side). There are 10 stages, each 6–11 km, markers W001–W156. Geographically it does something the MacLehose Trail cannot: it spans both Kowloon and the island—running all the way from the southern shore of Hong Kong Island to the southern bank of the Shenzhen River, walking the full geographic spine of the city.

The stage to focus on is Stage 8. This stage sets out from Kowloon Reservoir and crosses the main ridge of Pat Sin Leng (the eight peaks of Sin Ku, Cheung Sin, Choi Wo, Tsao Kau, Kuai Li, Kuo Lo, Chung Li, and Tung Pun), about 10.6 km in length, and is the stage with the greatest ascent of the whole trail—total cumulative climb over 800 meters. The Pat Sin Leng ridgeline is one of Hong Kong’s rare bare-rock escarpment terrains, with Plover Cove Reservoir to the south (the world’s first reservoir built in the sea, 1968) and Sha Tau Kok Hoi to the north, with superb views. But this stage carries another weight for Hongkongers: on February 10, 1996, a group of secondary-school teachers and students was engulfed by a hill fire here, and 5 died; two memorial pavilions still stand on the main ridge today. That fire, those two pavilions, and the collective memory of an entire generation of Hongkongers behind them—I’ll save the full account for Part III. Here I’ll note only one thing: every time you walk past those two small pavilions with red columns, time pauses for a moment.

On-the-ground info: A full through-hike takes 3–4 days (most people do it across two long weekends). The most iconic single day is Stage 1—Stanley Gap Road → Violet Hill → The Twins → Tai Tam Reservoir, about 4.8 km, starting in the afternoon and reaching Tai Tam at dusk, just in time to take bus 14 back to Central. To start Stage 8 from Kowloon Reservoir you have to catch the earliest bus (bus 72 from Kowloon Tong Station to the Kowloon Reservoir stop), and the 6:30 a.m. departure is the safest bet. Supply points are scarce throughout, and Stages 7 and 8 are almost entirely without water sources, so you must carry over 2.5 liters. Recommended photo spots: the panorama of Stanley Bay from the summit of Violet Hill on Stage 1; sunset from Shun Yeung Peak (the second-highest peak of Pat Sin Leng) on Stage 8. No smoking the entire way—because of that 1996 fire, this trail is the most strictly enforced of all; during the fire season (October through the following April), violations carry a maximum penalty of HK$250,000 plus one year’s imprisonment.

Hong Kong Trail (1985)

Length: 50 km · Stages: 8 · Opened: April 1985 · Named after: simply “Hong Kong Island”; the only one of the Four Trails not named after a person.

The logic behind the Hong Kong Trail’s birth is very different from that of the MacLehose Trail. The Hong Kong of 1985 was at its most anxious—the Sino-British Joint Declaration had just passed its first anniversary, the handover countdown had started, and the public’s uncertainty about the future was written into everything. The government’s introduction of the Hong Kong Trail that year was, in its very posture, a gentle gesture: at the most tense point of the Sino-British negotiations, it gave the more than one million urban residents of Hong Kong Island a “mountain trail right at their doorstep,” starting from Victoria Peak, where a 30-minute walk takes you out of the CBD and into native forest—something unique among Asian cities.

The 50 km traverse the island’s ridge across 8 stages, markers H001–H100. From Victoria Peak it runs east past Aberdeen Reservoir, the Tai Tam reservoir group, Mount Parker, and Tai Tam Gap, finally finishing at the Dragon’s Back beside Shek O. None of the 8 stages is long, each 4–8 km, making it the best beginner trail of the four—convenient supplies, MTR-accessible, signal online the whole way.

The stage to describe in detail is Stage 2. Setting out from Victoria Peak and following the ridge west at the junction of Harlech Road and Lugard Road, you pass Pinewood Battery. This battery was built by the British army in 1903, at an elevation of 307 meters, the highest fixed gun position in Hong Kong at the time. It was originally armed with two 6-inch BL coastal guns, and anti-aircraft guns were added in 1913—making it one of Hong Kong’s earliest air-defense positions. On the third day of the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941, Pinewood Battery was demolished in a single strike by Japanese bombers using 250-kilogram bombs, and the British abandoned it on the spot. Today’s trail runs straight through the battery ruins: the magazine, soldiers’ quarters, and gun platforms are all still there, with cracks shaken loose by the bombs still on the walls. That moss-covered concrete disc beside trail marker H012 is the gun base from those days.

The Hong Kong Trail also calls for writing about a place not on the trail itself but that the trail passes by: Wong Nai Chung Gap. It lies between Stages 3 and 4—the trail itself skirts around it from Tai Tam Reservoir, but the entrance to the gap is right beside the trail. On December 19, 1941, the Japanese 230th Regiment landed at North Point and pushed south, aiming to sever the north-south link of the island’s defenders. Holding this gap were the Winnipeg Grenadiers—a unit hastily reinforced to Hong Kong only in November 1941, average age 22, with almost no mountain-warfare experience. In this 800-meter-wide valley they held out for three days and three nights, and their commander, Brigadier John Lawson, was killed leading his men in a counter-charge from the command post at dawn on December 19—making him the first Commonwealth brigadier to be killed in battle in the entire Second World War. Today the gap has the “Hong Kong Defence Relics Trail” (a short route of about 5 km), with 10 stops marking the machine-gun positions, magazines, and dressing stations of those days. If you walk only the Hong Kong Trail without detouring into Wong Nai Chung Gap, you will miss the heaviest kilometer of the entire trail.

On-the-ground info: Stage 2 is the easiest beginner stage of the Hong Kong Trail—take bus 15 from MTR Central Station to The Peak, set out from Lion’s Pavilion along Harlech Road, and in under 2 km you reach Pinewood Battery, all on paved surface, sneakers are fine, and you can loop back to The Peak in 1.5 hours. Stage 8 is the Dragon’s Back—but the story of the Dragon’s Back, and its transformation from an ordinary final stage into what Time Asia named the “best urban hike in Asia” in 2004, I’ll save for a standalone account in Part III. Here I’ll just offer a transitional line: when you reach that stone at H094 and the sea-and-sky horizon suddenly opens before you, the wind pouring in from both sides, you’ll understand why Time used the phrase “rocky spine at the city’s edge.”

Lantau Trail (1984)

Length: 70 km · Stages: 12 (loop) · Opened: December 1984 · Named after: Lantau Peak (934 m), the highest point on the route; the only one of the Four Trails that forms a loop.

Before the 1980s, Lantau Island was almost another world to Hongkongers. It took 50 minutes by fishing boat from Central, the island had few roads, only temples, villages, salted-fish drying grounds, and a few abandoned British army barracks. In 1983 the Hong Kong government decided to bring all of Lantau into the country park system, and the next year it introduced the Lantau Trail—an obvious policy swap: locking in development under the name of “countryside,” handing the entire island over to hikers and temples. The expanse of green we see today from the Ngong Ping 360 cable car is what that one signature in 1984 locked in.

The 70 km circle the main ridge of Lantau across 12 stages, starting from Mui Wo pier, running clockwise via Chi Ma Wan → Cheung Sha → Shui Hau → Shek Pik → Pak Kung Au → Lantau Peak → Ngong Ping → Tung Chung, then looping back via Tai O → Sham Wat → and finally back to Mui Wo. Each stage is 2.5–10.5 km, markers L001–L140.

The stage to describe in detail is Stage 3—Nam Shan → Pak Kung Au → the main peak of Lantau Peak → Ngong Ping. This is the most grueling and most iconic stage of the whole loop, 4.5 km long with 750 meters of cumulative ascent. From the saddle at Pak Kung Au it is almost all stone steps upward, climbing all the way to the 934-meter summit.

Watching the sunrise from Lantau Peak is the most Hongkong thing about this mountain. Since the 1980s, every New Year’s Eve hundreds of Hongkongers set out at midnight carrying flashlights and thermoses, reaching the summit at 3–4 a.m. to wait for the first light of the new year to rise from the Lantau sea to the southeast. Lantau Peak is Hong Kong’s second-highest peak (after Tai Mo Shan’s 957 m), but because it sits on the southwest coast of Lantau, with no mountain mass blocking it to the east, it is the best terrain for watching the sunrise. Every New Year’s Day around 6:50, several hundred people on the summit hold their breath at once, waiting for the sky to turn from indigo to orange—a moment that feels almost like a collective, secular ritual of blessing.

Descending to Ngong Ping, you run into Po Lin Monastery and the Tian Tan Buddha. In 1906 three Chan masters (Tai Yuet, Yuet Ming, and Tun Sau) came to practice at what was then still called the “Big Thatched Hut”; in 1924 they formally renamed it “Po Lin Monastery,” opening the lineage of Hong Kong’s major Chan monasteries. In 1981 the monastery decided to build a bronze Buddha, broke ground in 1990, and consecrated it on December 29, 1993. The Tian Tan Buddha is 34 meters tall and weighs 250 tons, one of the tallest outdoor bronze seated Buddhas in the world. The structure of the Buddha’s base draws on the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, and the Buddha faces north—because in Buddhism, “the Buddha sits facing north” to signal compassion toward the faithful in the north. From Ngong Ping square you have to climb 268 stone steps to reach the Buddha’s feet—but this stretch of steps is not counted in the Lantau Trail’s mileage; it is a free extra ritual.

Before the loop closes at Tai O, it passes the Tai O stilt houses. This is a walking extension off the trail—from Ngong Ping along Lantau Trail Stage 7 to Tai O takes about 3 hours. Tai O is Hong Kong’s last native water-dwelling community, where the Tanka people have settled since the early Qing, with as many as 30,000 at their peak in the 1950s. Fewer than 2,000 households still live there today. The salted-fish drying grounds on the banks, the wooden-pile stilt houses on either side of the channels, the ruins of Fu Shan fort, the San Kei bridge—they form a slice of a 1950s Hong Kong fishing village. The stilt houses are built with wooden piles driven into the seabed, their floors raised 2 meters above the tide line, and the houses connected by wooden walkways—the most typical dwelling form of Lingnan water people since the Qing dynasty. In 2000 a fire burned down half of them, and in 2003 they were rebuilt with funds raised by the community. Today these stilt houses are intangible cultural samples listed for protection by Hong Kong’s Antiquities and Monuments Office.

On-the-ground info: Stage 3 (Pak Kung Au → Lantau Peak → Ngong Ping) has two most iconic approaches. For the sunrise: from Tung Chung Station take the 3M night bus to Pak Kung Au (last departure 2:00 a.m.), set out at 3:00 a.m., reach the summit at 4:30, watch the sunrise at 6:50, then descend to Ngong Ping by 7:30 to catch the first Ngong Ping 360 cable car back to Tung Chung—this is the most iconic New Year’s Eve day-trip route for Hongkongers. For the daytime: from Tung Chung Station take bus 23 to Pak Kung Au (every 30 minutes during the day), set out at 9 a.m., reach the summit at 11:30, reach Po Lin Monastery at Ngong Ping by 1 p.m. for vegetarian lunch (Po Lin Monastery’s vegetarian dining hall is famous across Hong Kong, HK$120/person including soup and tea, with a queue), then continue to Tai O to catch the 4 p.m. ferry back to Tuen Mun or Tung Chung. Supplies: Pak Kung Au trailhead (a tea kiosk with cold drinks and instant noodles) → summit (none) → Ngong Ping (full dining) → Tai O (full dining). On Lantau Peak’s summit in December, predawn temperatures are 5–8°C, and with wind chill they can drop below 0°C—you must bring a down jacket, wool hat, and gloves. The top photo spot is the sunrise rock to the summit’s southeast (near marker L032), and the second is the view down onto the Big Buddha from the Ngong Ping 360 cable car—not a hike, but an angle that’s one of a kind.

Wilson himself later returned to Britain in 1992, and in 1996 the Friends of the Country Parks invited him back to Hong Kong for the opening of the Wilson Trail. As he took his first step out from Stanley Gap Road, he said something to a reporter beside him: “The best part of being Governor of Hong Kong was the weekends.”

I believe that was the truth. The four trails total 298 km, and every kilometer is an extension of that 1976 ordinance—and the very existence of that ordinance is, beyond their political ledgers, a very private account about the mountains left behind by MacLehose, Wilson, and that generation of governors.

In the next chapter we leave the “Four Trails” and walk into the stories Hongkongers wrote into the mountains themselves—Lion Rock, Victoria Peak, Tai Mo Shan, three mountains that locals painted over and over with TV dramas, pop songs, and New Year’s fireworks.

Part II · The Mountain as Metaphor for the City: Three Cultural Peaks

The footpaths the governors built were about “putting the mountains to use”—as public space, as a line tethering the New Territories to Hong Kong Island. But Hong Kong’s mountains do not stop there. From the 1970s on, a few mountains slowly shifted from geographic coordinates into symbolic ones: they were written into TV theme songs, brushed into political speeches, printed and re-uploaded on Instagram—and then winched up by fire-department helicopters, again and again. The mountains were thereafter no longer just mountains. They became a catchphrase, a banner hung and then taken down, a record of accidents. The three below each carry the heaviest, the quietest, and the most dangerous of Hong Kong’s temperaments.

Lion Rock (495 m)

Lion Rock isn’t really that high. It arches up on the main ridge of New Kowloon, like a lion lying on its side—the mane to the west, the tail to the east, and the bare granite block at the head is the “lion’s head,” 495 meters in elevation. Seen from Hong Kong Island it is that familiar skyline to the north of Kowloon; seen from Sha Tin it screens Kowloon behind it. On one side it presses down on the postwar grassroots districts of Kowloon Walled City, Wong Tai Sin, and Sham Shui Po; on the other it presses down on Sha Tin, a new town flattened out of terraced fields and built up only in the 1970s—in a sense, the entire “lower body” of Hong Kong is watched over by this rock.

But what turned Lion Rock from a rock into a kind of spirit was not geography—it was a song.

In 1972, the television division of Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) began airing an anthology drama called Below the Lion Rock. Each episode was self-contained, half an hour, and chose to portray the small figures of Kowloon Walled City, the Wong Tai Sin resettlement estates, and the cubicle apartments of Sham Shui Po—unemployed dockworkers, widows behind on rent, Teochew refugees who had fled to Hong Kong. What made the series special for that era was that it did not teach you how to get rich, only how to endure. By 1979 the series had been airing for seven years, and the directors decided to change the theme song. Joseph Koo composed, James Wong wrote the lyrics, and Roman Tam sang—and “Below the Lion Rock” took shape.

The lines in the lyrics sound like aphorisms today: “In life there is joy, and inevitably there are often tears,” “Sharing the same far corner of the world, hand in hand we level the rugged path,” “Together we write, with hard-won effort, those immortal lines of glorious Hong Kong.” Roman Tam’s voice carried the cadence of Cantonese opera, singing the song with even more force than the drama itself. It was looped countless times in the 1980s—the economy took off, the new airport broke ground, the MTR opened—and Hong Kong’s middle class found in this song a justifying narrative of having risen from the grassroots and weathered hardship. The “Below the Lion Rock spirit” became the city’s official footnote: diligence, mutual aid, no complaining, climbing upward.

After 1997, this song was invoked again and again. Tung Chee-hwa quoted it in his policy address; Leung Chun-ying and Carrie Lam both mentioned it in public. The problem is that each time it was invoked, its core wore down a layer. A song originally about the struggle of the underclass was appropriated as a tool for exhorting Hongkongers to “be in the same boat and not quarrel”—the lyrics unchanged, the context entirely changed.

Then came October 23, 2014. The Umbrella Movement had reached its 26th day, and the occupation zones in Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mong Kok had not yet dispersed. That dawn, several climbing enthusiasts (later dubbed “Hong Kong Spidermen” by the media) climbed the lion’s head in the dark and, on the bare rock at the cliff’s edge, unfurled a giant yellow banner 28 meters long and 6 meters wide, bearing five large black characters: “I want genuine universal suffrage.” It was visible looking up from Kowloon Tong, Wong Tai Sin, and Kowloon City. The banner hung for several hours before firefighters rappelled down from the cliff top to remove it, but that photo had already spread around the world. For the first time, Lion Rock shifted from background to subject.

In the ten years since, whether “Below the Lion Rock” still exists has been an ambiguous question. It hasn’t been banned, the radio still plays it occasionally, and someone in the cha chaan teng under an old building still hums it. But RTHK’s drama of the same name changed its programming from 2018; and the frequency of the song being invoked in public slid from “every year” to “only on big occasions.” A song that was originally about the underclass, co-opted by officialdom and then reclaimed once by the public, then hung back up on the cliff—whether it sits in someone’s playlist today has almost become that person’s statement of attitude toward this city.

For a pilgrimage on foot, the most common route is to come out of MTR Lok Fu Station Exit B, walk north along Wang Tau Hom Road into Chuk Yuen Estate, then up Shatin Pass Road—this stretch is a paved road, an hour at walking pace. After reaching the Shatin Pass pavilion, turn onto MacLehose Trail Stage 5 heading west, gravel and dirt path alternating, about 30–45 minutes to the base of the lion’s head. After the base, the “lion’s mane” section requires climbing through a bare-rock crevice—not technically difficult, but very slippery after rain, so it’s best to go up on an afternoon after three dry days. The best shooting window is the hour before sunset, and the recommended spot is the western summit of Lion Rock looking back at Kowloon—at this hour the sun slants down from behind you, the whole Kowloon peninsula transitions from gray-blue to orange-gold, and then the silhouette of that rock behind you is locked by the last ray of light.

I’ve been up there twice myself. The first time was in the spring of 2018, the fog was thick, and at the lion’s head I couldn’t even see down the mountain, only the wind drawing out long notes in the rock crevices. The second time was early winter 2024, the air clear and bright, and from the top of the lion’s mane I could take in all of East Kowloon in one glance—the old traces of the Kai Tak runway, the industrial buildings of San Po Kong, the colorful façades of Choi Hung Estate. I stood looking for twenty minutes without speaking, then remembered a small thing: after Roman Tam finished singing “Below the Lion Rock” at a 2002 concert, he half-joked, “I’ve sung this song for so many years, I’m tired of singing it.” He died of liver cancer the next year. After that no one could ever sing that song the way he did. The mountain is still there; the people who sing of the mountain change generation after generation.

Tai Mo Shan (957 m)

Tai Mo Shan is Hong Kong’s highest point, 957 meters—nearly twice as high as Lion Rock, and a good bit higher than Victoria Peak (552 m) on Hong Kong Island. But its presence in culture is comparatively thin. It is too big, too far, too quiet, and outside the New Territories you can’t even easily see it—it hides behind the new towns of Tsuen Wan, Yuen Long, and Sheung Shui, like a thick quilt pressed down at the foot of the bed; no one goes out of their way to look at it, but it’s always there.

The name “Tai Mo” (Big Hat) comes from the mountain’s shape—from certain angles the whole mountain looks like an old-style sun hat turned upside down, round-domed with a wide brim. But its true texture you can only see by going in: the three subsidiary peaks of Wo Yang Shan, Sze Fong Shan, and Tai To Yan reach like three fingers toward the southeast, east, and north, and the round dome of the main peak is forever pressed under cloud, which is why it has the alias “Big Fog Mountain.”

This mountain has two layers of history that are easily overlooked.

The first layer is tea. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the area around Tai Mo Shan was a famous tea-producing region of South China, and the hillsides grew a local variant of mountain tea, the leaves finer than the common Guangdong broadleaf variety, fragrant and clean-bitter once made into green tea—locals called it “Phoenix tea” (note that this varietal name refers to the local tea of Tai Mo Shan, and has no direct connection to the Phoenix Dancong of Chaozhou in Guangdong, or to Lantau Peak; it is an easily confused case of shared names). If you walk today along the trails around Wo Yang Shan and look carefully at the lay of the land beneath your feet, you’ll see stretches of stone-built terraces weathered until they nearly merge with the mountain itself—their edges moss-covered granite bars, with about half a meter of drop between platforms. Those are not the embankments of a hiking trail; they are the terraces of tea gardens. As late as the mid-Qing, there were still Hakka people living in mountain-side hut-villages here, picking the first tea around Qingming each year. After Hong Kong’s founding as a port the tea industry withered, the hut-villages were abandoned one by one, and the mountain was given back to the grass.

The second layer is radar. In 1966 the Hong Kong Observatory built its first Doppler weather radar on the summit of Tai Mo Shan, and the white spherical dome became the mountain’s most conspicuous landmark ever since—remembered ahead of any scenic photo. The radar points at the South China Sea, scanning once every six minutes, and the data it sends out is the frontline eye of the typhoon warning system. In 1991 the dome was upgraded, and in 2014 it was updated again to an S-band dual-polarization system. The white ball on the summit still looks today like a ping-pong ball forgotten on a grassy slope, but every day it watches the sky on behalf of all seven million people in Hong Kong.

But what has really written this mountain into the news repeatedly over the past decade is winter.

Hong Kong’s winters are usually mild—the urban average low is around 14°C—but every few years the Siberian high pushes south once, soaking the entire Pearl River Delta in damp cold below 5°C. Because Tai Mo Shan is the highest and most exposed to the wind, at such times it can be 6 to 9 degrees lower than the urban area. In 1975, 1991, 1996, and 2016 the summit recorded ice glaze, rime, and frost flowers. The heaviest of these was January 24, 2016—the so-called “monster cold wave.” That day the urban low was 3.1°C (a 60-year record low), and the summit of Tai Mo Shan recorded -6°C, accompanied by freezing rain and force-9 gusts.

That night the whole mountain froze into transparent glass. The trouble was that the day was a Sunday, and news of the summit “frost” had gone viral on Facebook, LIHKG, and Instagram from the morning—and tens of thousands of citizens, families in tow, rushed up the mountain to see snow they might see only once in a lifetime. The result was that by evening the temperature plunged, visibility dropped to 5 meters, thin ice formed on the trails, and the mountain’s terrain blocked half the phone signal—at least 130 people were stranded on the mountain, dozens of them with symptoms of hypothermia, and the fire service, police, Civil Aid Service, and Government Flying Service mounted rescues all night. In the end no one died, but a dozen or so severe hypothermia cases were sent to hospital; this accident is still used as a standard teaching case by the fire and civil-aid services to this day.

For a pilgrimage on foot, plan conservatively. From MTR Tsuen Wan Station Exit W, take bus 51 or green minibus 80 to Tsuen Kam Au, the country park entrance. From Tsuen Kam Au, follow Tai Mo Shan Road (a paved road, uphill the whole way) for about 4 km and an ascent of about 500 meters, reaching the vicinity of the radar station in 1.5 to 2 hours. Beyond it a stretch runs alongside MacLehose Trail Stage 8—chest-high wild grass in summer, the whole New Territories plain exposed in winter. Before going in winter, always check the Hong Kong Observatory forecast—if there’s a cold weather warning or low-temperature alert, just give it up; don’t be lured by news photos. Pack clothing for 6°C below the urban temperature, plus a windproof shell.

The time I went up was late November 2024, 18°C in the city, 9°C at the summit, with fog. Looking north from the radar station, the reservoirs of the northern New Territories were like ribbons; looking south, all of Kowloon and all of Hong Kong Island were covered by a layer of grayish white, invisible, but the sound of traffic was audible—a continuous low-frequency hum, like a distant factory running. I stood on the summit for about ten minutes, and for the first time clearly realized that the highest place in this city is not for looking down on it, but for listening to it—from here, looking down, you can’t see anything specific, but you can hear the sound of seven million people living at once.

Sharp Peak (468 m)

Sharp Peak is only 468 meters, even shorter than Lion Rock. But it is the foremost of Hong Kong’s “Three Peaks”—the other two being High Junk Peak (344 m) in Sai Kung and Castle Peak (583 m) in Tuen Mun. The word “sharp” in “Three Peaks” is no exaggeration: on a topographic map they all form extremely acute triangles, their ridges drawn very narrow, and the final stretch to the summit generally starts at a 60-degree slope. Sharp Peak is the sharpest, most symmetrical, and most difficult of the three—from certain angles it looks like an isosceles triangle stood up on the sea—and so it carries a nickname repeatedly printed in hiking magazines: the “Asian Matterhorn.” It’s an exaggerated comparison, but stand at Chek Keng or Tai Long village and look north just once, and you’ll understand why they put it that way.

At its foot is one of Hong Kong’s most beautiful stretches of coastline—the Four Bays of Tai Long: from south to north, Tung Wan, Tai Wan, Ham Tin Wan, and Sai Wan. White sand, blue water, bay linked to bay, named by CNN in 2014 as one of “Asia’s most beautiful beaches.” Looking south from the top of Sharp Peak, the four bays connect into a string of necklace, each separated by its own headland; to the west is Cheung Sheung, to the east the open sea, and at the foot of the mountain no road carries traffic—only the narrow hiking line of MacLehose Trail Stage 2 passes through.

The human traces in this area are older still. The saddle between Sharp Peak and Chek Keng was, in the 19th century, a belt of Hakka settlements—the chain of villages Chek Keng, Tai Long, Tung Wan, and Ham Tin all have ruins of Hakka ancestral halls. The villagers lived for generations on fishing, salt-drying, and growing sweet potatoes, and the villages were linked by stone-slab paths. After the 1950s the young people went down the mountain one by one to the factories, restaurants, and docks of Kowloon, and from the 1960s the remaining elderly began to leave too. Go to Chek Keng today and most of the village houses have collapsed, leaving half-standing stone walls, fallen roof ridges, thresholds overturned by banyan roots—while the Holy Family Chapel left by Catholic missionaries a century ago still stands relatively intact at the edge of the bay. It is a rare layered relic in Hong Kong of a Hakka village overlaid with Catholicism.

Go back another hundred years and this area was used by yet another kind of people. Cheung Po Tsai (1786–1822)—the most famous pirate of eastern Guangdong in the Jiaqing reign of the Qing, said at his peak to command 600 ships and tens of thousands of men—and the many inner coves of Sai Kung were the harbors of refuge he frequented. Today the area around Tai Long and Chek Keng still carries the legend of “Cheung Po Tsai’s treasure cave,” and Cheung Chau and Lamma Island each have their own version. Most of these stories are unverifiable, but one thing is clear: before the 19th century, what lay between Hong Kong’s mountains and sea was not “nature” but a gray zone layered out of several livelihoods—smuggling, piracy, the Hakka, and the fishing seasons. That sharp ridge of Sharp Peak was, in those days, a lookout for reading the movements of the sea, not an Instagram photo spot.

Its turn into an Instagram photo spot is a thing of only the past decade. From around 2014, the silhouette of this mountain began going viral in Hongkong photography circles—especially the angle looking out from Sharp Peak Saddle, with the grassy slopes of Cheung Sheung in the foreground, the bays in the middle ground, and the pyramid-shaped summit in the background. Every autumn and winter weekend hundreds of people crowd the mountain queuing to take photos. The trouble is that this mountain’s danger has been severely underestimated.

The final stretch to the summit of Sharp Peak is not a hiking path but a scramble. The slope is 60–70 degrees, the ground is fine weathered schist mixed with small pebbles, like climbing stairs on a pile of ball bearings—going up is easier than coming down. On the descent, the moment your weight shifts off-center, the loose rock will slide you down with it. The summit is also an obvious wind gap, where the winter northeast monsoon can reach force 8–10 and blow you straight off the side slope. Between 2018 and 2024, Sharp Peak had at least 8–10 accidents requiring helicopter winch rescue—including falls with fractures, slips on post-rain mud, hypothermia, and getting lost at night. There was a fatal accident in 2019 and another in 2022.

For a pilgrimage on foot, you must set aside a whole day, and assess honestly according to the weather and your fitness. From MTR Diamond Hill Station Exit C2, go to the Diamond Hill bus terminus diagonally across and take green minibus 96R (running only on weekends and public holidays; on non-holidays take bus 92 to Sai Kung town and transfer to bus 94 or charter a taxi to Pak Tam Chung) to the Pak Tam Chung terminus. From Pak Tam Chung set out along MacLehose Trail Stage 2—the first stretch is a concrete firebreak road, turning into dirt path after Long Ke—about 4 hours to Sharp Peak Saddle (the col where the MacLehose Trail leaves the main line and meets the climbing spur). From Sharp Peak Saddle the summit is about 1 hour (the last 30 minutes of which is that loose-rock slope). Descend north along an even steeper ridge to Tung Wan, about 1.5 hours. The whole trip, with photos and rest, is at least 8–9 hours; it’s strongly advised to set out before 7 a.m. and clear that last loose-rock slope before 4 p.m. Don’t attempt it within 48 hours of rain. Don’t attempt it alone.

I’ve reached the foot of the mountain twice, and both times didn’t go up. The first was autumn 2022, and by the time I reached Sharp Peak Saddle it was already two in the afternoon; looking up, that loose-rock slope was clearly soaked by the previous night’s rain, and several hikers coming down toward me were scooting down the same line on their backsides—I took one look, turned around, and went out via the Tai Long village line back to Chek Keng. The second was early spring 2024, the weather perfect and my fitness ample, but reaching Sharp Peak Saddle the wind swept up from the north and blew my hat off three times, so I turned back again. On the way down I remembered a line: beautiful mountains are beautiful, and beautiful mountains often demand a price. Sharp Peak looks on a map like just a little 468-meter peak, but every year it takes something from hikers—sometimes a fingertip, a rib, sometimes a life. It is not the Matterhorn; it is itself.

Part III · Short Routes at the City’s Edge

Having walked the ridges and fires of the New Territories, let’s pull our gaze back. In fact, most Hongkongers’ real memory of the mountains lies neither at the No. 24 marker of the MacLehose Trail nor in the fog of Lantau—but in the kind of nearness where, fifteen minutes out of the MTR, you can already see a mountain pass. The mountains in this city have never been somewhere far away; they are the direction you set off in, in your sneakers, at nine on a Saturday morning. This section is about three routes that sit closest to the city: the Dragon’s Back, Devil’s Peak to Kowloon Peak, and Pat Sin Leng. Each is heavier than the last. The first is an introduction, the second is history, the third is a tragedy that can’t be skirted.

Dragon’s Back — The First Peak for Beginners

If you were allowed to introduce only one trail to a first-time visitor to Hong Kong, every Hongkonger would recommend the same one: Hong Kong Trail Stage 8, the Dragon’s Back. About 8.5 km long, its highest point Shek O Peak at 284 meters, and from getting off the bus to walking to the beach to rinse off, change, and take the bus back to the city, the whole sequence is exactly half a day. It is not the most spectacular mountain on the island, but it is the one most perfectly designed as an introduction—convenient supplies, a clear exit, and a density of scenery that doesn’t seem like an urban trail.

Its famous marketing line comes from 2004: that year Time Asia named the Dragon’s Back the “Best Urban Hike in Asia,” and ever since, every government tourist brochure and every Lonely Planet has quoted it. The absurd part is that Time Asia as a magazine ceased its Asian print edition back in 2009, and today few people even remember what the publication looked like—yet the title it nailed onto the Dragon’s Back has outlived it. This sort of thing isn’t rare in Hong Kong: names, institutions, and sayings left over from the colonial era, whose originals have long vanished, while the names keep floating on the city’s mountains and streets.

The truly beautiful thing about the Dragon’s Back is that it really does look like a dragon’s spine. Walking from Shek O Peak toward Shek O, on the left are Tai Tam Reservoir and the Cape D’Aguilar peninsula reaching into the South China Sea to the southeast, and on the right are the red roofs of Shek O village and the reefs across from Cape D’Aguilar. The ridge itself is not wide, the surface red earth and gravel trodden out by hundreds of thousands of shoes, and every stretch or so a section of granite spine is exposed. When the morning sun slants in on a winter morning, the whole spine takes on a pale yellow—which is why local photographers often say: the Dragon’s Back only exists between November and February; the rest of the time it’s another mountain in the fog.

On the ground, this is the smoothest way to go. Come out of MTR Chai Wan Station Exit A to the bus stop across the road and wait for bus 9 in the Shek O terminus direction, about 25 minutes to the “To Tei Wan” stop—when boarding, the driver may ask you “Dragon’s Back or Shek O?”, just answer “Dragon’s Back,” and the conductor will ring the bell for you. Across the road from where you get off is the trailhead, with a wooden sign reading “Hong Kong Trail Stage 8.” It’s about 40 minutes up to Shek O Peak, then over an hour along the ridge down to Big Wave Bay—one of the few beaches on Hong Kong Island with a proper surfing culture, with a little board-rental shop at the beach’s edge, food carts selling pineapple ice and beer, and showers. After rinsing off and getting dressed, take bus 9 from the Big Wave Bay bus stop back to Chai Wan Station, the whole sequence 3 to 4 hours. The best window is 9 to 11 a.m. on an autumn or winter morning—any later and there’s no shade on the ridge, any earlier and the buses haven’t started running frequently yet.

Why is every first-timer talked into coming here? Because it demonstrates the “standard answer of Hong Kong mountains”: reachable by MTR plus bus, a ridgeline of gentle fifteen-degree undulations, scenery that changes scene every thirty seconds, a beach with showers and cold beer at the end, and one bus back to the city. It asks no preparation of you—a pair of ordinary sneakers, a bottle of water, a hat, and three hours later you can post a photo on Instagram captioned “I’ve hiked Hong Kong too,” and you’ll very likely fall in love with the whole thing from then on. Its real function is not to make you complete a hike, but to make you feel “I can come back next week for a harder one.” The way this city trains hiking enthusiasts is to first give you a shot of sugar with the Dragon’s Back.

Devil’s Peak + Kowloon Peak — War Relics and the “Suicide Cliff”

Come out of MTR Yau Tong Station Exit A2 and look up, and you can see a green, not-very-tall mountain—Devil’s Peak, 222 meters. The name itself is the mountain’s first layer of history. In the mid-to-late 19th century, pirates roamed the waters at the eastern end of Victoria Harbour frequently, and the narrowest point of the Lei Yue Mun channel is only about 500 meters, the throat through which one entered the harbor from the open sea in those days; the British and local fishermen collectively called the hilltop “Devil’s Peak”—the place where the devil lived. After the signing of the New Territories extension treaty in 1898, the entire eastern coast of Kowloon entered British territory, and the Royal Engineers began converting Devil’s Peak into the defensive core of the eastern side of Victoria Harbour.

Three things remain. Gough Battery was built in the 1898–1900s on the southern side of the mountain, originally fitted with two 6-inch breech-loading guns. Pottinger Battery is on the northern slope, built in the same period, also with 6-inch guns. The Devil’s Peak Redoubt sits in the center, a complete polygonal fort with concrete about 1 meter thick, where you can still see embossed years like “1914” on the cement plaques, well-preserved magazine vaults, the firing slits of the machine-gun bunkers, and an underground passage running through from south to north. The two batteries and the redoubt are connected by a trench, which on the map is called the “Trench to Devil’s Peak Fort,” today a Grade II historic building of Hong Kong’s Antiquities and Monuments Office.

What really wrote Devil’s Peak into the record again and again is December 1941. At the same moment the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the predawn of December 8, they crossed the Shenzhen River southward to attack Hong Kong. From December 8 to 13, they took six days to push through the New Territories and northern Kowloon. On December 11, the British decided to withdraw from Kowloon back to Hong Kong Island—and Devil’s Peak was the last meaningful firing line in Kowloon. A battalion of the Royal Scots and Rajput soldiers of the 2/14 Punjab Regiment held back the advance of the Japanese 230th Regiment along the Devil’s Peak line, until that night the last ferry carried the defenders and the wounded across from Lei Yue Mun back to Shau Kei Wan on Hong Kong Island, and only then did all of Kowloon officially fall. On December 25 Hong Kong Island surrendered—this was the “Black Christmas” of Hong Kong’s history. Today, on the concrete vault of Gough Battery you can still see the shrapnel scars left by the shelling of those days, with rusted bolts embedded in the cement floor of the machine-gun bunker—lower your head to look at one, then raise your eyes to Victoria Harbour, and you’ll suddenly realize that the neon-lit Central across the water was once taken aim at through this firing slit.

North of Devil’s Peak is Kowloon Peak (602 m)—also called Fei Ngo Shan, because it is the highest point of that screen of mountains behind the Kowloon peninsula; looking north from Tsim Sha Tsui, that ridgeline lying across the sky is it. What Kowloon Peak is really famous for is not its summit, but the rock platform reaching out into the void on its northeast face—the “Suicide Cliff.” It is a thin slab of rock with almost no support in the horizontal direction, and standing on it and looking back, all of Kowloon Bay, Kai Tak, Choi Hung, San Po Kong, all the way to Victoria Harbour and the northern shore of Hong Kong Island, spreads out beneath your feet. Around 2015 this rock platform began to go viral on Instagram, becoming the standard photo spot for Hong Kong’s hashtag #suicidecliff. It should be noted that the word “suicide” comes from the terrain—the platform overhangs, and half a misstep is a hundred-meter drop—rather than from any actual incident, but in recent years there have indeed been quite a few cases of injury from missteps while taking check-in photos, and the entrance to Fei Ngo Shan Road now bears a government warning sign in Chinese and English.

The two mountains can be linked, but the route takes some care. The most iconic approach is going north from Devil’s Peak to Kowloon Peak: come out of Yau Tong MTR Exit A2 and walk 10 minutes to the Devil’s Peak entrance, loop counterclockwise from Pottinger Battery to string together the battery, the redoubt, and Gough Battery, about 1.5 hours back to the foot; then head north along Wilson Trail Stage 3, pick up Fei Ngo Shan Road (a paved mountain road, walkable and rideable) all the way to the Kowloon Peak summit car park, then turn onto a trail down to the Suicide Cliff. The whole route is 5 to 6 hours. If you only want to do Kowloon Peak, the simpler entrance is Pak Fa Lam—Pak Fa Lam is where the grave of Sun Yat-sen’s mother, Madam Yeung, lies, buried in 1910, today a Grade I historic building of Hong Kong, the headstone carved in granite reading “Grave of Madam Sun of Heung Yap.” From MTR Diamond Hill or Choi Hung Station you can reach Pak Fa Lam by minibus or about 30 minutes on foot, with the summit about 2 hours up.

I personally prefer the route starting from Devil’s Peak. When I sit down to drink water beneath the cement vault of Gough Battery, directly ahead is the entire eastern end of Victoria Harbour: to the left the narrow waterway of Lei Yue Mun, the residential blocks of Yau Tong and Tseung Kwan O; to the right the skyline from Shau Kei Wan to Quarry Bay on Hong Kong Island; and in the center the Star Ferries and large container ships shuttling without pause. The last withdrawing ferry of the British army on December 12, 1941 crossed this very stretch of water. The concrete behind me presses cool against my spine, and ahead is a modern port still running—the membrane between history and the present this thin, this is the biggest jolt Hong Kong’s mountains give you: unlike many famous mountains on the mainland that carry you to a place unrelated to daily life, it sits you on a gun position from 1898 and lets you watch a 2026 ferry cross the water.

Pat Sin Leng — The Pavilion That Fire Kept Failing to Consume

In the northeast New Territories, north of Tai Po and above Plover Cove Reservoir, eight peaks are connected. Sin Ku, Cheung Sin, Choi Wo, Tsao Kau, Kuai Li, Kuo Lo, Chung Li, and Shun Yeung—arrayed from west to east, each corresponding to one of the Eight Immortals of Daoism, one peak per immortal, and completing all eight in succession is colloquially called “crossing the Eight Immortals.” The highest point, Shun Yeung Peak, is 591 meters, and Wilson Trail Stage 8 crosses the whole ridge from west to east, making it the most open-viewed of the New Territories’ classic traverse routes: to the south it overlooks Tai Po town and Tolo Harbour, to the north the surface of Plover Cove Reservoir, and farther north you can see the high-rises of Shenzhen.

But most people who come to Pat Sin Leng know this mountain because of another thing.

On February 10, 1996, a Saturday, around one in the afternoon. Scouts from the Whampoa District of the Scout Association of Hong Kong and Kowloon and teachers and students from Pak Kau College—over a hundred people in all—were conducting their annual hiking training at the foot of the mountain, climbing up from Yi O. The weather that day was dry, and around one in the afternoon the scorched grassland at Yi O caught fire; the hill fire ran up the slope on the northeast wind and caught up with the group right as they were about to climb Sin Ku Peak. 5 students—Lai Chi-wang, Liu Chun-kit, Chan Ho-yin, Ho Ho-cheong, and Chow Man-fai (in the order of the memorial roll later published by Hong Kong’s Education Bureau, aged 13 to 17)—and 2 teachers, Wong Sau-mei and Chow Chi-chai, died in the flames, with many others severely burned and hospitalized. This was the heaviest collective loss of life in the history of Hong Kong’s hiking world.

Note: the student names above adopt the common spellings of the memorial roll for this article; for formal commemoration, defer to the inscription on the Spring Breeze Pavilion at Pak Kau College and the public records of the Hong Kong Education Bureau.

After that hill fire, Hong Kong’s outdoor education system for primary and secondary schools, the fire services’ hill-fire warning levels (the red-yellow-green three-color hill fire danger warning), and the inter-agency emergency coordination procedures of government departments were all rewritten between 1996 and 1998. Today every hill-fire warning sign of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, every “No Open Flames” iron plate at a trailhead, and every cancellation of a school’s outdoor activity in the dry season stands on that mountain line of February 10, 1996.

Beside the Tai Mei Tuk dam road at the foot of the mountain stands the “Spring Breeze Pavilion,” erected in 1996, the year of the incident, with donations from the families, the Scout Association, the teachers and students of Pak Kau College, and various sectors of society; the pavilion’s plaque reads “Pavilion of Spring Breeze and Nurturing Rain”—“spring breeze and nurturing rain” comes from the Mencius (Jin Xin I), “there are five ways the gentleman teaches; one is to transform like timely rain,” originally meaning that education is like timely rain; choosing these four characters returns those 7 names to their true vocations—they were teachers who went to lead students up the mountain, students taking part in school training. In 1998, about an hour and a half up the Wilson Trail, at the midway point, the “Pavilion of the Benevolent” was also erected, its plaque reading “Pavilion of the Benevolent Who Delight in Mountains”—“the benevolent delight in mountains, the wise delight in water” (Analects, Yong Ye), using the weight of the mountains to echo those who were lost. To this day, around February 10 each year, families, alumni, and strangers who hike come to lay flowers at both pavilions.

On the ground, go like this. Come out of MTR Tai Po Market Station Exit A2, go to the Tai Po Market bus terminus diagonally across, and wait for bus 75K (also the bus to the start of the Plover Cove Reservoir dam) to the Tai Mei Tuk terminus, about 30 minutes. After getting off, walk about 10 minutes inland along the Tai Mei Tuk dam road in the opposite direction to the Spring Breeze Pavilion, then about 1.5 hours up the mountain to the Pavilion of the Benevolent, then 1 hour up to Sin Ku Peak. If you want to cross the full Eight Immortals, from Sin Ku Peak go east along the ridge to Shun Yeung Peak, then descend to Bride’s Pool or Wu Kau Tang, the whole route 6 to 7 hours. Winter is best—December to February has low temperatures and good visibility; April to May the air is dry and it’s the high season for hill fires, and during a red hill fire danger warning the police will temporarily close some entrances.

When you go up the mountain you needn’t make a point of bringing flowers, nor of photographing the monument—remembering those 7 names is enough. Above the Pavilion of the Benevolent the ridge soon opens up, with the silver water surface of Tolo Harbour to the south, the whole lake-blue of Plover Cove Reservoir to the north, and the wind blowing in from both sides at once. Pat Sin Leng is a ridge that feels wonderfully spacious to walk, but every inch beneath your feet is remembered by the ash of that one year.

Part IV · Practical Compendium — Seasons, Gear, Supplies, Emergencies

Having walked through the first three Parts, here finally is a practical checklist, roughly answering the four questions of “when to go, how to get there, what to bring, and what to do if something goes wrong.” Within Hong Kong’s hiking circles these are all common knowledge, but first-time visitors are rarely walked through them systematically.

Seasons — November to March Is Best

November to March is the absolute window. The other months each have their own troubles:

• April to October is warm and humid, with daytime apparent temperatures often above 30°C and relative humidity around 85%; in windless spots on the mountain the apparent temperature can reach 38°C; this period is also the high-activity season for snakes and insects, with special care needed for the bamboo pit viper and the many-banded krait
• November is crisp autumn with the clearest skies; December is the most stable and the golden month for winter photography; January and February occasionally bring cold waves, with the urban area dropping as low as 5°C and the summit of Tai Mo Shan to 0°C or even frosting over—this weather is, conversely, some of Tai Mo Shan’s best days of the year
• April to May is the last stable window before the thunderstorm season, but it has also entered the hill fire danger warning cycle
• June to September brings frequent typhoons; as soon as the Hong Kong Observatory issues a Black Rainstorm Signal or a Typhoon Signal No. 8, all government-managed trails are immediately closed and warning tape is strung across the entrances

Transport Sense — The Octopus Card Goes Everywhere

Almost all of Hong Kong’s mountain entrances have direct public transport; the key is knowing which line to use:

• Hong Kong Island: Dragon’s Back (bus 9 or 9X toward Shek O terminus, departing from Chai Wan Station); other Hong Kong Trail stages (multiple entrances between HKU Station and Wan Chai Station)
• Kowloon: Lion Rock (from Lok Fu Station Exit B, up the mountain via Chuk Yuen); Devil’s Peak (10 minutes’ walk from Yau Tong Station Exit A2); Kowloon Peak (from Choi Hung Station transfer to bus 91 to the Fei Ngo Shan Road entrance, or from Diamond Hill transfer to a minibus to Pak Fa Lam)
• New Territories: MacLehose Trail, Wilson Trail, Pat Sin Leng, Tai Mo Shan—mainly via Tai Po Market Station or Diamond Hill Station connecting to a minibus/bus. A few numbers to remember: 96R (Diamond Hill MTR Station ↔ Sai Kung, running on holidays, the most common connection for MacLehose Stages 1–2), 75K (Tai Po Market Station ↔ Tai Mei Tuk), 51 (Tsuen Wan ↔ Kam Tin, crossing Tai Mo Shan along Tai Mo Shan Road, and you can ring the bell midway to get off at the country park entrance)
• Outlying Islands: for the Lantau Trail, first take the MTR to Tung Chung Station, then take bus 23 to Ngong Ping—this is the standard way up Lantau Peak or to western Lantau

The whole transport system works on the Octopus card throughout, which you can top up at MTR stations, convenience stores, or the airport. Note that the rural-line minibuses often have no Cantonese stop announcements and no English stop-name signs, so open Google Maps to follow the route ahead of time and press the bell 200 meters before your stop.

Gear Checklist — Don’t Over-Prepare

Hong Kong’s mountains are low, near, and well supplied, so the simpler the gear, the more sensible.

• Shoes: low-cut trail running shoes (summer) or mid-cut waterproof (winter and mountains with water mist, e.g. the summit of Tai Mo Shan). Ordinary running shoes are fine for the Dragon’s Back and Lion Rock, but on a loose-rock slope like Sharp Peak on MacLehose Stage 2 they’ll slip
• Water: 1.5 to 2 liters per person per 4 hours, double in summer. Most mountains have no supply points (Ngong Ping on Lantau and Tai Mei Tuk at the start of Pat Sin Leng being exceptions)
• Sun protection: a sun hat, sunscreen, sunglasses—the UV on Hong Kong’s mountains is very strong, especially on clear days from September to November
• Emergency: a whistle (the most effective rescue tool when lost), a headlamp (any trip still on the mountain after 3 p.m. should carry one), a rain poncho (a black rainstorm can come without warning, don’t gamble on luck), and an offline map—the Hong Kong Observatory’s “Enjoy Hiking” App is recommended (free, with GPS positioning, covering all official trails)
• Don’t bring: trekking poles are unnecessary on the entirety of the short routes in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon; only terrain like Sharp Peak, the Pat Sin Leng traverse, or the up-and-down of Ma On Shan on MacLehose Stage 4 calls for them

Emergencies — 999, Distance Posts, Enjoy Hiking

Hong Kong is not 911—Hong Kong’s emergency number is 999.

• Once connected, 999 will ask you to choose one of police / fire / ambulance; for distress in the mountains generally report fire (the fire service handles both hill fires and mountain search-and-rescue)
• The first action when lost in the mountains is not to wander, but to stay where you are, and when you call 999 state the number of the nearest trail distance post—every major Hong Kong trail has a post every 500 meters, the post yellow or white with a letter-plus-number code, e.g. “M124” means the 124th post of the MacLehose Trail, 500 m × 124 = at the 62 km mark; similarly there’s “W” for the Wilson Trail, “H” for the Hong Kong Trail, and “L” for the Lantau Trail. Stating the post number is faster than stating GPS coordinates—the rescue teams’ maps are drawn on this very grid
• The “Enjoy Hiking” App has built-in GPS positioning and a “one-tap send coordinates” feature, which can text your current location directly to an emergency contact or dial 999
• The government’s Hiking Guide is free online: search for “Leisure and Cultural Services Department hiking” or visit hkwalkers.net (a community-maintained trail database, unofficial but more detailed); the Observatory’s hko.gov.hk has hill-fire warnings, lightning warnings, and rainstorm warnings all in one place

One last small reminder: mobile signal in the mountains is decent on most of the Hong Kong Island and Kowloon lines, but Chek Keng on MacLehose Stage 2, the north slope of Tai Mo Shan, and the middle section of Pat Sin Leng all have long stretches of weak signal. Before setting off, send your itinerary to someone who’s not on the mountain, and tell them: “If you can’t reach me by 7 p.m. tonight, please call 999”—that one sentence has saved quite a few lives over the past decade or so.

The Lion Rock that Roman Tam sang of, the ribbon MacLehose cut in 1979, the gun positions mounted on Devil’s Peak in December 1941, the Spring Breeze Pavilion erected at Tai Mei Tuk in February 1996—this city of Hong Kong has never been only Victoria Harbour and Central. Every one of its mountains has been written over once. Nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, throw the backpack on your shoulder, and it’s no more than fifteen minutes from the MTR exit to the foot of the mountain.