Wang Tong Archaeology

When we lived in our previous house in the village, we hired men with shovels and a jackhammer to dig deep and turn the soil in the garden. To our amazement they discovered pieces of porcelain dishes, clay pots and several old bricks buried deep in the ground. We called a neighbor, an archaeologist whose job is to examine building site excavations for signs of archaeological treasures. He gathered some of our samples and brought them home for examination. Could they be remnants of some ancient Ming Dynasty settlement? Or at the very least maybe they belonged to someone who had farmed this spot a hundred years ago? They were down pretty deep; they must have been quite old.

The next day we learned the result: they were cheap dishes like you could buy at any Chinese department store. Most likely there had been a house on that spot which, along with all its contents, had been demolished and the rubble mixed into the soil before building the new house back in 1980. Oh well.

Wang Tong does have a few sites of historical interest, though. There's a disused traditional Chinese style pigsty left over from before pig farming was banned here in the 1980s. There is the watchtower on top of Butterfly Hill. And then there's the old restaurant.

When you walk toward the waterfall, at the top of the steepest part of the path, on your right are the remains of an entrance gate, which you can see in the photo. Some of the original green paint is left. The red Chinese characters are still readable and say "Sea food snack restaurant". My wife thinks the tree on the left was deliberately planted to frame the gate in a beautiful and auspicious manner. Walk through the gate and about 50 yards up the hill the only remains of the restaurant you'll find is part of its foundation.

Locals think the restaurant opened in the 1930s. Back then all of Lantau Island was a forgotten, remote backwater which may as well been the far side of the Moon. There were a few small fishing villages and nothing of much interest to tourists. The only way to get here was by a slow, infrequent ferry. Until the late 1950s there were no roads anywhere on the island. The main thoroughfare between the north and south of Lantau was a footpath which passed right through Wang Tong. It was paved with cobblestones, some of which can still be seen along the edges of the current footpath. The restaurant was likely a stop-off point for travelers at the end of the long hike.

Picture what it must have been like back in 1950. You just walked for two or three hours from Tung Chung, a cluster of tiny villages where pirates once lived. The cobbled path led you along the coast, up into a long valley and over a steep pass. Just one more hill to go and you'll be in Mui Wo. At the top of that small hill is a little seafood restaurant offering fast food and a view. What a nice place to have a little meal before trekking the last mile to the ferry pier and the end of your journey.

It would have been a stunning location. Today the hilltop where it stood is covered with dense forest, but in fact that wasn't the natural state of things on Lantau Island. Most of the island had been deforested by local inhabitants for fuel and building materials and from hill fires accidentally set by ancestor worshipers in various hillside cemeteries. So chances are that the restaurant patrons had a view unobstructed by trees. On one side they would have been able to see the Silvermine Waterfall. On the other side they'd have had a panoramic view across Wang Tong valley, likely covered with small farms, over Silvermine Bay, of the harbor and other islands, with western Hong Kong island in the distance. Judging by the quality of workmanship on the pillars, it must have been an elegant restaurant, probably a great place to linger over a bowl of noodles and a pot of tea.

In the late 1950s the government put in a paved road connecting the north and south of the island, which terminates at the ferry pier about a mile from Wang Tong. The old cobblestone footpath was no longer a vital throughway and the restaurant would have lost most of its patronage. So it isn't surprising that it closed in the 1960s.

No one knows who owned it and the site has never been put up for sale. There have been no restaurants in Wang Tong ever since. If you want noodles, you need to walk about a third of mile outside the village to the Sun Lok Restaurant, whose dishes are about as old and cracked as the ones we dug up from our garden.

Snakes in the Garden (again)

Our gardener phoned me. "Sir! Snakes in the lily pond!"

Did she say snakes...with a second S?

At the end of our garden we built a small pond and planted water lilies. The pond is fed by a little trickle of a stream at the edge of the property, entering through an opening in the back and exiting through the side, where it flows into the vegetable farm next door. The pond quickly became home to scores of tiny fish and, within a few months, was filled with tadpoles. Usually you can find frogs of various sizes hanging out on a lily pad. One day we discovered two large turtles chilling out in there; the next day they had moved on. But this was the first time we'd had snakes in the pond. I called the police to send the snake squad and ran downstairs (unfortunately forgetting my camera; I took the photo of the pond this morning, mainly because a gorgeous lily had just opened)

Nothing brings out the primeval gut feeling that we humans are just animals than when you face a snake. Fear, revulsion, the urge to flee and an urge to kill all well up inside and the skin tingles with adrenalin. I've been face-to-face with a brown bear and armed muggers, but the fight-or-flight response is never so intense as when there's a snake in front of me. In this case, not one but two slender dark brown snakes were curled up in the pond, their narrow heads breaking the surface. One rose up and looked at us curiously. Then the other.

And then they started to dance. They curled around each other, uncurled, then curled again in the other direction. Were they playing? Was it a mating dance? Do snakes mate in the water? Whatever they were doing, I couldn't help but think that they looked like they were having fun.

The police snake catchers arrived. They said it would be difficult to catch them in the water, since they couldn't be pinned down, and in any case they looked like non-venomous water snakes. My wife arrived home early from work and joined the crowd. Just as we were discussing whether they might be rat snakes (also non-venomous), one languidly crawled up over the edge of the pond, turned away from us, then calmly crossed the stream and disappeared into the farm next door. The other must have snuck out the water inlet hole, because there was no sign of it.

In the year and a half since we moved into our new house, we've had numerous snake visits. During the construction, a Burmese python ("The biggest one I've ever seen in my life" said one of the construction workers, who grew up in the countryside), passed right through our future living room. After we moved in, one morning a rat snake, easily nine feet long, was resting in the shade outside the kitchen door. When it saw me it lifted its head and indignantly traveled across the garden, over the wall and into the wild ginger field on the other side. We've had several black cobras pop their heads out of holes in the wall. Those are the ones I really hate. They're poisonous and short-tempered. I've had more close encounters with cobras than I can count in my 18 years in Wang Tong.

The oddest snake incident occurred one evening when Cathy, my wife, ran in from watering the garden. "I nearly stepped on a snake!" She grabbed a flashlight and our snake identification book. Next to a papaya tree was a muscular snake curled up like a garden hose. It had a stunning pattern of black and white rings around the length of its body. It turned out to be a banded krait, uncommon in this part of China, and so venomous that its bite will kill an adult human in 8 hours. The police sent over a brilliant snake catcher, who used a flashlight and a bamboo stick to actually hypnotize the reptile. He then stunned it with a tap on the head, and did something I'd never dare: he picked up the living but woozy snake and tossed it into a bag. Kraits are a protected species, so he had no intention of killing it. It would be taken to a remote spot and released.

Lucky for those snakes I'm not Chinese and my wife isn't a snake eater. In our previous house on the other side of the village, whenever anyone shouted "Snake!" several local men would come running with sacks and bamboo sticks. They could name instantly the species of the snake, as well as the price per pound of its meat. Their goal: catch whatever it was alive, carry it home and drop it into a pot of boiling water.

When the two snakes scurried away after their brief romp in our pond I actually felt kind of touched. They'd enjoyed a refreshing mid-summer-day swim, perhaps a little afternoon delight, and gone back to work. Live and let live, even snakes.

The News From Wang Tong

Welcome to Wang Tong, a little village somewhere on the southern end of Lantau Island in the South China Sea. That's most of it in the photo. Wang Tong has between 60 and 75 buildings, depending on your opinion about where the village boundary lies. Only a few are single-family homes. The rest are split into apartments, others are almost permanently vacant, and a few exist as down-market guesthouses for braying packs of teenagers.

How many people live here? I don't think anyone ever counted. Even the government census lumps Wang Tong and its neighboring villages into one broad entity called Mui Wo. But if I had to guess, I would say that the permanent population of our village hovers between 150 and 180.

Wang Tong is no Anatevka, or even Lake Wobegon. You would never go out of your way to visit this place. You can't drive to it; there are no roads! It isn't quite visible from the beach. You might stroll along its edge on your way to the Silvermine Waterfall, but you don't have to. There isn't much to see except a field of wild ginger, a few nice gardens and the one remaining vegetable farm.

So who lives here? Even in a village this tiny there are four distinct populations. Start with the so-called indigenous: descendents of the original, pre-British colonial era, settlers of Lantau Island. Two clans predominate: the Tsangs and the Wans. Then there are the other Chinese residents, people who drifted here to save money or get away from the city. Until around 2005 only a small handful of Caucasian and other non-Chinese people bought or rented homes, in order to have the space that we foreigners seem to need surrounding us. In the past several years, we've seen a small surge of incoming foreigners, including an increasing number of overseas Chinese. And don't forget the Filipinos. Since nearly every household employs a Filipina domestic helper, and a few have gardeners as well, Filipinos might in fact be the largest homogeneous group in Wang Tong.

I've lived in Wang Tong since 1991. My children grew up in its fields and streams and nearby beaches and hills. I truly love this village. I'll tell you more about it in this chronicle.