A study history of Tiu Keng Leng in the eyes of four generations

Abstract

Formerly known as Rennie’s Mill, Tiu Keng Leng has long been a peculiar geographical spot in the socio-political chart in the history of Hong Kong. This should be reflected, partly, by the nickname given to it some sixty years ago, as ‘Little Taiwan’, on account of the fact that the almost entire residents then and there were either people associated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang) or descendants of these people. They were not taken to be mere refugees but were boasted by the Taiwanese government and themselves as the ‘Anti-Communist Warriors’ who upheld a set of political sentiments in the form of, for instance, holding a series of anti-communist activities.

Conceived as such, Tiu Keng Leng in this project does not refer to the administrative district currently situated in Tseung Kwan O, but rather narrowly to the settlement that housed a population of 10,000 people as early as 1950 in the area known as Junk Bay. This project takes issues clustering around Tiu Keng Leng, not just as an outworn social issue that troubled the colonial government, but, at once, as a symbol of political interplay of different conflicting forces and a snapshot of the trajectory of the change in political attitude over a relatively long period of time span.

We believe that an Oral History that records these changes is highly significant in preserving the socio-historical development that should shed light on the contemporary development of local communities across the entire territory in Hong Kong. Oral History places heavy emphasis on the functional importance of keeping records and keeping track of the development under the focus of this project mainly by conducting interviews across a wide spectrum of relevant population of the concerned areas.

The use of the Oral Historical approach in this project can be further justified as follows. Many of the previous studies on Tiu Keng Leng were dictated by interpretation of official documents and archives via the perspective of the national policy of the Taiwanese government in relation to Tiu Keng Leng. This kind of study centers at the upper structure of the concerned historical period. As opposed to this, Oral History turns its attention to the infrastructure of the subjects, i.e. what changes there are in their own sense of identity as the historical context unfolds itself. Compared to other studies, this project represents a whole new approach in the study of local communities in Hong Kong.