The Antiquities and Monuments Office places Wong Uk Village at Yuen Chau Kok, where the Wong clan from Xingning, Guangdong, founded the settlement during the Qianlong reign. In the nineteenth century, the village became a trading station for people and goods travelling between Guangdong and Kowloon. The AMO pamphlet adds that an inn operated beside the Old House to serve travellers. This was a village connected to movement through the region, not simply a cluster of houses at the edge of what later became Sha Tin.
From the journal
Wong Uk: A Hakka House beside a Lost Trading Village
Wong Uk’s surviving Old House recalls Yuen Chau Kok’s former role as a route-side trading place. The village was reshaped by reclamation and Sha Tin New Town; one listed monument remains.
In this district · Sha Tin ↗A village on a route between regions
A building after reclamation
When Tide Cove was reclaimed for Sha Tin New Town, most of Wong Uk’s old buildings were demolished or fell into ruin. The two-storey green-brick Old House, built around 1911 by Wong Tsing Wo, remains as the village’s surviving landmark. The AMO describes mural paintings and traditional decoration on the building. It is now a declared monument. The change is stark: the house stands within a modern urban landscape, while the settlement and trading life it recalls are no longer present as a complete village.
A house within a transformed town
The Old House gives this larger history a physical point of focus. Its two-storey green-brick walls and surviving murals stand at Yuen Chau Kok, where a Hakka village once served travellers between Guangdong and Kowloon. Around it, reclamation and new-town construction remade the shore into an urban landscape. The contrast between the house and the city makes the scale of that change visible.