Sam Tung Uk Museum
Museo Sam Tung Uk
Sam Tung Uk Museum (2 Kwu Uk Lane, Tsuen Wan, New Territories) — There was a time when the urban hub of Tsuen Wan was nothing more than a sprinkling of rural communities bustling with village and agricultural life. Some of that nostalgic period is preserved at Sam Tung Uk (‘three rows of dwelling’ in Chinese), a 200-year-old restored rural walled village.
Those still living in the quaint village in the 1970s were relocated to make way for the Tsuen Wan terminus of the Mass Transit Railway. Tsuen Wan itself had already been transformed since the late 1940s, when wealthy textiles manufacturers and other factory owners in then-turbulent Shanghai were desperately looking for places to re-locate their businesses. Tsuen Wan offered the advantages of cheap land, affordable labour and good proximity to urban Kowloon. Factories hurriedly went up on former farmland, and soon the sights and sounds of rural Tsuen Wan were all but lost forever. But Sam Tung Uk lives on as our reminder. Declared a historical monument in 1981, the museum includes an ancestral hall, two rows of side houses, an exhibition hall and a lecture hall, and displays of period furniture, handicrafts and agricultural equipment.