The "walled city" (foreground, center-left) of Aberdeen (香港仔). But what is it...?

We stand along the promenade and take pictures of the skyline across the harbor.  This is Ap Lei Chau (鴨脷洲), an island south of Hong Kong Island’s southwest corner, and we are facing Aberdeen (香港仔), the main point of interest on our little weekend tour.

Between several apartment buildings across the water, however, I notice something unusually old on a hill.  It looks like a walled city, with tiers upon tiers of stone buildings.  Several signs are plastered along the slope of the hill.

Jordan takes out his monocular, and he and Melody take turns describing what they see.  “An ad for a recycling company…long railings…dirt and lots of stone structures…a lookout point…”

None of it makes sense to us.  But seeing as we’ve already been here for the past few hours, we decide to head back and take a look.

Thus begins – yet again – an adventure that none of us anticipated.

Aberdeen: another name bestowed upon another place by the British.  More specifically, the village’s name pays homage to George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who served as the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies when the designation was made in 1845.  Hamilton-Gordon would later become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1852.

For those of us who are unfamiliar with British colonial history, the details behind Aberdeen’s name may seem insignificant.  Yet the village itself played an instrumental role with respect to Hong Kong as a whole – because its original name, quite literally, was “Hong Kong (香港).”  Merchants and visitors who landed here in the early-19th century mistook the name of this village for the name of the entire island, a mistake that was neither noticed nor rectified until mid-century.  By then, however, the use of “Hong Kong” as the name of the entire island became so widespread that the moniker retained its place, and the ‘original’ village was subsequently renamed Aberdeen.  (The village’s name in Chinese – 香港仔- roughly translates into “little Hong Kong.”)

Of course, there’s little in the area today that suggests just how influential Aberdeen has been to granting Hong Kong one aspect of its current identity.  The center of the “village” has become – you guessed it – largely residential, with towering high rises and shopping centers shadowing small market streets and businesses.

But these aspects of this part of the island weren’t the ones that drew us here – if we wanted to see that, we could have stayed in Kowloon and done our shopping there.

What attracted us toward Aberdeen, rather, was its connection to fishing – or more specifically, its wholesale fish market.

A poor snapshot of the Aberdeen Fish Market...which means that we need to return here (with better footwear, of course).

I was actually inspired to come here by someone whom I’ve admired (and even drawn inspiration from in composing this “project”), a man who makes travel both compelling and essential.  That man is Anthony Bourdain, and on the Hong Kong episode of his series “The Layover” he urges viewers (very convincingly, with the help of a local guide) who want to go “off the tourist path” to check out Aberdeen’s fish market.  There are clips of fresh fish and seafood of all varieties swimming in large, clear tanks; it’s enough to make anyone who’s even remotely interested in such things hop on the next plane to Hong Kong.

On street level, however, Jordan, Melody, and I find that getting into the fish market is not as easy as I thought it was.  The local bus (42, from North Point) drops us off at the tail end of the large complex; even worse, we discover that the side facing the road is the loading zone, which means that we’re forced to navigate delicately through throngs of trucks, workers, fish, and water – lots of water – all making their way into the back entrances of the market.

The formal entrance to the market (a simple gate, with a sign warning casual visitors to “enter at their own risk”) also dashes our hopes of exploration, at least for today.  The floor is completely wet, and our footwear hasn’t prepared us for diving (poor pun intended) into the market.  We decide to explore the promenade instead, yet we know that we must return here to really swim with the…ok, ok, I’ll stop.

Several (of many) boats in Aberdeen's harbor. Those that do not serve as floating restaurants or commuter ferries largely engage in commercial fishing.

A series of floating restaurants, with the buildings of Ap Lei Chau (鴨脷洲) beyond the harbor.

As the presence of the market and the geography of the area suggest, Aberdeen has historically been renowned for its fishing industry.  Today, however, the practice has died commercially, with pollution and modernization effectively limiting its long-term sustainability.  But since the village does lie along the sea, one can always re-imagine the past simply by viewing the countless boats that float along in the harbor.  Most have now been converted into (tourist and commuter) ferries and (mostly tourist) floating restaurants, but there are still quite a few that serve as home for some local residents.

After taking our fair share of pictures, we begin to conjecture what’s on the other side of the harbor – there are large apartment buildings, as usual, but the hills and mountains in the background suggest that there’s another big island south of Hong Kong proper.  To the left, we see several people crossing a long footbridge (alongside regular traffic), so we decide to cross over ourselves.

The other side, as we eventually discover, is the island of Ap Lei Chau (鴨脷洲).  It’s a place that deserves its own explanation, so I’ll leave that excursion for later.

Several hours later, and we’re back in Aberdeen, on a mission to figure out exactly what this “walled city” is.  At street level, we discover a long staircase that leads to the top – but we can’t see anything beyond the final step.

I sigh a little.  My legs are not excited.

But a few minutes of steady walking (and less steady breathing) later, we arrive at the top, where we find a road with no vehicular traffic.  And that’s when we discover that this “walled city” is something quite different from what we expected.

It’s a cemetery.  Erected along the slope of a mountain.

I am neither apprehensive nor afraid, and yet the effect that the scene brings before us is still striking.  On our right, pictures and inscriptions of the deceased and their lives are arranged in formal grids on a series of marble walls, each individual occupying a small but dignified square on each wall.  We survey them briefly.  The sheen of the marble suggests that most of these individuals passed away recently, as confirmed by their dates of repose.

There are very few people here in this cemetery, although it is still too early for observing the Ching Ming Festival (清明節) – a day (April 5 this year) devoted to cleaning the graves of and offering libations to deceased loved ones.  It is a practice I observe with my family each year back in New York, in remembrance of my great-grandfather.

Here in Aberdeen, however, I (and we) have no relatives who are buried here, least of all in a cemetery as vast as this one.  We decide to ascend the slope carefully, following countless staircases that bring us to gravestones and tombs, nearly all of which face the harbor.  There are quite a few that have been well-kept over the years; likewise, many graves and burial sites have decayed with age, neglect, and changing conditions.

One of the more elegant resting sites of the deceased.

The lack of personal connections, combined with our own linguistic limits (the three of us decide to examine dates and names, with varying degrees of success), make it difficult for us to decipher and understand the significance behind each individual buried here.  But we are all very well aware of the impact these souls once had – and likely still have – on their survivors, and with that in mind we tread carefully.

We continue the ascent.  The din of engines and machinery in Aberdeen fades as we climb more stairs, and the view of the harbor (it’s late afternoon and the sun is out in nearly full force) is at once majestic and sobering.  If the souls of the departed continue to exist alongside us, then I imagine that they have found peace here with such a view of the bay.

At last, we reach the top of the hill – though we quickly discover that the cemetery continues along another mountain that rises even higher.  For today at least, we’ve reached our physical limits.

We stop and look into the beyond from every possible angle.  The harbor glimmers in the distance as it meets the sky and the sun at the horizon.  Between tall apartment buildings in the foreground, we can see the numerous boats on the water and the buildings of Ap Lei Chau farther beyond.  Hawks and seagulls circle the skies near us.

But it’s the view below that is truly compelling.  An endless terracing of graves and tombs, all connected physically by a vast network of staircases and handrails.  The layout both negates and confirms the suspicions I had earlier about this place: it is, in effect, a “walled city,” with its own residents settled along a steep mountain, far above the houses and residences of their survivors and descendants.

The residents here may no longer be ‘alive,’ yet somehow I feel they’ve never left, nor have they disappeared.  They’ve simply moved up the mountain.  Because when there’s no more room here to suit your needs, your life, and your self, you respond by finding room somewhere else – in this case, a cemetery.

A walled city.  A “second city,” nestled above the city that I thought was the only one present in Hong Kong.  But now, I’ve changed my mind.

Even up here, there are souls in motion – and I’m starting to think we’re not the only ones.