Tai Po Mei

About the village

Tai Po Mei (大埔尾) is a Hakka indigenous village in Tai Po District, Hong Kong. It stands at Pak Shek Kok beside Cheung Shue Tan (樟樹灘), on the Tai Po Road towards Tai Po Kau; before that coast was reclaimed, both villages looked out on Tolo Harbour. They belonged to the Cheung Shue Tan Yeuk (樟樹灘約), one of the seven yeuk of rural Tai Po. Its indigenous families are Li (李). The Li Ancestral Hall (李氏宗祠) is the village's oldest building, raised to commemorate Li Fangyuan (李芳遠), its founding ancestor, and its construction is traced to the early nineteenth century. From 1907 to 1941 it housed a private school where village children were taught the classical texts, and the occupying Japanese army later used it as a transit station. The Li holdings here were counted with Cheung Shue Tan until the 1905 land registration, when Tai Po Mei was constituted as a village in its own right. Families farmed and fished, carrying their produce by boat to Tai Po market. From the early 1950s the village's young men left for Britain and sent for the rest of their families. The land gods are shared with the neighbour. The altar to the Great King (大王) and the smaller Earth God altar beside it stand in Cheung Shue Tan and are worshipped by both villages, and 做社, the society that supplied their offerings, met in the first lunar month and was open to villagers over sixty. The ancestral hall was repaired again in 2011, the clan's ancestral tablets returned to it in a reopening ceremony.