Looking back – Walking tour: Shatin

Our Concept:

The main idea of our tour is to trace the ancient culture of Shatin and to shed some light on the great make-over it has undergone in the process of modernization. Ultimately, we are concerned with how people have changed their lifestyles and beliefs as new culture takes over the old one, illustrated by existing sites and infrastructures.  To explore this, we have picked the Che Kung Temple, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery which represent old culture and the Shatin Racecourse and the New Town Plaza which represent new culture.

After going through the initial excitements of planning the tour, finally, we put our ideas to action and “walked” it out ourselves.

Che Kung Temple

What a misfortune!  The Che Kung Temple was currently under a series of renovations. Of course, these renovations are good in the sense that it means people care about it. But I guess few tourists would ever want to come and visit a site still under construction, see the stature of Che Kung being surrounded by iron fences and inhale the dust and ash from around the temple! Fortunately, a staff member there told us that the series of renovations would be finished as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the Temple allowed just a small-scale of renovation one at a time to minimize the inconvenience to tourists and worshippers. This is great!

  
We’d love to see the Che Kung Temple in its best outlook too. It is not a big temple though, despite its great popularity; once one gets through its entrance gate, they will be able to see the four corners of the Temple. Nevertheless, it’s a well-structured construction indeed – statue in the centre, fortune-telling, windmills, the altar and the main worship hall each taking up a section and that made up the whole temple!

 Hong Kong Heritage Museum

A grand construction indeed! One just knows that it must be about something cultural solely from its exterior.  The museum tells historical facts of various fields – important past events, geography, entertainment, arts and even astronomy and it stores a wide spectrum of exhibits: photographs, sculptures, painting, manuscripts, real objects and so on.

There wasn’t much crowd in the well-conditioned museum even though it was Sunday and one needs to pay to get to the exhibitions in the upper floors. People are already pretty ignorant about culture and heritage; wouldn’t an entrance charge be more a discouragement to the public to knowing more about culture and heritage?

Ten Thousands Buddhas Monastery

WOW! There were really ten thousands buddhas in the Monastery! We’re afraid there could only be more! But before getting to see the first golden stature of buddha, one has to climb several thousand steps first. (There are no roads and one can only walk from the very bottom of the hill all the way up.) Zita was a bit annoyed as she was in high heels. Elgin felt no better as he was in slippers. That reminded us to make a special note about the dress code in briefing our customers on the trip.

We saw quite a few foreign tourists on our way up and down.  One gentleman was even with a 喼. Honestly, one must not expect statues of buddhas to be nice-looking. As Buddhism actually stresses “enduring pain” and “experiencing disasters”, quite a number of the Buddhas actually looked ugly and even scary. One Bodhisattva actually had two hands sticking out of where his eyes should be!  ><

Shatin Racecourse

We got off at Fo Tan Station and walked a rather long way before getting to the Racecourse. It would be better if we waited for the train that would go past the Racecourse Station though it would mean that we would have to wait for some ten to fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter much to young people like us but our sightseers, most likely senior citizens, who would like to leave early may want to know about this though.

Good that we got there just in time to gain free entrance and to watch the last race. People were already leaving by the time we arrived at the gate but still, we got to see some diehard supporters standing right at the front, chanting and yelling for the horse on which they made their bets. LOL!

There was such a large crowd but people acted much calmer than we anticipated. That’s desirable as our guests will be able to move around and to get to other sections of the racecourse like the gift shop and the parade ring easily.

New Town Plaza

We walked around the plaza, mainly trying to select a few shops to be recommended to our guests. But the plaza actually serves more as a contrast to the temple and monastery – much traffic in the plaza while just a few heads in the temple or the monastery or the museum. And we expect that few of our guests would really do shopping there as most shops are expensive brands.