How Hong Kong’s Tsuen Wan beaches are returning to former glory as water quality improves
- Before the 1980s, people from across Kowloon flocked to Tsuen Wan’s seven beaches for their spectacular views before water quality began to deteriorate
- The situation has vastly improved since 2010 and now the beaches are an attractive destination with a fraction of the crowds of more well-known spots
A group of Hong Kong’s most beautiful beaches are also its most overlooked. That is true in a literal sense, as tens of thousands of commuters pass above them on the Ting Kau Bridge and Tuen Mun highway every day. But it is also true in a figurative sense.
Despite offering spectacular views of the bridges, Lantau Island and the azure waters of the Rambler Channel, the beaches of Tsuen Wan District attract but a small fraction of the numbers that visit those further down the shore in Tuen Mun.
No doubt it is because many people still remember when these beaches were among the most polluted in Hong Kong.
For most of the 1990s and 2000s, the seven Rambler Channel beaches were officially closed to swimming because of sky-high E coli counts in their waters. In 1997, one reading at Ting Kau Beach revealed 1,500 counts of the bacteria per 100ml of water, compared to 11 counts at Repulse Bay.
“I used to go swimming around here when I was young. Everybody did. Now the water’s filthy,” a resident of beachside Ting Kau Village told the Post in 2009.
The same year, the Environmental Protection Department’s then assistant director of water policy, Elvis Au Wai-kwong, lamented how nearby villages had exploded in population, fouling the sea with overflowing septic tanks and illegal waste water pipes. “These seven beaches have been subjected to different sources of pollution from every direction since the 1990s,” he said.
