History
Sprouting from traditional Chinese farming villages growing rice, Tai Wai area once functioned as a light suburban industrial park in the 1970s. Few factory buildings are still in use, mostly as warehouses. The current urbanization of the area is the consequence of the development of Sha Tin New Town that started in the 1970s.
Tai Wai village, where the name of the area came from, was the largest and oldest walled village in Sha Tin. It was built in 1574 during the Ming Dynasty, and was called Chik Chuen Wai (Chinese: 積存圍) at the time. It was originally made up of 16 families, Wai (韋), Chan (陳), Ng (吳), Yeung (楊), Wong (黃), Lee (李), Hui (許), Cheng (鄭), Tong (唐), Yuen (袁), Yau (游), Lam (林), Lok (駱), Tam (譚), Mok (莫) and Choy (蔡).
The Wai family, being the largest family, is thought to be the direct descendants of the famous founder general of the Han Dynasty, Han Xin, who purportedly fled there to escape executions ordered by Emperor Gao of Han's empress Empress Lü Zhi. The Han descendants changed their surname into Wai by splitting the word Han (韓) in two halves and took up the character on the right hand side.
The Cheng family, on the other hand, originated from a place called Xingyang in Zhengzhou, Henan which is the place where Chang'e supposedly flew to the Moon. It is also the birthplace of Li Shangyin, one of the most famous poets in the late Tang Dynasty.
The first public housing estate built in the area was Mei Lam Estate, with the first two blocks of its Phase 1 completed in 1981. Tai Wai Station opened in August 1983.
Read more about this topic: Tai Wai
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (18181883)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)