How Hong Kong’s Biggest Swamp Became Happy Valley

This is the first in a series of articles about the life and history of Happy Valley. 

In some parallel universe version of Hong Kong, the city’s epicentre isn’t Central – it’s Happy Valley. That’s where British engineer Alexander T. Gordon, appointed in 1843 as Hong Kong’s first Land Officer, developed a plan to resituate the heart of the young British colony, with canals to drain the valley’s swampy fields.

Then known primarily by its historic Chinese name, Wong Nai Chung (wong4 nai4 cung1 黃泥涌, “yellow mud stream”), the valley was the only expanse of flat land on the north side of the otherwise mountainous Hong Kong Island. A small Cantonese village of tile-roofed stone houses was tucked into the southern edge of the valley, but it was otherwise open for colonial development. There was just one problem: malaria. 

As Gordon was working on his plan in the spring of 1843, troops stationed in West Point barracks on the northwestern edge of the island were burning up with fever. This had happened every spring since the British had first arrived two years earlier, but rather than subsiding as it had in previous summers, this time the epidemic only grew worse. Between May and July 1843, 294 of the 1,751 British troops stationed in Hong Kong came down with malaria and 25 of them died, including two of the seven officers who had been struck by fever. 

The illness continued to spread. Gordon delivered his report on July 6; within a month, fever had spread throughout the settled parts of Hong Kong, with some of the worst outbreaks happening around Wong Nai Chung and in the East Point development spearheaded by British trading conglomerate Jardine Matheson. By the time dry weather arrived in November, 24 percent of British troops and 10 percent of the European population of Hong Kong had died. The entire government and most of the elite had fled to Macau. There is no precise record of the number of Chinese deaths, but contemporary reports suggest the toll was similar to that of the European community.

At the time, nobody knew that malaria was caused by parasites spread by mosquitoes; that discovery wouldn’t come for another 37 years. But Hong Kong’s colonial rulers knew enough that the disease thrived in humid conditions. Compared to the rocky hillside where the British had first landed, in present-day Sheung Wan, Wong Nai Chung’s watery valley was deemed especially vulnerable to the “swamp gas” and “miasma” that led to fever. Gordon’s idea to develop the area was scuttled. It instead became a place to bury the victims of disease, earning the English name Happy Valley – a wry euphemism for an area associated with death.

But from these inauspicious origins emerged one of the most significant places in Hong Kong. Today, Happy Valley is still home to cemeteries, but it is also a prosperous residential and commercial area and the birthplace of the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Cultural diversity, sports, gambling, charity, land development and nature: Happy Valley ties all of these threads of Hong Kong history together. 

That’s one of the reasons Tai Kwun’s head of heritage, Anita Chung, chose to focus on the neighbourhood in her latest exhibition, Happy Valley: A Cultural Landscape. “There are a lot of forgotten stories in history,” she says. “And here, it’s about how the cultural elements are tied to the openness of the space – especially the flatland of the valley floor. This open space nurtured different kinds of cultural activities, like horse racing and sports. It’s all connected to this topographical feature.”

Running until February 23, the exhibition spans two floors in the former Central Police Station on Hollywood Road, with photos, videos, maps and an enormous interactive topological map. It’s as much an anthropological take on Happy Valley as a historical one, with plenty of attention paid to not just how the area evolved but how its people lived – and live. 

What becomes clear is just how much of that is related to the landscape. Before the arrival of the British, Wong Nai Chung was a typical agricultural village. In 1841, it was home to 300 people, making it the third-largest settlement on Hong Kong Island, after Chek Chu (later named Stanley in English), which had 2,000 inhabitants, and Shau Kei Wan, population 1,200. (All told, only 4,350 people lived on the entire island at the time, with another 2,000 living offshore in boats.) Like many villages, it was built according to the principles of feng shui, with houses oriented towards rice paddies built in the marshland and a wooded hillside behind them. It’s unclear exactly when it was first settled, but 19th century legal records show that villagers stated it had existed for “many generations” before the British arrived.

The British plan to develop the valley did not originate with Alexander Gordon. Instead, it was the brainchild of Edward Belcher, a Nova Scotia-born naval officer and hydrographer who was among the first of the British soldiers to land in Hong Kong. He was also the first person to create a detailed map of the harbour, which drew his attention to Wong Nai Chung. He mentioned its potential to Hong Kong’s first colonial governor, the Anglo-Irish soldier Henry Pottinger. 

As the harbourfront properties of Central and Sheung Wan were quickly sold off to private commercial interests between 1841 and 1843, Pottinger began thinking it might be useful to develop an entirely new civic centre from scratch – one where the government could control the shoreline. “The valley provided land enough for resettlement of the core administration, residences of various classes, growth in commercial activity and future expansion,” notes architect and historian Christopher Cowell in an article for Modern Asian Studies. Pottinger needed someone to draft a development plan and luckily he knew just the person: his cousin, Alexander Gordon.

Gordon had a vested interest in working on the project, because aside from nepotistic commissions from the colonial government, he relied on work from private clients including Jardine Matheson, which owned the land adjacent to Wong Nai Chung. His plan, which Cowell describes as “almost Venetian or Dutch,” was oriented around a series of canals leading to a praya lined by warehouses. European shops and residences would be located near the harbourfront, with a Chinese quarter further inland, with a horseshoe-shaped ring road built on the edges of the valley, which would be an ideal site for the colony’s wealthiest inhabitants to build their mansions – essentially a planned version of the Mid-Levels. 

Pottinger was apparently pleased and sent the plan to London for approval, with a reply expected by the following January. By then, however, the outbreak of malaria had had many important ramifications on Hong Kong’s development. It motivated the government to drain wetlands and rice paddies, start planting trees, improve the quality of roads and housing, and begin orienting its buildings in ways that encouraged good ventilation – an unacknowledged embrace of feng shui. (Standards soon became lax, however, leading to more deadly epidemics in the future.) It also resulted in Wong Nai Chung becoming terra non grata: the government’s medical advisors warned against new development there. The Gordon plan was abandoned.

That left a large expanse of open land in the middle of the rapidly growing colonial city, with Jardine Matheson’s development to the east and the patchwork development of Wan Chai to the west. What to do with it? By 1845, the government’s answer was clear: build a racecourse. 

Happy Valley: A Cultural Landscape runs until February 23, 2025 at Tai Kwun. Click here for more information.